One of the wonderful things about Shakespeare is that he trusted an audience to move quickly with him. One moment tragedy, the next comedy.
You know, a vampire book is not a book to be the vehicle for big themes and stuff, where sometimes when you’re dealing with art or the life of Christ or the oeuvre of Shakespeare, you know, it’s a little more ambitious.
I thought I’d begin by reading a poem by Shakespeare, but then I thought, why should I? He never reads any of mine.
Shakespeare’s words paint pictures in glorious colour in my language. They were written by a man whose use of words fits exactly into Xhosa.
‘Star Wars’ is mythology. It’s like Greek mythology or Shakespeare. It’s the story of good versus evil over a very long span of time. The storytelling is universal and timeless.
Shakespeare is universal.
I started in theatre. I was at Cleveland and I went to London for the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth.
Shakespeare’s language does not require a British accent. It requires a facility with language, and that’s all.
He’s a man who… well, one of the great things about Shakespeare is that his characters are inconsistent, and that’s something I think makes him a writer above most writers because inconsistency is what we, as people, are full of. We maybe don’t see it in ourselves too often, but we are inconsistent.
We had five goats, two dogs, a cat and racks of commentaries on Shakespeare.
I went to Fountain Valley High School. I remember watching Grove Shakespeare productions here. It left a big impression on me.
I used to just sit down and read the dictionary, and I read the Bible and Shakespeare from cover to cover.
Shakespeare was a man who wrote poetry. I’m a man who writes poetry. Why not compare yourself to the best?
There are a lot of theories about Shakespeare.
I did a play in New York at the public theater, a Shakespeare play, and M. Night Shyamalan, who is the writer/director of ‘The Village,’ came and saw me in the play and asked to go to lunch afterwards.
Kurosawa is the sensei, the Shakespeare, of filmmaking.
By recycling pre-existing material, Shakespeare seemed to endorse a view common in his time, which has become even more entrenched in the 400 years since: that all the truly essential stories are already in the bag.
If Antarctica were music it would be Mozart. Art, and it would be Michelangelo. Literature, and it would be Shakespeare. And yet it is something even greater; the only place on earth that is still as it should be. May we never tame it.
‘Shakespeare in Love’ was a particularly happy film.
The sacred books of all the world are worthless dross and common stones compared with Shakespeare’s glittering gold and gleaming gems.
I like Shakespeare, but it’s not my bread and butter. It’s not what fires me up about acting at all.A lot of the ingenue parts leave a lot to be desired, in my opinion.
We are accustomed in England to chalk in rolling downs, except where bitten into by the sea, but elsewhere it is riven and presents cliffs, and these cliffs are not at all like that of Shakespeare at Dover but overhang, where hard beds alternate with others that are friable.
I’ve definitely learned that if you want to have power as a woman in Shakespeare’s time, and it’s still relevant today, that you have to play a different game than men play, and you have to be a lot cleverer.
Shakespeare is where I live. I adore him.
I was a pretentious child. I grew up without a television. I read a lot of books and I loved Shakespeare. Still do.
To have a sense of contemporary ownership of Shakespeare is the most important thing to his work.
The greatest crime in a Shakespeare play is to murder the king.
I read Shakespeare when I was 14 because it’s what we were taught.
My father started out as a riveter, but he had the soul of an artist. He worshiped Shakespeare and had aspirations to be an actor. He claimed that from the first day he laid eyes on me, I was going to be this great dramatic actress.
I admire Turgenev, Camus, Proust and Shakespeare, but I’ve also learnt a lot about writing from composers and artists.
The only Shakespeare I ever did was a production of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ two years in a row in my garden in Rockland County on the Hudson River in the 1980s. I had all the actors from the Actors Studio come out, and we made our own costumes.
The English people, a lot of them, would not be able to understand a word of spoken Shakespeare. There are people who do and I’m not denying they exist. But it’s a far more philistine country than people think.
I owe a great deal to Harold Hobson, doyen drama critic of the ‘U.K. Sunday Times,’ who championed me as Shakespeare’s Richard II at the 1969 Edinburgh Festival.
I want to be known as ‘The Big Shakespeare.’ It was Shakespeare that said, ‘Some men are born great, some achieve greatness, some have greatness thrust upon them.’
If you read Shakespeare’s stage directions, all the gore and violence is right in there.
Shakespeare is so fundamental to the way we see story. A tremendous amount of narratives come from him – more than many authors are aware, I think.
You have to work with what you are given, even in Shakespeare. we have our form and it is important that we free ourselves through it.
Shakespeare was the main thing I did in my life from the age of 16 when I first played ‘Hamlet’ at school. I then did summer stock the next summer and then went to RADA and joined the RSC and ran my own company and then worked at the Globe. That was about 30 years of my life.
The elasticity of Shakespeare is extraordinary.
I’ll never forget watching my dad perform in a Shakespeare in the Park production of ‘Richard III’ in New York.
My background is somewhat unusual, as I trained to be a ballet dancer. I worked in the theatre for eight or nine years as a contemporary dancer. But as an actor one does read Shakespeare and does try to learn the classics.
In 1600, Shakespeare’s London was a city of 200,000 people. At the same time, there were already over a million in Tokyo.
