You can find more traditional Shakespeare than we do. But what we want to bring to these works is energy, passion, freshness.
~By John Bradshaw ~
No poem, not even Shakespeare or Milton or Chaucer, is ever strong enough to totally exclude every crucial precursor text or poem.
~By Harold Bloom ~
It's a perfectly valid position to not like Shakespeare.
~By Ted Rall ~
Then I got out of the service, and I was going to be a Shakespearean actor.
~By Harvey Korman ~
Shakespeare has no answers for us at all.
~By Edward Bond ~
Having spent so much of my life with Shakespeare's world, passions and ideas in my head and in my mouth, he feels like a friend - someone who just went out of the room to get another bottle of wine.
~By Patrick Stewart ~
Nobody's ever called me Sir Richard. Occasionally in America, I hear people saying Sir Richard and think there's some Shakespearean play taking place. But nowhere else anyway.
~By Richard Branson ~
The elasticity of Shakespeare is extraordinary.
~By Kenneth Branagh ~
I grew up reading Shakespeare and Mark Twain.
~By Jackson Browne ~
I think Shakespeare had a lot to contribute with his understanding of the human condition.
~By Sharon Gless ~
I wasn't always such a great fan of Shakespeare, mind you. I can guess we all at one time had it rammed down our necks at school, which tends to take the edge off it.
~By Christopher Eccleston ~
Dreaming is an act of pure imagination, attesting in all men a creative power, which if it were available in waking, would make every man a Dante or Shakespeare.
~By Frederick Henry Hedge ~
What Shakespeare and the Greeks were able to do was radically question what it meant to be a human being.
~By Edward Bond ~
Shakespeare lets us see real people undergoing real processes, with real feelings.
~By Vanessa Redgrave ~
How well Shakespeare knew how to improve and exalt little circumstances, when he borrowed them from circumstantial or vulgar historians.
~By Horace Walpole ~
I believe that nothing comes of nothing, even in Shakespeare. I wanted to know where he got the matter he was working with and what he did with that matter.
~By Stephen Greenblatt ~
It was easier to do Shakespeare than a lot of modern movie scripts that are so poorly written.
~By Jessica Lange ~
Shakespeare doesn't really write subtext, you play the subtext.
~By Gary Oldman ~
The aim, if reached or not, makes great the life: Try to be Shakespeare, leave the rest to fate!
~By Robert Browning ~
In fact, it is Shakespeare who gives us the map of the mind. It is Shakespeare who invents Freudian Psychology. Freud finds ways of translating it into supposedly analytical vocabulary.
~By Harold Bloom ~
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.
~By William Kempe ~
Shakespeare said pretty well everything and what he left out, James Joyce, with a judge from meself, put in.
~By Brendan Behan ~
I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.
~By Charles Darwin ~
The Shakespeare that Shakespeare became is the name that's attached to these astonishing objects that he left behind.
~By Stephen Greenblatt ~
Find enough clever things to say, and you're a Prime Minister; write them down and you're a Shakespeare.
~By George Bernard Shaw ~
I'm working now on a collection of Shakespearean sonnets, about 100 of them, that I may publish if anyone's interested. My take on life is a little different from the bard's.
~By Jack Prelutsky ~
If you think about Shakespeare, you remember Richard III and Macbeth before you remember Ferdinand, whose role is just to fall in love and be a bit of a wimp. I love the baddies. More important, though, is making the baddies somehow, weirdly, understood.
~By Mark Strong ~
What we know is that Shakespeare wrote perhaps the most remarkable body of passionate love poetry in the English language to a young man.
~By Stephen Greenblatt ~
I felt a little green, because Shakespeare writes the thought process within the text; it was tricky not to think of what to say and then say it, and instead just deliver the lines.
~By Neil Patrick Harris ~
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.
~By Charlton Heston ~
Sometimes I just crave to play in Shakespeare again and I know and love playing Orlando so much.
~By Basil Rathbone ~
Shakespeare was a dramatist of note who lived by writing things to quote.
~By H. C. Bunner ~
Shakespeare very rarely makes the least attempt to surprise by his catastrophes. They are felt to be inevitable, though the precise way in which they will be brought about is not, of course, foreseen.
~By Andrew Coyle Bradley ~
The remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he really is very good, in spite of all the people who say he is very good.
~By Robert Graves ~
It took three years to put Shakespeare's words together, there were a lot of words to be studied and a lot of words to be sorted out, and it proved to be a major project.
~By David Crystal ~
I am a genius who has written poems that will survive with the best of Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Keats.
~By Irving Layton ~
I'd like to do a piece of Shakespeare. Any upcoming Shakespeare film. Just a bit to say I did a classic.
~By Jim Varney ~
In approaching our subject it will be best, without attempting to shorten the path by referring to famous theories of the drama, to start directly from the facts, and to collect from them gradually an idea of Shakespearean Tragedy.
~By Andrew Coyle Bradley ~
Wouldn't you like to have heard the voice of Shakespeare, or Jesus Christ?
~By Henry Irving ~
People have known of Shakespeare's homosexuality down through the ages.
~By George Weinberg ~
I don't know how this company got the name National Shakespeare Company, because it was literally like retards employing retards.
~By Rob Corddry ~
I'd like to do more Shakespeare. I'd like to do Iago in Othello. I look so benign. It would be interesting to see that black evil come out of my soul.
~By Kyle MacLachlan ~
I never wanted to become an actress because I'd read great literature or seen great Shakespeare. It was more just wanting to understand what the people were really like, why they said all the strange things they did.
~By Julie Walters ~
I had a feeling about Shakespeare's soliloquies, that there should be a real exchange between the actor and the audience.
~By Trevor Nunn ~
The society Shakespeare knew was heading for tremendous change, and he seems to have recognized that and written about it in a coded way. I understand those codes, I think.
~By Vanessa Redgrave ~
Well, as a kid I did not get Shakespeare. I just never understood it.
~By Alanis Morissette ~
I think Freud is about contamination, but I think that is something he learned from Shakespeare, because Shakespeare is about nothing but contamination, you might say.
~By Harold Bloom ~
Shakespeare, Dickens, Mark Twain, and so many others were my dearest friends and greatest teachers.
~By Lloyd Alexander ~
Well it is certainly the case that the poems - which were in fact published during Shakespeare's lifetime - are weird if they began or originated in this form, as I think they did, because the poems get out of control.
~By Stephen Greenblatt ~
An actor should be ready to play any role within reason. For example, I think the most ridiculous thing for me to do would be to try and play Shakespeare.
~By Glenn Ford ~
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.
~By Stephen Greenblatt ~
But I don't think there has ever been anything written on the nature of violent man as deep and as thorough as Shakespeare's Titus. I think it puts all modern movies and modern exploitations of violence to shame.
~By Julie Taymor ~
In real life, unlike in Shakespeare, the sweetness of the rose depends upon the name it bears. Things are not only what they are. They are, in very important respects, what they seem to be.
~By Hubert H. Humphrey ~
It's an intuitive exercise to do a Shakespeare play and to go through a Shakespeare play.
~By Mark Rylance ~
First of all, there was a volcano of words, an eruption of words that Shakespeare had never used before that had never been used in the English language before. It's astonishing. It pours out of him.
~By Stephen Greenblatt ~
If we wish to know the force of human genius, we should read Shakespeare. If we wish to see the insignificance of human learning, we may study his commentators.
~By William Hazlitt ~
To judge therefore of Shakespeare by Aristotle's rule is like trying a man by the Laws of one Country who acted under those of another.
~By Elizabeth Montagu ~
On the streets, unrequited love and death go together almost as often as in Shakespeare.
~By Scott Turow ~
I'd like to be for cinema what Shakespeare was for theatre, Marx for politics and Freud for psychology: someone after whom nothing is as it used to be.
~By Rainer W. Fassbinder ~
Shakespeare said, nothing is either good nor bad but thinking makes it so.
~By Dyan Cannon ~
To me, Shakespeare uses the supernatural elements to reveal his character's inner desires and fears.
~By John Foster ~
I had never done Shakespeare before, but I don't think you can be an actor and not do it. There were moments when I thought, I'm just not going to be able to pull this off.
~By Jessica Lange ~
I don't make much distinction between being a stand-up comic and acting Shakespeare - in fact, unless you're a good comedian, you're never going to be able to play Hamlet properly.
~By Ian Mckellen ~
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.
~By Jessica Lange ~
One day, out of irritation, I said, you know all of those years with the Royal Shakespeare Company, all those years of playing kings and princes and speaking black verse, and bestriding the landscape of England was nothing but a preparation for sitting in the captain's chair of the Enterprise.
~By Patrick Stewart ~
A team is a team is a team. Shakespeare said that many times.
~By Dan Devine ~
With Westerns you have the landscape is important, and it's empty, and only you populate it. When you populate it, you can tell any kind story that Shakespeare told, you can tell in a Western.
~By Lawrence Kasdan ~
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.
~By Antony Sher ~
I read Shakespeare and the Bible, and I can shoot dice. That's what I call a liberal education.
~By Tallulah Bankhead ~
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.
~By Julie Taymor ~
It's incredibly moving to hear some of our greatest actors performing Shakespeare.
~By Judi Dench ~
We cannot arrive at Shakespeare's whole dramatic way of looking at the world from his tragedies alone, as we can arrive at Milton's way of regarding things, or at Wordsworth's or at Shelley's, by examining almost any one of their important works.
~By Andrew Coyle Bradley ~
Shakespeare reveals human nature brilliantly: he shines a light on our instinctive desire to dominate each other.
~By Edward Hall ~
Peter Hall was just organizing the Royal Shakespeare Company. It was going to be an ensemble, it was going to be in repertory, it was going to have a home in London as well as in the Midlands, and all of those things were happening at that time.
~By Trevor Nunn ~
Shakespeare's name, you may depend on it, stands absurdly too high and will go down.
~By George Byron ~
I was in 20 Shakespearean plays by the time I was 20.
~By John Lithgow ~
When Shakespeare begins his exposition thus he generally at first makes people talk about the hero, but keeps the hero himself for some time out of sight, so that we await his entrance with curiosity, and sometimes with anxiety.
~By Andrew Coyle Bradley ~
I have always wanted what I have now come to call the voice of personal narrative. That has always been the appealing voice in poetry. It started for me lyrically in Shakespeare's sonnets.
~By Diane Wakoski ~
I remain loyal to Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert in music and to Shakespeare and Jane Austen in literature.
~By Anne Stevenson ~
You learn from mistakes, but Shakespeare is one big non mistake isn't he? He just got everything right really.
~By Janet Suzman ~
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.
~By Ajay Naidu ~
With Shakespeare and poetry, a new world was born. New dreams, new desires, a self consciousness was born. I desired to know to know myself in terms of the new standards set by these books.
~By Peter Abrahams ~
Any good piece of material like Shakespeare ought to be open to reinterpretation.
~By Denzel Washington ~
This was Shakespeare's form; who walked in every path of human life, felt every passion; and to all mankind doth now, will ever, that experience yield which his own genius only could acquire.
~By Mark Akenside ~
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.
~By Howard Barker ~
I'm a games and theory kind of guy. I love puzzles, so it was fun dissecting Shakespeare's prose.
~By Neil Patrick Harris ~
I had the training at drama school where I studied Shakespeare and Brecht and Chekov and all these period historical playwrights and I think that I responded to the material.
~By Orlando Bloom ~
Shakespeare, who is probably the greatest writer and poet of the English language, lived in a time that was politically very conservative and it's reflected in his writings.
~By Alex Cox ~
Everybody gets a little dose of Shakespeare. He's the greatest playwright in the English language, but his politics are fairly square.
~By Alex Cox ~
I think reading Shakespeare's plays when I was young was extremely important. He had the ability to make utter strangers come alive.
~By Rita Dove ~
The nearest figure to myself would be Shakespeare.
~By Michael Tippett ~
Prior to Wordsworth, humor was an essential part of poetry. I mean, they don't call them Shakespeare comedies for nothing.
~By William Collins ~
When you know your cast well and their strengths and weaknesses, you can start writing for them, just the way Shakespeare wrote for his actors.
~By Stephen Sondheim ~
It's not that Shakespeare is frivolous, but you spend your time just getting people to dress up in other people's costumes and pretending to be people that they're not, and you think, after the years go by, well, what on earth was all that about?
~By Jonathan Miller ~
I'd like people to remember me for a diligent expert workman. I think a poet is a workman. I think Shakespeare was a workman. And God's a workman. I don't think there's anything better than a workman.
~By Laurence Olivier ~
There's that old adage about how there's only seven plots in the world and Shakespeare's done them all before.
~By Terri Windling ~
It is not that Shakespeare's art is in technicolor and fancy, and that real life is black and white and tedious. The life that Shakespeare was living was the only life he had, and he had to use it to create what he was doing.
~By Stephen Greenblatt ~
Jacobean plays, before Shakespeare, were particularly visceral.
~By Christopher Eccleston ~
I'd probably want to teach at university, because children would drive me insane. I suspect it would be English literature, Shakespeare and so forth. I've always been deeply, deeply in love with that kind of thing.
~By Stephen Fry ~
There is some mysterious thing that goes on whereby, in the process of playing Shakespeare continuously, actors are surprised by the way the language actually acts on them.
~By Kenneth Branagh ~
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