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.
