#shakes

If you think about Shakespeare, you remember Richard III and Macbeth before you remember Ferdinand, whose role is just to fall in love and be a bit of a wimp. I love the baddies. More important, though, is making the baddies somehow, weirdly, understood. ↗

— Mark Strong

#baddies #before #bit #fall #ferdinand

You learn from mistakes, but Shakespeare is one big non mistake isn't he? He just got everything right really. ↗

— Janet Suzman

#everything #got #just #learn #mistake

Any good piece of material like Shakespeare ought to be open to reinterpretation. ↗

— Denzel Washington

#good #like #material #open #ought

Nobody's ever called me Sir Richard. Occasionally in America, I hear people saying Sir Richard and think there's some Shakespearean play taking place. But nowhere else anyway. ↗

— Richard Branson

#anyway #called #else #ever #hear

It took three years to put Shakespeare's words together, there were a lot of words to be studied and a lot of words to be sorted out, and it proved to be a major project. ↗

— David Crystal

#major #out #project #proved #put

We had five goats, two dogs, a cat and racks of commentaries on Shakespeare. ↗

— Charles Dance

#commentaries #dogs #five #goats #had

... All who have brought about a state of sex-consciousness are to blame, and it is they who drive me, when I want to stretch my faculties on a book, to seek it in that happy age ... when the writer used both sides of his mind [the male and female sides of his mind] equally. One must turn back to Shakespeare then, for Shakespeare was androgynous; and so were Keats and Sterne and Cowper and Lamb and Coleridge. Shelley perhaps was sexless. Milton and Ben Jonson had a dash too much of the male in them. So had Wordsworth and Tolstoy. ↗

— Virginia Woolf

#keats #mind #shakespeare #writing #age

The anti-apartheid prisoners on the island, like so many in every age and nation, found that Shakespeare had a peculiar ability to gentle their condition. They used to gather clandestinely to read the plays; on one occasion, the book was passed around for each man to mark his favourite lines. ↗

— Daniel Hannan

#age #around #book #condition #each

I'm lucky enough to work with, I think, the greatest writer there's ever been, Shakespeare. Whose collected works would always be under my pillow if I was only ever allowed one book to keep, and who never bores me. ↗

— Samuel West

#always #been #book #bores #collected

As easy might I from myself depart As from my soul, which in thy breast doth lie. That is my home of love. -Shakespeare, Sonnet 109 ↗

— Shakespeare

#shakespeare #home