Now, when I talk about Shakespeare, I can't talk too much about Gielgud or Olivier. Because nobody knows who I'm talking about.
I've been with Shakespeare all my life.
If Shakespeare were alive today, he'd be doing sitcoms.
Had Shakespeare listened to the news of Duncans death in a tavern or heard the knocking on his own bedroom door after he had finished the writing of Macbeth?
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.
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.
There was always this idea that I would work on Shakespeare and some of the other classics, but it never came to be.
Considering the wealth of poetic drama that has come down to us from the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, it is surprising that so little of any value has been added since.
I liked Shakespeare in high school, but in university I spent a semester studying in London, and it was sort of in the middle of me falling deeply in love with literature, and I took a Shakespeare course with a professor who couldn't imagine anything more important than Shakespeare.
I did study Shakespeare, that was sort of my thing; I got a Literature A-level, which is my only claim to academic fame.
I did 'Love's Labour's Lost' in the theater and found it to be riotously funny.
I majored in Shakespearean studies at a very tiny school in Georgia.
Sweet Beatrice, wouldst thou come when I called thee? BEATRICE Yea, signior, and depart when you bid me. BENEDICK O, stay but till then! BEATRICE 'Then' is spoken; fare you well now... (Much Ado About Nothing)
Shakespeare is one of the last books one should like to give up, perhaps the one just before the Dying Service in a large Prayer book.
English dramatic literature is, of course, dominated by Shakespeare; and it is almost inevitable that an English reader should measure the value of other poetic drama by the standards which Shakespeare has already implanted in his mind.
