Quotes & Sayings About Theatre Shakespeare

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. — Mark Williams

I started in theatre. I was at Cleveland and I went to London for the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's birth. — James Cromwell

My background is somewhat unusual, as I trained to be a ballet dancer. I worked in the theatre for eight or nine years as a contemporary dancer. But as an actor one does read Shakespeare and does try to learn the classics. — William Kempe

What's this thing that gets between us and Shakespeare? — Al Pacino

Bad is the world, and all will come to naught
when such ill-dealing must be seen in thought. — William Shakespeare

In the theatre, people talk. Talk, talk until the cows come home about journeys of discovery and about what Hazlitt thought of a line of Shakespeare. I can't stand it. — Anthony Hopkins

Shakespeare has way too many lines. My ideal theatre piece is about 40 minutes long with no interval. — Daniel Craig

We number nothing that we spend for you;
Our duty is so rich, so infinite,
That we may do it still without accompt.
Vouchsafe to show the sunshine of your face,
That we, like savages, may worship it. — William Shakespeare

My parents took me to shows starting when I was a very little kid. I remember seeing Henry IV at the Shakespeare Theatre in DC and our neighbor, who was playing Banquo, winked at me during the curtain call. I remember thinking "he can SEE ME?!" I was hooked from then. I wanted to be part of the place where you can escape the world, and also wink at it. — Nick Blaemire

If you want more people to come to the theatre, don't put the prices at £50. You have to make theatre inclusive, and at the moment the prices are exclusive. Putting TV stars in plays just to get people in is wrong. You have to have the right people in the right parts. Stunt casting and being gimmicky does the theatre a great disservice. You have to lure people by getting them excited about a theatrical experience. — Catherine Tate

Playing Shakespeare requires technique. You don't play a Bach toccata by getting in the mood. — Kevin Kline

If one good deed in all my life I did,
I do repent it from my very soul. — William Shakespeare

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. — Neil MacGregor

responds to and develops recent currents of critical and scholarly thought which see Shakespeare not as a lone eminence but as a fully paid-up member of the theatrical community of his time, a working playwright with professional obligations to the theatre personnel without whose collaboration his art would have been ineffectual, and one who, like most other playwrights of the age, actively collaborated with other writers, not necessarily always as a senior partner. — Stanley Wells

What, my dear Lady Disdain! are you yet living?
Beatrice: Is it possible disdain should die while she hath
such meet food to feed it as Signior Benedick? — William Shakespeare

From kings to groundlings, Shakespeare made his work profound for everybody. That is how it should be. There is no hierarchy in theatre. It makes everyone part of a collective. — Lee Hall

Much of the day I have busied myself making notes on the small parts in Shakespeare, often nameless, which are rewarding to the actor if only he'll not dismiss them as beneath his dignity. If I can work it up into a talk I might call it, 'Only a cough and a spit ' -the phrase so often used by actors to explain away a lack of opportunity. — Alec Guinness

I think that music is crucially important in Shakespeare - and, clearly, was an important part of the Elizabethan theatre. And, it's always been something that was a profound element of the experience of Shakespeare that I have been drawn to - and interpreters have, as well. — Kenneth Branagh

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

It's shameful that today's mouthy political expositors aren't better versed in Orwell. Can you imagine a theatre director who hasn't studied Shakespeare? — William Giraldi

We cannot deny that 80 or even 90 percent of the spiritual treasures from the past 3,000 years have come from Europe. There is no other Greek theatre anywhere else in the world. There is no other Shakespeare, Dante or Cervantes. — Ismail Kadare

Had I not done Shakespeare, Pinter, Moliere and things such as 'Godspell' - I played Judas in a hugely successful production before I did 'Elm Street' - I'd probably be on a psychiatrist's couch saying: 'Freddy ruined me.' But I'd already done 13 movies and years of non-stop theatre. — Robert Englund

I'll tell everyone about our stellar apartment - though maybe I'll bump us up to Park Slope - and about my fabulous publishing internship - I think I'll pretend it's a salaried job." Come to think about it, this reunion seemed like a really bad idea. I leaned against the counter in defeat. "Oh, God. I haven't done anything. I'm going to show up and be a failure.""'Oh, woe is me,'" Eva said from back at the mirror."'To have seen what I have seen,see what I see!'"That was the problem with living with a former theatre major. Sometimes she rebuked me with Shakespeare. — Allison Parr

Kenji Mizoguchi is to the cinema what Bach is to music, Cervantes is to literature, Shakespeare is to theatre, Titian is to painting: the very greatest. — Jean Douchet

I'm a pro! No, what I mean is I have performed with the Royal Shakespeare Company in England. I have been all over the place. I have studied theatre for seven years. — Kunal Nayyar

All the world's a stage. — William Shakespeare

In my gap year between college and drama school, I taught art at a hospice and worked at a little coffee shop across the street from Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London when everything around it was still a construction zone. — Juliet Rylance

I'm grateful to be working. The most exciting thing for me is that I never get bored - I've done comedy, drama, musical theatre and now Shakespeare. — Sheridan Smith

I'm into parlor dramas. I'm into theatre. I'm trained for the stage. I trained to do Chekhov and Shakespeare, I was trained for the stage. — Tom Hardy

I think it's sad that movies and television have caused the theatre to fade as a popular art form. I hope to get young people into the theatre and expose them to Shakespeare. — Kelly McGillis

As in a theatre, the eyes of men, after a well-graced actor leaves the stage, are idly bent on him that enters next. — William Shakespeare

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. — Howard Barker

I'd like to be for cinema what Shakespeare was for theatre, Marx for politics and Freud for psychology: someone after whom nothing is as it used to be. — Rainer Werner Fassbinder

I take thee at thy word:
Call me but love, and I'll be new baptized;
Henceforth I never will be Romeo. — William Shakespeare

Thou seest we are not all alone unhappy:
This wide and universal theatre
Presents more woeful pageants than the scene
Wherein we play in. — William Shakespeare

I'm always keeping an eye out for a period piece. I was trained in theatre, so most of the things we did were classical - Shakespeare, Moliere, and Chekhov. — Dagmara Dominczyk

Each of my Shakespeare pieces is different to the other, but each espouses a set of philosophies common to all my theatre work. — Tim Crouch

I have Shakespeared my Moliere to Tenessee, and I am Wild for Becket!
But I got a little tired of the redundancy. — Natasha Tsakos

My background is in largely in theatre and acting. I grew up in a town with a well-respected Shakespeare Festival, and I fell in with some kids whose parents worked there. We staged all-kid versions of 'Hamlet', 'Cymbeline', a few others. All the while, I was making short films; monster movies, slapstick comedies, claymation. — Matt Ross

In Shakespeare, keep it simple. Don't over-inflect. The speech needs to be naturalistic and simple and accessible as much as possible. — Ralph Fiennes

As an actress and comedienne, I'm a huge fan of he theatre and the Tricycle in Kilburn is my favourite in London. I dragged my kids to a performance of 'Twelfth Night' there, where they handed out pizza. Who knew that all it takes to get children interested in Shakespeare is a snack? — Arabella Weir

The 16th-century theatre witnessed the particularly English manifestation of 'the history play.' There can be no doubt that Shakespeare's presentations of 'Henry V' and 'Richard III' have been incalculably more influential than any more sober historical study. — Peter Ackroyd

By the time I was seven, I did a sonnet at Shakespeare's Globe theatre for Shakespeare's birthday because my dad had been at the first season of the Globe and was friends with the artistic director. Somehow, that lead to me doing a sonnet! — Alfred Enoch

Totus mundus agit histrionem. (All the World's a Stage.)
[Motto of William Shakespeare's Globe Theatre (f. 1599) and its acting company, The King's Men; taken from the first play to be performed on the new stage.] — William Shakespeare

There is in our society a gulf opening up, a kind of cultural apartheid, between those who are brought up to feel our national culture is theirs, to take ownership of it, and enjoy the privileges of that, and those who are completely disfranchised, those - for example - who will never be taken to the theatre to see Shakespeare. — Richard Eyre