Shakespearean Characters Quotes

It is open to question whether the highly individualized characters we find in Shakespeare are perhaps not detrimental to the dramatic effect. The human being disappears to the same degree as the individual emerges.

'Born to play? Hmmm. Probably Romeo... or Hamlet, I guess. Also, I'd be a great Alexander the Great.

Much of the day I have busied myself making notes on the small parts in Shakespeare, often nameless, which are rewarding to the actor if only he'll not dismiss them as beneath his dignity. If I can work it up into a talk I might call it, 'Only a cough and a spit ' -the phrase so often used by actors to explain away a lack of opportunity.

He's a man who... well, one of the great things about Shakespeare is that his characters are inconsistent, and that's something I think makes him a writer above most writers because inconsistency is what we, as people, are full of. We maybe don't see it in ourselves too often, but we are inconsistent.

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.

On those nights, the words were for me alone. They came up unbidden from my heart. They spilled over my tongue and spilled out my mouth. And because of them, I, who was nothing and nobody, was a prince of Denmark, a maid of Verona, a queen of Egypt. I was a sour misanthrope, a beetling hypocrite, a conjurer's daughter, a mad and murderous king.

You can compare Holmes and Watson to great Shakespearean characters, in a way. They've been played by hundreds of actors over the years, and each one is a different interpretation - the source material can take that form of interpretation.

I really like Shakespeare a lot. The characters that he writes for females, I think, are really great and a lot more compelling than what modern writers write, which is weird because they didn't have actresses then.

Ophelia was bonkers, right? And Juliet was what, a sixth-grader?

Evil is such a simplistic way to describe any character, be it Iago or Caliban, or any character from history.

When Xena finished I just really wanted to work with Shakespeare's material.

Shakespeare was the thing that started me off on that train, you know, and every one of his plays. There are so many different characters, and the wonderful thing about being in an all-girls school was I got to play them all, you know. So I got to play Mercutio and Oberon and Malvolio - it was great.

There's something really incredible about watching what someone else does with a role that we know: the Hamlets or the Henry Vs or the Othellos or the Cleopatras that we've seen on stage.

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.

I've done 'Two Gentlemen of Verona,' I've understudied Iago in 'Othello.' I've done Mercutio in 'Romeo and Juliet.'

And you know, I hate to admit this, but I don't always think in terms of Shakespeare. When I eat, I do. When I'm at a restaurant, I'll think, 'Hmm, what would Macbeth have ordered?'

Everyone has a different interpretation of characters we know and love from Shakespeare, from 'Miller'. There's specific things about them that are written that are kind of the fingerprints of the first person who played that role, and so I like to think of it as a road map.

There's an honourable tradition of British actors who've gone to Hollywood playing baddies. Part of that is because we grow up with Richard III and Macbeth - we're not afraid of our villains.

Working on Shakespeare and learning about Shakespeare was the big takeaway for me.

I think nobody since has written such extraordinary work as Shakespeare writes. The characters he writes are full of inconsistencies, which is a great human quality - I mean, we're all very inconsistent in the way we behave.

Lear, Macbeth. Mercutio – they live on their own as it were. The newspapers are full of them, if we were only the Shakespeares to see it. Have you ever been in a Police Court? Have you ever watched tradesmen behind their counters? My soul, the secrets walking in the streets! You jostle them at every corner. There's a Polonius in every first-class railway carriage, and as many Juliets as there are boarding-schools. ... How inexhaustibly rich everything is, if you only stick to life.

The way Shakespeare wrote Fallstaff is with a heightened language and everything. That's the genuis of having Ken Branagh here as well. Shakespeare doesn't require you to have a doctorate in his language or whatever to understand him. It just has to be directed and played right. It's all about scale and presence and getting these huge, epic stories across.