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“As you sit there watching a performance of a Shakespeare, Johnson, or Marlowe play, the crowd will fade into the background. Instead, you will be struck by the diction. There are words and phrases that you will not find funny, but which will make the crowd roar with laughter. Your familiarity with the meanings of Shakespeare's words will rise and fall as you see and hear the actors' deliveries and notice the audience's reaction. That is the strange music of being so familiar with something that is not of your own time. What you are listening to in that auditorium is the genuine voice, something of which you have heard only distant echoes. Not every actor is perfect in his delivery; Shakespeare himself makes that quite clear in his Hamlet. But what you are hearing is the voice of the men for whom Shakespeare wrote his greatest speeches. Modern thespians will follow the rhythms or the meanings of these words, but even the most brilliant will not always be able to follow both rhythm and meaning at once. If they follow the pattern of the verse, they risk confusing the audience, who are less familiar with the sense of the words. If they pause to emphasize the meanings, they lose the rhythm of the verse. Here, on the Elizabethan stage, you have a harmony of performance and understanding that will never again quite be matched in respect of any of these great writers.”
Ian Mortimer“The nations which have put mankind and posterity most in their debt have been small states - Israel Athens Florence Elizabethan England.”
Dean William R. Inge“In Elizabethan England or classical Athens... theater was at the center of, not culture, but society and politics and religion and civic engagement. Those things have a different audience.”
Diane Paulus“If you want a language to survive, capture great thoughts within it. William Shakespeare has ensured Elizabethan English will never perish from this world.”
James Rozoff“Well, my wife always says to me, and I think it's true, it's very difficult for us to understand the Elizabethan understanding and enjoyment and perception of form as it is to say... it would be for them to understand computers or going to the moon or something.”
Mark Rylance“On the subject of literary genres, I've always felt that my response to poetry is inadequate. I'd love to be the kind of person that drifts off into the garden with a slim volume of Elizabethan verse or a sheaf of haikus, but my passion is story.”
J. K. Rowling“The Elizabethan Failure may engage in battle, but the blow that fells him will most likely be an accidental one. And the cup of water so gallantly offered will, at the last moment, slip from his weak grasp, thus rendering two people thirsty instead of one.”
Naomi Neale, Calendar Girl“At one point, so many people had assembled on the bridge that linked the ship to the shore that the timbers began to creak and groan. Suddenly, there was a tremendous crack and a hundred or more people were plunged into the muddy river. Wiser heads might have seen this as a warning that Elizabethan technology did not always match its enthusiasm.”
Giles Milton i Samurai William i“This reasoning is based on the wishful thinking that genius can only be earned through education and hard work. It denies the time-proven truth that genius can strike like a random bolt of lightning, at any time in any place, even in a humble glover's home in a small town in Elizabethan England.”
Andrea Mays, The Millionaire and the Bard: Henry Folger’s Obsessive Hunt for Shakespeare’s First Folio“The English language [during the Elizabethan era] wasn't standardized. There were no official dictionaries. There was no cultural belief that words should always be spelled the same way. So people spelled things however they heard them or however made sense. I mean the name Shakespeare had something like 16 different spellings, and the way he spelled it isn't the way we spell it.- School of Night - pg 44”
Bayard Louis