Shakespeare Audiences Quotes & Sayings

Sir Derek Jacobi has been an inspiration to so many actors and audiences throughout his brilliant career. To see him in Shakespeare is an event in itself. — Kenneth Branagh

After each performance of an Austin Shakespeare production, audiences are invited to stay for a ten-minute discussion of the work. And this tradition continues in our New York run. — Jeff Britting

Poetry is the break (or rather the meeting at the breaking point) between the visible and the invisible. — Jean Genet

It's a myth that older writers can't write for younger audiences. Shakespeare wasn't 15 when he wrote Romeo and Juliet. — Tracy Keenan Wynn

Being your sister is one of the best things about being me — Renee Ahdieh

Plays by Alan Ayckbourn have been attracting larger audiences in the regional theatres than those of Shakespeare. — Alan Ayckbourn

Solitude is a courageous encounter with our naked, most raw and real self, in the presence of pure love. — Richard Rohr

Exultation is the going Of an inland soul to sea Past the houses, past the headlands Into deep eternity! Bred as we, among the mountains Can the sailor understand The divine intoxication Of the first league out from land? — Emily Dickinson

When Shakespeare copied chroniclers verbatim, it was because he knew they were good enough for his audiences. In a more polished age he who could so move our passions, could surely have performed the easier task of satisfying our taste. — Horace Walpole

I had a little dog and my dog was very small ... Of all the treasures that were mine, I loved him most of all. — Francis Cornford

I know exactly what I'm doing, but I just can't stop. That's my greatest weakness. — Haruki Murakami

For not only every democracy, but certainly every republic, bears within itself the seeds of its own destruction. — Robert W. Welch Jr.

By wrenching this increasingly outdated revenge play into the present, Shakespeare forced his contemporaries to experience what he felt and what his play registers so profoundly: the world had changed. Old certainties were gone, even if new ones had not yet taken hold. The most convincing way of showing this was to ask playgoers to keep both plays in mind at once, to experience a new Hamlet while memories of the old one, ghostlike, still lingered. Audiences at the Globe soon found themselves, like Hamlet, straddling worlds and struggling to reconcile past and present. — James Shapiro

They'd performed more modern plays sometimes in the first few years, but what was startling, what no one would have anticipated, was that audiences seemed to prefer Shakespeare to their other theatrical offerings. — Emily St. John Mandel

A mental shutdown can happen when a young person is put in front of a Shakespeare play. My pieces are designed to release young audiences into the story and then creep up with the real Shakespeare, almost by stealth. — Tim Crouch

A long decade ago economic growth was the reigning fashion of political economy. It was simultaneously the hottest subject of economic theory and research, a slogan eagerly claimed by politicians of all stripes, and a serious objective of the policies of governments. The climate of opinion has changed dramatically. Disillusioned critics indict both economic science and economic policy for blind obeisance to aggregate material "progress," and for neglect of its costly side effects. Growth, it is charged, distorts national priorities, worsens the distribution of income, and irreparably damages the environment. Paul Erlich speaks for a multitude when he says, "We must acquire a life style which has as its goal maximum freedom and happiness for the individual, not a maximum Gross National Product." [in Nordhaus, William D. and James Tobin., "Is growth obsolete?" Economic Research: Retrospect and Prospect Vol 5: Economic Growth. Nber, 1972. 1-80] — James Tobin

One of the reasons why I love to do Shakespeare is that this great artist was able to talk to a wide variety of audiences. He could do the bawdy plays and the humor and the clowns-as you know, because you're a wonderful Stephano-that speaks to the populace, the masses, the groundlings, whatever. — Julie Taymor

But there were other great writers who had done all these things. What set Shakespeare apart ... even from other greats, was his generosity: his invitation, even insistence,for others to join him in the act of imagining ... His reticence [to add stage directions] made his works wonderfully elastic. It also made them demnding
sometimes maddeningly so
for directors and actors who had to figure out at every turn why these words and no others needed to be said right here and now. But Shakespeare was also demanding of his audiences: 'Yes,' you could almost hear him say, 'you are sitting in a fairly barren wooden theater. But dream yourselves to France. To a seacoast in Bohemia. To a magic-haunted island in a tempest-tossed sea. I dare you.' -Kate Stanley — Jennifer Lee Carrell

If a lot of people feel like this company is undervalued and go out and buy the stock, the stock price will go up reflecting the higher value of this company. You might have information because you trade with them or because you've done some research on them. — Robert F. Engle

Despite modifying his writing to suit the audiences, despite writing plays to draw large crowds, despite using other people's materials and copying plotlines from history, Shakespeare remains the preeminent artist of the English language and his reputation has reached such stratospheric heights as to border on idolatry (or Bardolatry as some people call it). Shakespeare was a product of his time and learned from his peers, but his plays transcend his time as all great works do - his genius is his own. As Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, Where is the master who could have taught Shakespeare? — William Shakespeare