Quotes About Shakespeare

What Shakespeare and the Greeks were able to do was radically question what it meant to be a human being.

That's really how I got started was doing Shakespeare. When I got out of school, I was lucky enough to meet George Wolfe, who ran The Public Theater.

I've done 'Two Gentlemen of Verona,' I've understudied Iago in 'Othello.' I've done Mercutio in 'Romeo and Juliet.'

'A Midsummer Night's Dream' is one of George Balanchine's greatest creations - and one of the greatest of all story ballets.

I like the fact George R. R. Martin took Shakespeare's political plays as material, but he also took on all sorts of other sensational stories and mingled them in together.

Although I have been doing plays since I was 8 years old, it was only when I started doing Shakespeare at age 19 at the Georgia Shakespeare Festival that I felt like my career started.

I've tried not to treat Shakespeare as a marble giant.

Most Britons, and most Americans as well, either thought the Globe was in Stratford-Upon-Avon or didn't know where it was at all.

We had five goats, two dogs, a cat and racks of commentaries on Shakespeare.

I sometimes think that what civilized serenity the British people possess, and small but real ability to smile at themselves, is chiefly due to their good luck in having had William Shakespeare born one of their company.

'The Merchant of Venice' is a straightforward, clear story, while 'The Winter's Tale,' as a general rule, is hard to present because there is so much plot.

I'd love to play Constance in 'King John' or Paulina in 'The Winter's Tale.' I'd like to go on working till I drop.

Any scene in Shakespeare can be vulgarised almost out of recognition with the wish to have a modern concept.

What I treasure most at any moment is intimacy, surprise, a sense of mystery, wit, depth and love. A handful of cherished friends offer me this, and the occasional singer or film-maker or artist. But my most reliable sources of electricity are Henry David Thoreau, Shakespeare, Melville and Emily Dickinson.

I want to play Lady Macbeth. I have a big chip on my shoulder about Lady Macbeth. People usually play her as this cold, Greek witch, but there's no evidence of that in the text! I think her intentions are pure.

My first part in a play was one of the witches in 'Macbeth.'

Every time we moved on, I joined a different class in a different school with different girls until, aged 13, my father had taken the decision to pull me out of school altogether. Everything I needed, he reasoned, could be found within the rich language of Shakespeare's plays at which, by then, I was something of an old hand.

Seeing Shakespeare in the Park, for me, it's just this side of feeling like you've witnessed some kind of magic. It's this spell that you're under, to be part of that!

The 16th-century theatre witnessed the particularly English manifestation of 'the history play.' There can be no doubt that Shakespeare's presentations of 'Henry V' and 'Richard III' have been incalculably more influential than any more sober historical study.

'Merry Wives of Windsor' is a wonderful machine. It's one of the great farces, and it's astonishing to remember that this is written by the same man who wrote 'Hamlet,' 'The Taming of the Shrew' or 'Cymbeline.' It's so similar, and yet the form is so different.

I wanted to have a house near his grave, and that's exactly what I did get. When I woke up in the morning, I would open my window and look out upon Holy Trinity Church, where Shakespeare's grave is. Not once did it fail to move me.

Well, if Fortune be a woman, she's a good wench for this gear.

There's a statistical theory that if you gave a million monkeys typewriters and set them to work, they'd eventually come up with the complete works of Shakespeare. Thanks to the Internet, we now know this isn't true.

I acknowledge Shakespeare to be the world's greatest dramatic poet, but regret that no parent could place the uncorrected book in the hands of his daughter, and therefore I have prepared the Family Shakespeare.