Shakespeare wrote about what was happening during the time; it still relates to us now.
Unless you're doing Shakespeare or Chekhov... the written word is not sacrosanct.
With Shakespeare, because you invest so much time in working on material, it always sort of stays with you to some degree.
There's a specificity of language that's required in Shakespeare that most drama students in England deal with - a specificity of language that is somehow not as clear in a lot of American schools.
If you can read, then you can recite Shakespeare. But that's not acting.
In speaking, for convenience, of devices and expedients, I did not intend to imply that Shakespeare always deliberately aimed at the effects which he produced.
In modern life, we hide behind ourselves. In Shakespeare, there's nowhere left to hide. It's life, larger than life, and every actor has to raise their game to get there.
I haven't read Ibsen, Shaw, Shakespeare - except 'The Merchant of Venice' in ninth grade. I'm not familiar with 'Death of a Salesman.' I haven't read Tennessee Williams.
I have an aunt who believed strongly that teaching kids that Shakespeare is 'hard' is wrong, so she handed me 'Hamlet' when I was in kindergarten to see what would happen. What happened was I did a book report on 'Hamlet' and caused quite a lot of trouble!
There was always this idea that I would work on Shakespeare and some of the other classics, but it never came to be.
