Shakespeare Theatre Quotes

#1. 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

#2. We number nothing that we spend for you;
Our duty is so rich, so infinite,
That we may do it still without accompt.
Vouchsafe to show the sunshine of your face,
That we, like savages, may worship it.

William Shakespeare

#3. Playing Shakespeare requires technique. You don't play a Bach toccata by getting in the mood.

Kevin Kline

#4. I'm into parlor dramas. I'm into theatre. I'm trained for the stage. I trained to do Chekhov and Shakespeare, I was trained for the stage.

Tom Hardy

#5. I take thee at thy word:
Call me but love, and I'll be new baptized;
Henceforth I never will be Romeo.

William Shakespeare

#6. Bad is the world, and all will come to naught
when such ill-dealing must be seen in thought.

William Shakespeare

#7. I started in theatre. I was at Cleveland and I went to London for the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's birth.

James Cromwell

#8. From kings to groundlings, Shakespeare made his work profound for everybody. That is how it should be. There is no hierarchy in theatre. It makes everyone part of a collective.

Lee Hall

#9. My background is somewhat unusual, as I trained to be a ballet dancer. I worked in the theatre for eight or nine years as a contemporary dancer. But as an actor one does read Shakespeare and does try to learn the classics.

William Kempe

#10. 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

#11. I'm a pro! No, what I mean is I have performed with the Royal Shakespeare Company in England. I have been all over the place. I have studied theatre for seven years.

Kunal Nayyar

#12. London theatre is different: it is a commercial theatre that brings the whole of society into one place. And Shakespeare grasped, better than anyone else, what it means to engage the entire audience.

Neil MacGregor

#13. Shakespeare has way too many lines. My ideal theatre piece is about 40 minutes long with no interval.

Daniel Craig

#14. As an actress and comedienne, I'm a huge fan of he theatre and the Tricycle in Kilburn is my favourite in London. I dragged my kids to a performance of 'Twelfth Night' there, where they handed out pizza. Who knew that all it takes to get children interested in Shakespeare is a snack?

Arabella Weir

#15. We cannot deny that 80 or even 90 percent of the spiritual treasures from the past 3,000 years have come from Europe. There is no other Greek theatre anywhere else in the world. There is no other Shakespeare, Dante or Cervantes.

Ismail Kadare

#16. 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

#17. Plays by Alan Ayckbourn have been attracting larger audiences in the regional theatres than those of Shakespeare.

Alan Ayckbourn

#18. In the theatre, people talk. Talk, talk until the cows come home about journeys of discovery and about what Hazlitt thought of a line of Shakespeare. I can't stand it.

Anthony Hopkins

#19. In my gap year between college and drama school, I taught art at a hospice and worked at a little coffee shop across the street from Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London when everything around it was still a construction zone.

Juliet Rylance

#20. If one good deed in all my life I did,
I do repent it from my very soul.

William Shakespeare

#21. Had I not done Shakespeare, Pinter, Moliere and things such as 'Godspell' - I played Judas in a hugely successful production before I did 'Elm Street' - I'd probably be on a psychiatrist's couch saying: 'Freddy ruined me.' But I'd already done 13 movies and years of non-stop theatre.

Robert Englund

#22. Kenji Mizoguchi is to the cinema what Bach is to music, Cervantes is to literature, Shakespeare is to theatre, Titian is to painting: the very greatest.

Jean Douchet

#23. I'm grateful to be working. The most exciting thing for me is that I never get bored - I've done comedy, drama, musical theatre and now Shakespeare.

Sheridan Smith

#24. By the time I was seven, I did a sonnet at Shakespeare's Globe theatre for Shakespeare's birthday because my dad had been at the first season of the Globe and was friends with the artistic director. Somehow, that lead to me doing a sonnet!

Alfred Enoch

#25. What's this thing that gets between us and Shakespeare?

Al Pacino

#26. I've never done stand-up; I came via small-scale touring theatre, through the Royal Shakespeare Company, the National Theatre, then I got employed on that as an actor who had a humorous sensibility.

Mark Williams

#27. I'm always keeping an eye out for a period piece. I was trained in theatre, so most of the things we did were classical - Shakespeare, Moliere, and Chekhov.

Dagmara Dominczyk

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. I am so far as I am aware not at all influenced by dramatists, expect for Shakespeare, who I have to say, it is impossible not to be influenced by if you hold language to be the major element of theatre.

Howard Barker

#31. In Shakespeare, keep it simple. Don't over-inflect. The speech needs to be naturalistic and simple and accessible as much as possible.

Ralph Fiennes

#32. Each of my Shakespeare pieces is different to the other, but each espouses a set of philosophies common to all my theatre work.

Tim Crouch

#33. I think it's sad that movies and television have caused the theatre to fade as a popular art form. I hope to get young people into the theatre and expose them to Shakespeare.

Kelly McGillis

#34. I have Shakespeared my Moliere to Tenessee, and I am Wild for Becket!
But I got a little tired of the redundancy.

Natasha Tsakos