People often ask me, “Why do you keep doing Shakespeare?” Well, because it’s meaningful to me. That to do it well—or even just to work on it—I find very life-enhancing. I don’t have any kind of conventional religious belief and I find Shakespeare’s a tremendous source of inspiration, because there’s no situation that I’ve come up against that somehow hasn’t been described in those plays. When I do work on it, it’s like going back to some great piece of music. It is dramatic poetry, so each time you hear it, it reacts on you in a different, usually a richer, way. It’s like a wonderful dog that gives you much more than you’ll ever give it. There’s unconditional love in there; he never lets you down and he’s never sentimental; he’s always bracing because he’s so very, very realistic about families and love and all the normal human stuff.

—Kenneth Branagh