With Easter approaching, what do you say we go hunting for eggs in Shakespeare’s work? I’m not going to list them all here (since it’s easy to hunt them down with a search engine where’s the fun in that?) but I’ll hit the most famous ones. Add more in the comments!
“Give me an egg, nuncle, and I’ll give thee two crowns.”
Why, after I have cut the egg i’ th’ middle and eat up the
meat, the two crowns of the egg.
When I first tried to read King Lear I couldn’t understand Fool at all. After many readings and watchings, I think the scenes with Lear, Fool and Kent are my favorite (even if I don’t always understand what he’s saying). He’s one of the few people (perhaps the only one?) who can say to the king, “Hey genius, how smart was it to split your kingdom down the middle and then give away both parts?”
Falstaff
Take away these chalices. Go brew me a pottle of
sack finely.Bardolph
With eggs, sir?
Falstaff
Simple of itself; I’ll no pullet-sperm in my brewage.
Ok Falstaff, eww. How am I supposed to look at my kids’ Easter eggs the same way ever again? (Courtesy Merry Wives of Windsor, for those that don’t remember this charming lesson in animal husbandry showing up in the Henry plays.) I actually googled this to see if I was missing something and saw it turn up in a list entitled “Why Aren’t These Shakespeare Quotes Famous Too?”
What, you egg!
[Stabbing him]
Young fry of treachery!
Students love this quote, I regularly see it posted when people reading Macbeth for the first time stumble across it. There are web pages and apps and even books dedicated to Shakespearean Insults, but calling somebody an egg just has a special sort of “What did he just call me?” flare to it.
My favorite part is the second line, where he calls him a young fry of treachery. You know why, don’t you?
Because now he’s a fried egg.
On that note, I’m out of here before anybody gets the pitchforks. What other egg references have you found?