Quote

Shakespeare is renewed each time you see it or read it. I've seen 'Midsummer Night's Dream' so many times, and each time it's a little different, or a different line leaps out at me. It's like re-reading a good book over and over, always noticing something you hadn't seen the time before - and that's rare.

There's that old adage about how there's only seven plots in the world and Shakespeare's done them all before.

And I just think that to introduce an unknown Shakespeare is thrilling, too - not to do Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet, to do the richer Shakespeare. People will come to this and not know the story.

There are a lot of theories about Shakespeare.

When Shakespeare begins his exposition thus he generally at first makes people talk about the hero, but keeps the hero himself for some time out of sight, so that we await his entrance with curiosity, and sometimes with anxiety.

Shakespeare is the one who gets re-interpreted most frequently.

With Shakespeare, because you invest so much time in working on material, it always sort of stays with you to some degree.

My problem is that the audience is more fiction-literate than ever. In Shakespeare's day, you probably expected to see a play once or twice in your life; today you experience four or five different kinds of fiction every day. So staying ahead of the audience is impossible.

Shakespeare does a great job of taking 5,000-year-old stories and turning them into modern pieces that are true to the original essence but are completely remade.

Even Shakespeare gives you a scene off.