Shakespearean Drama Famous Quotes & Sayings

Freshly sprung from my monogamous LTR, I had no idea how vulnerable I would be to the onslaught of chemicals your brain releases when you're attracted to someone. These chemicals are responsible for every single people-in-love-are-crazy-fools song, movie plot, and Shakespearean drama ever written. They stimulate the same area of the brain that lights up when you snort a fat rail of cocaine. This state of mind, limerence, is a biological relative of obsessive-compulsive disorder. If you are an addict, or perhaps have the sort of low-dopamine, low-serotonin brain soup best served with a side of SSRIs, you are perhaps more sensitive to the mind-altering power of limerence. And if you are a romantic, you are perhaps more likely to label this heady, overwhelming sensation love. Being a low-serotonin addict with romantic tendencies, I had to experience many crashed-and-burned affairs to understand that for me, love really was a drug. — Michelle Tea

The defense of the Western Canon is in no way a defense of the West or a nationalist enterprise ... The greatest enemies of aesthetic and cognitive standards are purported defenders who blather to us about moral and political values in literature. We do not live by the ethics of the Iliad, or by the politics of Plato. Those who teach interpretation have more in common with the Sophists than with Socrates. What can we expect Shakespeare to do for our semiruined society, since the function of Shakespearean drama has so little to do with civic virtue or social justice? — Harold Bloom

Each of our lives is a Shakespearean drama raised to the thousandth degree. — Anna Akhmatova

I need all kinds of songs - fast ones, slow ones, minor key, ballads, rumbas - and they all get juggled around during a live show. I've been trying for years to come up with songs that have the feeling of a Shakespearean drama, so I'm always starting with that. — Bob Dylan

American radio is the reverse of the Shakespearean stage. In Shakespeare's time the world's greatest dramas were acted with the most primitive technical arrangements; on the American air the world's most primitive writing is performed under perfect technical conditions. — George Mikes

'Othello' was my first Shakespearean discovery. I was obsessed with drama at school, and I studied the play for my English GCSE. Desdemona is the part that everyone wants, but Iago's wife Emilia is the one I've always been drawn to. — Michelle Dockery

'Dating Game' wasn't social commentary, political analysis, Shakespearean-level drama or even blunt-force comedy. It was just the televised equivalent of meeting someone at a bar. But it appealed to our most basic Darwinian instinct: selecting a good mate. You can't go wrong when a show's premise is hard-wired into human DNA. — Seth Shostak

In approaching our subject it will be best, without attempting to shorten the path by referring to famous theories of the drama, to start directly from the facts, and to collect from them gradually an idea of Shakespearean Tragedy. — Andrew Coyle Bradley