Shakespearean Theater Quotes

That's really how I got started was doing Shakespeare. When I got out of school, I was lucky enough to meet George Wolfe, who ran The Public Theater.

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.

I think, as an actor, it is good to feel the fear of failing miserably. I think you should take that risk. Fear is a necessary ingredient in everything I do. But if I do 'Hamlet,' it will probably be in a small theater on a small stage, and it will have to be very, very soon because I'm getting a little long in the tooth for it.

One reason why Shakespeare's plays remain so popular is that they're now regularly presented in updated stagings with a contemporary flavor.

To be invited to the Park - the greatest free Shakespeare festival in the world - is a great honor, and I don't take it lightly.

American radio is the reverse of the Shakespearean stage. In Shakespeare's time the world's greatest dramas were acted with the most primitive technical arrangements; on the American air the world's most primitive writing is performed under perfect technical conditions.

Even in the days when they did Othello, you didn't necessarily have to be black to play Othello. You wore the makeup.

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?

As a child, I would watch 'Frasier' a lot, and there was one episode with Derek Jacobi where he was playing this Shakespearean actor that was a terrible Hamlet. And he reenacted the performance, and for days I went on. I'd perform and do that, and I knew I wanted to do something kind of like that as a kid for awhile.

Characters are an extreme form in Shakespeare's theater.

Now the Gielgud Theater is a very famous old theater, because it was originally called the Globe, and the Globe is where my mother made her very first professional appearance in London, was at the Globe Theater.

Here Greek and Roman find themselves alive along these crowded shelves; and Shakespeare treads again his stage, and Chaucer paints anew his age.