top of page
"We cannot arrive at Shakespeare's whole dramatic way of looking at the world from his tragedies alone, as we can arrive at Milton's way of regarding things, or at Wordsworth's or at Shelley's, by examining almost any one of their important works."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Shakespeare quotes

"Sondheim is the Shakespeare of the musical theater world."

"Was there ever such stuff as great as part of Shakespeare? Only one must not say so! But what think you? - What? - Is there not sad stuff? What? - What?"

"It was easier to do Shakespeare than a lot of modern movie scripts that are so poorly written."

"We were not allowed to say, Screw, but we could say, Hump the hostess, because hump is in Shakespeare."

"Find enough clever things to say, and you're a Prime Minister; write them down and you're a Shakespeare."

"Well, as a kid I did not get Shakespeare. I just never understood it."
Explore more quotes by Andrew Coyle Bradley

"Nor does the idea of a moral order asserting itself against attack or want of conformity answer in full to our feelings regarding the tragic character."

"A Shakespearean tragedy as so far considered may be called a story of exceptional calamity leading to the death of a man in high estate. But it is clearly much more than this, and we have now to regard it from another side."

"Job was the greatest of all the children of the east, and his afflictions were well-nigh more than he could bear; but even if we imagined them wearing him to death, that would not make his story tragic."

"In the first place, it must be remembered that our point of view in examining the construction of a play will not always coincide with that which we occupy in thinking of its whole dramatic effect."

"Shakespeare also introduces the supernatural into some of his tragedies; he introduces ghosts, and witches who have supernatural knowledge."

"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."

"King Lear alone among these plays has a distinct double action. Besides this, it is impossible, I think, from the point of view of construction, to regard the hero as the leading figure."

"In Shakespearean tragedy the main source of the convulsion which produces suffering and death is never good: good contributes to this convulsion only from its tragic implication with its opposite in one and the same character."

"But, in addition, there is, all through the tragedy, a constant alternation of rises and falls in this tension or in the emotional pitch of the work, a regular sequence of more exciting and less exciting sections."

"Shakespeare's idea of the tragic fact is larger than this idea and goes beyond it; but it includes it, and it is worth while to observe the identity of the two in a certain point which is often ignored."
bottom of page