Shakespeare Quotes

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.

Language is always evolving. It's difficult to read Shakespeare now because language has shifted. Similarly, kids these days can get to the point really quick in about 140 characters or less because of these new tools.

And I just think that to introduce an unknown Shakespeare is thrilling, too - not to do Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet, to do the richer Shakespeare. People will come to this and not know the story.

Because Shakespeare's language is so expansive, we're under this misconception that it's difficult. But I discovered that it's easy because it's so brilliantly written. The words are perfect, and the language is intelligent and very emotional.

Most people, even among those who know Shakespeare well and come into real contact with his mind, are inclined to isolate and exaggerate some one aspect of the tragic fact.

There's a statistical theory that if you gave a million monkeys typewriters and set them to work, they'd eventually come up with the complete works of Shakespeare. Thanks to the Internet, we now know this isn't true.

And it was the idea that you can do a play - like a Shakespeare play, or any well-written play, Arthur Miller, whatever - and say things you could never imagine saying, never imagine thinking in your own life.

The society Shakespeare knew was heading for tremendous change, and he seems to have recognized that and written about it in a coded way. I understand those codes, I think.

When I first started acting, and we would all sit down and talk about Shakespeare and how great it was. I thought well, I suppose it is.

The greatest crime in a Shakespeare play is to murder the king.

I didn't come from a traditional background of studying theater and doing Shakespeare.

It was an outdoor Shakespeare theater that I grew up at. That feels like home, and the place I'm always trying to figure out how to get to.

Shakespeare said pretty well everything and what he left out, James Joyce, with a judge from meself, put in.

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've never really had a desire to do Shakespeare. For me, it's just too many lines.

Well it is certainly the case that the poems - which were in fact published during Shakespeare's lifetime - are weird if they began or originated in this form, as I think they did, because the poems get out of control.

First of all, there was a volcano of words, an eruption of words that Shakespeare had never used before that had never been used in the English language before. It's astonishing. It pours out of him.

My career is chequered. Then I think I got pigeon-holed in humour; Shakespeare is not my thing.

I've got no need to prove to myself that I can do Shakespeare. I've done it.

Every time I do a movie like 'Finding Neverland' or 'Chocolat' or 'Shakespeare' in Love,' we deal with the creative process, but there's humor and fun along the way. I always love that kind of movie.

But if Shakespeare himself is maybe about meaning and truth, I don't know, then he is certainly about pleasure and interest, we start with pleasure and interest, but maybe eventually it gets to meaning and truth.

The English people, a lot of them, would not be able to understand a word of spoken Shakespeare. There are people who do and I'm not denying they exist. But it's a far more philistine country than people think.

I think reading Shakespeare's plays when I was young was extremely important. He had the ability to make utter strangers come alive.

Shakespeare and his work will always be relevant. He wrote those pieces hundreds of years ago and we haven't really changed as humans, have we? We have to deal with love, honour and adultery now - people were the same then, too - that's what's so wonderful and powerful.

Shakespeare's idea of the tragic fact is larger than this idea and goes beyond it; but it includes it, and it is worth while to observe the identity of the two in a certain point which is often ignored.

One of the things that makes Hamlet unique among Shakespeare's characters is his courage to face up to the darker elements of his personality.

I think Shakespeare is really the one. Words as music and music as words. Everything he wrote was good, which is really frightening.

Most of my career has been spent with the RSC doing Shakespeare, and the thing you learn from Shakespeare is that his historical plays don't bear anything other than a basic resemblance to history.

An actor should be ready to play any role within reason. For example, I think the most ridiculous thing for me to do would be to try and play Shakespeare.

I feel like any single woman of color who's been onstage has a Shakespeare monologue in her back pocket, and a monologue from 'For Colored Girls.' It's just part of what you should have, as a woman of color.