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 This should be determined by the general spirit of the play more than by any actual historical references which may occur in it.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.
