Question

in 'a game of chess', the second part of 'the waste land', the narrator suffers under a tirade of paranoid abuse (incidentally, based on eliot's experience of his first wife vivienne). during this, he soliloquizes 'those were pearls which were his eyes'. which shakespeare play is this a quotation from?

Answer 1

The line "those were pearls that were his eyes" is a quotation from the play "The Tempest" by William Shakespeare. It is spoken by the character Prospero in Act I, Scene 2. In "The Waste Land" by T.S. Eliot, the line is used as a reference in the section titled "A Game of Chess."