Today, people go around quoting lines from famous shows and movies in everyday conversation. Did this happen in some form for previous versions of media like radio, silent film, books, and theater?

This certainly did happen a lot during the nineteenth century, and we can see it happening by examining contemporary newspapers. I'm currently involved in a major project which requires transcription and annotation of hundreds of C19th century newspaper articles, which in turn means I need to track down and explain such quotations. The fact that these are pretty much never attributed suggests that the educated newspaper audience of the period, at least, was expected to be able to spot and appreciate such allusions by drawing on their own resources when they did appear, which was pretty frequently.

Shakespeare – essentially just a couple of plays, predominantly (in my sample anyway, which is focused on material detailing early 19th century ghost scares) Hamlet – was the author most often cited, but more recent lyric and narrative poems, of the sort often featured then as party pieces at family gatherings and local public entertainments, were also common, as were popular songs. To give you a few examples:

WINCHESTER

‘Angels and ministers of grace defend us!–’ The grisly ghost which has for some time haunted other parts of this county, has at length paid a visit to this ancient and spiritual city.

Hampshire Telegraph & Sussex Chronicle, 16 January 1826. The quote is from Hamlet, I, iv

And

On Tuesday last, our butcher, as strong, and apparently as fearless as the Oaks of the forest, was returning from Corbets Tye, to his dwelling, about the verge of midnight of course –

‘In thought still half absorbed, and chill’d with cold;

When lo! an object frightful to behold, –

A grisly Spectre, cloth’d in silver grey.

Around whose feet the waving shadows play,

Stands in his path’

Essex Herald, 20 February 1838. The quote is from Robert Bloomfield’s then-famous verse ‘The farmer’s boy: a rural poem’ (1800). Bloomfield (1766-1823) made his name with this work, which sold 25,000 copies within two years of its publication.

And

Thus the ghost is causing no end of nuisances and recrimination, and to prove an alibi is becoming a necessity for us all. In the meantime, to quote incorrectly the old enquiry of Chloe –

‘If you are I, and she is him,

And he is it or me,

Arises then the question grim

Why, who on earth is he?’

We look to the police to give the public a practical reply to this momentous question.

Camberwell & Peckham Times, 23 November 1872. The quotation is adapted from ‘Identity Quartette,’ a song in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Happy Arcadia, a musical entertainment which had premiered in London the previous month.

I could go on at quite some length, but hopefully even this small sample helps to show the wide variety of references, both "canon" and very contemporary, that an audience of educated readers of Victorian era newspapers and books would be expected to "get".

What's also noticeable about my sample (which certainly wasn't compiled to demonstrate this, and so is hopefully fairly accurate on this point) is the almost complete absence of classical quotations, certainly given in the original Latin or Greek. This suggests, of course, that knowledge of such sources was pretty limited among the journalists who wrote my material, if not necessarily their readers, even in the high Victorian period. An excellent recent post here by u/Verspertine helps us to understand what was happening to the people that Oxford and Cambridge (and to a lesser extent the new universities of the 19th century) were training up in classics in this period – they were being shipped off to run India and Britain's other colonies, not diving into careers as journalists.

Finally, with regard to radio and its immediate precursors, music hall and vaudeville, performers often went to quite some lengths to encourage quotation of their material by audiences, especially by developing "catch phrases" that were specifically designed to catch on and become part of everyday conversation. Thus Marie Lloyd, the most popular British music hall artiste of the early 20th century, was always associated with the phrase "A little of what you fancy does you good." As this famous line suggests, Lloyd specialised in innuendo that could easily be exported into common speech and used to make a "saucy" point while handily distancing the person who used it from responsibility for uttering obscenities – as in the song title "She’d Never Had Her Ticket Punched Before". And during World War II, the BBC radio comedy ITMA ("It's That Man Again"), starring Tommy Handley, gave birth to such popular (and to us, now, meaningless) phrases as "Can I do you now, sir?", "I don't mind if I do" – both, of course, in much the same vein as Marie Lloyd's cheerful smut – and "Don't forget the diver". Such catchphrases are clearly direct precursors of the sort of contemporary material that you are referencing.