Quotes About Shakespeare

I love 'Richard III,' but in terms of a general play, 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' has always been a big one for me. It's just so sexy.

I think you have lots of actors who would much rather do a wonderful part at the Royal Shakespeare Company, but then you have to take a two-line part in a TV thing to pay the bills.

I think you need brains to do any Shakespeare with any authority. I could do Shakespeare, but not with any authority.

My middle daughter is with the Royal Shakespeare Company and was on Broadway several years ago.

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.

In my last year of drama school, I was Abigail in 'The Crucible' and Nina in 'The Seagull,' and I did some Shakespeare with the RSC. That's what casting directors saw me in, and I got put up for a lot of period drama auditions. I always get told I suit the costumes. I don't think I have a very modern-looking face.

In the summer of 2009, I was at the Shakespeare lab at the public theater in New York.

One of the things that I'd like to get back to that I did as a younger actor was to work on, you know, a rep season for a summer where you did two or three Shakespeares, and you'd do a couple of either new plays or classic plays, and you did a different one almost every night.

I owe a great deal to Harold Hobson, doyen drama critic of the 'U.K. Sunday Times,' who championed me as Shakespeare's Richard II at the 1969 Edinburgh Festival.

Simon Russell Beale is an incomparable speaker of Shakespeare and a superb all-round actor.

I wasn't beautiful, so there were plenty of character roles. I never did any Shakespeare, I'm far too superficial for that. I just act instinctively.

I cannot marry the facts of William Shakespeare to his verse: Other men had led lives in some sort of keeping with their thought, but this man is in wide contrast.

To describe adequately is the high power & one of the highest enjoyments of man. She was beautiful and he fell in love with her. The thing has happened to millions, yet how few can tell the story. Try some of them, set them at the painting; each knows it all & can communicate nothing. Then comes Shakspeare [sic], & tells it point for point as it befel [sic], or better; and now we have two things, love & literature.

In the works of Shakespeare, the most wonderful genius the world has ever known, there is the enormous number of 15,000 different words, but almost 10,000 of them are obsolete or meaningless today.

Great Authors—Classification—The World's Best Books. The Bible is the world's greatest book. Apart from its character as a work of divine revelation, it is the most perfect literature extant. Leaving out the Bible the three greatest works are those of Homer, Dante and Shakespeare. These are closely followed by the works of Virgil and Milton.

Her long periods of intense concentration began to be punctuated by bouts of directionless daydreaming, sudden explosions of feeling. At such times Shakespeare was too dangerous to be read closely—Hamlet whispered truths too cruel to be borne, every word in Lear hooked in flesh and could not be dislodged. As for Wilde, Hobbes, Schopenhauer . . . even cynicism, Marya saw, can't save you.

This is why many people find performances of Shakespeare incomprehensible, because the actors are playing the poetry instead of letting the lines mean something and playing the situation.

We read too much Shakespeare at school, and view our parliamentary politics as dynastic drama, in which an impatient crown prince frets at his long subordination and begins to scheme for the throne he knows he merits, was promised and has earned.

Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety" (Antony, 2.2.245–46).

the first American Shakespeare expert, Richard Grant White

Smith elaborated on this a year later in a book, Bacon and Shakespeare, which claimed, among other things, that the plays were meant to be read, not staged;

WHEN SCHOLARS TALK ABOUT THE SOURCES OF SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS, they almost always mean printed books like Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles

Yankee Lady, sent by Emerson, who has discovered that the 'Man Shakespear' is a Myth, and did not write those plays that bear his name, which were on the contrary written by a 'Secret Associate' (names unknown): she has actually come to England for the purposes of examining that, and if possible, proving it … Ach Gott!

One thing remains certain: as long as anxieties about racial, national, sexual, and religious difference continue to haunt the way we imagine ourselves and respond to others, Shakespeare's words will remain 'not of an age, but for all time.