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.
