So it’s Valentine’s Day! Like many of us here, you may be panicking because life got in the way and you didn’t get your loved one something special like flowers or chocolates or even a card. So we at Shakespeare in the Ruff decided to offer you a little help. Our resident lover, hopeless romantic (he was playing Valentine in the picture above after all) and might we add single, Jesse Griffiths, has compiled his Top Ten List of romantic lines from Shakespeare. If you are in a pinch for an incredible romantic gesture, take a minute to memorize one of the lines below and wow your lover (or bestie), with your diction and line endings.
As an added bonus, if you can top Jesse’s selection with a love line of your own (does not have to be Shakespearean), Ruff will award you and a guest with VIP passes to our annual Ruffing It event coming up at the end of March. This will include free admission, reserved seats and a round of drinks on us! Post your love line in the comments section before the end of Valentine’s Day for your chance to win.
Happy Valentine’s Day from Shakespeare in the Ruff!
1. Romeo and Juliet
My bounty is as boundless as the sea,
My love as deep; the more I give to thee,
The more I have, for both are infinite.
2. The Tempest
Hear my soul speak:
The very instant that I saw you, did
My heart fly to your service.
3. As You Like It
If thou remember’st not the slightest folly
That ever love did make thee run into,
Thou hast not loved.
4. Sonnet 116
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
5. Hamlet
Doubt thou the stars are fire;
Doubt that the sun doth move;
Doubt truth to be a liar;
But never doubt I love.
6. Love’s Labour’s Lost
When Love speaks, the voice of all the gods
Makes heaven drowsy with the harmony.
7. Venus and Adonis
Love is a spirit all compact of fire.
8. Romeo and Juliet (there had to be at least 2 from this play)
Love goes toward love as school-boys from their books,
But love from love, toward school with heavy looks.
9. Twelfth Night
If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.
10. Cymbeline
I can express no kinder sign of love, than this kind kiss.
You got something better? We’d love to hear it.
The Scottish Bard trounces the one from Stratford by 500 miles.
Robert Burns, Scotland’s immortal bard, resented his wife, growing old and wrote about all the lasses he had and hadn’t.
My grandparents were married in Scotland on February 25, 1914, 100 years ago this month! They came to Canada just before WWI started. The quotations are taken from my granny’s auld Burns poetry book.
My favorite is the last verse of “My love is like a Red Red Rose”.
If you still think Valentines’ is a good thing, read on…
ABOUT THE CHASE
“Corn rigs, an’ barley rigs,
An’ corn rigs are bonnie;
I’ll ne’er forget that happy night,
Amang the rigs wi’ Annie”
“Altho’ my bed were in yon muir, Amang the heather in my plaidie,
Yet happy, happy would I be,
Had I my dear Mongomery’s Peggy.”
ABOUT CHOICES
“All you that are in love, and cannot it remove,
I pity you the pains you endure;
For experience makes me know that your hearts are full o’ woe,
A woe that no mortal can cure.”
“Oh why should fate sic pleasure have,
Life’s dearest bans untwining;
Or why sae sweet a flow as love
Depend on fortune’s shining?”
“Tho’ cruel fate should bid us part,
Far as the pole and line,
Her dear idea around my heart
Should tenderly entwine”
ABOUT BEING MARRIAGE
“O that I had ne’er been married;
I wad never had nae care;
Now, I’ve gotten wife and bairns,
An’ they cry crowdie ever mair.”
ABOUT AGING
“Love, thou hast pleasures, and deep hae I lov’;
Love, thou hast sorrows, and sair hae I pro’ve;
But this bruised heart that now bleeds in my breast,
I can feel by throbbings will soon be at rest.”
MORE ABOUT AGING
“And I will luve ye still, my dear,
While the sands o’life shall run.
Till all the seas gang dry, my dear,
And the rocks melt wi’ the sun.”
“Love seeketh not itself to please
Nor for itself has any care,
But for another gives it’s ease,
and build a Heaven in Hell’s despair”
My life is for my children to know,.
What kind of person I was.,
My fantacies my dreams of people who areclose to me.,
Of the one who is to be my wife,.
I look back now upon my life and wounder.,
If i where right and they where wrong,.
Then the end is just the begining.
By Tarian Davies
“For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings,
That then I scorn to change my state with kings”.
– Sonnet 29
One half of me is yours, the other half yours—
Mine own, I would say. But if mine, then yours,
And so all yours
-The Merchant of Venice
Still I feel in all ways, the last verses of Midsummer’s Nights Dream are the most universally romantic!❤️