Great actors try to dismiss all ideas from their conscious mind in order to provide an experience that is real.

Well, my wife always says to me, and I think it's true, it's very difficult for us to understand the Elizabethan understanding and enjoyment and perception of form as it is to say... it would be for them to understand computers or going to the moon or something.

I think I find it easier to live on the stage than in life.

And it is a very beautiful idea, and possibly true, that a common man from Stratford with a common education was able to write these plays.

Our job is to make manifest the story, to be it. In a sense, the theatre is such a big star itself, bigger than any Shakespearean actor I could hire, that we should take the opportunity to fill it with voice and verse and movement, not interpretation.

And people do enjoy the plays at completely different levels. And, likewise, they enjoy the authorship question... at completely different levels.

There have been more books alone written about Hamlet than have been written about the Bible.