Quotes About Shakespeare

I had great English teachers in high school who first piqued my interest in Shakespeare. Each year, we read a different play - 'Othello,' 'Julius Caesar,' 'Macbeth,' 'Hamlet' - and I was the nerd in class who would memorize soliloquies just for the fun of it.

I have an aunt who believed strongly that teaching kids that Shakespeare is 'hard' is wrong, so she handed me 'Hamlet' when I was in kindergarten to see what would happen. What happened was I did a book report on 'Hamlet' and caused quite a lot of trouble!

What we have in this great story, as I have proposed elsewhere, is not merely a report of history but an imagining of history that is analogous to what Shakespeare did with historical figures and events in his history plays.

If there is a streak of ham anywhere in an actor, Shakespeare will bring it out.

Should the poor be flattered?—Shakespeare.

I kiss'd thee ere I kill'd thee: no way but this; Killing myself, to die upon a kiss. -Speaking to the corpse of Desdemona, and kissing her, Othello dies

Are you kidding me? It's Shakespeare'! Look at Romeo And Juliet.; they're what, like fourteen years old, and they meet at a party and bam, jump in bed. They hook up in her bedroom with her parents in the house, and then they get caught and everybody dies... Slutty fourteen year olds and gang violence. I can't believe they make high school kids read it.

No: Shakespear's household bills Could never be responsible, they say, For all the heartache and the 1000 ills His work is heir to, poem, sonnet, play . . . Emended readings give the real reason: The times were out of joint, the loves, the season. - The Critics

Complaining about boring football is a little like complaining about the sad ending of King Lear: it misses the point somehow.

In reading, in literature and poetry, I found an artistic freedom that I didn't see at Woolworth's. I would read everything from Shakespeare to science fiction ... sometimes a book a day.

Shakespeare drew a map of the human mind as clearly as Newton mapped the heavens. Wht is one considered science and the other fir only to be mocked with jokes about pretty girls and drury lane?

Caches of data are being recovered all the time. Why, just the other day, I heard that we now had complete texts for all three of Shakespire's plays!

He had read Shakespeare and found him weak in chemistry.

It's at times like this, said Pu Sto, massaging her wounded shoulder gently and grimacing, when I'm sitting inside Shakespeare's nose about to be shot through the torso - for the second time today - by one of our government's most capable assassins, that I really wished I'd listened to what my mother told me when I was young.

Had [Shakespeare] put into the mouths of his heroes only prophecies that were later confirmed, he would have made a case for the total predictability of history. The false prophets are there for a purpose; they testify to the unpredictability of the historical future.

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.

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.

If Shakespeare can compare all of life to a stage, maybe it's not odd to believe that part of the play can take place on a basketball court.

Shakespeare, in some sense, helped create the modern man, didn't he, his influence is that pervasive. He held the mirror up to nature, but he also created that mirror: so the image he created is the very one we hold ourselves up to.

The city's legions of working men disagreed. They always had counted Harrison as one of their own, "Our Carter," even though he was a plantation-reared Kentucky man who had gone to Yale, spoke fluent French and German, and recited lengthy passages from Shakespeare.

My tongue will tell the anger of my heart, or else my heart, concealing it, will break. —Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew

This is who Shakespeare was meant for: not The New York Times! Not intellectuals. Just plain folks. You play Shakespeare's music right for a real house and that shit goes up all by itself.

It's funny—but there will be no need for insurance in heaven. None at all. And there will be so much need for poetry and songs and jokes. People will value what you've learned. It doesn't matter if you can make a living. Shakespeare will be important. You will be so valuable, William. And I will just sit there listening, realizing how I've misspent my life.

There are only two kinds of Shakespeare productions; ones that change your life, and ones that suck shit. That's it. Because if it doesn't change the audience's life... the production has failed.