Now we sit through Shakespeare in order to recognize the quotations.
Reading Shakespeare is sometimes like looking through a window into a dark room. You don't see in. You see nothing but a reflection of yourself unable to see in. An unflattering image of yourself blind.
The wonderful thing about the theater is that it can emphasize BOTH our diversity AND our common humanity. In many ways, the world of Shakespeare (or Aeschylus or Racine) is totally different from our world; and yet any human being can look through the differences in dress and mores and discover our common problems, passions, and potentials.
All the great Shakespeare plays are about killing. Alas, poor Yorick, thats about death. And in Romeo and Juliet everyone up ends up dying. The greatest dramas in the world are all about sex, violence and death.
You have to work with what you are given, even in Shakespeare. we have our form and it is important that we free ourselves through it.
I don't think I'm like Shakespeare.
There Shakespeare, on whose forehead climb The crowns o' the world; oh, eyes sublime With tears and laughter for all time!
You learn from mistakes, but Shakespeare is one big non mistake isn't he? He just got everything right really.
I went to London because, for me, it was the home of literature. I went there because of Dickens and Shakespeare.
I love the way an Irish man, they can hardly speak proper English, is doing William Shakespeare. So I find that extraordinary as I get older. But I always see music, live shows, performances as moments and to really get there you've just got to actually get into the essence, flesh and the blood.
I can't write a book commensurate with Shakespeare, but I can write a book by me.
If you like poetry let it be first-rate; Milton, Shakespeare, Thomson, Goldsmith, Pope (if you will, though I don't admire him), Scott, Byron, Camp[b]ell, Wordsworth, and Southey. Now don't be startled at the names of Shakespeare and Byron. Both these were great men, and their works are like themselves. You will know how to choose the good and avoid the evil; the finest passages are always the purest, the bad are invariably revolting, you will never wish to read them over twice.
With Shakespeare, there's no subtext; you're speaking exactly what you're thinking constantly.
If ever Shakespeare rants, it is not when his imagination is hurrying him along, but when he is hurrying his imagination along.
There are a lot of roles in Shakespeare, basically. If I feel that the script is a movie, I would be interested in doing any role of Shakespeare's.
Shakespeare wouldn't have been any good if he'd stayed in Stratford. He had to go to London to be bathed in the full current of the Renaissance.
We need a more complex understanding of writers working under authoritarian or repressive regimes. Something to replace this simpleminded, Cold War-ish equation in which the dissident in exile is seen as a bold figure, and those who choose to work with restrictions on their freedom are considered patsies for repressive governments. Let's not forget that most writers in history have lived under nondemocratic regimes: Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and Goethe didn't actually enjoy constitutionally guaranteed rights to freedom of speech.
Shakespeare is a good raft whereon to float securely down the stream of time; fasten yourself to that and your immortality is safe.
Poets like Shakespeare know more about poetry than any $25 an hour man.
I think there's as much profundity and wisdom in Shakespeare, more so in fact, than those in the Bible.