Words matter. These are the best Shakespeare Quotes from famous people such as Andrew Coyle Bradley, Rebecca Serle, William Ernest Henley, Sheridan Smith, Mandy Patinkin, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Shakespeare also introduces the supernatural into some of his tragedies; he introduces ghosts, and witches who have supernatural knowledge.
We need to take a far more active role in love than ‘Romeo and Juliet’ would lead us to believe. Perhaps that’s what Shakespeare’s saying, in a way. We can’t leave it all up to fate.
Shakespeare and Rembrandt have in common the faculty of quickening speculation and compelling the minds of men to combat and discussion.
I’m grateful to be working. The most exciting thing for me is that I never get bored – I’ve done comedy, drama, musical theatre and now Shakespeare.
On occasion, a well-constructed drama can do what no reality or news program can do, what Shakespeare does brilliantly, is it can show both sides’ opinions.
I think academics are infuriating. For every expert on Shakespeare there is another one to cancel his theory out. It drives you up the wall. I think the greatest form of finding out the truth is through fantasy.
Simon Russell Beale is an incomparable speaker of Shakespeare and a superb all-round actor.
Reading the play at home, however fulfilling, can never be the vivacious experience that Shakespeare intended.
When you’re working class and you feel like you’re a bit of a toerag, you think Shakespeare’s not for you, you know?
My parents are the reason I wanted to make Shakespeare available to ordinary people.
In any long string of letters, one can find countless anomalies that will seem like convincing proofs of hidden meaning to the mind that wants to believe that the text is somehow special. Numerological tricks, for example, can demonstrate that William Shakespeare wrote the ‘King James Bible.’
I don’t think my looks are modern. I always imagined I’d end up doing Chekhov, Ibsen and Shakespeare all my life and never play a contemporary character.
Nobody will go on being remembered for a very long time, unless you’re Shakespeare or Milton. I have no hope of being remembered at all.
In the theatre, people talk. Talk, talk until the cows come home about journeys of discovery and about what Hazlitt thought of a line of Shakespeare. I can’t stand it.
I’d like people to remember me for a diligent expert workman. I think a poet is a workman. I think Shakespeare was a workman. And God’s a workman. I don’t think there’s anything better than a workman.
I’m one of those people that feels that Americans that shouldn’t do Shakespeare… The rhythms of the English language and the mannerisms of the English speech seems to work effortlessly with William Shakespeare, but when Americans do it, something seems stuck.
By all means, let us study the great writers of the past for their own sakes, but let us study them for our guidance: that we, in our turn, having (it is to be hoped) something to say in our span of time, say it worthily, not dwindling out the large utterance of Shakespeare or of Burke.
I wanted to have a house near his grave, and that’s exactly what I did get. When I woke up in the morning, I would open my window and look out upon Holy Trinity Church, where Shakespeare’s grave is. Not once did it fail to move me.
I liked Shakespeare in high school, but in university I spent a semester studying in London, and it was sort of in the middle of me falling deeply in love with literature, and I took a Shakespeare course with a professor who couldn’t imagine anything more important than Shakespeare.
In a very literal way, of course, Shakespeare did change the course of history: when it didn’t fit the plot he had in mind, he simply rewrote it. His English histories play fast and loose with chronology and fact to achieve the desired dramatic effect, re-ordering history even as it was then understood.
My writing improved the more I wrote – and the more I read good writing, from Shakespeare on down.
With ‘True Grit,’ the language was very specific, as is Shakespeare. You couldn’t really improvise, nor would you really ever have to. I never felt the need to. It was all so beautifully written, and it was all right there.
I believe that nothing comes of nothing, even in Shakespeare. I wanted to know where he got the matter he was working with and what he did with that matter.
I never wanted to become an actress because I’d read great literature or seen great Shakespeare. It was more just wanting to understand what the people were really like, why they said all the strange things they did.
What, if not Shakespeare, is open for interpretation?
There’s that old adage about how there’s only seven plots in the world and Shakespeare’s done them all before.
I love American English, not least because a lot of it was ours to begin with. Indeed, many Americanisms can be found in the works of William Shakespeare.
Shakespeare is, essentially, the emanation of the Renaissance. The overflow of his fame on the Continent in later years was but the sequel of the flood of the Renaissance in Western Europe. He was the child of that great movement, and marks its height as it penetrated the North with civilization.
Everybody gets a little dose of Shakespeare. He’s the greatest playwright in the English language, but his politics are fairly square.
For a writer, personal freedom is not so important. It is not individual freedom that guarantees the greatness of literature; otherwise, writers in democratic countries would be superior to all others. Some of the greatest writers wrote under dictatorship – Shakespeare, Cervantes.
A marvellous power of expression over language often distinguishes genius; but Shakespeare in his phrases seems independent of the bonds of language as of the bonds of metre.
I feel like Shakespeare is so epic, in a way that sci-fi genre stuff is epic, it transcends the mundane, and it takes you to this place of real passion and real beauty.
If an L.A. actor is a star or a good face, and they want to get cred by doing a serious Shakespeare play, they will come to New York first.
My background isn’t in social software; it’s in online community, social networks, personal publishing, blogging, self-expression on the Web. I got on the Internet in the 1980s, and the magic moment for me arose from my being a literature geek, especially Dante and Shakespeare.
The thing that I have a horror of is ideological theatre – Shakespeare never told us how to think.
Why is the public so interested in movies about the wealthy? My answer is that Shakespeare wrote about kings. That’s where the action is. And it’s the classic, cathartic thing. You get to indulge in a lifestyle you’re not part of, a tragic error leads to a downfall, and you get to say, ‘Thank God I’m not him.’
I want to play Eva Peron. I’ve already done a lot of Shakespeare, but I’d like to do Lady Macbeth.
When you get the high art of William Shakespeare and the greatest love story ever told, and you collision crash it with the low art of the tacky garden gnome, you’re going to have lots and lots of opportunity for fun and putting your tongue very firmly in your cheek.
I went to London because, for me, it was the home of literature. I went there because of Dickens and Shakespeare.
In my gap year between college and drama school, I taught art at a hospice and worked at a little coffee shop across the street from Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London when everything around it was still a construction zone.
When you know your cast well and their strengths and weaknesses, you can start writing for them, just the way Shakespeare wrote for his actors.
And you know, I hate to admit this, but I don’t always think in terms of Shakespeare. When I eat, I do. When I’m at a restaurant, I’ll think, ‘Hmm, what would Macbeth have ordered?’
I’ve got no need to prove to myself that I can do Shakespeare. I’ve done it.
Shakespeare was the great one before us. His place was between God and despair.
One reason why Shakespeare’s plays remain so popular is that they’re now regularly presented in updated stagings with a contemporary flavor.
I like the fact George R. R. Martin took Shakespeare’s political plays as material, but he also took on all sorts of other sensational stories and mingled them in together.
Increasingly, I find myself drawn to classic forms – to Euripides, Shakespeare and grand opera.
I’ve always adored Shakespeare.
In Shakespeare, unique individuals repudiate the stereotypes demanded by the structure of the play: Shylock commands our sympathy, Barnardine refuses to be hanged. Individuals trump the category.
There’s something about doing Shakespeare with a single gender, whether it is all-male or all-female, that opens up certain possibilities. You are able to throw the behavior of the men into a particular relief and be playful within a slightly larger-than-life way with it.
I saw a Shakespeare play when I was – I guess I was in junior high. And I just fell in love with the theater because, for me, it was a combination of big ideas and feeling.
I have a personal issue with Shakespeare. When I first encountered him, he made me feel thick. Well, not him, but the productions I saw.
I don’t know, I’d love to try some theater. That’s my other thing. I’d love to do some Shakespeare.
I wasn’t a model schoolboy. Of course, I was forced to sit through Shakespeare and I really got into some of it, though it depended on who was reading it out.
If you got what it takes, you’ll make it. If you don’t, Shakespeare couldn’t help you.
First of all, Shakespeare is about pleasure and interest. He was from the first moment he actually wrote something for the stage, and he remains so.
Anything one can do to provoke and inspire an interest in the works of Shakespeare in a young audience is fair game. Anything.
I think that with Bob Dylan around, we’re living in an era where we have Whitman presenting new work, we have Dickens presenting new work, we have Yeats and Shakespeare presenting new work. It’s that level.
Shaw is like a train. One just speaks the words and sits in one’s place. But Shakespeare is like bathing in the sea – one swims where one wants.
My career is chequered. Then I think I got pigeon-holed in humour; Shakespeare is not my thing.
We were not allowed to say, Screw, but we could say, Hump the hostess, because hump is in Shakespeare.
Only once in a thousand years or so do we get to hear a Mozart or see a Picasso or read a Shakespeare. Ali was one of them, and yet at his heart, he was still a kid from Louisville who ran with the gods and walked with the crippled and smiled at the foolishness of it all.
There’s a phrase in Shakespeare: he refers to it as the ‘hidden imposthume’, and this idea of a hidden swelling is seminal to cancer. But even in more contemporary writing it’s called ‘the big C’.
Shakespeare had found language for the agony of living with one’s own mistakes. There were words for finding yourself isolated with your failures. Phrases for discovering that you were wrong, all, all wrong, wrong, wrong.
Now, when I talk about Shakespeare, I can’t talk too much about Gielgud or Olivier. Because nobody knows who I’m talking about.
Things happen in ‘If This is a Man’ that are beyond ordinary daily experience, but it is still us to whom they are happening, and the understanding Levi seeks is no different in kind from that sought by Shakespeare in ‘King Lear’, or Conrad in ‘The Heart of Darkness’.
I play guitar; you’ll find me at home strumming ‘Vincent’ on the guitar. I also read a lot of poetry, and Shakespeare was my first love, which was why I got into acting. A lot of the fighters are intelligent!
Many of the novelists I admire never left their hometown. Look at Flannery O’Connor. So many of the great Russians never left Russia. Shakespeare never left England. The list goes on.
If Shakespeare was around today I would ask him out to dinner. The only thing I don’t like about him is the way he did his hair.
I considered several names, but Titania, a character from Shakespeare’s ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’, was best able to portray the image I wanted for what is a fantastically elegant and sexy yacht.
All the great Shakespeare plays are about killing. ‘Alas, poor Yorick,’ that’s about death. And in ‘Romeo and Juliet’ everyone up ends up dying. The greatest dramas in the world are all about sex, violence and death.
What is the point of teaching how to analyse a poem or a piece of Shakespeare but not to analyse the Internet?
I kinda liked ol’ Shakespeare and them guys, you know. I went back and got my master’s just in case. I thought, if I ever needed it, I’d have the sheepskin to show people no matter how dumb I looked, actually I was about half intelligent. I got the degree to let ’em know I wasn’t as dumb as I acted.
Characters are an extreme form in Shakespeare’s theater.
Shakespeare and his work will always be relevant. He wrote those pieces hundreds of years ago and we haven’t really changed as humans, have we? We have to deal with love, honour and adultery now – people were the same then, too – that’s what’s so wonderful and powerful.
The remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he really is very good, in spite of all the people who say he is very good.
You may be able to read Bernard Shaw’s plays, you may be able to quote Shakespeare or Voltaire or some new philosopher; but if you in yourself are not intelligent, if you are not creative, what is the point of this education?
When Shakespeare was writing, he wasn’t writing for stuff to lie on the page; it was supposed to get up and move around.
I have always wanted what I have now come to call the voice of personal narrative. That has always been the appealing voice in poetry. It started for me lyrically in Shakespeare’s sonnets.
For Russians, to whom Pushkin’s poem ‘Eugene Onegin’ is sacred text, the ballet’s story and personae are as familiar and filled with meaning as, for instance, ‘Romeo’ and ‘Hamlet’ are for us. Russians know whole stretches of it by heart, the way we know Shakespeare and Italians know Dante.
Shakespeare is a permanent presence in the English letters.
Shakespeare is one of the last books one should like to give up, perhaps the one just before the Dying Service in a large Prayer book.
I’ve done a lot of Shakespeare over the years. You start to realise how the plays fit together; he’s always using pieces from one and slotting them into others.
Now we sit through Shakespeare in order to recognize the quotations.
My foundation in acting has been serious theatre: Albert Camus, Arthur Miller, Shakespeare. It’s really the best medium to learn the craft.
A book is sent out into the world, and there is no way of fully anticipating the responses it will elicit. Consider the responses called forth by the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare – let alone contemporary poetry or a modern novel.
The trap in Hamlet is he’s the most passive of Shakespeare’s characters. He’s not a Richard III, not out there taking a lot of action. It’s a lot of asides and soliloquies where he’s wrapped in angst, and that’s not a very interesting character.
The 16th-century theatre witnessed the particularly English manifestation of ‘the history play.’ There can be no doubt that Shakespeare’s presentations of ‘Henry V’ and ‘Richard III’ have been incalculably more influential than any more sober historical study.
When you study, as I did, every theatrical beginning in this country, none of them have been greeted well. The Royal Shakespeare Company was a disaster, Peter Hall was a disaster, Richard Eyre was a disaster, Trevor Nunn was always a disaster.
I love physical comedy. I love Oscar Wilde, I love Shakespeare comedies, I love improv.
I remain loyal to Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert in music and to Shakespeare and Jane Austen in literature.
You would get some fantastic syntactical phenomena. You would hear people talking in Barbados in the exact melody as a minor character in Shakespeare. Because here you have a thing that was not immured and preserved and mummified, but a voluble language, very active, very swift, very sharp.
I couldn’t believe verse was supposed to be hard. It was a snap for me. I loved Shakespeare.
I’ve hated poetry ever since I was at school. I include Shakespeare in that. I don’t understand the obsession with him!
The language can be different, but the emotional lives are the same no matter whether you’re doing Shakespeare or Stoppard or something else… The emotional life is all the same.
Shakespeare gives you these clues – these little pieces of gold dust, I call them. They tell you so much about the story, the character, the drive, the intentions. It’s like a gift.
As a Shakespeare character, if you can persuade someone in a sentence or a speech, you’ve got it right.
Shakespeare is the true multicultural author. He exists in all languages. He is put on the stage everywhere. Everyone feels that they are represented by him on the stage.
The Bible is very resonant. It has everything: creation, betrayal, lust, poetry, prophecy, sacrifice. All great things are in the Bible, and all great writers have drawn from it and more than people realise, whether Shakespeare, Herman Melville or Bob Dylan.
I had a very bad first experience of Shakespeare at school, and, now I’m determined to put that wrong right and just make Shakespeare as vivid and live as possible.
Kings had their clowns, the people their actors and musicians. Shakespeare was scheduled as a servant. It is thus that successful stupidity has always treated genius.
Shakespeare has great ability to skirt around a subject and portray human nature.
In many ways, ‘William Shakespeare’s Star Wars’ is modeled on Shakespeare’s Henry V, which relied on a chorus to explain in words the battles of Harfleur and Agincourt that could never be captured on the Elizabethan stage.
Whenever I play Shakespeare, I keep thinking, ‘how did this Englishman know so much about me?’
I don’t do Shakespeare. I don’t talk in that kind of broken English.
In 1600, when Shakespeare’s audience at the Globe heard ‘Hamlet’ for the first time, every one of them knew very well what it meant to be handed a cup of wine by a figure of authority and told to drink.
Shakespeare – I was very influenced – still am – by Shakespeare. I couldn’t believe that a white man in the 16th century could so know my heart.
I landed in Los Angeles where I’ve stayed, with one year-long exception when I returned to Ashland as an actor in the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.
With Westerns you have the landscape is important, and it’s empty, and only you populate it. When you populate it, you can tell any kind story that Shakespeare told, you can tell in a Western.
I look on myself as a sort of hybrid, having grown up in the world of Shakespeare out in the cornfields of Ohio.
I kept writing not because I felt I was so good, but because I felt they were so bad, including Shakespeare, all those. The stilted formalism, like chewing cardboard.
I started out in the theater, and my background is classical. I’d love to be in a film version of a Shakespeare play.
Shakespeare is global – of course he can be shared.
It’s an intuitive exercise to do a Shakespeare play and to go through a Shakespeare play.
Shakespeare is rhythmic; he is musical in the sense that he likes poetry, and he’s musical because he constantly refers to settings where there’s singing and dancing.
When you tell a film financier that you want to do a Shakespeare film, their face drops. Shakespeare films don’t have a very wonderful history at the box office.
The first time I ever acted was in ‘The Glass Menagerie’ in high school, and my first line was, ‘I didn’t know Shakespeare had a sister.’
I’m as thrilled watching Mark Rylance do Shakespeare as I am watching ‘The Book of Mormon.’
I grew up reading Shakespeare and Mark Twain.
I’ve only written 30 songs or something. Dylan’s written over 500 songs. There’s no comparison. He’s the Shakespeare of rock ‘n’ roll and popular music.
Shakespeare very rarely makes the least attempt to surprise by his catastrophes. They are felt to be inevitable, though the precise way in which they will be brought about is not, of course, foreseen.
I cut school to read Shakespeare and to learn about that because, for the first time, I felt like I really discovered a passion – the passion of my life.
I have my sweetheart Yorkshire terrier, Tabasco, along with two cats, Romeo and Jasmine. Yes, I am both a Shakespeare and Disney addict.
White people use their literature to maintain culture. That’s why you find references to Milton and Spencer and Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky in contemporary novels.
Shakespeare reveals human nature brilliantly: he shines a light on our instinctive desire to dominate each other.
Shakespeare, who is probably the greatest writer and poet of the English language, lived in a time that was politically very conservative and it’s reflected in his writings.
I didn’t particularly aim to be a Shakespeare actor, but I suppose I had a certain gift or it; I certainly got offered lots of it. I liked Complicite and Shared Experience and Kick Theatre, and all the small theatre companies that were getting going. I wanted to be like that, making original theatre.
I don’t fool myself. I can’t see myself doing Shakespeare.
I went to drama school for four years at Carnegie Mellon, conservatory training before television comedy. I was doing Shakespeare and Chekov plays. It’s about delivering on the promise of a $100,000 education and taking the shackles off and trying the hand at my craft. I’m thrilled with what I’ve seen so far.
I started out as a singer and a musician, and I was taught that your job is just to get out of the way of Brahms or Arthur Miller or Shakespeare and convey the brilliance that they created.
I’d love to do Shakespeare. I’ve been asked to do Malvolio but for one reason or another haven’t been able. On a school trip to the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford I saw the great Emrys James as Feste and it’s always been a role I’ve coveted.
Iago is one of the most liked characters in Shakespeare’s canon, and he’s the most evil, most extraordinarily manipulative person in history. He says the worst, most politically incorrect things, even for the time the play is set in – and yet audiences adore that character.
I think every New York actor’s dream is to do Shakespeare in the Park. Each show is so special and unique and diverse because of the elements that we’re performing in. Every live show is truly a one-of-a-kind.
I haven’t read Ibsen, Shaw, Shakespeare – except ‘The Merchant of Venice’ in ninth grade. I’m not familiar with ‘Death of a Salesman.’ I haven’t read Tennessee Williams.
Shakespeare is like mother’s milk to me.
It is no exaggeration to say that the English Bible is, next to Shakespeare, the greatest work in English literature, and that it will have much more influence than even Shakespeare upon the written and spoken language of the English race.
When you’re on TV, you’re looking at a half-page of material, trying to memorize it really quickly. By the time it’s on TV, I’ve already forgotten what I said, but I can still recite my whole role from Shakespeare in the Park. It works a different set of muscles.
I do think that, for instance, we’ve been very lucky to have theatrical careers and be associated with Shakespeare which sometimes gives you a kind of bogus kudos.
The best decision I made at NYU was joining the Shakespeare ensemble. It literally led to everything I did after that. It gave me the kind of confidence I really needed.
It was easy to believe, between lessons on Shakespeare and Dickens and Austen, that all of the great stories had already been written by dead Europeans. But every time I saw ‘The Outsiders’, I knew better. It was the first time I’d realized that real people write books.
Whether it is the cavemen in the caves thousands of years ago, Shakespeare plays, television, movies and books, stories and characters take us on a journey. All I do is tell those stories without scripts and without actors.
I surrendered to a world of my imagination, reenacting all those wonderful tales my father would read aloud to me. I became a very active reader, especially history and Shakespeare.
I’d love to tackle a classic Shakespeare play or take on Nora Helmer in ‘A Doll’s House.’ Musical theater, it’s the classics like Rodgers and Hammerstein and Cole Porter’s ‘Kiss Me Kate.’ I’m much more a Julie Andrews-type soprano than an Idina Menzel.
I never wanted to do Shakespeare; I never liked watching it, it’s always frightened me, and I’ve never been any good at it. But I really wanted to work with the director Tim Carroll and Mark Rylance.
You rarely pay the rent by doing Shakespeare or Ibsen.
Jacobean plays, before Shakespeare, were particularly visceral.
The anti-apartheid prisoners on the island, like so many in every age and nation, found that Shakespeare had a peculiar ability to gentle their condition. They used to gather clandestinely to read the plays; on one occasion, the book was passed around for each man to mark his favourite lines.
I’m an actor. I started as an actor. I started on Broadway doing ‘Hair’ and Shakespeare in the Park.
Shakespeare’s work is like a good song: you never really forget the main lines.
‘As You Like It’ was the first Shakespeare production I ever did.
Now a Protestant confronting a Catholic ghost is exactly Shakespeare’s way of grappling with what was not simply a general social problem but one lived out in his own life.
I never publicise in advance what I’m going to be singing because I never quite know until I start. I often change my mind halfway through. I sometimes throw in stuff about politics or Shakespeare or do songs in Yiddish.
I don’t know how this company got the name National Shakespeare Company, because it was literally like retards employing retards.
It’s often assumed that British actors read Shakespeare and sonnets as we’re going to bed at night and we’re all very familiar with it.
I owe so much to Shakespeare. Nothing is more humbling and more exhilarating than taking ahold of those sacred words and riding them like a wave.
If you want to make idols accessible – which I think Shakespeare should be – then you have to bring a human touch, make it self-effacing and warm.
Sir Derek Jacobi has been an inspiration to so many actors and audiences throughout his brilliant career. To see him in Shakespeare is an event in itself.
I’m constantly intimidated by Shakespeare’s work. Trying to decipher what he’s saying and holding on to that thought – not just as an actor, but as a human being – is a rigour.
I think reading Shakespeare’s plays when I was young was extremely important. He had the ability to make utter strangers come alive.
With due apologies to Shakespeare, some people are born writers, some people achieve it after a lot of hard work, some people have a writing career thrust upon them. I am in that last group.
It’s not that Shakespeare is frivolous, but you spend your time just getting people to dress up in other people’s costumes and pretending to be people that they’re not, and you think, after the years go by, well, what on earth was all that about?
I come from the world of theater, and I know Noel Coward’s writing well. He has such a specific voice, and was one of the wittiest writers who ever lived, and you think of him in the same category as someone like Shakespeare who’s just impossible to imitate.
Anything that brings people to see Shakespeare is fine by me. He’s the great humanist.
From the early days of the Raj, Shakespeare had been woven into the fabric of India’s education, and my father understood that in a culture rich with storytelling and fantastical tales, Shakespeare’s characters and storylines resonated in a powerful way.
You could argue we are a different audience today,but on the other hand what is it that makes Shakespeare great? It is that he understands the common denominator of man, his emotions and relationships.
As an actress and comedienne, I’m a huge fan of he theatre and the Tricycle in Kilburn is my favourite in London. I dragged my kids to a performance of ‘Twelfth Night’ there, where they handed out pizza. Who knew that all it takes to get children interested in Shakespeare is a snack?
I’ve been doing Shakespeare readings with my friends for years.
When we study Shakespeare on the page, for academic purposes, we may require all kinds of help. Generally, we read him in modern spelling and with modern punctuation, and with notes. But any poetry that is performed – from song lyric to tragic speech – must make its point, as it were, without reference back.
One of the things that makes Hamlet unique among Shakespeare’s characters is his courage to face up to the darker elements of his personality.
In designing the scenery and costumes for any of Shakespeare’s plays, the first thing the artist has to settle is the best date for the drama. This should be determined by the general spirit of the play more than by any actual historical references which may occur in it.
I have grown up loving Shakespeare.
Shakespeare was the thing that started me off on that train, you know, and every one of his plays. There are so many different characters, and the wonderful thing about being in an all-girls school was I got to play them all, you know. So I got to play Mercutio and Oberon and Malvolio – it was great.
A Shakespeare could have arisen only on English soil. In the same way, your great dramatists and poets express the nature and essence of the Norwegian people, but they also express that which is universally valid for all mankind.
What is taught in schools generally in the West Indies is that if something is your thing, it’s better than anybody else’s because it’s yours. It’s extremely provincial and also damaging. You prevent people from learning things. The biggest absurdity would be, ‘Don’t read Shakespeare because he was white.’
Personally, speaking as a historian and a storyteller, when it comes to inaccuracy in historical fictioneering, I follow the Shakespeare principle: I’m willing to overlook gobs of mistaken detail if the poetic valence is basically correct.
I didn’t want to do Chekhov or Shakespeare. So I switched my major from acting to costume design. Eventually, I got a job working as a wardrobe assistant for a theater company. I would dress the actors, fix their costumes, do the quick changes for them and all that stuff.
I’m sure if Shakespeare were alive today, he’d be doing classic guitar solos on YouTube.
Nobody knows anything about Shakespeare the person. It’s all legend, it is all rumor.
Shakespeare was writing about his time, and it was a time when women were beginning to demand a voice, demand a say in their lives for one reason or another, mainly to do with the economics of the time.
Well, as a kid I did not get Shakespeare. I just never understood it.
Prior to Wordsworth, humor was an essential part of poetry. I mean, they don’t call them Shakespeare comedies for nothing.
In my family, there was no celebration of ignorance. They’d come and see Chekhov or Shakespeare. I’ve got a sister who got a first in her degree. We don’t sit around watching TV all the time.
So, through all that early professional career I would occasionally do a musical, a pantomime or a play with songs. The next stop would be a Shakespeare, or an Ibsen, or a play by a brand new writer who had never done anything in the theater before.
Shakespeare belongs to the whole of mankind, not just one country.
I started doing musicals, but the acting bug bit when I did a four-week Shakespeare workshop.
I’m a big lover of Shakespeare. In fact, the only plays that I’ve ever done professionally in New York have been Shakespearian.
I owe the little formal education I got to my drama teacher, Mr. Pickett, who got us to read Shakespeare, Moliere, and other classics.
The records – what little we know about Shakespeare, including the records of the plays in his playhouse – were often the story of how quickly they came off if they didn’t work. They had to move on. They were absolutely led by box office.
It is not that Shakespeare’s art is in technicolor and fancy, and that real life is black and white and tedious. The life that Shakespeare was living was the only life he had, and he had to use it to create what he was doing.
It was a wonderful experience to live the life for a year; to spend all day doing Shakespeare and then do a play in the evening.
I always ended up having the funny part in Shakespeare, but I really thought I’d be doing theater. That was my ambition for myself.
I believe that writers have a responsibility to evolve the language, whether by introducing new words or new usages. Shakespeare alone is responsible for something like 3400 words and phrases.
Because I was writing verse, my instructor suggested I study Shakespeare. The Shakespeare teacher insisted you couldn’t understand the text without seeing it on its feet.
I love e-books. I can carry the complete works of William Shakespeare around with me all the time. Just think about that. Whether I’m on an airplane or wherever. Being able to have a library in your back pocket basically is something I support.
I was in several school performances, mainly Shakespeare and comedic roles. I just accidentally became an actor. I totally didn’t expect this.
Having spent so much of my life with Shakespeare’s world, passions and ideas in my head and in my mouth, he feels like a friend – someone who just went out of the room to get another bottle of wine.
I think there is this huge hole in Shakespeare that you do not know why Macbeth is who he is.
But I don’t think there has ever been anything written on the nature of violent man as deep and as thorough as Shakespeare’s Titus. I think it puts all modern movies and modern exploitations of violence to shame.
I think Shakespeare really got it. He was the first one to introduce psychology to villains and give them a real point of view.
Shakespeare is still Shakespeare because story rules.
Shakespeare wrote all there is that we need to know about dementia in ‘King Lear.’
To me, Mozart is our Shakespeare, the one who wrote the most dramatic, psychologically most baffling music. He combined ideas that no one else would have thought of putting together.
One day, out of irritation, I said, you know all of those years with the Royal Shakespeare Company, all those years of playing kings and princes and speaking black verse, and bestriding the landscape of England was nothing but a preparation for sitting in the captain’s chair of the Enterprise.
Shakespeare said, nothing is either good nor bad but thinking makes it so.
I could hear music playing in the background of works by certain authors, like Poe and Shakespeare. And I discovered Nikki Giovanni when I was in eighth grade. Her writing has a musical energy with pulse and rhythm, almost like jazz or hip-hop.
We’re not doing brain surgery. We’re not saving lives… Even if you’re doing Shakespeare, it’s still entertainment. We’re just entertaining people. We’re just doing the stuff that comes on in between the ads.
The printing press was at first mistaken for an engine of immortality by everybody except Shakespeare.
In my prayers every day, which are a combination of Hebrew prayers and Shakespeare and Sondheim lyrics and things people have said to me that I’ve written down and shoved in my pocket, I also say the name of every person I’ve ever known who’s passed on.
I’ve always wanted to do a Shakespeare play.
In Shakespeare, the moral balances are very fine.
We cannot arrive at Shakespeare’s whole dramatic way of looking at the world from his tragedies alone, as we can arrive at Milton’s way of regarding things, or at Wordsworth’s or at Shelley’s, by examining almost any one of their important works.
Actually, the language in Shakespeare is wonderfully musical. You need to hear the music to connect with the words.
The society Shakespeare knew was heading for tremendous change, and he seems to have recognized that and written about it in a coded way. I understand those codes, I think.
I acted at school but got very bad parts – things that they’d made up in Shakespeare plays like ‘Guard 17’ – so I wrote plays and gave myself parts, then I wrote sketches, then I did stand-up. Even in the school nativity I was the emu in the manger.
There are so few who are men worthy of praise in this dreadful life: Mr. McMahon is one who immediately comes to mind; Billy Shakespeare is another, Bob Barker, god rest his soul – wait, he’s not passed yet has he? Drat, take that one off, I suppose.
The biggest and most interesting crisis in the world is the human crisis, and it never gets boring. It goes back to Shakespeare. You don’t need a gimmick; it’s just man against man and their intolerance of each other.
Taking trains and trams in Berlin, I noticed people reading. Books, I mean – not pocket-size devices that bleep as if censorious, on which even Shakespeare scans like a spreadsheet.
Everyone has a different interpretation of characters we know and love from Shakespeare, from ‘Miller’. There’s specific things about them that are written that are kind of the fingerprints of the first person who played that role, and so I like to think of it as a road map.
In fact I’d like to go back and live in Shakespeare’s London.
It took three years to put Shakespeare’s words together, there were a lot of words to be studied and a lot of words to be sorted out, and it proved to be a major project.
I hate Shakespeare. I think Shakespeare’s rubbish.
There are plenty of writers, past and present, from Shakespeare to Henry James to Lydia Davis, who test the limits of coherence and put pressure on current notions of accessible (and acceptable) narrative methods. To thrive and change and grow, any art needs this kind of pressure.
I think there’s a poet who wrote once a tragedy by Shakespeare, a symphony by Beethoven and a thunderstorm are based on the same elements. I think that’s a beautiful line.
The Shakespeare that Shakespeare became is the name that’s attached to these astonishing objects that he left behind.
If you think about Shakespeare, you remember Richard III and Macbeth before you remember Ferdinand, whose role is just to fall in love and be a bit of a wimp. I love the baddies. More important, though, is making the baddies somehow, weirdly, understood.
I love acting, I really do, I’ve always loved doing it, and it’s a joy to be asked to do this. I mean, to do Beatrice, for God’s sake, it is the best comedy Shakespeare role for a woman, and to be asked to do it.
Obviously we had to study Shakespeare at school, but to be honest, I was not a fan. I found the language very difficult, and I didn’t enjoy watching it or studying it. I auditioned five times for the Royal Shakespeare Company early on in my career, and I didn’t even get past the first rounds.
It was an outdoor Shakespeare theater that I grew up at. That feels like home, and the place I’m always trying to figure out how to get to.
I think it’s sad that movies and television have caused the theatre to fade as a popular art form. I hope to get young people into the theatre and expose them to Shakespeare.
I’m sort of nerdy, I liked Shakespeare and Chekhov and the classics.
Shakespeare’s name, you may depend on it, stands absurdly too high and will go down.
I’m always keeping an eye out for a period piece. I was trained in theatre, so most of the things we did were classical – Shakespeare, Moliere, and Chekhov.
Shakespeare’s plays were a great Teutonic Valhalla with brilliant sunshine at times and violent tempests at others. The world to him was a battlefield, but his sense of poetic justice, his sublime faith in life and its infinite resources, guided the battles.
How well Shakespeare knew how to improve and exalt little circumstances, when he borrowed them from circumstantial or vulgar historians.
I’d read Shakespeare in school, translated into isiXhosa, and loved the stories, but I hadn’t realised before I started reading the English text how powerful the language was – the great surging speeches Othello has.
Shakespeare is the happy hunting ground of all minds that have lost their balance.
Shakespeare will not make us better, and he will not make us worse, but he may teach us how to overhear ourselves when we talk to ourselves… he may teach us how to accept change in ourselves as in others, and perhaps even the final form of change.
Shakespeare didn’t work at all for me.
Well it is certainly the case that the poems – which were in fact published during Shakespeare’s lifetime – are weird if they began or originated in this form, as I think they did, because the poems get out of control.
Shakespeare is the one who gets re-interpreted most frequently.
If you take away a lot of the pretension and grandness from Shakespeare, a true poeticism is revealed.
Shakespeare fascinated me. He hardly ever left the country. His imagination was worldwide though reading.
I’ve been with Shakespeare all my life.
People think that direct address was invented by Ferris Bueller, but in fact, it wasn’t. It was invented by Shakespeare.
I don’t make any distinction between a popular TV series or blockbuster film and doing Shakespeare. They’re different, but as long as the material is good and the intention is honourable, it’s all the same to me.
What makes Shakespeare eternal is his grasp of psychology. He knew how to nail stuff about us as human beings.
My problem is that the audience is more fiction-literate than ever. In Shakespeare’s day, you probably expected to see a play once or twice in your life; today you experience four or five different kinds of fiction every day. So staying ahead of the audience is impossible.
Even Shakespeare gives you a scene off.
It’s a perfectly valid position to not like Shakespeare.
I’ll bet Shakespeare compromised himself a lot; anybody who’s in the entertainment industry does to some extent.
Seeing Shakespeare in the Park, for me, it’s just this side of feeling like you’ve witnessed some kind of magic. It’s this spell that you’re under, to be part of that!
I had the training at drama school where I studied Shakespeare and Brecht and Chekov and all these period historical playwrights and I think that I responded to the material.
If you’re gonna steal from somebody, why not Shakespeare?
Why are we reading a Shakespeare play or ‘Huckleberry Finn?’ Well, because these works are great, but they also tell us something about the times in which they were created. Unfortunately, previous eras and dead authors often used language or accepted as normal sentiments that we now find unacceptable.
I like Shakespeare. I like some of his work a lot.
Sometimes I just crave to play in Shakespeare again and I know and love playing Orlando so much.
I am a close friend of Robert Loggia. And I just love how, with actors, there’s the screen persona. Here is Robert, known for his portrayal of many characters, including gangsters. But in real life, he is elegant and erudite. He sits in the garden reading the sonnets of William Shakespeare.
I don’t steal stories. If I’m a plagiarist, so is Hitchcock. And Tolkien. And Shakespeare.
Had I not done Shakespeare, Pinter, Moliere and things such as ‘Godspell’ – I played Judas in a hugely successful production before I did ‘Elm Street’ – I’d probably be on a psychiatrist’s couch saying: ‘Freddy ruined me.’ But I’d already done 13 movies and years of non-stop theatre.
The thing I’d really like to see is the old London Bridge, with all the old buildings around it like Shakespeare’s Globe. I’d like to walk along that. Don’t worry, I won’t get drunk and fall in.
A mental shutdown can happen when a young person is put in front of a Shakespeare play. My pieces are designed to release young audiences into the story and then creep up with the real Shakespeare, almost by stealth.
There’s been a kind of inverse snobbery about culture. I get the feeling some people would look at Shakespeare and say, that’s a bit too intimidating for working-class people.
Different things made ‘Cheers’ and ‘Frasier’ special. Both of them, though, were honest. It was the old Shakespeare thing: Hold the mirror up to life.
I always loved the creative process, from ‘Shakespeare in Love’ to ‘Finding Neverland’ to ‘Basquiat’; whether it’s serious, or it’s comedic, whether it’s the ‘inside look’ at that, it seems to be a theme of what I do.
When I started in the theater, I’d do plays by Shakespeare or Ibsen or Chekhov, and they all created great women’s roles.
My middle daughter is with the Royal Shakespeare Company and was on Broadway several years ago.
When I was taught Shakespeare in school, it was such an alien, sanitized puzzle, it made no sense.
Read not Milton, for he is dry; nor Shakespeare, for he wrote of common life.
I’m generally not interested in Shakespeare or ‘Broadchurch’. I only want to make people laugh, really.
I’m a pro! No, what I mean is I have performed with the Royal Shakespeare Company in England. I have been all over the place. I have studied theatre for seven years.
I started out doing a lot of theater, a lot of Shakespeare, classic plays.
Shakespeare’s idea of the tragic fact is larger than this idea and goes beyond it; but it includes it, and it is worth while to observe the identity of the two in a certain point which is often ignored.
In fact, it is Shakespeare who gives us the map of the mind. It is Shakespeare who invents Freudian Psychology. Freud finds ways of translating it into supposedly analytical vocabulary.
I saw a production of ‘Titus Andronicus’ at the Royal Shakespeare Company with Brian Cox back in 1987. That sort of rocked my world. It was a remarkable production in its simplicity and its realism and passion.
One year at the SAG Awards, somebody practically knocked me over, and it was Helen Mirren. She was like, ‘Oh my God – is it really you? I’m your biggest fan.’ I was like, ‘Wait, aren’t you supposed to be home reading Shakespeare or something?’
Exposure is about, among other things, the ferocity of the press and the way – in an echo of some of Shakespeare’s plays – the modern media creates heroes to destroy them.
At NSD, I had an amazing experience learning everything from stagecraft to western drama and Shakespeare, Maxim Gorky, Anton Chekov.
Whether you’re doing Shakespeare or Disney, good work is good work.
The reason there’s no modern-day Shakespeare is because he didn’t have anything to do except sit in a room with a candle and think.
When I was a boy, I began writing a biography of Shakespeare, and since then I’ve written a number of biographies of actors and famous people.
There’s a statistical theory that if you gave a million monkeys typewriters and set them to work, they’d eventually come up with the complete works of Shakespeare. Thanks to the Internet, we now know this isn’t true.
The hardest part of writing ‘William Shakespeare’s Star Wars’ was probably the sheer amount of iambic pentameter and tiptoeing around certain scenes I knew would be hot-button issues for ‘Star Wars’ fans.
The rules of drama are very much separate from the properties of life. I think that’s especially true of Shakespeare.
Keeping young people away from Shakespeare is like removing a link to their humanness.
Shakespeare in the Park is one of the greatest gifts in New York City. You just have to wait for the tickets – and it’s worth the wait.
My first acting lessons were Shakespeare. The first time I ever started working with a coach was doing scenes from ‘Measure for Measure,’ which were tough dramatic scenes. And then ‘Taming of the Shrew,’ which required comedic timing. And that’s the kind of stuff I love.
I realize we’re not curing diseases with ‘iCarly,’ and we’re not doing Shakespeare. It’s not an Academy Award-winning film, but it has definitely touched people universally.
I fell in love with Shakespeare when I was 12, and I read the whole works. Yes, I was precocious.
I would love to do Shakespeare, either onstage or on film.
In my mind’s eye, Shakespeare is a huge, hot sea-beast, with fire in his veins and ice on his claws and inscrutable eyes, who looks like an inchoate hump under the encrustations of live barnacle-commentaries, limpets and trailing weeds.
I apologize for being obvious, but every time I watch the curtain come down on even a halfway decent production of a Shakespeare play I feel a little sorrowful that I’ll never know the man, or any man of such warm intelligence.
My parents were not at all backstage parents. We had none of that in the family. It was just very clear right away that I was an actor, even from 4 years old. I’ve never waited a table. I taught some – I’ll teach classes in improv or Shakespeare, but there’s some motor in me that needs to do that.
Algebra looked like Chinese characters to me, and I could never get into reading Shakespeare. I just did not get it.
I actually did Shakespeare when I was at North Carolina School of the Arts. I studied with Gerald Freedman and Mary Irwin – it was fun; I enjoyed it.
Shakespeare is for everybody, not just for toffs with a cauliflower down their tights.
I went to a performing arts high school, we learned Shakespeare, I did ‘Fences.’ When you train, you can do anything.
I did a lot of musicals when I was young and finally went to drama school to try and get away from doing musicals… and of course the first thing that happened when I got out is I got offered a musical. And then when I got to the Royal Shakespeare Company, which was my next job, I ended up doing a bloody musical!
For example, Americans seem reluctant to take on Shakespeare because you don’t think you’re very good at it – which is rubbish. You’re missing out here.
I love Charles Baudelaire. Him and Shakespeare are the only people I think are better than me.
No writer besides Shakespeare has created more memorable characters attached to vices and virtues. In even their least sympathetic characters, one senses a kind of helplessness to passion quivering between the poles of good and evil.
I learned from master teachers at the University of Evansville, at Juilliard, at Shakespeare festivals all over the country, eventually landing at Shakespeare in the Park in N.Y.C. That show transferred, so I got to make my Broadway debut doing ‘The Tempest’ with Patrick Stewart.
I’ve tried not to treat Shakespeare as a marble giant.
The magic word ‘Shakespeare’ always freezes you in your chair.
Shakespeare is absolutely big in Africa. I guess he’s big everywhere. Growing up, Shakespeare was the thing. You’d learn monologues and you’d recite them. And just like hip-hop, it made you feel like you knew how to speak English really well. You had a mastery of the English language to some extent.
Doing Shakespeare in the Park has always been a dream. Everyone else says Hamlet, but I want to play Romeo.
If you look at Shakespeare’s history plays, what the setting of monarchy allows is this extraordinary intensification of emotions and predicament.
Anything well written with good language and clarity and honesty is worth doing. It comes out of the same tradition as Shakespeare.
The language is always powerful in Shakespeare, but with ‘Antony and Cleopatra,’ the speeches are so big and muscular and rich – exhausting to speak, actually.
That’s really how I got started was doing Shakespeare. When I got out of school, I was lucky enough to meet George Wolfe, who ran The Public Theater.
I’m not in the Shakespeare stakes. I have no ambition.
While Shakespeare wasn’t the first voice in the room, in North America and Europe, he’s one of the loudest voices.
Some of the finest Shakespeare has been done recently by college theater programs. I’ll tell you what these young kids have: They have a natural authority in Shakespeare. They feel a right to do it. And once they honor the humanity of it, the rhythm of the verse comes with it.
Normally, I could hit hard enough, as anyone who studied my fights might have known. But the impression was that I was essentially defensive, the very reverse of a killer, the prize fighter who read books, even Shakespeare.
I’d love Shakey Bill to tell me a story – I mean, William Shakespeare, he could squeak a nib couldn’t he?
I was thrust, excitingly, via ‘Elizabeth’ and ‘Shakespeare in Love,’ into a position one can only dream of, but it was startling, too. I was offered a multitude of roles riding horses in flouncy shirts, and I just thought, ‘Hang on, I’ve just done that. What next?’
I love that he’s both comic and tragic, and highly poetic but also just dirty at times. … I love that within the world of Shakespeare’s plays, the whole world is sort of encompassed in a certain way.
I’ve never done anything for money. My first love is things of limited commercial appeal. I could be happy doing Shakespeare for the rest of my life.
Shakespeare is as naturally a part of American culture as it is the British culture; the Americans have a natural interest in their heritage.
I’m a natural clown, I suppose, in writing, and one has to accept that; I can’t do anything about it. I have written one or two novels which are not specifically funny. I wrote a study of Shakespeare which was not intended to be funny, but some people regard it as such.
I did Shakespeare in college and the nerves I got doing Shakespeare are the same nerves I get doing ‘Mad Men.’
Most people know me from ‘The Office,’ where I played a guy who grunted out three or four words an episode and was kind of a knucklehead, and so I think it’s surprising for people to see me do something like this. But Shakespeare is what I grew up wanting to do.
To be invited to the Park – the greatest free Shakespeare festival in the world – is a great honor, and I don’t take it lightly.
I remember, after graduating high school, I got a part in a play with the Washington Shakespeare Festival – a little part. But I remember thinking this would be a great way of making a living… to be an actor. I never really thought I’d make a lot of money at it.
If you’re going to do Shakespeare, do Shakespeare. There’s a reason why he’s been performed for hundreds of years. His words affect people on a very deep level. He’s the true humanist. That all comes through his text, his words.
Shakespeare has always been up for grabs, and choreographers have every right to use him any way they choose.
One of the most beautiful things about Shakespeare’s Hamlet is when he stops in the middle of the play to ask, ‘To be or not to be?’ Then, right at the end, he decides to ‘let be.’ The first season of ‘Stranger Things’ was Hopper asking whether ‘to be or not to be’ and the second is to ‘let be.’
I joined the Royal Shakespeare Co. with no experience whatsoever – I’d never been to a drama school or anything. But I was strong and could lift things, I could move scenery about.
Most of my career has been spent with the RSC doing Shakespeare, and the thing you learn from Shakespeare is that his historical plays don’t bear anything other than a basic resemblance to history.
The only line that’s wrong in Shakespeare is ‘holding a mirror up to nature.’ You hold a magnifying glass up to nature. As an actor you just enlarge it enough so that your audience can identify with the situation. If it were a mirror, we would have no art.
I don’t think it’s that I don’t like Sondheim. It’s that I find it really… I don’t know how to describe it. Doing it is the most extraordinary thing. Because it’s like Shakespeare times 100 with singing. It’s that satisfying – and that demanding.
I wasn’t into sports, but I was really into Shakespeare.
It meant so much to me as a kid to see professional theater and hear Shakespeare’s words.
No poem, not even Shakespeare or Milton or Chaucer, is ever strong enough to totally exclude every crucial precursor text or poem.
The Globe is a missing monument. There’s no existing example of a theater from Shakespeare’s time. You have Roman theaters, Greek theaters, all kinds of theaters, but none in which the plays of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson and Marlowe were performed. Scholars feel that it would be of immense value to have one.
Israel is too attached to America, too influenced by America. It should be connected to Europe. America is based on mythology – the free man, the individual, the open frontier. Europe is more conscious of history. Take Britain and Shakespeare. You shape your identity through history.
In 1996, Shakespeare’s ‘Twelfth Night’ was removed from classrooms after a school board passed a ‘prohibition of alternative lifestyle instruction’ act. Apparently, a young female character disguised as a boy was a danger to the youth of Merrimack, New Hampshire.
I felt a little green, because Shakespeare writes the thought process within the text; it was tricky not to think of what to say and then say it, and instead just deliver the lines.
‘Macbeth’ sags in act four – the England scene with Malcolm and Macduff just doesn’t work theatrically. But with ‘Hamlet,’ although the play is so long, Shakespeare manages to sustain the arc.
I was taught Shakespeare brilliantly by an eccentric genius at Harrow named Jeremy Lemmon who made me want to be a writer.
You can’t do Shakespeare with a Southern accent, honey.
I think Shakespeare is everybody’s treasure.
Shakespeare is undoubtedly the greatest dramatist the world has known, and 95 countries translate his work into their languages.
I’ve always wanted to give ‘Hamlet’ a shot. It’s the big one, you know. I haven’t done Shakespeare professionally, so I think it would be terrifying.
Don’t make generalisations about any group of children. For years I have felt angry with those who argue that Shakespeare and the rest of the classic canon are irrelevant to inner-city kids.
I think that Shakespeare himself raided fairy tales and chronicle writers, and he always looked to people who worked in the mythic genres, whether it was folk tales or popular novels.
I went to drama school. I’m classically trained; I studied Shakespeare, blah blah blah. But I always preferred to do Oscar Wilde, or Shakespeare’s comedies over his dramas.
The Elizabethan mind wanted and demanded that one word could mean 50 things. What Shakespeare offers us is not ambiguity; it’s choices.
The reason the contracts are so long is because actors are very spontaneous; we may want to do Shakespeare one day and be Porky Pig the next!
Even if you aren’t a believer, there are incredible stories in the ‘good book’ that I guarantee you will keep you glued to the page. The Bible is no less a part of our cultural heritage than Shakespeare is – and by the way, Shakespeare’s plays are absolutely loaded with Biblical references.
I had great English teachers in high school who first piqued my interest in Shakespeare. Each year, we read a different play – ‘Othello,’ ‘Julius Caesar,’ ‘Macbeth,’ ‘Hamlet’ – and I was the nerd in class who would memorize soliloquies just for the fun of it.
I’ve stopped acting, but I don’t think I’ve finished using my voice. I could, and probably will, record the whole of Shakespeare’s sonnets. They live at the side of my bed and are my constant companions.
As I get older I find myself thinking it all begins with Shakespeare.
Thank God we don’t know a lot about Shakespeare or Moses or Homer or Lautreamont. These are the best guys we got, and their art is powerful because they’re mysterious.
Tom Hanks, who starred in ‘The Da Vinci Code,’ turns out to be related to a number of the historic characters that feature in ‘The Da Vinci Code,’ including William the Conqueror and Shakespeare.
Plays are frequently infected with ideas that came from actors or even sound engineers. Some Shakespeare scholars wonder whether some of the Bard’s lines came from onstage improvisations by actors.
In Shakespeare’s world, characters cannot trust their senses. Is the ghost in Hamlet true and truthful, or is it a demon, tempting young Hamlet into murderous sin? Is Juliet dead or merely sleeping? Does Lear really stand at the edge of a great cliff? Or has the Fool deceived him to save his life?
I’d like to do more Shakespeare. I’d like to do Iago in Othello. I look so benign. It would be interesting to see that black evil come out of my soul.
I’m John Clare now. I was Byron and Shakespeare formerly.
James Agate, a great critic of the day, advised me that the way to learn your job properly was to learn Shakespeare, so I went to Stratford. It really sorts out the men from the boys.
I love live theater. I get my rocks off by doing stand-up, and I am the only actor. But to show up eight times a week and not have that time for myself; to do someone else’s lines? When I work for Wendy Wasserstein or Terrence McNally, Neil Simon or even Shakespeare, I do not have the right to change the lines.
Classical plays require more imagination and more general training to be able to do. That’s why I like playing Shakespeare better than anything else.
Shakespeare is a wonderful language to speak, but it’s also a world to get your mind into thematically.
I’ve always loved Victorian melodrama. And I’ve always liked larger-than-life theater, providing it’s truthful and honest. I like what the theater can provide in energy and bombast – I enjoy it when it’s large, and by that I don’t mean in size, I mean in emotions. Shakespeare did that.
Christopher Knowles, Buechner, Heiner Mueller, Burroughs, Chekhov, Shakespeare – it’s all one body of work.
In modern life, we hide behind ourselves. In Shakespeare, there’s nowhere left to hide. It’s life, larger than life, and every actor has to raise their game to get there.
I had been in a Shakespeare company for three years and done a lot of Shakespeare. That was fun. That was interesting.
I grew up doing regional Shakespeare, and when Hamlet sees the ghost of his father, there’s something about that that you don’t really do in film anymore.
At the roots, people are still people. That’s why Shakespeare is so popular no matter what the language.
This was Shakespeare’s form; who walked in every path of human life, felt every passion; and to all mankind doth now, will ever, that experience yield which his own genius only could acquire.
You know who my gods are, who I believe in fervently? Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson – she’s probably the top – Mozart, Shakespeare, Keats. These are wonderful gods who have gotten me through the narrow straits of life.
In real life, unlike in Shakespeare, the sweetness of the rose depends upon the name it bears. Things are not only what they are. They are, in very important respects, what they seem to be.
I’d like to do a piece of Shakespeare. Any upcoming Shakespeare film. Just a bit to say I did a classic.
Was there ever such stuff as great as part of Shakespeare? Only one must not say so! But what think you? – What? – Is there not sad stuff? What? – What?
And I just think that to introduce an unknown Shakespeare is thrilling, too – not to do Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet, to do the richer Shakespeare. People will come to this and not know the story.
In Jaipur, I did almost everything from regional theatre to Shakespeare’s plays. But when I shifted to Mumbai, I joined Anupam Kher’s academy, Actor Prepares,to hone my acting skills.
Anyone can play anyone in Shakespeare. I don’t think there are limits.
Writing ‘William Shakespeare’s Star Wars’ was a fun exercise in mixing just the right amount of the Bard with just the right amount of everyone’s favorite galaxy far, far away.
I don’t admire Freud as much as some people do. Imagine Shakespeare being aware of the Oedipal complex when he wrote Hamlet. It would have been a disaster.
Shakespeare’s ‘Othello’ was inspired by Cinthio’s ‘A Moorish Captain’; his ‘Hamlet’ came from Saxo Grammaticus’s ‘Amleth.’
My mom started working at the California Shakespeare Theater in Oakland when I was two years old, so I’ve always grown up around theater.
It blows my mind that you get Shakespeare where the ‘low’ comedy characters have got Northern or Welsh accents.
No two dramatists think or write alike. Ten thousand playwrights can take the same premise, as they have done since Shakespeare, and not one play will resemble the other except in the premise. Your knowledge, your understanding of human nature, and your imagination will take care of that.
You learn from mistakes, but Shakespeare is one big non mistake isn’t he? He just got everything right really.
Many people know that Shakespeare’s dramatic ‘canon’ was established in 1623 by the publication of the so-called First Folio. That hefty volume contained thirty-six plays.
Shakespeare does a great job of taking 5,000-year-old stories and turning them into modern pieces that are true to the original essence but are completely remade.
What if Shakespeare had had a test audience for Romeo and Juliet or Hamlet?
When I first moved to New York, I wanted to be a dancer. I danced professionally for years, living a hand-to-mouth existence. I never tapped into nightlife; all I knew was dancers. We went to bed early and got up early and went to free concerts at the Lincoln Center and Shakespeare in the Park.
When I first encountered Shakespeare as a boy, I read every word this man has written. To me, he is like an African storyteller.
I have been doing acting my whole life. I did plays in high school. I take it pretty seriously. I used to do a lot of Shakespeare and Shakespearean festivals and monologues.
The reason that I’m a writer today is because of Shakespeare and falling in love with Shakespeare when I was 8. That was through the movies, actually – through Olivier’s ‘Hamlet.’ That was the first thing that got me to fall in love with Shakespeare and movies and everything in one big preadolescent rush.
I got introduced to Shakespeare at four years old, and I fell in love with the language.
I hear Shakespeare, sometimes, the way other people might hear God or Marx or something. But he’s so different from that.
My father used to act in high school. He was in a production of ‘Othello;’ I don’t know who he played, but it wasn’t Othello. He would talk about it, though, and read Shakespeare to me.
I studied Shakespeare at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in New York City, and ‘Orange’ was my first audition ever for TV or film.
The public is absolutely fascinated by aging. They don’t want to get old. And you can see – read Shakespeare. Read the sonnets. They’re all about aging.
Certainly in the case of ‘Gnomeo & Juliet,’ if it makes children or adults a little more interested in Shakespeare, there’s nothing wrong with that!
What I treasure most at any moment is intimacy, surprise, a sense of mystery, wit, depth and love. A handful of cherished friends offer me this, and the occasional singer or film-maker or artist. But my most reliable sources of electricity are Henry David Thoreau, Shakespeare, Melville and Emily Dickinson.
The euro pleases dispirited people for whom European history is not Chartres and Shakespeare but the Holocaust and the Somme. The euro expresses cultural despair.
People have known of Shakespeare’s homosexuality down through the ages.
I grew up with Shakespeare, and there are so many wonderful teachings in those plays. The stories are all so unique and timeless. There is just so much learning in that body of work, and that is something I will always go back to.
I got an M.F.A. in acting from NYU, and part of our training is to learn how to use swords in combat situations in a performance and Shakespeare plays where you have to fight.
We’re very lucky, men, that there are these fabulous parts. Women – once you’ve done all the parts in Shakespeare, they start running out. So you can pick and choose and find something to energise you.
If you grow up in Britain, you just do Shakespeare. If you go and work in a theater once or twice or three times in your life, you’re going to end up doing a Shakespeare, because he’s obviously such a brilliant, brilliant writer.
Actors on stage, you can go from playing a myriad of roles, from Shakespeare to a Eugene O’Neil drama, and it’s the norm. I came up in a world where you’re supposed to be able to do three things very well. Act, sing, dance, paint, do something. The emphasis was on versatility.
Before acting, I was always attracted to words, to literature – be they the words of Williams, Arthur Miller, Shakespeare or Moliere.
I am so far as I am aware not at all influenced by dramatists, expect for Shakespeare, who I have to say, it is impossible not to be influenced by if you hold language to be the major element of theatre.
I’ve never read it because I’d like to see one Shakespeare play that I don’t know what happens. I close my ears and hum whenever I hear anything about ‘Pericles, Prince of Tyre.’
The nearest figure to myself would be Shakespeare.
I’ve done two Shakespeare tragedies, so I’d desperately like to do comedy. It would be nice not to die.
Shakespeare and Co dedicates itself to a shared, heady and outdated ideal that is scarce in our protective and fearful age.
Only the pun remains. The pun, beloved of Shakespeare, children and tabloid headline-writers, is normally eschewed in the modern, sophisticated circles in which I move.
After ‘Homeland,’ I was offered a lot of very authoritarian, square, angry boss types, but I wanted to do something different. Casting directors are surprised when they look at my CV and see all the work I’ve done, from Shakespeare to playing Nelson Mandela.
I’ve got no problem with getting history wrong for a purpose – Shakespeare often got things wrong for a reason. But it’s the randomised arrogance of ignorance of ‘The Tudors.’ Shame on the BBC for producing it.
Shakespeare speaks for the human heart but Dickens speaks for the social man and for injustices.
I think my strength is always been in being very natural. I think Shakespeare and things like that would be more a stretch for me.
The thing that I had saved up for myself and wanted most to bring off was a fully fledged professional production of Hamlet at the Royal Shakespeare Theater in Stratford.
Music is rhythm, and all theater is rhythm. It’s about tempo and change and pulse, whether you’re doing a verse play by Shakespeare or a musical.
If you are an atheist as I am, Shakespeare can be your ideal. Everything is within Shakespeare, especially in his 10 greatest plays. They have life, meaning, understanding, the whole lot.
I do believe, and I will always believe, that Shakespeare on film is really something that should be tried more often because it is an opportunity to take the humanity that Shakespeare writes into characters and express it.
My biggest break wasn’t ‘Rent;’ it was the first job that ever paid me. I couldn’t believe that they were paying me all that money to go around the country and do Shakespeare. I would have done it for free.
To my mind, ‘Dear Brutus’ stands halfway between Shakespeare’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ and Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s ‘Into the Woods’. Like them, it is a play about enchantment and disillusion, dreams and reality.
When I was 19, I took a train from Houston to New York, and I had in my lap the collected works of William Shakespeare. The play I read on that journey was ‘Titus Andronicus.’
You can give me any of Shakespeare’s plays and I’ll tell you a parallel African folktale.
You cannot underestimate the influence of Shakespeare.
I actually grew up seeing a lot of classical theater – a lot of Shakespeare – but I have such a passion for music and find that way of telling a story to be really compelling as well.
Sondheim is the Shakespeare of the musical theater world.
The British are much more cynical and regard the idea of a Globe reconstruction as an Elizabethan Disneyland. But the Americans have a real hunger for what they see as their history, their culture and their Shakespeare.
Shakespeare is the outstanding example of how that can be done. In all of Shakespeare’s plays, no matter what tragic events occur, no matter what rises and falls, we return to stability in the end.
I think Jane Austen is like Shakespeare, in a slightly different way. I think people will continue to revisit these stories because they remain relevant, regardless of how you do them.
If you can read, then you can recite Shakespeare. But that’s not acting.
I’m a games and theory kind of guy. I love puzzles, so it was fun dissecting Shakespeare’s prose.
I believe that it is a whole lifetime of work on Shakespeare’s part that enabled him to do what he did. But the question is how you can explain this whole lifetime in such a way to make it accessible and available to us, to me.
One hundred percent, all your Shakespeare training serves you in the work in musical theater today: specifically in modern musical theater, our soliloquies, and now what we call rap. It’s the reason it’s so easy to learn, because it’s verse; it’s rhyme! It just sticks in the soul very easily.
Everything that we have gone through, are going through, and will go through is there in Shakespeare. It is all of human life.
Shakespeare pulls on us and demands the best of us. You never successfully wrestle one of his plays to the ground and say, ‘See? That’s It!’
What Shakespeare was able to do in English he would certainly not have done in French.
But if Shakespeare himself is maybe about meaning and truth, I don’t know, then he is certainly about pleasure and interest, we start with pleasure and interest, but maybe eventually it gets to meaning and truth.
What we know is that Shakespeare wrote perhaps the most remarkable body of passionate love poetry in the English language to a young man.
Astrology had an important role in the ancient world. You can’t understand many things unless you know something about astrology – the plays of Shakespeare and so on.
Homer, Vergil, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Proust – not exactly authors one expects to whiz through or take lightly, but like all works of genius, they are meant to be read out loud and loved.
The forest has always been a place, in fairy tales and in Shakespeare, where you go and discover who you are. You get stripped of everything you thought you were, some type of ordeal takes place, and you come out stronger.
I love Shakespeare and the Greeks – learned a lot studying them at one time.
I have an aunt who believed strongly that teaching kids that Shakespeare is ‘hard’ is wrong, so she handed me ‘Hamlet’ when I was in kindergarten to see what would happen. What happened was I did a book report on ‘Hamlet’ and caused quite a lot of trouble!
One of the wonderful things about Shakespeare is that he trusted an audience to move quickly with him. One moment tragedy, the next comedy.
You know, a vampire book is not a book to be the vehicle for big themes and stuff, where sometimes when you’re dealing with art or the life of Christ or the oeuvre of Shakespeare, you know, it’s a little more ambitious.
I thought I’d begin by reading a poem by Shakespeare, but then I thought, why should I? He never reads any of mine.
Shakespeare’s words paint pictures in glorious colour in my language. They were written by a man whose use of words fits exactly into Xhosa.
‘Star Wars’ is mythology. It’s like Greek mythology or Shakespeare. It’s the story of good versus evil over a very long span of time. The storytelling is universal and timeless.
Shakespeare is universal.
I started in theatre. I was at Cleveland and I went to London for the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth.
Shakespeare’s language does not require a British accent. It requires a facility with language, and that’s all.
He’s a man who… well, one of the great things about Shakespeare is that his characters are inconsistent, and that’s something I think makes him a writer above most writers because inconsistency is what we, as people, are full of. We maybe don’t see it in ourselves too often, but we are inconsistent.
We had five goats, two dogs, a cat and racks of commentaries on Shakespeare.
I went to Fountain Valley High School. I remember watching Grove Shakespeare productions here. It left a big impression on me.
I used to just sit down and read the dictionary, and I read the Bible and Shakespeare from cover to cover.
Shakespeare was a man who wrote poetry. I’m a man who writes poetry. Why not compare yourself to the best?
There are a lot of theories about Shakespeare.
I did a play in New York at the public theater, a Shakespeare play, and M. Night Shyamalan, who is the writer/director of ‘The Village,’ came and saw me in the play and asked to go to lunch afterwards.
Kurosawa is the sensei, the Shakespeare, of filmmaking.
By recycling pre-existing material, Shakespeare seemed to endorse a view common in his time, which has become even more entrenched in the 400 years since: that all the truly essential stories are already in the bag.
If Antarctica were music it would be Mozart. Art, and it would be Michelangelo. Literature, and it would be Shakespeare. And yet it is something even greater; the only place on earth that is still as it should be. May we never tame it.
‘Shakespeare in Love’ was a particularly happy film.
The sacred books of all the world are worthless dross and common stones compared with Shakespeare’s glittering gold and gleaming gems.
I like Shakespeare, but it’s not my bread and butter. It’s not what fires me up about acting at all.A lot of the ingenue parts leave a lot to be desired, in my opinion.
We are accustomed in England to chalk in rolling downs, except where bitten into by the sea, but elsewhere it is riven and presents cliffs, and these cliffs are not at all like that of Shakespeare at Dover but overhang, where hard beds alternate with others that are friable.
I’ve definitely learned that if you want to have power as a woman in Shakespeare’s time, and it’s still relevant today, that you have to play a different game than men play, and you have to be a lot cleverer.
Shakespeare is where I live. I adore him.
I was a pretentious child. I grew up without a television. I read a lot of books and I loved Shakespeare. Still do.
To have a sense of contemporary ownership of Shakespeare is the most important thing to his work.
The greatest crime in a Shakespeare play is to murder the king.
I read Shakespeare when I was 14 because it’s what we were taught.
My father started out as a riveter, but he had the soul of an artist. He worshiped Shakespeare and had aspirations to be an actor. He claimed that from the first day he laid eyes on me, I was going to be this great dramatic actress.
I admire Turgenev, Camus, Proust and Shakespeare, but I’ve also learnt a lot about writing from composers and artists.
The only Shakespeare I ever did was a production of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ two years in a row in my garden in Rockland County on the Hudson River in the 1980s. I had all the actors from the Actors Studio come out, and we made our own costumes.
The English people, a lot of them, would not be able to understand a word of spoken Shakespeare. There are people who do and I’m not denying they exist. But it’s a far more philistine country than people think.
I owe a great deal to Harold Hobson, doyen drama critic of the ‘U.K. Sunday Times,’ who championed me as Shakespeare’s Richard II at the 1969 Edinburgh Festival.
I want to be known as ‘The Big Shakespeare.’ It was Shakespeare that said, ‘Some men are born great, some achieve greatness, some have greatness thrust upon them.’
If you read Shakespeare’s stage directions, all the gore and violence is right in there.
Shakespeare is so fundamental to the way we see story. A tremendous amount of narratives come from him – more than many authors are aware, I think.
You have to work with what you are given, even in Shakespeare. we have our form and it is important that we free ourselves through it.
Shakespeare was the main thing I did in my life from the age of 16 when I first played ‘Hamlet’ at school. I then did summer stock the next summer and then went to RADA and joined the RSC and ran my own company and then worked at the Globe. That was about 30 years of my life.
The elasticity of Shakespeare is extraordinary.
I’ll never forget watching my dad perform in a Shakespeare in the Park production of ‘Richard III’ in New York.
My background is somewhat unusual, as I trained to be a ballet dancer. I worked in the theatre for eight or nine years as a contemporary dancer. But as an actor one does read Shakespeare and does try to learn the classics.
In 1600, Shakespeare’s London was a city of 200,000 people. At the same time, there were already over a million in Tokyo.
