457 Quotes About Shakespeare

Here's one of the problems with communicating in the words of a man who is not around to explain himself: it's damn hard sometimes to tell what he was talking about. Look, the sheer fact that people have banged out book after article after dramatic interpretation of this guy should tell you that despite his eloquence, he wasn't the clearest of communicators.

Interestingly, this speech by Prospero does not contrast the unreality of the stage with the solid, flesh-and-blood existence of real men and women. On the contrary, it seizes on the flimsiness of dramatic characters as a metaphor for the fleeting, fantasy-ridden quality of actual human lives. It is we who are made of dreams, not just such figments of Shakespeare’s imagination as Ariel and Caliban. The cloud-capped towers and gorgeous palaces of this earth are mere stage scenery after all.

Teagan: How long has it been since you read a book that didn’t havevampires in it?Abby: They write books with no vampires? Wait...the penguins made us read that Shakesrear guy, right?Teagan: Shakespeare.

Women may fail when there is no strength in man

He folds the board and says “It’s because violent desires have violent ends. ““Quoting Shakespeare, my dear. That’s sounds more like me. ““Yet most of us will eventually end up like his characters, won’t we? What’s more dangerous is we act upon those desires with the clear mind the outcome will be disastrous.”I smile sadly at him and at the reality of his words.

Punctuation is important, but the rules are changing. Spelling is important today in a way that it wasn't when Shakespeare was a boy. Grammar isn't set in stone.

A woman in the English Department at Fudan University walked with a cane as a result of criticism by Red Guards-she was kicked and beaten for advocating the reading of the Bourgeois feudalist William Shakespeare. But times had changed. This same woman had just been a faculty adviser on a student production of Much Ado About Nothing at the Shanghai Shakespeare Festival in the spring of 1986.

IN ENGLISH, words of Latin origin tend to carry overtones of intellectual, moral and aesthetic “classiness"—overtones which are not carried, as a rule, by their Anglo-Saxon equivalents. “Maternal,” for instance, means the same as “motherly,” “intoxicated” as “drunk”—but with what subtly important shades of difference! And when Shakespeare needed a name for a comic character, it was Sir Toby Belch that he chose, not Cavalier Tobias Eructation.

If you want a language to survive, capture great thoughts within it. William Shakespeare has ensured Elizabethan English will never perish from this world.