Shakespeare History Quotes

#1. I love the Shakespeare history plays; I love the struggle for the crown as a plot.

Mark Gatiss

#2. The euro pleases dispirited people for whom European history is not Chartres and Shakespeare but the Holocaust and the Somme. The euro expresses cultural despair.

George Will

#3. I surrendered to a world of my imagination, reenacting all those wonderful tales my father would read aloud to me. I became a very active reader, especially history and Shakespeare.

Andrew Wyeth

#4. I was reading everything under the sun from music history to feminist literature to Shakespeare, which is why I'm not a complete idiot at this time.

Emilie Autumn

#5. If you look at Shakespeare's history plays, what the setting of monarchy allows is this extraordinary intensification of emotions and predicament.

Tom Hooper

#6. What a tribute this is to art; what a misfortune this is for history.
(In reference to Shakespeare's 'Richard III')

Paul Murray Kendall

#7. I studied Shakespeare all through high school. Both of my parents teach English and history, so it has always been around my experience as a young man.

Xavier Samuel

#8. All the rest of [Shakespeare's] vast history, as furnished by the biographers, is built up, course upon course, of guesses, inferences, theories, conjectures - an Eiffel Tower of artificialities rising sky-high from a very flat and very thin foundation of inconsequential facts.

Mark Twain

#9. Most of my career has been spent with the RSC doing Shakespeare, and the thing you learn from Shakespeare is that his historical plays don't bear anything other than a basic resemblance to history.

Antony Sher

#10. Shakespeare in Love ... such smart writing of an alternative view of history, and such beautiful acting. Like most Americans, I'm a sucker for the accent.

Anita Diament

#11. Ay me! For aught that I could every read,
Could ever hear by tale or history,
The course of true love never did run smooth,
But either it was different in blood-

William Shakespeare

#12. I began with the desire to speak with the dead.

Stephen Greenblatt

#13. Malone's commentary on Sonnet 93 was a defining moment in the history not only of Shakespeare studies but also of literary biography in general. What has emerged in our time as a dominant form of life writing can trace its lineage back to this extended footnote.

James Shapiro

#14. As for sex, well, I mean sex is a perfectly respectable subject as far as Shakespeare is concerned. I mean, all history is love and violence.

Ian Fleming

#15. But there stands the sword of my ancestor Sir Richard Vernon, slain at Shrewsbury, and sorely slandered by a sad fellow called Will Shakspeare, whose Lancastrian partialities, and a certain knack at embodying them, has turned history upside down, or rather inside out.

Walter Scott

#16. Historically, Macbeth is one of the greatest kings Scotland ever had. He was on the throne for 19 years, and he simply has this dreadful reputation because Shakespeare manipulated history for the benefit of James I, who was paying him to write the play to blacken Macbeth's name.

David Hewson

#17. 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

#18. A brilliant treatment of the history of Purgatory in England and its survivals and echoes throughout Shakespeare's plays, above all Hamlet.

Carol Zaleski

#19. Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.

Susan Sontag