A Quote by Rhys Ifans

I've done a lot of Shakespeare onstage, and I'm not convinced that the Earl of Oxford was the author of all those works, but I am convinced that the Stratfordian William Shakespeare was not. My feeling is that it was an amalgamation of many writers, in the same way that most films are a collaborative endeavor.
Shakespeare is one of the reasons I've stayed an actor. Sometimes I spend full days doing Shakespeare by myself, just for the joy of reading it, saying those words... I do Shakespeare when I am feeling a certain way.
I no longer believe that William Shakespeare the actor from Stratford was the author of the works that have been ascribed to him.
I love American English, not least because a lot of it was ours to begin with. Indeed, many Americanisms can be found in the works of William Shakespeare.
There's a wonderful author named Can Themba, who said that Africa extends a fraternal handshake to Shakespeare. That William Shakespeare would have recognized Elizabethan England more readily in Africa today than in England today.
In many ways, 'William Shakespeare's Star Wars' is modeled on Shakespeare's Henry V, which relied on a chorus to explain in words the battles of Harfleur and Agincourt that could never be captured on the Elizabethan stage.
"With this same key Shakespeare unlocked his heart" once more! Did Shakespeare? If so, the less Shakespeare he!
I've done a lot of Shakespeare as a young man; I was involved with Shakespeare and Company.
I had been in a Shakespeare company for three years and done a lot of Shakespeare. That was fun. That was interesting.
I had been in a Shakespeare company for three years and done a lot of Shakespeare. That was fun. That was interesting. It was a lot of work - anything other than Shakespeare was less work. I had a lot of interesting roles, but I don't point to them and say, "That was more interesting than that," because I don't know what the criteria are.
Nowadays, one of the churches of Tlön maintains platonically that such and such a pain, such and such a greenish-yellow colour, such and such a temperature, such and such a sound, etc., make up the only reality there is. All men, in the climactic instant of coitus, are the same man. All men who repeat one line of Shakespeare are William Shakespeare.
Shakespeare's always been sitting on my back, since I began reading. And, certainly, as a writer, he's who I hear all the time. And he's almost indistinguishable now from the English language. I have no sense of what Shakespeare is like. I have no sense of the personality that is Shakespeare. I think, alone among writers, I don't know who he is.
I'm one of those people that feels that Americans that shouldn't do Shakespeare... The rhythms of the English language and the mannerisms of the English speech seems to work effortlessly with William Shakespeare, but when Americans do it, something seems stuck.
I think American actors are much more intimidated by Shakespeare. I actually want to do this Shakespeare play in New York, but I think it's interesting that there's this gaping hole in the repertoire in the American theater, which is Shakespeare. It's hardly ever done, compared to how often it's done in other companies, not just Britain. Someone from the Roundabout Theater Company - I said, "You never do Shakespeare." And he said, "Yes, we're not very good at it." And I thought, "What a terrible thing to say.".
Many years ago, in the late '70s, I toured colleges along the East Coast and I presented a kind of show where I got a lot of books and poetry and pieces of [William] Shakespeare and other writers that I admire, read it to the class and then afterward we would talk and I would answer questions. It was really a way of expressing and finding out about where I was at that particular time, so it was very therapeutic for me.
If you are an atheist as I am, Shakespeare can be your ideal. Everything is within Shakespeare, especially in his 10 greatest plays. They have life, meaning, understanding, the whole lot.
I believe strongly in what John Keats called negative capability: the trait or practice that allows a poet to remain in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason. For Keats, William Shakespeare exemplified negative capability, and I do think it's extraordinary that for all the thousands of pages Shakespeare left behind, we really don't know much about Shakespeare's own personality or opinions.
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