Quotes About Shakespeare

No doubt one is familiar with Shakespeare to a degree, from one's earliest years. His celebrated passages are quoted by everybody; they are in half the books we open, and we all talk Shakespeare, use his similes, and describe with his descriptions...

The plays he had liked were the one called Measure for Measure, and another one called Macbeth. They were easy to follow, and what happened in them was kind of like what happened in junior high school.

Doing Shakespeare once is not fair to the play. I have been in Shakespeare plays when it's not until the last two or three performances when I even understand certain things. In the old days star actors would travel the world doing the same parts over and over again.

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.

It was in India that I started my acting career, courtesy of my parents, long before I set foot on stage in England. They headed a company of travelling players performing Shakespeare up and down the land.

One reason why Shakespeare's plays remain so popular is that they're now regularly presented in updated stagings with a contemporary flavor.

Nature listening stood, whilst Shakespeare play'd And wonder'd at the work herself had made.

Shakespeare was the main thing I did in my life from the age of 16 when I first played 'Hamlet' at school. I then did summer stock the next summer and then went to RADA and joined the RSC and ran my own company and then worked at the Globe. That was about 30 years of my life.

I admit we don't know for sure the exact spot where the original Globe stood. But the Greenmore Wharf site is as nearly right as we can figure.

After 'Othello,' it was, like, 'I can stop acting. I have played one of the great characters in the English language. I feel I have played him well and honorably. I have nothing to prove anymore.'

I've stopped acting, but I don't think I've finished using my voice. I could, and probably will, record the whole of Shakespeare's sonnets. They live at the side of my bed and are my constant companions.

Shakespeare is still Shakespeare because story rules.

Personally, speaking as a historian and a storyteller, when it comes to inaccuracy in historical fictioneering, I follow the Shakespeare principle: I'm willing to overlook gobs of mistaken detail if the poetic valence is basically correct.

When I first encountered Shakespeare as a boy, I read every word this man has written. To me, he is like an African storyteller.

Shakespeare is repeated around the world in different languages, just because it's good storytelling.

Men and women in their very essence -in their souls if you wish- have natural parity. (...) This was a relatively new idea at the time [of Shakespeare]. It ran counter to the teaching in the Bible -Eve's being made out of Adam's rib to be his helpmate -which was the basis for the idea, held for so long, that women do not have souls of their own but are dependent on their fathers' and husbands' .

He [Shakespeare] was a wordsmith who loved to act and to see things from many points of view.(...) His genius lay in being able to see all sides of an argument.

Shakespeare broke a mold. After about five years of writing, he saw women as women, including the bind they had been put into. No other playwright, writing before Shakespeare or at the same time as Shakespeare, had ever seen women as women.

Shakespeare was a white male, but he is not a dead white male. There may be only three or four women in each Shakespeare play but they are the key to how to transform a society. They are the teachers and the leaders in a new way of thinking about relationships, hierarchies, and love. They have the focus and energy to counterbalance the authority of the ten to thirty men who inhabit each play.

When I was in high school, I fell in love with Olivia Hussey in 'Romeo And Juliet.'

Shakespeare belongs to the whole of mankind, not just one country.

The Elizabethan mind wanted and demanded that one word could mean 50 things. What Shakespeare offers us is not ambiguity; it's choices.

The only time I've played a real baddy was when I was Regan in 'King Lear.'

Israel is too attached to America, too influenced by America. It should be connected to Europe. America is based on mythology - the free man, the individual, the open frontier. Europe is more conscious of history. Take Britain and Shakespeare. You shape your identity through history.