Shakespeare is like the world, or life itself. Every historical period finds in him what it is looking for and what it wants to see.
Jan Kott in Shakespeare, Our Contemporary (1964)

Submitted by Dan Costinaş
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I had the training at drama school where I studied Shakespeare and Brecht and Chekov and all these period historical playwrights and I think that I responded to the material.
quote by Orlando Bloom

Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Polonius: The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited. Seneca cannot be too heavy, nor Plautus too light. For the law of writ and the liberty, these are the only men.
line from Hamlet, Act II, Scene 2 by William Shakespeare (1599)

Submitted by Dan Costinaş
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I don't really have a historical overview of my work at all. I'm not an art historian. I don't see that there's this period and that period.
quote by Howard Hodgkin

Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Most of my career has been spent with the RSC doing Shakespeare, and the thing you learn from Shakespeare is that his historical plays don't bear anything other than a basic resemblance to history.
quote by Antony Sher

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The Sixties are now considered a historical period, just like the Roman Empire.
quote by Dave Barry

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In fact, it is Shakespeare who gives us the map of the mind. It is Shakespeare who invents Freudian Psychology. Freud finds ways of translating it into supposedly analytical vocabulary.
quote by Harold Bloom

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We have gotten away from this double aspect of either putting the character back into historical events or of making a historical event of his very life.
quote by Raymond Queneau

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There is a vulgar incredulity, which in historical matters, as well as in those of religion, finds it easier to doubt than to examine.
quote by Walter Scott

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Our questions and answers are in part determined by the historical tradition in which we find ourselves. We apprehend truth from our own source within the historical tradition. The content of our truth depends upon our appropriating the historical foundation. Our own power of generation lies in the rebirth of what has been handed down to us. If we do not wish to slip back, nothing must be forgotten; but if
philosophising is to be genuine our thoughts must arise from our own source. Hence all appropriation of tradition proceeds from the intentness of our own life. The more determinedly I exist, as myself, within the conditions of the time, the more clearly I shall hear the language of the past, the nearer I shall feel the glow of its life.
quote by Karl Jaspers

Submitted by Veronica Serbanoiu
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I wander around, get the lay of the land and try to imagine what kind of people would have lived there in that historical period. What would they eat? What kind of clothing would they wear? How did they shelter themselves? How did they get around?
quote by James Welch

Submitted by Lucian Velea
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I could write historical fiction, or science fiction, or a mystery but since I find it fascinating to research the clues of some little know period and develop a story based on that, I will probably continue to do it.
quote by Jean M. Auel

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It was clear to me that the forms of consciousness of our inherited and acquired historical education - aesthetic consciousness and historical consciousness - presented alienated forms of our true historical being.
quote by Hans-Georg Gadamer

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Duke: And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.
line from As You Like It, Act II, Scene 1 by William Shakespeare (1599)

Submitted by Dan Costinaş
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Ellis Peters's historical detail is very accurate and very minute, and therefore is not only interesting to read but good for an actor to acquire a sense of the period. And the other thing I think is that an actor lives in the land of imagination.
quote by Derek Jacobi

Submitted by Lucian Velea
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While I was pleasantly surprised by the relatively high number of jobs created in April, the fact is that job creation during this recovery period has significantly lagged both historical experience in recovery, and the projections of the Bush Administration.
quote by Barney Frank

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Picasso had his pink period and his blue period. I am in my blonde period right now.
quote by Hugh Hefner

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Now, whenever you read any historical document, you always evaluate it in light of the historical context.
quote by Josh McDowell

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It is of course the nature of historical contraction that the shortest distance to a historical destination is never a straight line.
quote by Ibrahim Babangida

Submitted by Lucian Velea
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It is not that Shakespeare's art is in technicolor and fancy, and that real life is black and white and tedious. The life that Shakespeare was living was the only life he had, and he had to use it to create what he was doing.
quote by Stephen Greenblatt

Submitted by Lucian Velea
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The 1st period is won by the best technician. The 2nd period is won by the kid in the best shape. The 3rd period is won by the kid with the biggest heart.