Top 98 Shakespeare Plays Quotes
#1. All the great Shakespeare plays are about killing. 'Alas, poor Yorick,' that's about death. And in 'Romeo and Juliet' everyone up ends up dying. The greatest dramas in the world are all about sex, violence and death.
Ray Winstone
#2. You're just trying on different identities, like everyone in those Shakespeare plays. And the people we pretend at, they're already in us. That's why we pretend them in the first place.
Gayle Forman
#3. I acted at school but got very bad parts - things that they'd made up in Shakespeare plays like 'Guard 17' - so I wrote plays and gave myself parts, then I wrote sketches, then I did stand-up. Even in the school nativity I was the emu in the manger.
Jack Whitehall
#4. One of the things that gives me a lot of pleasure about both the solo show and the book is that it tells people about my dad. He really was an important man. He was a kind of pioneer of regional theater. He was the first American producer to ever produce all of Shakespeare plays.
John Lithgow
#5. Whether it is the cavemen in the caves thousands of years ago, Shakespeare plays, television, movies and books, stories and characters take us on a journey. All I do is tell those stories without scripts and without actors.
Mark Burnett
#6. I got an M.F.A. in acting from NYU, and part of our training is to learn how to use swords in combat situations in a performance and Shakespeare plays where you have to fight.
Danai Gurira
#7. 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
#8. Was Mann himself fully aware of all the facets of his irony? Probably not - any more than Shakespeare was fully aware of all the riches subsequent critics have found in his plays.
Philip Kitcher
#9. This sounds so bogus, but I would love to, at some point when my kids are in college, is just go do a whole season at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and do a year of plays. Most actors miss the days of live theater.
Donal Logue
#10. Why, as men do a-land; the great ones eat up the
little ones: I can compare our rich misers to
nothing so fitly as to a whale; a' plays and
tumbles, driving the poor fry before him, and at
last devours them all at a mouthful:
William Shakespeare
#11. Shakespeare is to me the purest voice of nature, and he does no meddle with nature. His plays provide us with the greatest variety of erotic expression, and with Shakespeare eros is the proper term to use.
Allan Bloom
#12. 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
#13. Plays are frequently infected with ideas that came from actors or even sound engineers. Some Shakespeare scholars wonder whether some of the Bard's lines came from onstage improvisations by actors.
Clive Thompson
#16. Let's say there was a burning building and you could rush in and you could save only one thing: either the last known copy of Shakespeare's plays or some anonymous human being. What would you do?
Woody Allen
#17. Shakespeare wrote great plays that we're still watching all these years later. Charlie Chaplin made great comedies and they are still as funny today as they ever were.
Leonard Maltin
#18. The difficulty in the way of writing a children's play is that Barrie was born too soon. Many people must have felt the same about Shakespeare. We who came later have no chance. What fun to have been Adam, and to have had the whole world of plots and jokes and stories at one's disposal.
A.A. Milne
#19. I love the Shakespeare history plays; I love the struggle for the crown as a plot.
Mark Gatiss
#20. It's the one touch of nature that makes the whole world kin. (That isn't original. I got it out of one of Shakespeare's plays). However,
Jean Webster
#21. ...There thou mightst behold the great image of authority: a dog's obey'd in office. - Thou rascal beadle, hold thy bloody hand! Why dost though lash that whore? Strip thine own back; Thou hotly lusts to use her in that kind For which thou whipst her. The usurer hangs the cozener.
William Shakespeare
#22. Being a theater actor, I've done a lot of plays where I've seen someone else play the same role in another production. Especially with the classics: Shakespeare, Tennessee Williams.
Jacki Weaver
#23. 'Tis not to make me jealous
To say my wife is fair, feeds well, loves company,
Is free of speech, sings, plays, and dances well;
Where virtue is, these are more virtuous.
William Shakespeare
#24. Learning (Shakespeare's plays) ... in school was a bit of a bore.
Al Pacino
#25. 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
#26. Immersing myself in Shakespeare's plays, reading them closely under the guidance of a brilliant, plain-spoken professor changed my life: It opened up the great questions; it put my petty problems into perspective. It got me out of bed in the mornings and kept me in the library late into the night.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#27. I look at it like this: that if Shakespeare were alive today, he would have written two or three plays about the Kennedy family, and actors would traditionally play JFK like they Hamlet or King Lear. They just would. I mean, people have played JFK, and they'll play him long after I have.
Rob Lowe
#28. Astrology had an important role in the ancient world. You can't understand many things unless you know something about astrology - the plays of Shakespeare and so on.
Steven Pinker
#29. What we do have for Shakespeare are his plays - all of them but one or two - thanks in very large part to the efforts of his colleagues Henry Condell and John Heminges, who put together a more or less complete volume of his work after his death - the justly revered First Folio.
Bill Bryson
#30. You know I can't stand Shakespeare's plays, but yours are even worse.
Leo Tolstoy
#31. I love that he's both comic and tragic, and highly poetic but also just dirty at times ... I love that within the world of Shakespeare's plays, the whole world is sort of encompassed in a certain way.
Lauren Groff
#32. In designing the scenery and costumes for any of Shakespeare's plays, the first thing the artist has to settle is the best date for the drama. This should be determined by the general spirit of the play more than by any actual historical references which may occur in it.
Oscar Wilde
#33. To put it one way, a collection of Shakespeare's plays is richer than a phone book that uses the same number of letters; to put it another, the essence of information lies in the relationships among bits, not their sheer number.
Hans Christian Von Baeyer
#34. To read Shakespeare is to feel encompassed -- the plays contain practically every word I know, practically every character type I have ever met, and practically every idea I have ever had.
Kenji Yoshino
#35. Life is the tragedy,' she said bitterly. 'You know how they categorize Shakespeare's plays, right? If it ends with a wedding, it's a comedy. And if it ends with a funeral, it's a tragedy. So we're all living tragedies, because we all end the same way, and it isn't with a goddamn wedding.
Robyn Schneider
#36. WHEN SCHOLARS TALK ABOUT THE SOURCES OF SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS, they almost always mean printed books like Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles
James Shapiro
#37. It's the remarkable thing about academics: they look at Shakespeare and always see their own faces in him.
Amanda Craig
#38. One reason why Shakespeare's plays remain so popular is that they're now regularly presented in updated stagings with a contemporary flavor.
Terry Teachout
#39. You know how they categorize Shakespeare's plays, right? If it ends with a wedding, it's a comedy. And if it ends with a funeral, it's a tragedy.
Robyn Schneider
#40. Here comes Monseiur Le Beau.
Rosalind: With his mouth full of news.
Celia: Which he will put on us, as pigeons feed their young.
Rosalind: Then shall we be news-crammed.
Celia: All the better; we shall be the more marketable.
William Shakespeare
#41. You may be able to read Bernard Shaw's plays, you may be able to quote Shakespeare or Voltaire or some new philosopher; but if you in yourself are not intelligent, if you are not creative, what is the point of this education?
Jiddu Krishnamurti
#42. I have been doing acting my whole life. I did plays in high school. I take it pretty seriously. I used to do a lot of Shakespeare and Shakespearean festivals and monologues.
Vinny Guadagnino
#43. Plays by Alan Ayckbourn have been attracting larger audiences in the regional theatres than those of Shakespeare.
Alan Ayckbourn
#44. If you look at Shakespeare's history plays, what the setting of monarchy allows is this extraordinary intensification of emotions and predicament.
Tom Hooper
#45. I am spellbound by the plays of Shakespeare. And I am spellbound by the second law of thermodynamics. The great ideas in science, like the Cro-Magnon paintings and the plays of Shakespeare, are part of our cultural heritage.
Alan Lightman
#46. In Shakespeare's plays, the mourner hastening to bury his friend is all the time colliding with the reveller hastening to his wine.
Samuel Johnson
#47. Under the greenwood tree,
Who loves to lie with me
And tune his merry note,
Unto the sweet bird's throat;
Come hither, come hither, come hither.
Here shall he see
No enemy
But winter and rough weather.
William Shakespeare
#48. Shakespeare wrote great poetry and preposterous plays. Who really cares, for example, which petty tyrant rules Milan? Or who succeeds to the throne of Denmark? Or why the barons ganged up on Richard II?
Edward Abbey
#49. Shakespeare pulls on us and demands the best of us. You never successfully wrestle one of his plays to the ground and say, 'See? That's It!'
Jack O'Brien
#50. People take England on trust, and repeat that Shakespeare is the greatest of all authors. I have read him: there is nothing that compares Racine or Corneille: his plays are unreadable, pitiful.
Napoleon Bonaparte
#51. She [Cressida] knows it is men's sexual desire that makes women "angels" before they have been able to possess them; once possessed, women are "things" [Troilus and Cressida I.2, 225-28, 233-34].
Tina Packer
#52. But man, proud man,
Dressed in a little brief authority,
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As makes the angels weep.
William Shakespeare
#54. Classical plays require more imagination and more general training to be able to do. That's why I like playing Shakespeare better than anything else.
Vivien Leigh
#55. I was too young that time to value her,
But now I know her. If she be a traitor,
Why, so am I. We still have slept together,
Rose at an instant, learned, played, eat together,
And wheresoe'er we went, like Juno's swans,
Still we went coupled and inseparable.
William Shakespeare
#56. 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
#57. He [Shakespeare] was a wordsmith who loved to act and to see things from many points of view.(...) His genius lay in being able to see all sides of an argument.
Tina Packer
#58. Exposure is about, among other things, the ferocity of the press and the way - in an echo of some of Shakespeare's plays - the modern media creates heroes to destroy them.
Mal Peet
#59. I started out doing a lot of theater, a lot of Shakespeare, classic plays.
Andre Holland
#60. Shakespeare is the outstanding example of how that can be done. In all of Shakespeare's plays, no matter what tragic events occur, no matter what rises and falls, we return to stability in the end.
Charlton Heston
#61. I'm a big lover of Shakespeare. In fact, the only plays that I've ever done professionally in New York have been Shakespearian.
Samira Wiley
#62. 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
#63. At his heart, Shakespeare was a YA author. So many of his plays are set with high school-aged characters. He understood the passion, the confusion and drama that marks that life stage.
Eric Walters
#64. It is true that there are few plays of Shakespeare that I haven't done.
Judi Dench
#65. I'm fascinated by failure, and I'm fascinated by finality. Shakespeare's historical plays are more universal than his comedies because they relate to the finality of life. Without finality, life would not be beautiful.
George Hickenlooper
#66. A brilliant treatment of the history of Purgatory in England and its survivals and echoes throughout Shakespeare's plays, above all Hamlet.
Carol Zaleski
#67. Many people know that Shakespeare's dramatic 'canon' was established in 1623 by the publication of the so-called First Folio. That hefty volume contained thirty-six plays.
Michael Dirda
#68. Shakespeare's plays often turn on the idea of fate, as much drama does. What makes them so tragic is the gap between what his characters might like to accomplish and what fate provides them.
Nate Silver
#69. People are fascinated by the rich: Shakespeare wrote plays about kings, not beggars.
Dominick Dunne
#70. I started to work in television for three or four years, in 1954. There was one channel of television, black and white. But it could be entertaining and educational. During the evening they showed important plays, opera or Shakespeare's tragedies.
Umberto Eco
#71. 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
#72. If one good deed in all my life I did,
I do repent it from my very soul.
William Shakespeare
#73. 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
#74. I grew up with Shakespeare, and there are so many wonderful teachings in those plays. The stories are all so unique and timeless. There is just so much learning in that body of work, and that is something I will always go back to.
Juliet Rylance
#75. I can't think of anything worse than calling Shakespeare 'highbrow,' because on the one hand, it's brilliant writing. But his plays were popular. People went to see them.
Timothy Dalton
#78. It is often noted, for instance, that Shakespeare's plays are full of ocean metaphors ("take arms against a sea of troubles," "an ocean of salt tears," "wild sea of my conscience") and that every one of his plays has at least one reference to the sea in it somewhere.
Bill Bryson
#79. [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
#80. Shakespeare put no children in his plays for a reason," Sir Godfrey muttered, glaring at Alf and Binnie.
"You're forgetting the Little Prince," Polly reminded him.
"Who he had the good sense to kill off in the second act," snapped Sir Godfrey.
Connie Willis
#81. Mobile phones would have wrecked the plots of most of Shakespeare's plays.
Jackie French
#82. They'd performed more modern plays sometimes in the first few years, but what was startling, what no one would have anticipated, was that audiences seemed to prefer Shakespeare to their other theatrical offerings.
Emily St. John Mandel
#83. I think reading Shakespeare's plays when I was young was extremely important. He had the ability to make utter strangers come alive.
Rita Dove
#84. Shakespeare's plays are more violent than 'Scarface.'
Al Pacino
#85. Looking for God-or Heaven-by exploring space is like reading or seeing all Shakespeare's plays in the hope that you will find Shakespeare as one of the characters ...
C.S. Lewis
#86. 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
#87. Shakespeare is a drunken savage with some imagination whose plays please only in London and Canada.
Voltaire
#88. The records - what little we know about Shakespeare, including the records of the plays in his playhouse - were often the story of how quickly they came off if they didn't work. They had to move on. They were absolutely led by box office.
Kenneth Branagh
#89. I have been right, Basil, haven't I, to take my love out of poetry, and to find my wife in Shakespeare's plays? Lips that Shakespeare taught to speak have whispered their secret in my ear. I have had the arms of Rosalind around me, and kissed Juliet on the mouth.
Oscar Wilde
#90. Poems, and several other poems. His plays have been translated into every major living language, and are performed m
William Shakespeare
#91. I think going from doing TV and straight plays to Shakespeare is weird enough because you have this heightened language, and you are telling a story through metric poetry. But I think music is that place beyond poetry.
Tamsin Greig
#92. When I started in the theater, I'd do plays by Shakespeare or Ibsen or Chekhov, and they all created great women's roles.
Annette Bening
#93. 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
#94. Shakespeare's plays were a great Teutonic Valhalla with brilliant sunshine at times and violent tempests at others. The world to him was a battlefield, but his sense of poetic justice, his sublime faith in life and its infinite resources, guided the battles.
Bjornstjerne Bjornson
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. 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
