James Agate, a great critic of the day, advised me that the way to learn your job properly was to learn Shakespeare, so I went to Stratford. It really sorts out the men from the boys.
I believe kids shouldn't be taught Shakespeare. They should experience it first by seeing a great production.
The way Shakespeare wrote Fallstaff is with a heightened language and everything.
There is a time to study a map passionately, obsessively. To see where you've gone, where others have gone before you. To commit to memory every obstacle, every danger. Shakespeare had a term for this obsession: mappery. But there is a time, too, when you say, come dragons. I challenge you to find me.
I think Freud is about contamination, but I think that is something he learned from Shakespeare, because Shakespeare is about nothing but contamination, you might say.
Ibsen, Chekhov, Shakespeare, and Beckett to me are the most revolutionary.
In real life, unlike in Shakespeare, the sweetness of the rose depends upon the name it bears. Things are not only what they are. They are, in very important respects, what they seem to be.
If you are feeling something, then Shakespeare felt it and wrote about it - and wrote about it so eloquently.
We must be free or die, who speak the tongue That Shakespeare spake; the faith and morals hold Which Milton held.
I had studied William Shakespeare in Oxford, England and I had this sort of high faluttin' education but I had also worked in comic books. So, I wasn't too proud to work in something like cartoons.
If Shakespeare had lived in our age, he would have been sued for writing Romeo And Juliet, because as everybody knows, he plagiarized that from an Italian play.
Why can’t you remember your Shakespeare and forget the third-raters. You’ll find what you’re trying to say in him- as you’ll find everything else worth saying. 'We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with sleep. '' - 'Fine! That’s beautiful. But I wasn’t trying to say that. We are such stuff as manure is made on, so let’s drink up and forget it. That’s more my idea.
Shakespeare is like mother's milk to me.
People assume that I'm very highly trained, that I studied and did years and years of Shakespeare. I have no training whatsoever and I've only done one Shakespeare play at university. If people want to believe that, I'm happy to go along with it.
I was Byron and Shakespeare formerly.
If Shakespeare were alive today and writing comedy for the movies, he would be the head-liner for the Mack Sennett studios.
Its extremely dangerous to compare anyone else to Shakespeare.
The filming of Shakespeare is always problematic, because he hates posing for the camera
"With this same key Shakespeare unlocked his heart" once more! Did Shakespeare? If so, the less Shakespeare he!
I have always been an impassioned advocate for the works of Shakespeare. I regard him as one of the most complete miracles of his or any other age.