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!
