Quotes About Shakespeare

A lot of people have a fear of Shakespeare. Even actors do. People are like, "Oh, I won't go and see Shakespeare because the language is so hard," but it is. When you read it on the page, you go, "What?! What does that mean?!" If you go to a Shakespeare play and you've never been, you sit there and go, "I'm an idiot! I don't get it!"

It would be unjust, and moreover Utopian, for Shakespeare to direct the shoemakers' union. But it would be equally disastrous forthe shoemakers' union to ignore Shakespeare.

Whoever wrote Shakespeare is a working class hero be he an aristocrat or a peasant. Shakespeare is a great leveler. We're presented with kings, queens, emperors and giants who feel the same things as everyone else: jealousy, love, anger, bitterness, grief, loss.

And Prometheus was flying directly toward them. William Shakespeare shifted uncomfortably in his seat. "Now, I've never been a warrior,and I know little about tactics,but shouldn't we be flying in the other direction?" They were close enough now to see the wide-eyed anpu in the nearest craft. "We will," Prometheus said. "Just as soon as the missiles explode." "Which missiles?" Shakespeare asked. "The two just behind us.

I had been in a Shakespeare company for three years and done a lot of Shakespeare. That was fun. That was interesting.

One of things I'd love to do one day is a Shakespeare with Trevor Nunn. I've done musicals with him, but never Shakespeare. There's no one better.

There's a wonderful author named Can Themba, who said that Africa extends a fraternal handshake to Shakespeare. That William Shakespeare would have recognized Elizabethan England more readily in Africa today than in England today.

Often in America people would assume that [as an English actor] you've had some sort of deep, classical training, or that you're a Shakespeare enthusiast. I have zero interest in me performing Shakespeare.

The way Shakespeare wrote Fallstaff is with a heightened language and everything. That's the genuis of having Ken Branagh here as well. Shakespeare doesn't require you to have a doctorate in his language or whatever to understand him. It just has to be directed and played right. It's all about scale and presence and getting these huge, epic stories across.

In school I really loved Shakespeare, and I participated in a country-wide Shakespeare competition.

And I just think that to introduce an unknown Shakespeare is thrilling, too - not to do Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet, to do the richer Shakespeare. People will come to this and not know the story.

We don't go to Shakespeare to find out about life in Elizabethan England; we go to Shakespeare to find out about ourselves now.

English dramatic literature is, of course, dominated by Shakespeare; and it is almost inevitable that an English reader should measure the value of other poetic drama by the standards which Shakespeare has already implanted in his mind.

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.

Because Shakespeare's language is so expansive, we're under this misconception that it's difficult. But I discovered that it's easy because it's so brilliantly written. The words are perfect, and the language is intelligent and very emotional.

I wasn't particularly afraid of death itself. As Shakespeare said, die this year and you don't have to die the next.

There's that old adage about how there's only seven plots in the world and Shakespeare's done them all before.

I was reading everything under the sun from music history to feminist literature to Shakespeare, which is why I'm not a complete idiot at this time.

I love William Shakespeare. He wrote some of the rawest stories. I mean look at Romeo and Juliet. That's some serious ghetto expletive. You got this guy Romeo from the Bloods who falls for Juliet, a female from the Crips, and everybody in both gangs are against them. So they have to sneak out and they end up dead for nothing. Real tragic stuff.

If Shakespeare were alive today and writing comedy for the movies, he would be the head-liner for the Mack Sennett studios.

Worldwide travel is not compulsory. Great minds have been fostered entirely by staying close to home. Moses never got further than the Promised Land. Da Vinci and Beethoven never left Europe. Shakespeare hardly went anywhere at all-certainly not to Elsinore or the coast of Bohemia.

A Shakespeare could have arisen only on English soil. In the same way, your great dramatists and poets express the nature and essence of the Norwegian people, but they also express that which is universally valid for all mankind.

The slight, the facile and the merely self-glorifying tend to drop away over the centuries, and what we are left with is the bedrock: Homer and Milton, the Greek tragedian and Shakespeare, Chaucer and Cervantes and Swift, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and James and Conrad. Time does not make their voices fainter, on the contrary, it reinforces our sense of their truth-telling capacity.

In college, I started out doing musicals and Shakespeare

I think Shakespeare got drunk after he finished King Lear. That he had a ball writing it.

My career is chequered. Then I think I got pigeon-holed in humour; Shakespeare is not my thing.

As Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark, had said in Shakespeare's immortal words, 'I must be cruel only to be kind.

Most people, even among those who know Shakespeare well and come into real contact with his mind, are inclined to isolate and exaggerate some one aspect of the tragic fact.

Shakespeare was a man who wrote poetry. I'm a man who writes poetry. Why not compare yourself to the best?

If Romeo had never met Juliet, maybe they both would have still been alive, but what they would have been alive for is the question Shakespeare wants us to answer.

Shakespeare's name, you may depend on it, stands absurdly too high and will go down.

Jesus and Shakespeare are fragments of the soul, and by love I conquer and incorporate them in my own conscious domain. His virtue,--is not that mine? His wit,--if it cannot be made mine, it is not wit.

If I had any doubts at all about the justice of my dislike for Shakespeare, that doubt vanished completely. What a crude, immoral,vulgar, and senseless work Hamlet is. The whole thing is based on pagan vengeance; the only aim is to gather together as many effects as possible; there is no rhyme or reason about it.

If Shakespeare was alive today, he'd be writing wrestling shows.

I am Warhol. I am the No. 1 most impactful artist of our generation. I am Shakespeare in the flesh.

Homer and Shakespeare and Milton and Marvell and Wordsworth are but the rustling of leaves and crackling of twigs in the forest, and there is not yet the sound of any bird. The Muse has never lifted up her voice to sing.

I'm an infant with Shakespeare; I'm kind of learning how to walk. I am trying to decipher the code, you know? I do my research. And I get a clear understanding of what the language is. It is a tremendous process I have to go through as I am sure all actors do, finding the gems hidden in his language.

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.

I'd say our ability to supersize emotions are American-made special effects. In European countries, people mostly stay close to home and whatever rage there is simmers under the surface - it's what made the plays of Shakespeare and Harold Pinter so good.

Our contention has always been that Shakespeare is our greatest living author. If he can survive a season on Broadway, he must be.

In the theatre, people talk. Talk, talk until the cows come home about journeys of discovery and about what Hazlitt thought of a line of Shakespeare. I can't stand it.

Actors want to do Shakespeare again and again, or want to do Hamlet. When you hear one guy do Hamlet and another guy do it, it's going to be a whole different experience.

'Refudiate,' 'misunderestimate,' 'wee-wee'd up.' English is a living language. Shakespeare liked to coin new words too. Got to celebrate it!'

Shakespeare never had more than 6 lines together without a fault.

Shakespeare is the Joss Whedon of his generation.

Everyone steals. My favorite movie is Love Don't Cost a Thing with Nick Cannon. Which is based on Can't Buy Me Love, which is based on Kramer vs. Kramer, or something, which I think was Shakespeare.

I sort of feel that the role of a portrait in society is to represent the sitters, we see paintings of Shakespeare and we believe that it is what he looked like, well maybe a little older, fatter and with a higher hairline. I guess it would be cool if the portraits that were painted really did look like the sitter or expressed some sort of emotion that gave the viewers in the future a sense of the sitter's pathos at the time it was painted.

Look at me. My concerns-are they spiritual, do you think, or carnal? Come on. We've read our Shakespeare.