Shakespearean Performance Quotes

I had a dialect coach from the Royal Shakespeare Company who was from Sheffield.

I owe a great deal to Harold Hobson, doyen drama critic of the 'U.K. Sunday Times,' who championed me as Shakespeare's Richard II at the 1969 Edinburgh Festival.

Some of the finest Shakespeare has been done recently by college theater programs. I'll tell you what these young kids have: They have a natural authority in Shakespeare. They feel a right to do it. And once they honor the humanity of it, the rhythm of the verse comes with it.

A British actor will savour every syllable of a Shakespearean line, while a French actor will drive to the end of a sentence or a speech with a propulsive rhythm: the thing you never say to a French actor is, 'Take your time.'

We hope the Bell Shakespeare Company will become an indigenous part of the Globe Shakespeare Centre in Australia.

I suppose that there might have been leading men who were put off from casting me as the ingenue because I was taller than they were, but I've no idea that this ever happened. When I did 'Much Ado About Nothing' opposite Mark Rylance in the West End, we used the difference in our heights as part of their relationship.

When I first went to acting school, they made me lose my accent, which is very upsetting for me. The first day of Shakespeare class, I remember the professor was like, 'Oh, boy. Oh no, no, no, no. No, no, no,' and sent me to a voice and speech class to get rid of the accent immediately.

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

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

In modern life, we hide behind ourselves. In Shakespeare, there's nowhere left to hide. It's life, larger than life, and every actor has to raise their game to get there.

People think for Shakespeare you have to have a big English accent, but it's not true. He designed it so it can be performed in any accent in any time period.

I felt a little green, because Shakespeare writes the thought process within the text; it was tricky not to think of what to say and then say it, and instead just deliver the lines.

My biggest break wasn't 'Rent;' it was the first job that ever paid me. I couldn't believe that they were paying me all that money to go around the country and do Shakespeare. I would have done it for free.

I adored being at the RSC and working on the verse and getting the iambic pentameter right. You just skim across the surface, and the speech is over before you know it. You can just ride along on the music of it.

To see him act is like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning.

My parents were not at all backstage parents. We had none of that in the family. It was just very clear right away that I was an actor, even from 4 years old. I've never waited a table. I taught some - I'll teach classes in improv or Shakespeare, but there's some motor in me that needs to do that.

I think every New York actor's dream is to do Shakespeare in the Park. Each show is so special and unique and diverse because of the elements that we're performing in. Every live show is truly a one-of-a-kind.

Because I was writing verse, my instructor suggested I study Shakespeare. The Shakespeare teacher insisted you couldn't understand the text without seeing it on its feet.

A lot of American actors when they do Shakespeare put on a phoney English accent and it drives me crazy. You're always fighting against the idea that only the British know how to do Shakespeare.

It's actually now, more common to see conceptual productions of Shakespearian, which Hamlet is played as a Nazi, or a homosexual, or whatever concept is being laid over the play, then it is to see a production of Shakespeare in which there is no conceptual overlay and the play is simply being presented on its own terms.

In the Victorian age, actors played Romeo until they were 60 or 70 years old.

On Laurence Olivier as Hamlet in a 1948 film: Olivier's idea of introspection was to hood his eyes, dentalize his consonants and let the camera circle his blondined head like a sparrow looking for a place to deposit its droppings.

I say this quite deliberately, this is the finest Shakespearean performance I've seen.

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.