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I'm constantly intimidated by Shakespeare's work. Trying to decipher what he's saying and holding on to that thought - not just as an actor, but as a human being - is a rigour.

It's extremely dangerous to compare anyone else to Shakespeare.

There is some mysterious thing that goes on whereby, in the process of playing Shakespeare continuously, actors are surprised by the way the language actually acts on them.

First of all, there was a volcano of words, an eruption of words that Shakespeare had never used before that had never been used in the English language before. It's astonishing. It pours out of him.

In the theatre, people talk. Talk, talk until the cows come home about journeys of discovery and about what Hazlitt thought of a line of Shakespeare. I can't stand it.

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.

New fathers, political prisoners, traumatised presidential aides, resolute schoolboys, MEPs addressing unfriendly chambers - we all find that Shakespeare has magically anticipated our precise circumstances. How he was possible, I still don't understand; but there isn't a day I'm not grateful that he speaks to me in my own language.

There was a time when people liked to take Shakespeare and twist him around to make whatever social or political statement they wanted to make.

Simon Russell Beale is an incomparable speaker of Shakespeare and a superb all-round actor.

I think Shakespeare is really the one. Words as music and music as words. Everything he wrote was good, which is really frightening.