Quotes About Shakespeare

You know, a vampire book is not a book to be the vehicle for big themes and stuff, where sometimes when you're dealing with art or the life of Christ or the oeuvre of Shakespeare, you know, it's a little more ambitious.

I played Shylock in my school's staging of 'Merchant of Venice.'

If I'm going to be honest with you, when I trained at school, I feel like I was training to be a chameleon. I want to be that versatile actor who can do anything - that's why you learn fifty different dialects, you do Shakespeare, you do commedia, you do it all so that if any job comes your way, you should be able to do it.

Juilliard is wonderful in that they don't pick just one way of working. They give you a palette. There is method acting. There is a lot of attention to Shakespeare and verse.

One hundred percent, all your Shakespeare training serves you in the work in musical theater today: specifically in modern musical theater, our soliloquies, and now what we call rap. It's the reason it's so easy to learn, because it's verse; it's rhyme! It just sticks in the soul very easily.

Music is rhythm, and all theater is rhythm. It's about tempo and change and pulse, whether you're doing a verse play by Shakespeare or a musical.

One day, out of irritation, I said, you know all of those years with the Royal Shakespeare Company, all those years of playing kings and princes and speaking black verse, and bestriding the landscape of England was nothing but a preparation for sitting in the captain's chair of the Enterprise.

I couldn't believe verse was supposed to be hard. It was a snap for me. I loved Shakespeare.

Because I was writing verse, my instructor suggested I study Shakespeare. The Shakespeare teacher insisted you couldn't understand the text without seeing it on its feet.

I adored being at the RSC and working on the verse and getting the iambic pentameter right. You just skim across the surface, and the speech is over before you know it. You can just ride along on the music of it.

My favorite-ever version of 'King Lear' is the 1971 film by Peter Brooks. He has this enormous fur thing, and it adds enormous gravitas.

One of my favourite pieces is 'Antony and Cleopatra' - I'd love to be in that. Or an alternative version of 'Romeo & Juliet' where I get to play Mercutio, something like that.

Most people don't know that I am an accomplished dramatic actor... But I've performed in several Shakespeare productions including Hamlet, except in this version, Hamlet lives in an apartment with two women, and has to pretend he's gay so that the landlord won't evict him.

Shakespeare's metaphors are the paragon of creativity. "Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs." "Adversity's sweet milk, philosophy." "There's daggers in men's smiles.

Blow, wind, crack your cheeks, I thought. Brian wasn't the only one who could quote Shakespeare. I made it to my room without thinking of any other suitably apocalyptic line from Lear, and I was too tired to start in on Othello. I flopped onto the bed facedown—and immediately I was bent into a bow shape, with the soles of my feet facing the back of my head.

From kings to groundlings, Shakespeare made his work profound for everybody. That is how it should be. There is no hierarchy in theatre. It makes everyone part of a collective.

When Xena finished I just really wanted to work with Shakespeare's material.

I'm constantly intimidated by Shakespeare's work. Trying to decipher what he's saying and holding on to that thought - not just as an actor, but as a human being - is a rigour.

It took three years to put Shakespeare's words together, there were a lot of words to be studied and a lot of words to be sorted out, and it proved to be a major project.

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.

'Othello' was my first Shakespearean discovery. I was obsessed with drama at school, and I studied the play for my English GCSE. Desdemona is the part that everyone wants, but Iago's wife Emilia is the one I've always been drawn to.

I actually did Shakespeare when I was at North Carolina School of the Arts. I studied with Gerald Freedman and Mary Irwin - it was fun; I enjoyed it.

I studied Shakespeare at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in New York City, and 'Orange' was my first audition ever for TV or film.

I liked Shakespeare in high school, but in university I spent a semester studying in London, and it was sort of in the middle of me falling deeply in love with literature, and I took a Shakespeare course with a professor who couldn't imagine anything more important than Shakespeare.