Quotes About The Elizabethan Era

#1. The Elizabethan age might be better named the beginning of the smoking era..

James M. Barrie

#2. Well, my wife always says to me, and I think it's true, it's very difficult for us to understand the Elizabethan understanding and enjoyment and perception of form as it is to say ... it would be for them to understand computers or going to the moon or something.

Mark Rylance

#3. I thought of myself as an itinerant brain
the equivalent of a strolling player of Elizabethan times, or else a troubadour, clutching my university degree like a cheap lute.

Margaret Atwood

#4. But as my voice coach keeps saying, if we actually spoke the way they imagine the Elizabethan voice might have been, we wouldn't be able to understand it.

Geoffrey Rush

#5. In Elizabethan England you will only find small codpieces. Large ones, stuffed with wool and looking like an erect male member, are out of date

Ian Mortimer

#6. 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

#7. The classical writers ... playwrights, Jacobean, Elizabethan playwrights, all showed areas of all classes and how they live and painted them pretty authentically.

Timothy West

#8. All of Shakespeare's plays were written under this law of censorship, which is why they are set in the past or in foreign countries, separated from the hot topics of Elizabethan and Jacobean England by the dramatic distance of time or space.

William Shakespeare

#9. 'The Prince's blunt candor has been a scandal for 500 years. The book was placed on the Papal Index of banned books in 1559, and its author was denounced on the Elizabethan stages of London as the 'Evil Machiavel.' The outrage has not dimmed with time.

Michael Ignatieff

#10. The great ages did not perhaps produce much more talent than ours,' [T.S.] Eliot wrote. 'But less talent was wasted.

Jonah Lehrer

#11. In Elizabethan England or classical Athens ... theater was at the center of, not culture, but society and politics and religion and civic engagement. Those things have a different audience.

Diane Paulus

#12. If you had to find a period in history that would equate to what the Internet has presented us with now, it would be Elizabethan England. It was a world in flux.

Rhys Ifans

#13. How I would love to be transported into a scented Elizabethan garden with herbs and honeysuckles, a knot garden and roses clambering over a simple arbor.

Rosemary Verey

#14. Language always occurs in a context - you can speak Elizabethan words, but to speak the language you have to put on the mindset ...

John Geddes

#15. Sometimes I joke that I'm an Elizabethan who's had the misfortune to be alive during the reign of the wrong Elizabeth.

George Fetherling

#16. The cupidity centered on bank statements and shareholdings is more difficult to understand than the avarice of an Elizabethan trader.

Penelope Lively

#17. I love Bach, I love Beethoven, I love Mozart, I love the Beatles, I love you know, Stockhausen, I love many things. But for some reason I come back to Elizabethan music because it's a little bit like the Beatles.

Tod Machover

#18. I wasn't a trained actor, I was trained in musical comedy theater, and when you do that, the audience is completely part of the thing. It's like Elizabethan theater. You play the scene, and then you turn - the audience is part of it.

Christopher Walken

#19. Comedies are fit for common wits:
But to present a kingly troop withal,
Give me a stately-written tragedy;
Tragadia cothurnata, fitting kings,
Containing matter, and not common things.

Thomas Kyd

#20. On the subject of literary genres, I've always felt that my response to poetry is inadequate. I'd love to be the kind of person that drifts off into the garden with a slim volume of Elizabethan verse or a sheaf of haikus, but my passion is story.

J.K. Rowling

#21. We don't go to Shakespeare to find out about life in Elizabethan England; we go to Shakespeare to find out about ourselves now.

Jeanette Winterson

#22. The nations which have put mankind and posterity most in their debt have been small states Israel, Athens, Florence, Elizabethan England.

Bill Vaughan

#23. Nw a kind of no-man's-land occupied by a neo-Elizabethan hugger-mugger of racketeers, drug dealers, gangsters and abortionists, the shark-toothed area seemed only a rowdier version of the city all around - a freewheeling, free-spending center of free enterprise.

Pico Iyer

#24. As with all literature, the play should be read through the eyes of the author, as far as this is possible, which in Shakespeare's case means reading it through the eyes of an orthodox Christian living in Elizabethan England.

William Shakespeare

#25. The road to India, the Suez Canal, the oil fields of Mosul, the whole complex of political and strategic requirements that drew Britain into Palestine in 1918, began with the enterprise of the Elizabethan merchant adventurers.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#26. Most Elizabethan men will shake their heads in disbelief if you suggest the idea of the equality of the sexes. No two men are born equal - some are born rich, some poor; the elder of two brothers will succeed to his father's estates, not the younger - so why should men and women be treated equally?

Ian Mortimer

#27. Once you reach your fifties, you have to stop being interested in the present and write only on Elizabethan poets.

Umberto Eco

#28. The Elizabethan Failure may engage in battle, but the blow that fells him will most likely be an accidental one. And the cup of water so gallantly offered will, at the last moment, slip from his weak grasp, thus rendering two people thirsty instead of one.

Naomi Neale

#29. What then is tragedy? In the Elizabethan period it was assumed that a play ending in death was a tragedy, but in recent years we have come to understand that to live on is sometimes far more tragic than death.

George Pierce Baker

#30. This reasoning is based on the wishful thinking that genius can only be earned through education and hard work. It denies the time-proven truth that genius can strike like a random bolt of lightning, at any time in any place, even in a humble glover's home in a small town in Elizabethan England.

Andrea Mays

#31. Considering the wealth of poetic drama that has come down to us from the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, it is surprising that so little of any value has been added since.

James Fenton

#32. I think the height of ridiculousness was when I was playing Elizabeth in 'The Golden Age' while preparing to start shooting 'I'm Not There.' I literally finished filming Elizabethan grandeur on Friday, flew to Montreal, and started being Bob Dylan on Monday.

Cate Blanchett

#33. In many ways, 'William Shakespeare's Star Wars' is modeled on Shakespeare's Henry V, which relied on a chorus to explain in words the battles of Harfleur and Agincourt that could never be captured on the Elizabethan stage.

Ian Doescher

#34. Strangely, the thing I listen to 75% of the time, when I'm exercising with my headphones on is English Tudor/Elizabethan music, so music from about 1450 to the early 1600's.

Tod Machover

#35. Lord, what fools these mortals be!

William Shakespeare

#36. If you want a language to survive, capture great thoughts within it. William Shakespeare has ensured Elizabethan English will never perish from this world.

James Rozoff

#37. Once upon a time, about 10 years ago, I thought maybe I could write a mystery series about a midwife in Elizabethan England. I had an elaborately convoluted title and an elaborately convoluted plotline, and at that point I got stupendously bored.

Deborah Harkness