where does this line come from"THE SHEETED DEAD DID SHRIEK AND GIBBER IN THE STREETS OF ROME"?

Question

Another quote my dear old dad used to say!Id love to know where this comes from,wish i had cared more when he was here!

Answer 1

It's from Shakespeare's Hamlet. Here's some more info:

Shakespeare worked the same way, plundering the available translations of Latin works for his Roman plays, and English chroniclers like Holinshed, Grafton, and Halle for his English history plays. It is always a startling and illuminating experience to place a passage from one of these sources side by side with a speech from one of Shakespeare's plays and note both the changes the poet made and, often more strikingly, the changes he did not make. A familiar example from Julius Caesar makes the point: Shakespeare took Caesar's comment on Cassius from Thomas North's translation of Plutarch's Lives, "What will Cassius do, think ye? I like not his pale looks," and just later his reservations about Antonius and Dolabella: "As for those fat men and smooth-combed heads,' quoth he, 'I never reckon of them, but these pale-visaged and carrion-lean people, I fear them most'" (The Renaissance in England, 550). Shakespeare transformed and metered these words into some of the most remembered, if not most memorable lines he ever wrote: "Let me have men about me that are fat, / Sleek-headed men and such as sleep o' nights. / Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look, / He thinks too much; such men are dangerous"(I.ii.192-95). "Would he were fatter" (I.ii.198). More revealing, however, is the poet's ability to take the barest hint in his source and amplify it into a powerful image. Plutarch's account of the ominous marvels presaging Caesar's death includes the spectacular accounts of fire in the sky, the flame from the slave's hand, the solitary birds at noon in the marketplace, and so on, that are familiar to us in Shakespeare's reworking of them. But one especially striking detail in the play has but slender warrant in Plutarch, who included among the "wonderful signs . . . seen before Caesar's death" "fires in the element and spirits running up and down in the night, and also these solitary birds. . . ." Of the reference to "spirits running up and down in the night" Shakespeare made ". . . graves have yawned and yielded up their dead . . . / . . . And ghosts did shriek and squeal about the streets" (II.ii.18, 24). He liked that detail so well that he used it again, in improved form, in Hamlet, where Horatio cites it in comparison with the apparition on the castle wall: "In the most high and palmy state of Rome, / A little ere the mightiest Julius fell, / The graves stood tenantless and the sheeted dead / Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets" (I.i.113-116).

Answer 2

It's from Hamlet, Act 1 Scene 1:

Horatio:
A mote it is to trouble the mind's eye.
In the most high and palmy state of Rome,
A little ere the mightiest Julius fell,
The graves stood tenantless and the sheeted dead
Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets:
As stars with trains of fire and dews of blood,
Disasters in the sun; and the moist star
Upon whose influence Neptune's empire stands
Was sick almost to doomsday with eclipse:
And even the like precurse of fierce events,
As harbingers preceding still the fates
And prologue to the omen coming on,
Have heaven and earth together demonstrated
Unto our climatures and countrymen.--
But soft, behold! lo, where it comes again!

Answer 3

It's from Shakespeare - Hamlet

Answer 4

Don't know positively - but would have guessed, from the wording, that it might be from 'JABBERWOCKY(IE?)'......