Beam Me Up Scotty / Theatre

• There are a few Shakespearean examples of this:
  • Macbeth:
    • Lady Macbeth never actually says Out, out damn spot!. Macbeth does say "Out, out, brief candle!", which is probably where the confusion stems from. Lady Macbeth's line was actually "Out, damned spot!", with only one "out", and "damned", not "damn".
    • Macbeth's line when he hallucinates the dagger is often quoted as "Is this a dagger I see before me?" However, Macbeth actually says, "Is this a dagger which I see before me, the handle toward my hand?"
    • "Double, double toil and trouble", not "Bubble bubble" or "Hubble, bubble". If nothing else, they rhyme it with "bubble" in the next line, so it'd be a pretty lazy rhyme. Also, they used toe of frog not toad. Though they threw a whole toad in there too.
    • The prophecy by the apparitions is often referred to as "No Man of Woman Born shall harm Macbeth," but the apparition actually states that " None of woman born shall harm Macbeth." Emphasis on the man specifically is from Tolkien, who created his prophecy for The Lord of the Rings out of express dissatisfaction with how Shakespeare resolved his.
    • "Lead on, Macduff", which is a common misquotation of "Lay on, Macduff", often used in a completely different context from how it is used in the play.^note Fiorello! makes one character's last name "Macduff" for no better reason than to use the misquotation. Macbeth is challenging Macduff to attack him in the final scene, threatening that it will be no holds barred. Macduff then fights Macbeth, killing him off-stage.
  • Hamlet:
    • Queen Gertrude never said "Methinks the lady doth protest too much"; it was actually "The lady doth protest too much, methinks." Which isn't terribly different but is certainly drier. Note that the line means something mostly different than what people think it means ("protest" means "firmly declare", not "speak against" or "complain".)
    • Although Hamlet undoubtedly "knew him well", he never said so of Yorick in so many words:
    Hamlet: Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! my gorge rises at it.
    • Polonius is often quoted as saying, "Neither a borrower nor a lender be, but to thine own self be true." That quote comes from two different sentences in the scene where he is giving advice to Laertes.
    • Horatio says, "Good-night, sweet prince; And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest", not "a flight of angels".
    • The phrase "This is a tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind" is nowhere to be found in Shakespeare's play, only in Laurence Olivier's 1948 film version.
    • What are Hamlet's two iconic scenes? The "To be or not to be" monologue and the "Alas, poor Yorick" scene where he's holding the defunct jester's skull. Some depictions of the play show Hamlet saying the former line, skull in hand.
  • Prospero from The Tempest has a line that is frequently misquoted as "the stuff that dreams are made of." He is actually talking about the transience of human life, and the line goes: "We are such stuff / As dreams are made on, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep."
  • More a misunderstanding than a misquote, but the Polonius' saying "brevity is the soul of wit" is often used as actual advice for telling jokes. While this is true in a lot of cases (as the listener might get bored if you take way too long to get to the punchline). The character in question is anything but brief or witty, and the quote is said at the beginning of a long, rambling monologue. In other words, it was meant as a form of Hypocritical Humor, as opposed to actual advice.
  • Romeo and Juliet:
    • "Romeo, Romeo... Wherefore art thou Romeo?" Not a misquote but a common misinterpretation; it doesn't mean "Where are you, Romeo?" but "Why are you Romeo?" i.e., "Why is it the one named Romeo Montague that I love?" This one is so firmly ingrained (by a million comedy skits that have Romeo replying "I'm down here!") that when David Beckham named his son Romeo, one British newspaper felt it had to alter the quote to ask WHY FOR ART THOU ROMEO? Poor dears thought they were punning. The dating website OK Cupid uses this as a shibboleth to help theater and literature nerds find each other.
    • "A rose by any other name smells just as sweet." - it's actually: "What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other word would smell as sweet."
    • When I saw you I fell in love, and you smiled because you knew. is neither a quote from Romeo and Juliet nor even by Shakespeare. It comes from Giuseppe Verdi's opera Falstaff, based on ''The Merry Wives of Windsor."
  • King John: "To gild refined gold, to paint the lily" was shortened to "gild[ing] the lily", which makes less sense. To "gild" something is to add gold to it, usually to the edges. Hence the point being made is that adding gold to gold is superfluous; as is "painting the lily" (since it's already colorful) or "throwing a perfume on the violet" (which already smells pleasant). While adding gold edges to a flower might be impractical, it could still theoretically improve its beauty.
  • Doesn't exactly fit, but an example in the same vein, from Richard III: "Now is the winter of our discontent / made glorious summer by this sun of York" - it means "Our winter of discontent has now been ended by this sun [son] of York". "Now is the winter of our discontent" is often used or cited on its own as a complete thought, to express sorrow, even though it of course makes no sense in the context of the play or even the full sentence.
  • Julius Caesar:
    • "Stand on ceremony" is used to mean "be ceremonious and formal", when it actually means "pay attention to omens and portents", which when you think about it, makes "stand on" make more sense.
    • In Act III, scene II, after Antony says, "Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears", the following sentence, "I have come to bury Caesar, not to praise him", is often misquoted as "I come not to praise Caesar, but to bury him."
  • Twelfth Night: "If music be the food of love, play on" is quoted a fair bit, without the next part, "Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,/The appetite may sicken, and so, die." It's not a cheery request for more music to arouse more love, it's an order/prescription for an emotional purgative: give me enough to make me (metaphorically) throw up and stop being in love.
  • The Winter's Tale: The "most famous piece of stage direction in history" is "Exit, Pursued by a Bear", not "Exit stage left, pursued by a bear". Perhaps people are mixing up Shakespeare and Snagglepuss?
  • In A Midsummer Night's Dream, Puck doesn't say "Oh what fools these mortals be!" The actual line is "Lord, what fools these mortals be!"
  • In Henry IV, Part 2, Henry's most famous quote is not "Heavy lies the head that wears the crown", or even "Heavy lies the crown", as it is sometimes rendered. It's "Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown".
• William Congreve's play, The Mourning Bride said "Music has charms to soothe a savage breast" (i.e. music can help you calm down when your emotions are out of control). People will often quote it as "Music hath charms to soothe the savage beast".
  • Also, "Hell hath no fury like a Woman Scorned" is actually "Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, nor Hell a fury like a woman scorned." There is no "hath" at all in the line. (Or in any other line written in a William Congreve play, for that matter, since he lived in a time where "hath" had fallen out of use in favour of "has" already.)
• In East Lynne, Lady Isabel does not say, "Dead — and never called me mother!"^note This would be erroneous, since "Mother" is her son's last word as he dies in her arms. The actual line in the play is, "See here — my child is dead! and never knew that I was his mother."^note The novel the play was based on had only the narration commenting on this dramatic situation; an earlier dramatization, The Tangled Path, omitted the scene entirely. The misquote was popularised by The Goon Show which used it as a Running Gag; in one episode Neddie Seagoon actually calls it "an excerpt from East Lynne".
• In You Can't Take It With You, Kolenkhov never says "Confidentially, it stinks," though he more than once says "it stinks" and once, in reference to Essie, says, "Confidentially, she stinks." The Rodgers and Hart song "Ev'rything I've Got" also just barely misses using the exact phrase. It doesn't help that parodists often distort the line further, to "Confidentially, this stinks!"
• In Grease, Sandy's full name isn't "Sandra Dee." Her name is Sandy Dumbrowski in the stage version, Sandy Olsson in the film, and Sandy Young in the TV remake. Sandra Dee was, of course, a popular actress, and when Rizzo calls Sandy "Sandra Dee," she's comparing her squeaky-clean persona to the actress's image.
• In Gypsy, June and Louise call their mother "Momma", other characters just call her Rose, and she sometimes bills herself as "Madame Rose." Not once is she referred to as "Momma Rose", although it is a decent catch-all name for her.
• Another in-universe occurrence is in the musical Bye Bye Birdie. Having become frustrated with her fiancé, Rose makes the following remark about men: "They're all alike - from puberty to senility, from Benedict Arnold to Mussolini." Kim overhears Rosie and later truncates the quote in front of her parents: "Rosie was right! Men are all alike - from puberty to Mussolini!" (This causes her father, Harry, to complain about his daughter using such words in front of him.)
• Cedric Diggory of A Very Potter Musical is often depicted going around randomly blurting out the word "Find!" He does this exactly once in the trilogy, and the moment is actually pretty easy to miss. He does say "find" a lot, but he generally uses it in actual sentences.
• The line 'I saw Goody Proctor with the devil' is normally used to reference the scene at the end of Act One of "The Crucible" where the girls cry out variations on 'I saw X with the devil'. However, that precise line does not appear in the play.
• In Waiting for Godot, the very last stage direction in Act I is "They do not move", but it's frequently misquoted as "They do not go". Though inaccurate, this phrasing fits a bit more humorously with the last lines of Act I, which it's meant to contrast.
  Estragon: Well, shall we go?
  Vladimir: Yes, let's go.
  (they do not move)
• A Man for All Seasons has a famous speech about "Giving the Devil the benefit of the law" which isn't misquoted (usually) so much as it's frequently misinterpreted. In context, Sir Thomas More is telling his son-in-law that even an evil man (speaking specifically of ambitious courtier Richard Rich, just before his Heel–Face Turn) deserves legal protection and assumption of innocence until and unless he actually commits a crime. The speech is often presented (especially in political contexts) as an argument either that no man is above the law, which has nothing to do with More's argument (that people should be protected by the law, not that they're subject to it), or worse, that the law should be enforced at all costs, which is precisely the opposite of the point More and playwright Robert Bolt intended to make.
• My Fair Lady: The famous phonetics exercise which becomes Eliza's first phrase of "proper English" isn't "The rain in Spain lies mainly on the plain” or “The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain.” It's "The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain."

---