Quotes About Shakespeare

In Shakespeare's time only about .8 percent of the world's population could speak English; today about 20 percent can. Shakespeare was lucky: a rising tide lifted his posthumous boat.

Should Shakespeare have stayed home in Stratford-on-Avon to help rear his family and not have abandoned them for London, the city that made him?

Mrs. Ayrton was equally bewildered. She picked up the book and began to turn over the pages and in a very few moments her idea that Shakespeare's Plays were suitable reading for the young received a severe shock. She replaced the book in her husband's library and informed her daughters that they were not to read Shakespeare's Plays.

I started out in the theater, and my background is classical. I'd love to be in a film version of a Shakespeare play.

I played a little basketball, but basketball interfered with theater season. That's when we did our term plays and did nutshell versions of Shakespeare for English classes. And, believe me, I got a fair amount of looks from the guys on the team. 'You're in theater but you can play football?'

Nobody will go on being remembered for a very long time, unless you're Shakespeare or Milton. I have no hope of being remembered at all.

I've always loved Victorian melodrama. And I've always liked larger-than-life theater, providing it's truthful and honest. I like what the theater can provide in energy and bombast - I enjoy it when it's large, and by that I don't mean in size, I mean in emotions. Shakespeare did that.

I think of being ornate as a Victorian quality, little to do with Shakespeare. But even Dickens wasn't ornate; he wrote with flow and naturalism.

By recycling pre-existing material, Shakespeare seemed to endorse a view common in his time, which has become even more entrenched in the 400 years since: that all the truly essential stories are already in the bag.

All of those faeries and duels and mad queens and so on, and no one quoted old Billy Shakespeare. Not even once.

Given intelligence, success in any area has always struck me as a matter of the level of attention, excluding the arts, of course, which seem to be involved in a mystery known only to their practitioners, if, indeed, they know themselves. You can read a Chekhov story, a Shakespeare sonnet, or listen to a Mozart sonata a dozen times and you'll still be left twiddling your thumbs in mute admiration.

He did recall that the summer after graduating from college before he joined the state police he had read Shakespeare. It was the pure language that stupefied him. He would be in a diner reading A Midsummer Night's Dream and his acquaintances were confident he was studying for some test. The test turned out to be the nature of his mind. Shakespeare seemed even truer than history. Literature was against the abyss while history wallowed in it.

I have no interest in Shakespeare and all that British nonsense... I just wanted to get famous and all the rest is hogwash.

He who studies MA in English Literature but fears the name Shakespeare is one who studies shadow but afraid of its statue.

Let me stop there, but my God, how beautiful Shakespeare is, who else is as mysterious as he is; his language and method are like a brush trembling with excitement and ecstasy. But one must learn to read, just as one must learn to see and learn to live.

Classical plays require more imagination and more general training to be able to do. That's why I like playing Shakespeare better than anything else.

If it really was Queen Elizabeth who demanded to see Falstaff in a comedy, then she showed herself a very perceptive critic. But even in The Merry Wives of Windsor , Falstaff has not and could not have found his true home because Shakespeare was only a poet. For that he was to wait nearly two hundred years till Verdi wrote his last opera. Falstaff is not the only case of a character whose true home is the world of music; others are Tristan, Isolde and Don Giovanni.

As his wife, Emilia must know Iago better than anybody else. She does not know, any more than the others, that he is malevolent, but she does know that her husband is addicted to practical jokes. What Shakespeare gives us in Iago is a portrait of a practical joker of a peculiarly appalling kind, and perhaps the best way of approaching the play is by a general consideration of the Practical Joker.

By how much unexpected, by so much We must awake endeavour for defence; For courage mounteth with occasion.

My dad is a big extrovert - he's a doctor - but he always loved [William] Shakespeare and he took us to tons of theater.

Unless the old adage must be verified, That beggars mounted, run their horse to death.

Cordelia! stay a little. Ha! What is't thou say'st? Her voice was ever soft.

I ram my phone back in my pocket and reread the same page in Hamlet for the thirteenth time. I still don't see how this is supposed to be English. I have no clue what these people are saying.

Shakespeare's sonnets. Nay, if you read this line, remember not The hand that writ it, for I love you so That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot If thinking on me then should make you woe.