Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
In my family, there was no celebration of ignorance. They'd come and see Chekhov or Shakespeare. I've got a sister who got a first in her degree. We don't sit around watching TV all the time.
I went to drama school for three years, and the whole thing there is that hopefully you are introduced to a man called William Shakespeare who is the greatest of all time of all storytelling.
This was Shakespeare's form; who walked in every path of human life, felt every passion; and to all mankind doth now, will ever, that experience yield which his own genius only could acquire.
From Shakespeare to Robi Thakur, everyone has written stories about people and incidents around them. There is no creativity minus reality irrespective of how flowery or abstract you make it.
Homer, Vergil, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Proust - not exactly authors one expects to whiz through or take lightly, but like all works of genius, they are meant to be read out loud and loved.
With Westerns you have the landscape is important, and it's empty, and only you populate it. When you populate it, you can tell any kind story that Shakespeare told, you can tell in a Western.
I believe that writers have a responsibility to evolve the language, whether by introducing new words or new usages. Shakespeare alone is responsible for something like 3400 words and phrases.
'Macbeth' sags in act four - the England scene with Malcolm and Macduff just doesn't work theatrically. But with 'Hamlet,' although the play is so long, Shakespeare manages to sustain the arc.
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.
The thing I'd really like to see is the old London Bridge, with all the old buildings around it like Shakespeare's Globe. I'd like to walk along that. Don't worry, I won't get drunk and fall in.
I considered several names, but Titania, a character from Shakespeare's 'Midsummer Night's Dream', was best able to portray the image I wanted for what is a fantastically elegant and sexy yacht.
Tom Hanks, who starred in 'The Da Vinci Code,' turns out to be related to a number of the historic characters that feature in 'The Da Vinci Code,' including William the Conqueror and Shakespeare.
In Shakespeare, unique individuals repudiate the stereotypes demanded by the structure of the play: Shylock commands our sympathy, Barnardine refuses to be hanged. Individuals trump the category.
What could be more fitting - or more exciting - than to restage Shakespeare's plays on the very spot where they were first performed, in the shape and style of theater for which they were written?
There's a phrase in Shakespeare: he refers to it as the 'hidden imposthume', and this idea of a hidden swelling is seminal to cancer. But even in more contemporary writing it's called 'the big C'.
Particularly for English people, Shakespeare is always at the forefront of both drama and the English language. He's always been there. I can't remember starting school and not learning about him.
I went to Yale's drama school for theater, so we did tons of Shakespeare; then, I got out of school and said, 'OK, it will be Shakespeare,' and it was like, 'Or, it will be commercials and soaps.'
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.
Plays are frequently infected with ideas that came from actors or even sound engineers. Some Shakespeare scholars wonder whether some of the Bard's lines came from onstage improvisations by actors.
Shakespeare is the outstanding example of how that can be done. In all of Shakespeare's plays, no matter what tragic events occur, no matter what rises and falls, we return to stability in the end.
There's a specificity of language that's required in Shakespeare that most drama students in England deal with - a specificity of language that is somehow not as clear in a lot of American schools.
I wasn't a musical-theater kid. We went to plays at school and took field trips to see Shakespeare. And that really sparked that fire for me, and so that's still going, and I haven't given up on it.
I've never done stand-up; I came via small-scale touring theatre, through the Royal Shakespeare Company, the National Theatre, then I got employed on that as an actor who had a humorous sensibility.
Having spent so much of my life with Shakespeare's world, passions and ideas in my head and in my mouth, he feels like a friend - someone who just went out of the room to get another bottle of wine.
London theatre is different: it is a commercial theatre that brings the whole of society into one place. And Shakespeare grasped, better than anyone else, what it means to engage the entire audience.
Shakespeare is a seminal story-teller. I don't think he imagined he was writing classics or that he was writing great poetry. I don't think he dreamt his work would be staged 400 years after he died.
I never wanted to do Shakespeare; I never liked watching it, it's always frightened me, and I've never been any good at it. But I really wanted to work with the director Tim Carroll and Mark Rylance.
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.
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.
I'd like people to remember me for a diligent expert workman. I think a poet is a workman. I think Shakespeare was a workman. And God's a workman. I don't think there's anything better than a workman.
Shakespeare very rarely makes the least attempt to surprise by his catastrophes. They are felt to be inevitable, though the precise way in which they will be brought about is not, of course, foreseen.
I did a play in New York at the public theater, a Shakespeare play, and M. Night Shyamalan, who is the writer/director of 'The Village,' came and saw me in the play and asked to go to lunch afterwards.
I love that he's both comic and tragic, and highly poetic but also just dirty at times. ... I love that within the world of Shakespeare's plays, the whole world is sort of encompassed in a certain way.
You could argue we are a different audience today,but on the other hand what is it that makes Shakespeare great? It is that he understands the common denominator of man, his emotions and relationships.
I just wasn't meant to do Shakespeare. I'm not vocally equipped; I've got this flat, nasal, East Anglian voice. I got to understand the fantastic words Shakespeare wrote but never got to fly with them.
We're very lucky, men, that there are these fabulous parts. Women - once you've done all the parts in Shakespeare, they start running out. So you can pick and choose and find something to energise you.
Shakespeare was writing about his time, and it was a time when women were beginning to demand a voice, demand a say in their lives for one reason or another, mainly to do with the economics of the time.
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.
In 1600, when Shakespeare's audience at the Globe heard 'Hamlet' for the first time, every one of them knew very well what it meant to be handed a cup of wine by a figure of authority and told to drink.
My father was an athlete, a great athlete, fought in the Marines in World War I. He was all sports and activity. My mother was all academics. I still have the complete works of Shakespeare that she had.
I've stopped acting, but I don't think I've finished using my voice. I could, and probably will, record the whole of Shakespeare's sonnets. They live at the side of my bed and are my constant companions.
It's what Shakespeare's mission was - to illuminate our thoughts and struggles and bring about the possibility of getting the most we can out of a day as opposed to least in this brief moment we're here.
I am so far as I am aware not at all influenced by dramatists, expect for Shakespeare, who I have to say, it is impossible not to be influenced by if you hold language to be the major element of theatre.
The hardest part of writing 'William Shakespeare's Star Wars' was probably the sheer amount of iambic pentameter and tiptoeing around certain scenes I knew would be hot-button issues for 'Star Wars' fans.
It was in India that I started my acting career, courtesy of my parents, long before I set foot on stage in England. They headed a company of travelling players performing Shakespeare up and down the land.
I think that with Bob Dylan around, we're living in an era where we have Whitman presenting new work, we have Dickens presenting new work, we have Yeats and Shakespeare presenting new work. It's that level.
It's funny to be in rooms where you were originally referred to as 'The Shakespeare Guy' and to suddenly be in the position where you're 'The Blockbuster Guy.' That's a pretty unusual turnabout, I must say.
My biggest break wasn't 'Rent;' it was the first job that ever paid me. I couldn't believe that they were paying me all that money to go around the country and do Shakespeare. I would have done it for free.
There's very few people - like Shakespeare - who, no matter what, were gonna do what they did. For the rest of us, there's a lot of events that have to happen in order for things to end up the way they are.
I think Shakespeare is like a dialect. If I heard a broad Scots accent, I'd probably struggle at first but then I'd start to look for words I recognise and I'd get the gist. I think Shakespeare is like that.