Shakespeare is a man for all ages. If you tried Ben Jonson’s rave review on your average school student they probably wouldn’t agree; instead, the very name William Shakespeare could be enough to make them look confused, yawn with boredom, or tremble with fear. If you sat them down in front of a play, however, they just might believe it. In January 2010 I joined the eight to twelve-year-olds of Claremont School, Kingsbury…

For our celebration of Shakespeare’s birthday today, we thought we would complement our own blogging about Shakespeare’s influence on us with some quotes from writers on how Shakespeare has influenced them. Read below for quotes from William Carlos Williams, Ray Bradbury, Jack Kerouac, Katherine Anne Porter, Roger Ebert, and Harold Bloom.

When I was very young—in first or second grade perhaps—my aunt gave my parents a book called, if I remember correctly, The Bathroom Book. It was an anthology of short selections from literature, each of which was meant to be the right length to read while on the john. I thought this was hilarious and took to paging through the book and reading the pieces aloud.
I was quickly drawn to one selection in particular, a few lines from “the famous play of Romeo and Juliet.”
Romeo
She speaks: 

O, speak …

Shakespeare is almost directly responsible for the huge change in direction my life took about six years ago. I was a software developer, but I wasn’t satisfied doing it, and I’d turned to acting in community theatre to give my right brain something to do…

My introduction to Shakespeare came over 50 years ago when I was 14. Our high school English teacher gave us an assignment to watch “An Age of Kings,” the BBC’s multi-part adaptation of Shakespeare’s two tetralogies of history plays which was being shown on a local television station. I was the only one “dumb” enough to complete the assignment…