Sam Wanamaker Quotes

When I first went to London to do a film in 1949, I naturally went to visit the site of the Globe. There was this small plaque on the side of a grimy brewery wall in a derelict alley near the riverfront. I was shocked.

But then history does not only consist of documents.

Even in the tragedies, Shakespeare always put in parts for the comic actors because his audience was mixed. He puts in people who talk like aristocrats. He puts in idiots and fools. He puts in certain middle-range characters. And when you go to the Globe, you realize how that all works. The people who paid more sat in seats around the edge. Everybody else paid a penny. They put it into a tin box - that's why we call it the "box office." They stood in the pit, but they were very close, so when Hamlet was doing his soliloquy, it was addressed to you, the audience - right there.

Biographers search for traces, for evidence of activity, for signs of movement, for letters, for diaries, for photographs.

The concept of preserving history, collating full archives, making them as usable as possible so the public have access to them, I really feel that it allows the public an ability to engage with their own history.

We talk about theatre museums filled with old costumes and things. What we also need is a theatre museum of the old routines on videotape. We are only the custodians of those techniques, and they should be preserved.

Jacobean plays, before Shakespeare, were particularly visceral.

If Shakespeare was around today I would ask him out to dinner. The only thing I don't like about him is the way he did his hair.

One of the consequences of the Iranian revolution has been an explosion of history. A country once known only from British consular reports and intrepid travelogues is now awash with historical documents, letters, diaries, grainy video, weblogs and secret police files of questionable authenticity.

Particularly for English people, Shakespeare is always at the forefront of both drama and the English language. He's always been there. I can't remember starting school and not learning about him.

I hope that not only my documentaries, but everybody's documentaries, last. It will really confuse historians in the next century, because they'll have, in addition to all the print material, they'll have all these pictures to look at.

There can be no history without archives.

It is impossible to write ancient history because we do not have enough sources, and impossible to write modern history because we have far too many.

The map we made of the 3,000-year-old city of Tanis requires no imagination. It has buildings, streets, admin complexes, houses - clear as day.

The most exciting moment as an archaeologist happened when I was looking at the great archaeology site of Tannis, which of course we all know from 'Indiana Jones.' We got satellite imagery of the city of Tannis, we processed it, and literally from thousands of miles away from my lab in Alabama, we were able to map the entire city.

I've been writing American history for a long time, and I've had a hard time finding strong, interesting female characters. There are women, of course, in American history, but they're hard to write about because they don't leave much of a historical trace, and they're not usually involved in high-profile public events.

Most biographers are apt to be discouraged by the sheer volume of papers left behind by their subject.

We will get back to the earlier, instinctive and less inhibited nature of theatre. Today, spectators are passive, but Elizabethan, Greek and Roma; theatre was interactive.

What could be more fitting - or more exciting - than to restage Shakespeare's plays on the very spot where they were first performed, in the shape and style of theater for which they were written?

'Pompeii' is kind of a lifelong obsession for me.

The British are much more cynical and regard the idea of a Globe reconstruction as an Elizabethan Disneyland. But the Americans have a real hunger for what they see as their history, their culture and their Shakespeare.

The starting point for the new history, both in Europe and America, has been the record of births, marriages, and deaths, which most literate societies preserve in one form or another. In colonial America, surviving records of this kind - as of every other kind - are most abundant for New England.

When I was 15 years old, I saw my first production of a Shakespeare play at the British pavilion at the Century of Progress World's Fair in Chicago.

The Puritans left behind so full a record of what they thought and did that scholars cannot resist the temptation to make the most of it.

I want the Dead Sea, like Masada, to be part of UNESCO's world heritage.