It's an intuitive exercise to do a Shakespeare play and to go through a Shakespeare play.
~By Mark Rylance ~
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 ~
I did about 2000 covers altogether, for all sorts of books - from Shakespeare to James Bond - and I always had the idea that I must give 100%, no matter who the author was.
~By Dick Bruna ~
When I first started acting, and we would all sit down and talk about Shakespeare and how great it was. I thought well, I suppose it is.
~By Judy Davis ~
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 ~
There is hardly a pioneer's hut which does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare. I remember reading the feudal drama of Henry V for the first time in a log cabin.
~By Alexis de Tocqueville ~
I should be soaring away with my head tilted slightly toward the gods, feeding on the caviar of Shakespeare. An actor must act.
~By Laurence Olivier ~
A Shakespearean tragedy as so far considered may be called a story of exceptional calamity leading to the death of a man in high estate. But it is clearly much more than this, and we have now to regard it from another side.
~By Andrew Coyle Bradley ~
I surrendered to a world of my imagination, reenacting all those wonderful tales my father would read aloud to me. I became a very active reader, especially history and Shakespeare.
~By Andrew Wyeth ~
The elasticity of Shakespeare is extraordinary.
~By Kenneth Branagh ~
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 ~
The nearest figure to myself would be Shakespeare.
~By Michael Tippett ~
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 ~
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 ~
Anything well written with good language and clarity and honesty is worth doing. It comes out of the same tradition as Shakespeare.
~By Michael Moriarty ~
I have no interest in Shakespeare and all that British nonsense... I just wanted to get famous and all the rest is hogwash.
~By Anthony Hopkins ~
Shakespeare is universal.
~By Harold Bloom ~
Shakespeare is like mother's milk to me.
~By John Lithgow ~
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 ~
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 ~
Shakespeare was the great one before us. His place was between God and despair.
~By Eugene Ionesco ~
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.
~By Lytton Strachey ~
This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.
~By Virginia Woolf ~
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 ~
How well Shakespeare knew how to improve and exalt little circumstances, when he borrowed them from circumstantial or vulgar historians.
~By Horace Walpole ~
A book is sent out into the world, and there is no way of fully anticipating the responses it will elicit. Consider the responses called forth by the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare - let alone contemporary poetry or a modern novel.
~By Chaim Potok ~
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 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 aim, if reached or not, makes great the life: Try to be Shakespeare, leave the rest to fate!
~By Robert Browning ~
My writing improved the more I wrote - and the more I read good writing, from Shakespeare on down.
~By Dick Schaap ~
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 ~
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 ~
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 ~
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 ~
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 ~
Shakespeare was not meant for taverns, nor for tavern louts.
~By Samuel G. Engel ~
The only line that's wrong in Shakespeare is 'holding a mirror up to nature.' You hold a magnifying glass up to nature. As an actor you just enlarge it enough so that your audience can identify with the situation. If it were a mirror, we would have no art.
~By Montgomery Clift ~
To me, Mozart is our Shakespeare, the one who wrote the most dramatic, psychologically most baffling music. He combined ideas that no one else would have thought of putting together.
~By Lukas Foss ~
Now a Protestant confronting a Catholic ghost is exactly Shakespeare's way of grappling with what was not simply a general social problem but one lived out in his own life.
~By Stephen Greenblatt ~
In college, I started out doing musicals and Shakespeare.
~By Ray Liotta ~
Jacobean plays, before Shakespeare, were particularly visceral.
~By Christopher Eccleston ~
And to Shakespeare I owe my vision of the world as a theater, wherein all humans are acting out their parts.
~By James Broughton ~
We had five goats, two dogs, a cat and racks of commentaries on Shakespeare.
~By Charles Dance ~
If you are feeling something, then Shakespeare felt it and wrote about it - and wrote about it so eloquently.
~By Richard McCabe ~
Normally, I could hit hard enough, as anyone who studied my fights might have known. But the impression was that I was essentially defensive, the very reverse of a killer, the prize fighter who read books, even Shakespeare.
~By Gene Tunney ~
Classical plays require more imagination and more general training to be able to do. That's why I like playing Shakespeare better than anything else.
~By Vivien Leigh ~
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 had a feeling about Shakespeare's soliloquies, that there should be a real exchange between the actor and the audience.
~By Trevor Nunn ~
But as I grew up as a child, falling in love with the theater and Shakespeare, my heroes were Sir Laurence Olivier and Sir John Gielgud.
~By Patrick Stewart ~
I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.
~By Charles Darwin ~
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.
~By Mark Rylance ~
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.
~By Stephen Greenblatt ~
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 ~
I know not, sir, whether Bacon wrote the works of Shakespeare, but if he did not, it seems to me that he missed the opportunity of his life.
~By James M. Barrie ~
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 ~
Shakespeare has no answers for us at all.
~By Edward Bond ~
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 ~
Shakespeare doesn't really write subtext, you play the subtext.
~By Gary Oldman ~
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 ~
Doing Shakespeare in the Park has always been a dream. Everyone else says Hamlet, but I want to play Romeo.
~By Aaron Yoo ~
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 ~
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 ~
I've got no need to prove to myself that I can do Shakespeare. I've done it.
~By Anthony Hopkins ~
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 ~
Shakespeare said, nothing is either good nor bad but thinking makes it so.
~By Dyan Cannon ~
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 ~
Shakespeare will not make us better, and he will not make us worse, but he may teach us how to overhear ourselves when we talk to ourselves... he may teach us how to accept change in ourselves as in others, and perhaps even the final form of change.
~By Harold Bloom ~
I'm lucky enough to work with, I think, the greatest writer there's ever been, Shakespeare. Whose collected works would always be under my pillow if I was only ever allowed one book to keep, and who never bores me.
~By Samuel West ~
Shakespeare is the one who gets re-interpreted most frequently.
~By Sam Waterston ~
I cannot understate the ability to handle classical texts such as Shakespeare.
~By Louise Jameson ~
Read not Milton, for he is dry; nor Shakespeare, for he wrote of common life.
~By Charles Stuart Calverley ~
Shakespeare also introduces the supernatural into some of his tragedies; he introduces ghosts, and witches who have supernatural knowledge.
~By Andrew Coyle Bradley ~
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 ~
One of the things that makes Hamlet unique among Shakespeare's characters is his courage to face up to the darker elements of his personality.
~By Kenneth Branagh ~
I don't know how this company got the name National Shakespeare Company, because it was literally like retards employing retards.
~By Rob Corddry ~
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 ~
I don't admire Freud as much as some people do. Imagine Shakespeare being aware of the Oedipal complex when he wrote Hamlet. It would have been a disaster.
~By Nathalie Sarraute ~
When Shakespeare was writing, he wasn't writing for stuff to lie on the page; it was supposed to get up and move around.
~By Ken Kesey ~
It's a perfectly valid position to not like Shakespeare.
~By Ted Rall ~
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 ~
It is no exaggeration to say that the English Bible is, next to Shakespeare, the greatest work in English literature, and that it will have much more influence than even Shakespeare upon the written and spoken language of the English race.
~By Lafcadio Hearn ~
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 ~
I don't fool myself. I can't see myself doing Shakespeare.
~By Sharon Tate ~
A remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he is really very good in spite of all the people who say he is very good.
~By Robert Graves ~
What if Shakespeare had had a test audience for Romeo and Juliet or Hamlet?
~By Brendan Fraser ~
You learn from mistakes, but Shakespeare is one big non mistake isn't he? He just got everything right really.
~By Janet Suzman ~
Was there ever such stuff as great as part of Shakespeare? Only one must not say so! But what think you? - What? - Is there not sad stuff? What? - What?
~By George III ~
Now we sit through Shakespeare in order to recognize the quotations.
~By Orson Welles ~
Shakespeare, Dickens, Mark Twain, and so many others were my dearest friends and greatest teachers.
~By Lloyd Alexander ~
You rarely pay the rent by doing Shakespeare or Ibsen.
~By Mandy Patinkin ~
I was already devouring literature and I was the ripe old age of 15 when I decided to be an actor. I just thought plays were the most fantastic way of expressing life. I thought I'd discovered Shakespeare - 'hey, there's a new guy in town, don't know if anyone's read him.' I was just excited about the whole thing, from day one.
~By Chiwetel Ejiofor ~
I grew up reading Shakespeare and Mark Twain.
~By Jackson Browne ~
Shakespeare fascinated me. He hardly ever left the country. His imagination was worldwide though reading.
~By Michael Tippett ~
I remain loyal to Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert in music and to Shakespeare and Jane Austen in literature.
~By Anne Stevenson ~
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 ~
Sometimes I just crave to play in Shakespeare again and I know and love playing Orlando so much.
~By Basil Rathbone ~
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 ~
Well, as a kid I did not get Shakespeare. I just never understood it.
~By Alanis Morissette ~
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 ~
I went to London because, for me, it was the home of literature. I went there because of Dickens and Shakespeare.
~By Ben Okri ~
|