Shakespeare himself (Symbol & Motif)
We see an actor dressed as Shakespeare in the audience as Pacino walks onto a stage at the beginning of the film. The image of Shakespeare himself represents the fact that even though the playwright has been dead for centuries, he still looms large as a symbol of greatness. His appearance in the film represents the fact that Pacino feels a great responsibility to adequately represent and reflect what Shakespeare would have wanted.
Scholarship vs. Acting (Symbols)
In one playful argument between Frederic Kimball and Al Pacino, Kimball accuses Pacino of privileging the expertise of the scholars he is interviewing over the more embodied emotional expertise of actors and theater people. In this argument, Kimball turns each discipline into a symbol, by suggesting that scholars, in their detached, straight-to-camera representations, symbolize some notion of absolute truth or intellectual expertise, while actors represent a more embodied or subjective reality. Pacino seeks to undo this assumption by suggesting that neither scholars and actors are authorities, and that they are all engaged in the same project of subjective interpretation.
Visiting the Globe Theatre (Symbol)
Pacino visits the site of the Globe Theatre which is being rebuilt on the River Thames in London in the exact location it existed before burning down centuries prior. The visit to the Globe, like the image of the actor playing Shakespeare, represents Pacino's desire to commune with history in such a way that he is doing justice to Shakespeare's work. He wants to visit the exact locations in order to catch the feeling of what it might have been like to have made plays during Shakespeare's time, and the exercise is as much a spiritual, symbolic one as a historical investigation.
Richard's Deformity (Symbol)
Richard III is deformed and has a hunchback in Shakespeare's play. This, we are told, is an external manifestation of his inner corruption and immoral qualities, a symbol of how his spirit is deformed.
Acting (Symbol)
Over the course of the film, we come to see the discipline of acting as its own kind of symbolic entity. In Pacino's view, acting represents our ability as humans to commune with the past and with emotions that might seem outside our understanding. For Pacino, to feel and to express as an actor is representative of the ways that history is continuous and not so far away from our experience as we suspect.
