Most of my career has been spent with the RSC doing Shakespeare, and the thing you learn from Shakespeare is that his historical plays don't bear anything other than a basic resemblance to history.
Antony Sher

Most people don't know that I am an accomplished dramatic actor... But I've performed in several Shakespeare productions including Hamlet, except in this version, Hamlet lives in an apartment with two women, and has to pretend he's gay so that the landlord won't evict him.
John Ritter

Most people, even among those who know Shakespeare well and come into real contact with his mind, are inclined to isolate and exaggerate some one aspect of the tragic fact.
Andrew Coyle Bradley

My background is somewhat unusual, as I trained to be a ballet dancer. I worked in the theatre for eight or nine years as a contemporary dancer. But as an actor one does read Shakespeare and does try to learn the classics.
William Kempe

My career is chequered. Then I think I got pigeon-holed in humour; Shakespeare is not my thing.
Maggie Smith

My writing improved the more I wrote - and the more I read good writing, from Shakespeare on down.
Dick Schaap

No poem, not even Shakespeare or Milton or Chaucer, is ever strong enough to totally exclude every crucial precursor text or poem.
Harold Bloom

Nobody knows anything about Shakespeare the person. It's all legend, it is all rumor.
Jeanette Winterson

Normally, I could hit hard enough, as anyone who studied my fights might have known. But the impression was that I was essentially defensive, the very reverse of a killer, the prize fighter who read books, even Shakespeare.
Gene Tunney

Now a Protestant confronting a Catholic ghost is exactly Shakespeare's way of grappling with what was not simply a general social problem but one lived out in his own life.
Stephen Greenblatt

Now we sit through Shakespeare in order to recognize the quotations.
Orson Welles

On the streets, unrequited love and death go together almost as often as in Shakespeare.
Scott Turow

One day, out of irritation, I said, you know all of those years with the Royal Shakespeare Company, all those years of playing kings and princes and speaking black verse, and bestriding the landscape of England was nothing but a preparation for sitting in the captain's chair of the Enterprise.
Patrick Stewart

One of the things that makes Hamlet unique among Shakespeare's characters is his courage to face up to the darker elements of his personality.
Kenneth Branagh

People have known of Shakespeare's homosexuality down through the ages.
George Weinberg

Peter Hall was just organizing the Royal Shakespeare Company. It was going to be an ensemble, it was going to be in repertory, it was going to have a home in London as well as in the Midlands, and all of those things were happening at that time.
Trevor Nunn

Prior to Wordsworth, humor was an essential part of poetry. I mean, they don't call them Shakespeare comedies for nothing.
William Collins

Read not Milton, for he is dry; nor Shakespeare, for he wrote of common life.
Charles Stuart Calverley

Shakespeare also introduces the supernatural into some of his tragedies; he introduces ghosts, and witches who have supernatural knowledge.
Andrew Coyle Bradley

Shakespeare doesn't really write subtext, you play the subtext.
Gary Oldman