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.
