Critic Quote by Samuel Johnson

In Shakespeare the birds sing, the bushes are clothed with green, hearts love, souls suffer, the cloud wanders, it is hot, it is cold,…

— Victor Hugo

“Shakespeare's plays are not in the rigorous and critical sense either tragedies or comedies, but compositions of a distinct kind; exhibiting the real state…

— Samuel Johnson

“Shakespeare has united the powers of exciting laughter and sorrow not only in one mind, but in one composition.”

— Samuel Johnson

“Shakespeare, the greatest of poets, was the greatest reader of Nature and life.”

— Kaiten Nukariya

“Shakespeare is above all writers, at least above all modern writers, the poet of nature; the poet that holds up to his readers a…

— Samuel Johnson

“All the rest of [Shakespeare's] vast history, as furnished by the biographers, is built up, course upon course, of guesses, inferences, theories, conjectures —…

— Mark Twain

What's this thing that gets between us and Shakespeare?

— Al Pacino

“Shakespeare's bitter play [Troilus and Cressida] is therefore a dramatization of a part of a translation into English of the French translation of a…

— Gilbert Highet

“ The Arden Shakespeare is intended both as a student text and as a revision of traditional scholarship. If it is to be used…

— Peter Porter

Shakespeare carries us to such a lofty strain of intelligent activity, as to suggest a wealth which beggars his own; and we then feel…

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The image of a wood has appeared often enough in English verse. It has indeed appeared so often that it has gathered a good…

— Charles Williams

“A condensed Shakespeare with all of the dull parts removed, leaving only the great moments of drama: ghosts, and bloodied daggers, and dying kings.”

— John Connolly