Shakespeare Politics Quotes

#1. 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

#2. The wholesale corruption of social relationships, even the most intimate, is an essential part of Shakespeare's chilling exposure of authoritarian politics.

William Shakespeare

#3. We read too much Shakespeare at school, and view our parliamentary politics as dynastic drama, in which an impatient crown prince frets at his long subordination and begins to scheme for the throne he knows he merits, was promised and has earned.

James Buchan

#4. I never publicise in advance what I'm going to be singing because I never quite know until I start. I often change my mind halfway through. I sometimes throw in stuff about politics or Shakespeare or do songs in Yiddish.

Mandy Patinkin

#5. A political reading of Shakespeare is bound to be less interesting than a Shakespearean reading of politics[.]

Harold Bloom

#6. It's shameful that today's mouthy political expositors aren't better versed in Orwell. Can you imagine a theatre director who hasn't studied Shakespeare?

William Giraldi

#7. Everybody gets a little dose of Shakespeare. He's the greatest playwright in the English language, but his politics are fairly square.

Alex Cox

#8. I'd like to be for cinema what Shakespeare was for theatre, Marx for politics and Freud for psychology: someone after whom nothing is as it used to be.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder