What Elizabethan playwrights learned from the Greek classics was not theories of insanity, but dramatic practice — that is, madness is a dandy theatrical element. It focuses the audience's attention and increases suspense, since you never know what a mad person may get up to next; and Shakespeare himself makes use of it in many forms. In King Lear, there's a scene in which one man pretending to be mad, another who has really gone mad, and a third who has probably always been a little addled, are brought together for purposes of comparison, irony, pathos, and tour de force acting. In Hamlet, there are two variations — Hamlet himself, who assumes madness, and Ophelia, who really does go winsomely bonkers. In MacBeth, it's Lady MacBeth who snaps.
Margaret Atwood
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English is a language of mass destruction. Lady Macbeth is a queen of mass destruction. Lear is a king of mass destruction. Hamlet is a prince of mass destruction. Shakespeare is a bard of mass destruction. And Moby Dick is a whale of mass destruction. Why are you a culture of death and destruction? Why do you obliterate villages, cities, and civilizations with your language of mass destruction? Is the destruction worth the destruction? For what purpose did you destroy my language? To impose the sovereignty of your rule of law with weapons of mass destruction—to then say: --I offer you my lifesaver. Now, we can communicate in the same language. English only, please.
Giannina Braschi
King Lear is undoubtedly the greatest play ever written by Shakespeare — or anybody else for that matter. Hamlet is certainly great, but it doesn't contain as many elements of humanity as we see in Lear.
Paul Scofield
All perform their tragic play,
There struts Hamlet, there is Lear,
That’s Ophelia, that Cordelia.William Butler Yeats
It isn't difficult to leave King Lear or Macbeth, but once you have gone back to yourself, you want it to be the same self you have always been.
Paul Scofield
If Shakespeare had to go on an author tour to promote Romeo and Juliet, he never would have written Macbeth.
Joyce Brothers
Atwood, Margaret
Aubrey, John
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