Quotes About Shakespeare

Profound subject matter can be encompassed in small space - for proof, look at any sonnet by Shakespeare!

Shakespeare doesn't really write subtext, you play the subtext.

If I was white I would have been like John Wayne... I feel like a tragic hero in a Shakespeare play

England has two books, one which she has made and one which has made her: Shakespeare and the Bible.

The ornament of beauty, Shakespeare wrote, is suspect. And he was right. But beauty itself, unadorned and unaffected, is sacred, I think, worthy of our awe and our loyalty.

For where is any author in the world Teaches such beauty as a woman's eye?

Ay; beauty's princely majesty is such, Confounds the tongue and makes the senses rough.

Shakespeare was a man who wrote poetry. I'm a man who writes poetry. Why not compare yourself to the best?

One can forgive Shakespeare anything, except one's own bad lines.

Shakespeare's ambiguous lubricity in Venus is less disturbing than the bleakly moral emphasis of Lucrece , where virtue is so low-spirited, its exclamation so lachrymose and its justification the nasty realpolitik of Roman Republicanism. The sun has not dried the dew on the grass in Venus , but the ill-lit world of Livy's Rome darkens Lucrece . The first poem lives out of doors; the second is in a permanent chiaroscuro.

Auden is an accomplished rhymer and Shakespeare is not.

The Arden Shakespeare is intended both as a student text and as a revision of traditional scholarship. If it is to be used in the first way, then the often narrow thread of text above a sediment of footnotes, something Dr Leavis so deplored, can prove debilitating. Poems, especially the classics of our language, should be read headlong. Dubieties may be looked up later.

the English lost at most 500 men, including only two lords, the Earl of Suffolk and the Duke of York. Shakespeare's Exeter gives these two noblemen a brilliant chivalric epitaph; history, however, adds its usual sour note by pointing out that York perished, not by the sword, but by suffocation or a heart attack after falling off his horse. He was quite fat.

Todas las vidas son una; <>, como dijo Shakespeare una vez

Bütün hayat birdir; 'kimse bir ada deÄŸildir,' Shakespeare'in eski zamanlarda söylediÄŸi gibi.

No one, not even Shakespeare, surpasses Milton in his command of the sound, the music, the weight and taste and texture of English words.

Shakespeare again. Once you let him into your head, he takes up tenancy and will not leave.

Now, another way to think about this is that Shakespeare's ego was so very insatiable he thought he could speak for everybody: a black duke, a transvestite girl, a carefree prince, a mad king. But we tend not to think of it that way, in Britain, instead we consider Shakespeare's breed of impersonality among the highest literary virtues.

I apologize for being obvious, but every time I watch the curtain come down on even a halfway decent production of a Shakespeare play I feel a little sorrowful that I'll never know the man, or any man of such warm intelligence.

Quite possibly one of the most revealing passages about Shakespeare as a man comes from one of the roughest of the jottings made by gossip John Aubrey from his interview with William Beeston, son of the Christopher Beeston who had acted with Shakespeare's company. The partly cancelled note reads: 'the more to be admired, he was not a company keeper. [He] ... wouldn't be debauched, and if invited to, writ [i.e. wrote] he was in pain.' [Ch.24]

In a word, Shakespeare comes across as a bit of a biological determinist.   Toward

Technologist Kevin Kelly suggests, "If a thousand lines of letters in UNIX qualifies as a technology, . . . then a thousand lines of letters in English (Hamlet) must qualify as well. They both can change our behavior, alter the course of events, or enable future inventions. A Shakespeare sonnet and a Bach fugue, then, are in the same category as Google's search engine and the iPod. They are something useful produced by a mind.

The influence of William Shakespeare on the English language and literature can hardly be exaggerated. His life spanned A.D. 1564 to 1616 and he made a name for himself as a poet and playwright. Creating such memorable works as Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet, he has become the most-quoted author of the English-speaking world. Because of this, many of the words and phrases he used or coined are still in use today. His plays are still studied and performed.

all her mother's pains and benefits . . .'" She faltered, and I continued the Shakespeare for her. "'To laughter and contempt, that she may feel / How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is / To have a thankless child.