Top 100 Shakespeare Play Sayings
#1. I saw a Shakespeare play when I was - I guess I was in junior high. And I just fell in love with the theater because, for me, it was a combination of big ideas and feeling.
Annette Bening
#2. My favorite play is Hamlet. It was my first love when it comes to Shakespeare, and I've read it and seen it performed more than just about every other Shakespeare play. I've had the "To be or not to be" monologue memorized since I was 15, and it's just really close to my heart.
Ian Doescher
#3. It's an intuitive exercise to do a Shakespeare play and to go through a Shakespeare play.
Mark Rylance
#4. I've always wanted to do a Shakespeare play.
Kelli O'Hara
#5. I apologize for being obvious, but every time I watch the curtain come down on even a halfway decent production of a Shakespeare play I feel a little sorrowful that I'll never know the man, or any man of such warm intelligence.
Ian McEwan
#6. And it was the idea that you can do a play - like a Shakespeare play, or any well-written play, Arthur Miller, whatever - and say things you could never imagine saying, never imagine thinking in your own life.
James Earl Jones
#7. The greatest crime in a Shakespeare play is to murder the king.
Alex Cox
#8. If I was white I would have been like John Wayne ... I feel like a tragic hero in a Shakespeare play
Tupac Shakur
#9. Nature listening stood, whilst Shakespeare play'd
And wonder'd at the work herself had made.
Charles Churchill
#10. I had always wanted to retell a Shakespeare play. It was an ambition from college days. But in order to be able to do it ... the circumstances in my life didn't come together for a long time.
Chris Adrian
#11. I did a play in New York at the public theater, a Shakespeare play, and M. Night Shyamalan, who is the writer/director of 'The Village,' came and saw me in the play and asked to go to lunch afterwards.
Bryce Dallas Howard
#12. When you can type a few words into a search engine and land on your topic - or when you can scan a Shakespeare play for specific words or symbols - what opportunities might you miss to expand your thinking in unexpected ways?
Christina Baker Kline
#13. 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
#14. It's good to have a lot of once-in-a-lifetimes in your lifetime. If you get the chance to skydive, go skydiving. If you're offered a part in a weird Shakespeare play in San Diego, slap on some tights and rock out some iambic pentameter.
Neil Patrick Harris
#15. People assume that I'm very highly trained, that I studied and did years and years of Shakespeare. I have no training whatsoever and I've only done one Shakespeare play at university. If people want to believe that, I'm happy to go along with it.
Hugh Laurie
#16. You can read a Shakespeare play, but does that mean you wouldn't want to see it on the stage?
Stan Lee
#17. So, through all that early professional career I would occasionally do a musical, a pantomime or a play with songs. The next stop would be a Shakespeare, or an Ibsen, or a play by a brand new writer who had never done anything in the theater before.
Trevor Nunn
#18. You can find a connection with any Shakespeare role you play.
Michelle Dockery
#19. It must be remembered that the Iliad and Odyssey were composed as epic tales and not as historical texts. To use Shakespeare's Macbeth as a source for 11th-century Scottish politics would rather miss the point of the play, and the same is true of the Homeric epics.
Nic Fields
#20. Whenever I've been asked to be in a film, directors only want me to play myself ... I'm fascinated by the thought of being an actor, but it's too hard. And I think Shakespeare-which has been suggested to me-might be a bit of a stretch.
Tom Jones
#21. If music be the food of love, play on. 1 Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, 2 The appetite may sicken and so die. 3 That strain again! It
William Shakespeare
#22. It would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare.
Virginia Woolf
#24. I spent six years touring the world playing Shakespeare, Molire, Shaw, Goldsmith ... But I slowly came to realise that the people you are working with are as important as the parts you play, and that there were lots of interesting people working in film and T.V.
Stephen Mangan
#25. Bad is the trade that must play fool to sorrow,
Ang'ring itself and others.
William Shakespeare
#26. Never Play With The Feelings Of Others, Because You May Win The Game But The Risk Is That You Will Surely Lose The Person For Life Time
William Shakespeare
#27. I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano; A stage where every man must play a part, And mine is a sad one.
William Shakespeare
#28. Call me what instrume you will,though you can fret me,yet you cannot play upon me.
William Shakespeare
#29. If it be true that good wine needs no bush,
'tis true that a good play needs no epilogue;
yet to good wine they do use good bushes,
and good plays prove the better by the help of good epilogues.
William Shakespeare
#30. Music is rhythm, and all theater is rhythm. It's about tempo and change and pulse, whether you're doing a verse play by Shakespeare or a musical.
Diane Paulus
#31. People are fascinated by the rich: Shakespeare wrote plays about kings, not beggars.
Dominick Dunne
#32. I hold the world but as the world ... - / A stage where every man must play a part
William Shakespeare
#33. Why should I play the Roman fool and die On mine own sword? Whiles I see lives, the gashes Do better upon them.
William Shakespeare
#34. Away, you trifler! Love! I love thee not,
I care not for thee, Kate: this is no world
To play with mammets and to tilt with lips:
We must have bloody noses and cracked crowns.
William Shakespeare
#35. Character halts without aid of the imagination, which our classes in Shakespeare and Browning, music and drawing, recognize not only as amusement and by-play of the mind, but a co-ordinate power. Its work is unhappily styled fiction; for to idealize is to realize.
C. A. Bartol
#36. 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
#37. How DARE you and the rest of your barbarians set fire to my library? Play conqueror all you want, Mighty Caesar! Rape, murder, pillage thousands, even millions of human beings! But neither you nor any other barbarian has the right to destroy one human thought!
William Shakespeare
#38. Shall we upon the footing of our land
Send fair-play orders, and make compromise,
Insinuation, parley, and base truce,
To arms invasive?
William Shakespeare
#39. They didn't understand, for we were Shakespeare, and they were mere actors in the play.
Cassandra Giovanni
#40. I think," said antonio , "that the world is astage. Everybody has a part to play , and my part is sad part .
William Shakespeare
#41. 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
#42. I want to play Eva Peron. I've already done a lot of Shakespeare, but I'd like to do Lady Macbeth.
Tamara Tunie
#43. When we play an unaccompanied Bach suite we may compare ourselves to an actor in Shakespeare's day, creating scenery which did not exist at all, through the power of declamation and suggestion. So in Bach. There is but one voice
and many voices have to be suggested.
Pablo Casals
#44. A brilliant treatment of the history of Purgatory in England and its survivals and echoes throughout Shakespeare's plays, above all Hamlet.
Carol Zaleski
#45. You came to talk about the play," he said. "Let me discourage you. It was written to entertain people. Like horror movies. It isn't literature, it doesn't mean anything. Wharfinger was no Shakespeare." "Who was he?" she said. "Who was Shakespeare? It was a long time ago.
Thomas Pynchon
#46. Great while ago the world began, With hey-ho, the wind and the rain; But that's all one, our play is done, And we'll strive to please you every day. Exit
William Shakespeare
#47. 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
#48. I talk of you:
Why did you wish me milder? would you have me
False to my nature? Rather say I play
The man I am.
William Shakespeare
#49. Doing Shakespeare once is not fair to the play. I have been in Shakespeare plays when it's not until the last two or three performances when I even understand certain things. In the old days star actors would travel the world doing the same parts over and over again.
Al Pacino
#50. Let me play the lion too: I will roar that I will do any man's heart good to hear me. I will roar that I will make the duke say 'Let him roar again, let him roar again.
William Shakespeare
#51. Shakespeare is a great psychologist, and whatever can be known of the heart of man may be found in his plays.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#52. 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
#53. No two dramatists think or write alike. Ten thousand playwrights can take the same premise, as they have done since Shakespeare, and not one play will resemble the other except in the premise. Your knowledge, your understanding of human nature, and your imagination will take care of that.
Lajos Egri
#54. There's a reason Tony Stark makes fun of 'Thor,' and mentions 'Shakespeare' in the park in 'The Avengers.' It's great to play high drama and comedy alongside a modern story.
Joss Whedon
#55. It was a wonderful experience to live the life for a year; to spend all day doing Shakespeare and then do a play in the evening.
Phil Daniels
#56. I play guitar; you'll find me at home strumming 'Vincent' on the guitar. I also read a lot of poetry, and Shakespeare was my first love, which was why I got into acting. A lot of the fighters are intelligent!
Dave Legeno
#57. Tis ten to one this play can never please
All that are here. Some come to take their ease
And sleep an act or two; but those, we fear,
W' have frighted with our trumpets.
William Shakespeare
#58. I don't make much distinction between being a stand-up comic and acting Shakespeare - in fact, unless you're a good comedian, you're never going to be able to play Hamlet properly.
Ian McKellen
#59. The southern wind
Doth play the trumpet to his purposes;
And, by his hollow whistling in the leaves,
Foretells a tempest and a blustering day.
William Shakespeare
#60. Reading the play at home, however fulfilling, can never be the vivacious experience that Shakespeare intended.
Arthur Smith
#61. I had great English teachers in high school who first piqued my interest in Shakespeare. Each year, we read a different play - 'Othello,' 'Julius Caesar,' 'Macbeth,' 'Hamlet' - and I was the nerd in class who would memorize soliloquies just for the fun of it.
Ian Doescher
#62. 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
#63. If music be the food of love, play on, Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, The appetite may sicken, and so die. That strain again! It had a dying fall. O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound That breathes upon a bank of violets, Stealing and giving odour. Enough, no more!
William Shakespeare
#64. I wanted to play a TV detective because it's a rite of passage; I wanted to experience every area of acting. I haven't done comedy or as much Shakespeare as I had intended.
Olivia Williams
#65. Away, you cut-purse rascal! you filthy bung, away! By this wine, I'll thrust my knife in your mouldy chaps, an you play the saucy cuttle with me. Away, you bottle-ale rascal! you basket-hilt stale juggler, you!
William Shakespeare
#66. The ordinary price paid for a new play was less than seven pounds; Oldys, on what authority is not known, says that Shakespeare received only five pounds for "Hamlet.
William Shakespeare
#68. To my mind, 'Dear Brutus' stands halfway between Shakespeare's 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' and Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's 'Into the Woods'. Like them, it is a play about enchantment and disillusion, dreams and reality.
Michael Dirda
#69. Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me, you would seem to know my stops, you would pluck out the heart of my mystery, you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass..." Hamlet.
William Shakespeare
#71. If Shakespeare had lived in our age, he would have been sued for writing Romeo And Juliet, because as everybody knows, he plagiarized that from an Italian play.
Lloyd Kaufman
#72. A new report claims that William Shakespeare was a marijuana user and may have been high when he wrote some of his plays. Which explains that one line: 'To be, or not to be ... Wait, what was the question?'
Jimmy Fallon
#73. I lay my eternal curse on whomsoever shall now or at any time hereafter make schoolbooks of my works and make me hated as Shakespeare is hated. My plays were not designed as instruments of torture. All the schools that lust after them get this answer, and will never get any other.
George Bernard Shaw
#75. She should have read the damned play. She should have spent hours reading Shakespeare. The duke was making literature sound a lot more interesting than her governess had ever done.
Eloisa James
#77. A witty and informative professor posits that more authors do not choose titles borrowed from Shakespeare's sonnets and plays for the reason some people claim not to have partners: "All the good ones are taken."
Thomas C. Foster
#78. The love that follows us sometime is our trouble, which still we thank as love.
William Shakespeare
#79. In the plays of Shakespeare man appears as he is, made up of a crowd of passions which contend for the mastery over him, and govern him in turn.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#80. It should also be remembered that the Ghost sees things differently from every other character in the play. He has the eyes of eternity. He sees things as they are and not merely as they seem from the perspective of those trapped in the tunneled vision of time.
William Shakespeare
#82. I enjoy doing martial arts films, but I like the straight stuff, too. I'd like to go back and do some Shakespeare, and maybe knock out a play or two. It's all about keeping balance.
Thomas Ian Griffith
#83. That they will find each other during the play, once more, in the words of Shakespeare.
Gayle Forman
#84. King Lear is undoubtedly the greatest play ever written by Shakespeare - or anybody else for that matter. Hamlet is certainly great, but it doesn't contain as many elements of humanity as we see in Lear.
Paul Scofield
#85. Shakespeare is a drunken savage with some imagination whose plays please only in London and Canada.
Voltaire
#87. I played a little basketball, but basketball interfered with theater season. That's when we did our term plays and did nutshell versions of Shakespeare for English classes. And, believe me, I got a fair amount of looks from the guys on the team. 'You're in theater but you can play football?'
Dennis Haysbert
#88. Shakespeare doesn't really write subtext, you play the subtext.
Gary Oldman
#89. Playing Shakespeare requires technique. You don't play a Bach toccata by getting in the mood.
Kevin Kline
#90. There would be more genuine rejoicing at the discovery of a complete new novel by Jane Austen than any other literary discovery, short of a new major play by Shakespeare.
Margaret Drabble
#91. HAMLET
I do not well understand that. Will you play upon this pipe?
GUILDENSTERN
My lord, I cannot.
HAMLET
I pray you.
GUILDENSTERN
Believe me, I cannot.
HAMLET
I do beseech you.
GUILDENSTERN
I know no touch of it, my lord.
HAMLET
It is as easy as lying.
William Shakespeare
#92. My problem is that the audience is more fiction-literate than ever. In Shakespeare's day, you probably expected to see a play once or twice in your life; today you experience four or five different kinds of fiction every day. So staying ahead of the audience is impossible.
Steven Moffat
#93. I don't think my looks are modern. I always imagined I'd end up doing Chekhov, Ibsen and Shakespeare all my life and never play a contemporary character.
Alex Kingston
#96. Instead of Otello being an Italian opera written in the style of Shakespeare, Othello is a play written by Shakespeare in the style of Italian opera.
George Bernard Shaw
#97. We are glad the Dauphin is so pleasant with us;
His present and your pains we thank you for:
When we have match'd our rackets to these balls,
We will, in France, by God's grace, play a set
Shall strike his father's crown into the hazard.
King Henry, scene ii
William Shakespeare
#99. In Shakespeare's play As You Like It, Touchstone says to Audrey in the Forest of Arden "The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool." (Act V, Scene I).
Karolina Achirri
#100. [Anton] Chekhov is the most produced playwright in the world after Shakespeare, and most of the people in my sort of audience would have seen at least one of his plays.
Robert Dessaix
