SHAKESPEARE THINK’ST THOU ART A GENERAL OFFENCE
Fair is Foul and Foul is Fair: The Ultimate Shakespeare Insult List!
With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare when I measure my mind against his. The intensity of my impatience with him occasionally reaches such a pitch, that it would positively be a relief to me to dig him up and throw stones at him, knowing as I do how incapable he and his worshippers are of understanding any less obvious form of indignity.
— George Bernard Shaw, after seeing Henry Irving’s production of Cymbeline
You half-faced cheese
Die and be damn’d!
Thou crusty batch of nature
You are smelt above the moon
Her nights are foulest
Irksome scold
Thy lips rot off
What pace is this that thy tongue keeps
Hell is empty – All the devils are here
Hags of hell
Thou inhuman
I sent thee thither
I beat thee but i should infect my hands
I think thou wast created for mangy men to breathe themselves upon thee.
I will make a quagmire of your mingled brains thy detestable bones.
Falstaff sweats to death and lards the lean earth as he walks along.
Be a whore still; they love thee not that use thee. Give them disease.
The devil will not have me damn’d, lest the oil that’s in me should set hell on fire.
Tame that shrew
Hedge-born swain
You bead, you acorn
Shakespeare — what trash are his works in the gross.
— Edward Young
A saucy minion
How now cow!
Chok’d with ambition
Bless me, what a fry of fornication
Kiss by the book
Thou lump of foul deformity
If she lives till doomsday, she’ll burn a week longer than the whole world.
The wicked fire of lust have melted him in his own grease.
His wit’s as thick as a Tewkesbury mustard.
I am pigeon-liver’d and lack gall.
I am sick when I do look on thee
I must tell you friendly in your ear, sell when you can, you are not for all markets.
If thou wilt needs marry, marry a fool; for wise men know well enough what monsters you make of them.
I’ll beat thee, but I would infect my hands.
I scorn you, scurvy companion.
Methink’st thou art a general offence and every man should beat thee.
More of your conversation would infect my brain.
My wife’s a hobby horse!
Peace, ye fat guts!
Poisonous bunch-backed toad!
The rankest compound of villainous smell that ever offended nostril
Shakespeare’s name, you may depend upon it, stands absurdly too high and will go down. He had no invention as to stories, none whatever. He took all his plots from old novels, and threw their stories into dramatic shape… That he threw over whatever he did write some flashes of genius, nobody can deny; but this was all.
— Lord Byron, letter to James Hogg (24 March 1814)
A wholesome jackanapes must take me up for swearing, as if I borrowed mine oaths of him
As I told you always, her beauty and her brain go not together
Away!, Thou art poison to my blood
Boils and plagues plaster you over, that you may be abhorred farther than seen and one infect another against the wind a mile. You souls of geese that bear the shapes of men
Caesar’s ambition – which swelled so much that it did almost stretch the sides of the world
Dissembling harlot, thou are false in all
He is deformed, crooked, old and sere, ill faced, worse bodied, shapeless everywhere, vicious, ungentle, foolish, blunt, unkind, stigmatical in making, worse in mind
He that depends upon your favours swims with fins of lead, and hews down oaks with rushes
A dog, a cat, a mouse, a rat to scratch a man to death
A knot you are of damned blood suckers
A plague on both your houses
A slippery and subtle knave
I can hardly think it was the Stratford boy. Whoever wrote [the plays] had an aristocratic personality.
– Charlie Chaplin
An index and obscure prologue to the history of lust and foul thoughts
Both like serpents are, who, though they feed on sweetst flowers, yet they poison breed
Courtesy would seem to cover sin
Curtailed of this fair proportion, cheated of feature by dissembling nature, deformed, unfinished
Damn her, lewd minx
Deep, hollow, treacherous, and full of guile
Despised substance of divinest show
Fiend, thou torments me ere I come to hell
Go thou and fill another room in hell
God and good men hate so foul a liar
Hang, beg, starve, die in the streets
He did not flow from honourable sources
He heareth not, he stirreth not, he moveth not, the ape is dead
He is not the flower of courtesy
Heaven truly knows that thou are as false as hell
I had rather be a toad, and live upon the vapour of a dungeon, than keep a corner in the thing I love for others uses
I think upon it, I think, I smelled, O villainy
It issues from the rancour of a villain, a recreant and most degenerate traitor
Never hung poison on a fouler toad
Not shaped for sportive tricks, nor made to court an amorous looking glass
Now put it, God, in the physician’s mind to help him to his grave immediately
O curse of marraige, that we can call these delicate creatures ours, and not their appetites
Out of my sight, thou dost infect mine eyes
Pray God we may make haste, and come too late
She speaks yet she says nothing
Snakes, in my heart blood warmed, that sting my heart. Three Judases, each one thrice worse than Judas
The food is such as hath been belched on by infected lungs
The pox upon her green sickness
The very butcher of silk button
This is a subtle whore, a closet lock and key of villainous secrets.
“Hamlet” is a coarse and barbarous play . . . One might think the work is a product of a drunken savages imagination.”
— Voltaire
Thou art like the harpy, which, to betray, dost with thine angels face, seize with thine eagle’s talons
Thou art the rudeliest welcome to this world
Thou detestable maw, thou womb of death
Thou haught insulting man
Thou little thing better than earth
Thou lump of foul deformity
Thou unfit for any place but hell
Thy head is as full of quarrels as an egg is full of meat
Thy mothers name is ominous to children
Tis thy presence that exhales blood from cold and empty veins where no blood dwells
What a drunken knave the sea was to cast thee in our way
When good manners shall lie all in one or two man’s hands and they unwashed too, tis a foul thing
Why he’s a man of wax
Wretched, bloody and usurping boar
You are welcome sir to Cyprus, Goats and monkeys
A fellow of the strangest mind in the world
A fiend like thee might bear my soul to hell
A monster, a very monster in apparel
A slave whose gall coins slanders like a mint
All the infections that the sun sucks up from bogs, fens, flats, on Prospero fall, and make him by inch meal a disease
Am I your bird?, I mean to shift my bush
As ass head and a coxcomb and a knave, a thin faced knave and gull
As loathsome as a toad
Bite him to death I prithee
One of the greatest geniuses that ever existed, Shakespeare, undoubtedly wanted taste.
— Horace Walpole
Degenerate and base art thou
Fie, thou dishonest Satan
Foul spoken coward, that thund’rest with thy tongue, and with thy weapon nothing dares perform
Go rot!
Go shake your ears!
Go to, your a dry fool, I’ll no more of you
Hag-seed hence
Hang cur, hang, you whoreson, insolent noisemaker
Having flown over may knavish professions, he settled only on rogue
He has not so much brain as ear wax
He is melancholy without cause
He speaks nothing but madman
He was a frantic fool, hiding his better jests in blunt behaviour
Here comes those I have done good to against my will
He’s opposite to humanity
His complextion is perfect gallows
His days are foul and his drink dangerous
His garments are rich but he wears them not handsomely
How foul and loathsome is thine image
Hoy doy, what a sweep of vanity comes this way
I can hardly forbear hurling things at him
I do wish thou were a dog, that I might love thee somthing
I had rather be a tick in a sheep than such a valiant ignorance
I hate thee, pronounce thee a gross lout, a mindless slave
I know she is an irksome brawling scold
I wonder men dare trust themselves with men
If I be waspish, best beware my sting
If you had but looked big and spit at him, he’d have run
If you spend word for word with me, I shall make your wit bankrupt
Lady, you are the cruelst she alive
Lead apes in hell
Leave thy vain bibble-babble
Live and love thy misery
Most wicked sir, whom to call brother would even infect my mouth
Nothing but lechery, all incontinent varlets
O most insatiate and luxurious woman
O, ho, monster
Observe him, for the love of mockery
I have striven hard to open English eyes to the emptiness of Shakespeare’s philosophy, to the superficiality and second-handedness of his morality, to his weakness and incoherence as a thinker, to his snobbery, his vulgar prejudices, his ignorance, his disqualifications of all sorts for the philosophic eminence claimed for him.
— George Bernard Shaw
Say wall eyed slave, whither wouldst thou convey this growing image of thy fiend like face
She hath more hair than wit, and more faults than hairs, and more wealth than faults
She is lumpish, heavy, melancholy
She is peevish, sullun, forward, proud, disobedient, stubborn, lacking duty
She is spread of late into a goodly bulk
Should all despair that hath revolted wives, the tenth of mankind would hang themselves
That there should be small love amongst these sweet knaves, and all this courtesy, the strain of man’s bred out into baboon and monkey
That were to enlard his fat already pride
There’s small choice in rotten apples
They were the most needless creatures living
Think’st thou, though her father be very rich, any man is so very a fool to be married to hell?
Those healths will make thee and thy state look ill
Thou disease of a friend
Thou dost over ween in all
Thou fresh piece of excellent witchcraft
Thou has no more brain than I have in mine elbows
Thou hast need o fmore rags to lay on thee
Thou most lting slave
Though stool for a witch
Though thing of no bowels, thou
Though you bite so sharp at reasons, you are so empty of them
Toads, beetles, bats, light on you
A disproportioned and misshapen giant.
— David Hume
Watch out he’s winding the watch of his wit, by and by it will strike
We may account thee a whoremaster and knave
We need no grave to bury honesty, there’s not a grain of it the face to sweeten of the whole dungy earth
Were I like thee, I would throw away myself
What a caterwauling dost thou keep
What have we here?, a man or a fish, dead or alive?
What strange fish hath made his meal on thee
Why, this have not a fingers decency
Why, thou full dish of fool
You are now sailed into the north of my ladies opinion, where you will hang like an icicle on a Dutchman’s beard
You are rough and hairy
You heedless joltheads and unmannered slaves
You ruinious butt, you whoreson indistinguishable cur
You, minion, are too saucy
You kiss by the book
You ratcatcher
You rise to play and go to bed to work
Your peevish chastity is not worth a breakfast in the cheapest country
Her complexion is like Swart, like my shoe, but her face nothing like so clean kept, for why, she sweats, a man may go over shoes in the grime of it
He’s a disease that must be cut away
His beastly mind
I find the ass in compound with the major part of your syllables
If thou art changed to aught, tis to an ass
It is fit that I commit offence to my inferiors
No longer from head to foot than from hip to hip, she is spherical, like a globe, I could find out contries in her
O disloyal thing, that shouldst repair my youth, thou heap’st a years age on me
Priests must become mockers, if they shall encounter such ridiculous subjects as you
She’s the kitchen wench, and all grease; and I know not what use to put her but to make a lamp of her and run her from her own light. I warrant, her rags and the tallow in them will burn a Poland winter. If she lives till doomsday, she’ll burn a week longer than the whole world.
I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.
— Darwin, Autobiography
Slander, whose edge is sharper than the sword, whose tongue outvenoms all the worms of Nile
The tartness of his face sours ripe grapes, when he walks he moves like an engine and the ground shrinks before his treading
There’s many a man hath more hair than wit
This Cloten was a fool, an empty purse, there was no money in it. Not Hercules could have knocked out his brains for he had none
Thou wrong’st a gentleman who is as far from thy report as thou from honour
What’s the matter you dissentious rogue that, rubbing the poor itch of your opinion, make yourselves scabs ?
You are the must chaff, and you are smelt above the moon
You reek as a sacrifice. Where air comes out, air comes in, there’s none abroad so wholesome as that you vent
Your beards deserve not so honourable a grave as to stuff a botcher’s cushion or to be entombed in as ass’s pack saddle
There’s no more faith in thee than in a stewed prune.
Thine forward voice, now, is to speak well of thine friend; thine backward voice is to utter foul speeches and to detract.
That trunk of humours, that bolting-hutch of beastliness, that swollen parcel of dropsies, that huge bombard of sack, that stuffed cloak-bag of guts, that roasted Manningtree ox with pudding in his belly, that reverend vice, that grey Iniquity, that father ruffian, that vanity in years?
Thine face is not worth sunburning.
This woman’s an easy glove, my lord, she goes off and on at pleasure.
Was the Duke a flesh-monger, a fool and a coward?
Thou art as fat as butter.
Here is the babe, as loathsome as a toad.
Like the toad; ugly and venomous.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “I had never seen [it] before, nor shall ever again, for it is the most insipid, ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life.”
The Taming of the Shrew: “It hath some very good pieces in it, but generally is but a mean play.”
Romeo and Juliet: “It is a play of itself the worst that ever I heard.”
The Merry Wives of Windsor: “The humours of the country gentleman and the French doctor very well done, but the rest but very poorly, and Sir J. Falstaffe as bad as any.”
Henry IV, Part 1: “It did not please me.”
The Two Noble Kinsmen: “No excellent piece.”
Twelfth Night: “One of the weakest plays that ever I saw on the stage.”
— Samuel Pepys, opinions of Shakespeare’s plays, from his diary:
Thou art unfit for any place but hell.
Thou cream faced loon
Thou clay-brained guts, thou knotty-pated fool, thou whoreson obscene greasy tallow-catch!
Thou damned and luxurious mountain goat.
Thou elvish-mark’d, abortive, rooting hog!
Thou leathern-jerkin, crystal-button, knot-pated, agatering, puke-stocking, caddis-garter, smooth-tongue, Spanish pouch!
That poisonous bunch-back’d toad!
Thou sodden-witted lord! Thou hast no more brain than I have in mine elbows.
Thou subtle, perjur’d, false, disloyal man!
Thou whoreson zed , thou unnecessary letter!
Thy sin’s not accidental, but a trade.
Thy tongue outvenoms all the worms of Nile.
Would thou wert clean enough to spit upon
Would thou wouldst burst!
You poor, base, rascally, cheating lack-linen mate!
You are as a candle, the better burnt out.
You scullion! You rampallian! You fustilarian! I’ll tickle your catastrophe!
You starvelling, you eel-skin, you dried neat’s-tongue, you bull’s-pizzle, you stock-fish–O for breath to utter what is like thee!-you tailor’s-yard, you sheath, you bow-case, you vile standing tuck!
Your brain is as dry as the remainder biscuit after voyage.
Virginity breeds mites, much like a cheese.
Villain, I have done thy mother.
Away, you three-inch fool!
Come, come, you froward and unable worms!
Go, prick thy face, and over-red thy fear, Thou lily-liver’d boy.
Away, you starvelling, you elf-skin, you dried neat’s-tongue, bull’s-pizzle, you stock-fish!
A most notable coward, an infinite and endless liar, an hourly promise breaker, the owner of no one good quality.
I cannot read him, he is such a bombast fellow.
— George II
Was there ever such stuff as the greater part of Shakespeare? Only one must not say so.
— George III
Little Helen, farewell; if I can remember thee, I will think of three at court
The complaints I have heard of you I do not all believe; ’tis my slowness that I do not, for I know you lack not folly to commit them and have ability enough to make such knaveries yours.
You would answer very well to a whipping
Scurvy, old, filthy, scurry lord
You are not worth another word, else I’d call you knave
France is a dog hole, and it no more merits the tread of a man’s foot
She is too mean to have her name repeated
He’s a most notable coward, an infinite and endless liar, an hourly promise breaker, the owner of not one good quality
I spoke with her but once, and found her wondrous cold
For I knew the young Count to be dangerous and lascivious boy, who is a whale to virginity, and devours up all the fry it finds
Drunkenness is his best virtue, for he will be swine drunk, and in his sleep he does little harm, save to his bedclothes about him
He hath out-villiain’d villainy so far that the rarity redeems him
He excels his brother for a coward, yet his brother is reputed one of the best there is. In a retreat he outruns any lackey, marry, in the coming on he has the cramp
Use the carp as you may, for he looks like a poor, decayed, ingenious, foolish, rascally knave
I saw the man today, if man he be
Pray you, stand farther from me
Die a beggar
Experience, manhood, honour, ne’er before did violate so itself
Thou didst drink the stale of horses and the guilded puddle which beasts would cough at
O slave, of no more trust than love that’s hir’d
His rude unpolished style and antiquated phrase and wit.
— Lord Shaftesbury
Slave, souless villain, dog ! O rarely base!
In their thick breaths, rank of gross diet, shall be enclouded, and forc’d to drink their vapour
Her benefits are mightily misplaced
What shall I call thee when thou art a man?
Sweep on, you fat and greasy citizens
I think he be transformed into a beast; for I can nowhere find him like a man
And in his brain which is as dry as the remainder biscuit after a voyage, he hath strange places
Lets meet as little as we can
I desire that we be better strangers
I was seeking for a fool when I found you
His kisses are Judas’s own children
Certainly, there is no truth in him
You lisp and wear strange suits
Men are April when they woo, December when they wed
Frailty, thy name is woman
A bankrupt, a prodigal, who dare scarce show his head on the Rialto
A dwarfish theif
Now we sit through Shakespeare in order to recognize the quotations.
– Orson Welles
A fool, a coward, one all of luxury, an ass, a madman
A stony adversary, an inhuman wretch, uncapable of pity, void and empty from any dram of mercy
A villain with a smiling cheek, a goodly apple rotten at the heart
All that is within him does condemn itself for being there
Art thou lunatics?
Art thou the slave that with thy breath hast killed
Away with those giglets
Beg that thou may have leave to hang thyself
Boys, apes, braggarts, jacks, milksops!
Come, you are a tedious fool.
Destroy your sight with a new Gorgon
Dishonest varlet, we cannot misuse him enough
Fit to govern, No, not to live
Playing Shakespeare is very tiring. You never get to sit down unless you’re a king.
– Josephine Hull
Ford’s a knave, and I will aggravate his style
Four of his five wits went halting off, and now is the whole man governed with one
Gratiano speaks an infinite deal of nothing
Have you no modesty, no maiden shame, no touch of bashfulness
How now, Mephostophilus
I do not like your look, I promise thee
I do repent the tedious minutes I with her have spent
I had rather be married to a deaths head with a bone in his mouth
I say the gentlemen had drunk himself out of his five senses
I will find you twenty lascivious turtles ere one chaste man
If you were men, as men you are in show, you would not use a gentle lady so
Ill met by moonlight
I’ll pray a thousand prayers for your death
In swinish sleep their drenched natures lie
It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing
It is certain that when he makes water his urine is congealed ice
King Urinal
Shakespeare never had six lines together without a fault. Perhaps you may find seven, but this does not refute my general assertion.
— Samuel Johnson
Men from children nothing differ
O base hungarian wight
O you beast, o faithless coward, o dishonest wretch. Wilt thou be made a man out of my vice
Oh, these deliberate fools
Out of my door, you witch, you hag, you baggage, you polecat, you ronyon!
Rash wanton
Rogues, hence, avant vanish like hailstones go
She’s a great lubbery boy
Silence that fellow, I would he had some casuse to prattle for himself
Soft and dull eyed fool
Tempt not too much the hatred of my spirit, for I am sick when I do look on thee
There are a sort of men whose visages do cream and mantle like a tanding pond
This is the silliest stuff that I ever heard
Thy bones are hollow, impiety has made a feast of thee
Vile worm, you were overlooked even in thy birth
What hempen homespun have we swaggering here
What tempest, I trow, threw this whale with so many tons of oil in his belly, ashore at Windsor
When he is best, he is a little worse than a man, and when he is worst, he is little better than a beast
Where we are there’s daggers in mens smiles
Whose horrible image doth unfix my hair and make my seated heart knock at my ribs
His poetry has been cut into minute indigestible fragments and used like wedding cake, not to eat but to dream upon.
– Walter Raleigh
You Banbury cheese
You egg, you fry of treachery
You have such a February face, so full of frost, of storm and cloudiness
You heart hearted adamant
You secret, black and midnight hags
You should be women and yet your beards forbid me to interpret that you are so
Your bum is the greatest thing about you, so that, in the beastliest sense, you are Pomey the Great
As some ungracious pastors do, show me the steep and thorny way to heaven, whiles, like a puffed and reckless libertine, himself the primrose path of dailliance treads and recks not his own rede.
Something is rotten in the state of Denmark
So lust though to a radiant angel linked, will sate itself in a celestial bed and prey on garbage
When I read Shakespeare I am struck with wonder That such trivial people should muse and thunder In such lovely language.
– D.H. Lawrence
He is open to incontinency
A foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is man!
What such fellows as I do, crawling between earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves all, believe none of us
If thou dost marry, I’ll give thee this plague for thy dowry, be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shall not escape calummy
It out herods Herrod
It offends me to the soul to hear a robustious periwig pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags.
Live in the rank sweat of an enseamed bed, strewed in corruption, honeying and making love over a nasty sty
My two schoolfellows. Whom I shall trust as I will adders fangs
I see a good amendment of life in thee, from praying to purse taking
There is neither honesty, manhood or good fellowship in thee.
You tread upon my patience
He made me mad to see him shine so brisk, and smell so sweet, and talk so like a waiting gentlewoman
France has not insults, fool’s-caps, and pillories enough for such a scoundrel. My blood boils in my own veins while I speak to you about him … And the terrible thing is that … it is I myself who was the first to speak about this Shakespeare [in France]. I was the first who showed to the French a few pearls which I had found in his enormous dunghill.
— Voltaire
We leak in your chimney and your chamber lye breeds fleas like a loach
There is no more valour in that Poins than in a wild duck
Out, you mad headed ape. A weasel hath not such a deal of spleen as you are tossed with
Why, thou clay brained guts, thou knotty pated fool, thou whoreson obscene greasy tallow catch
What a slave art thou to hack thy sword as thou hast done, and then say it was in a fight
Do thou amend thy face, and I’ll amend my life
Your means are very slender, and your waste is great
So, thou common dog, didst thou disgorge thy glutton bosom?
He hath eaten me out of house and home, he hath put all my substance into that fat belly of his
What a disgrace it is to me that I should remember your name
What a maidenly man at arms you have become
A pox damn you, you muddy rascal, is that all the comfort you bring me?
Hang yourself, you muddy conger
Is thy name Mouldy ?
Lord, how subject we old men are to this vice of lying
A ruffian that will swear, drink, dance, revel the night, rob, murder and commit the oldest of ins the newest kind of ways.
Thou damned tripe visaged rascal
For anything I know Falstaff shall die of a sweat, unless already he be killed with your hard opinions
Put thy face between his sheets and do the office of warming pan
He’ll yield the crow a pudding one of these days
Thou cruel, ingrateful, savage and inhuman creature.
A vain, giddy, shallow, humorous youth
I desire nothing but odds with England
He never broke any mans head but his own, and that was against a post when he was drunk
I think Shakespeare is shit! “Thee” and “Thou”-the guy sounds like a faggot.
– Gene Simmons
What a wretched and peevish fellow is this King
That is a perilous shot out of an elder gun
He be as good a gentleman as the devil is, as Lucifer and Beelzebub himself
If I owe you anything I shall pay you in cudgels
A wonder and a pointing stock to every idle rascal
As goodness is poison to your stomach
Base dunghill villain and mechanical, I’ll have thy head.
Base slave, thy words are blunt, and so art thou
Be packing
Beauforts red sparkling eyes blab his hearts malice, and Suffolks cloudy brew his stormy hate
Contemptuous base born callet
Down, down to hell, and say I send thee thither
Farewell, sour annoyI can see his pride peep through each part of him
Go forward, and be choked with thy ambition
Go rate thy minions, proud insulting boy
He begins a new hell in himself
His breath stinks with eating toasted cheese
His will is most malignant
I abhor this dilatory sloth
The undisputed fame enjoyed by Shakespeare as a writer is, like every other lie, a great evil.
— Tolstoy
I will chastise this high minded strumpet
In thy need such comfort come to thee as now I reap at thy too cruel hand
O tigers heart wrapped in a woman’s hide
O, were mine eye bans into bullets turned, that in a rage I might shoot them at your faces
Sit there, the lyingest knave in Christendom
A huge translation of hypocrisy, vilely compiled, profound simplicity
A most pathetical nit
A whitely wanton with a velvet brow, with two pitch balls stuck in her face for eyes
Ah, you whoreson loggerhead, you were born to do me shame
An admirable evasion of whore master man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star
False of heart, light of ear, bloody of hand, hog in sloth, fox in stealth, wolf in greediness, dog in madness, lion in prey
From the extremest upward of thy head to the descent and dust beneath thy foot, a most toad spotted traitor
He hath a half face
He hath been five thousand years a boy
He is a dreamer, let us leave him
He that is likest to a hogs head
His intellect is not replenished, he is only an animal, only sensible in the duller parts
I do find it cowardly and vile
I have seen drunkards to more than this in sport
If is name be George, I’ll call him Peter
O you hard hearts, you cruel men
On my knee I give heaven thanks that I am not like to thee
Out, dunghill
Pernicious and indubitate beggar
So vile a lout
If all the work of Shakespeare could be gathered up and burned in one pile, the world would witness the most beneficial action for the sake of literature since the invention of alcohol.
— Waterloo, Iowa, Times-Tribune, 1920
That same purpose clanger, that sly devil, that broker that still breaks the pate of faith, that daily break vow
The music of his own vain tongue doth ravish like enchanting harmony
There is not yet so ugly a fiend of hell as thou shall be
This bawd, this broker, this all changing word
This is the foul fiend Flibbertigibbet
Thou art a boil, a plague sore, an embossed carbuncle in my corrupted blood
Thou art a traitor, false to thy gods, thy brother and thy father
Thou art more deep damned than Prince Lucifer
Thou halfpenny purse of wit, thou pigeon egg of discretion
Thou odoriferous stench, sound rottenness
Thy detestable bones
Weed this wormwood from your fruitful brain
What a brazen faced varlet art thou
What a fool art thou, a rampaging fool, to brag and stamp and swear
What cracker is this same that deafs our ears with this abundance of superfluous breath
What rubbish, what offal
We can say of Shakespeare that never has a man turned so little knowledge to such great account.
– T.S. Eliot
Where will thou find a cavern dark enough to mask thy monstrous visage
You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things
You showed your teeth like apes, and fawned like hounds and bowed like bondmen
You talk greasily, your lips grow foul
You whoreson cullionly barbermonger
Your purpled hands do reek and smoke
Small curs are not regarded when they grin
Teeth hadst thou in thy head when thou wast born to signify thou came to bite the world
The common people swarm like summer flies
The terror of the French, the scarecrow that affrights our children so.
There is mischief in this man
This butcher’s cur is venom mouthed
Thou misshapen Dick
Vile fiend and shameless courtesan
Wedded be thou to the hags of hell
You are strangely troublesome
You have as little honesty as honour
You put sharp weapons in a madmans hands
You, that are polluted with your lusts, stained with the guiltless blood of innocents, corrupt and tainted with a thousand vices.
Your heart is crammed with arrogancy, spleen and pride
Your hearts I’ll stamp out with my horse’s heel and make a quagmire of your mingled brains
For there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and beeing an absolute Johannes fac totum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey.
— Robert Greene, Groats-worth of Witte (1592)