The fact remains that Shakespeare's vocabulary and Shakespeare's cadences are even more pervasive in our ordinary discourse today than the idiom of the King James Bible, which Bartlett's lists as only the second most plentiful source of
Familiar Quotations. And much the same could be said of those mirrors of our nature, Shakespeare's characters. From small delights such as Juliet's Nurse, or Flute the Bellows-mender, or Hamlet's Gravedigger, to such incomparable originals as Falstaff, King Lear, and Cleopatra, Shakespeare has enlarged our world by imitating it. It should not surprise us, therefore, that personalities as vivid as these have gone on, as it were, to lives of their own outside the dramatic settings in which they first thought and spoke and moved. In opera alone there are enough different renderings of characters and scenes from Shakespeare's plays to assure that the devotee of Charles-Francois Gounod, Giuseppe Verdi, Richard Wagner, and Benjamin Britten could attend a different performance every evening for six months and never hear the same aria twice. Which is not to suggest, of course, that the creators of other musical forms have been remiss: Franz Schubert, Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann, Franz Liszt, Hector Berlioz, Pyotr Ilich Tchaikovsky, Claude Debussy, Jean Sibelius, Sergey Prokofiev, and Aaron Copland are but a few of the major figures who have given us songs, tone poems, ballets, symphonic scores, or other works based on the Shakespearean corpus.
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