If you look at Shakespeare's history plays, what the setting of monarchy allows is this extraordinary intensification of emotions and predicament.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
If you take away a lot of the pretension and grandness from Shakespeare, a true poeticism is revealed.
Shakespeare is all big themes, like the most amazing love, or the most scary war.
I love the Shakespeare history plays; I love the struggle for the crown as a plot.
Tales of power and ambition and intrigue and betrayal and desire - when you're telling those in a big way, you automatically want to go to Shakespeare.
Shakespeare's plays were a great Teutonic Valhalla with brilliant sunshine at times and violent tempests at others. The world to him was a battlefield, but his sense of poetic justice, his sublime faith in life and its infinite resources, guided the battles.
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.
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.
Characters are an extreme form in Shakespeare's theater.
Shakespeare is a wonderful language to speak, but it's also a world to get your mind into thematically.
From kings to groundlings, Shakespeare made his work profound for everybody. That is how it should be. There is no hierarchy in theatre. It makes everyone part of a collective.