Joely Richardson on Shakespeare's Women Shakespeare Uncovered

What country, friends, is this?

That simple sentence is from one of my favourite Shakespearean plays.

What country, friends, is this?

It is spoken by Viola at the beginning of Twelfth Night

as she finds herself washed up on a foreign shore.

For me, this place speaks to all our hopes and dreams,

the chance to start again, the prospect of a whole new world.

Like all of Shakespeare's happiest comedies,

in Twelfth Night we witness new life, new laughs

and, eventually, new love.

And, at the centre of this play, and driving the plots of all

of Shakespeare's comedies are his extraordinary comic heroines.

Most radiant, exquisite and unmatchable beauty.

In the strangely dark comedy of Twelfth Night,

there's the cross-dressing Viola.

That question's out of my part.

One of the things that makes Shakespeare

an amazing dramatist, I think, is his sympathy for female characters.

I pray you, tell me if this be the lady of the house,

for I never saw her.

He creates these fascinating, mischievous, interesting,

funny female characters.

There is no-one like them in dramatic history, really.

-Are you a comedian?

-No, my profound heart.

And yet by the very fangs of malice I swear, I am not that I play.

One of the things that's fabulous about Shakespeare is the way

he understands the psychology of women,

or maybe creates the psychology of women.

And few women in any drama can match the heroine of Shakespeare's

sweetest and most romantic comedy, Rosalind in As You Like It.

What said he? How looked he? Wherein went he? What makes him here?

Did he ask for me? Where remains he? How parted he with thee?

And when shalt thou see him again? Answer me in one word!

LAUGHTER

The sheer sophistication, the verve, the dramatic

and verbal range of Shakespeare's female parts is quite unprecedented.

There's no doubt Shakespeare loved strong women.

-That brings me out of tune!

-Do you not know I am a woman?

When I think, I must speak!

LAUGHTER

In this film, I want to explore how Shakespeare's comedies

still have the power to entertain, enthral and move us,

just like they did 400 years ago.

Historically, people have paid more attention

to Shakespeare's tragedies and history plays than his comedies.

But that's a huge mistake.

In terms of thinking about what it is to be human,

what it is to live in society and what it's like to live in

personal relationships, men and women together, families, the comedies are

the place where Shakespeare really works that out in a profound way.

Shakespeare has been part of my life ever since I can remember.

Generations of my family have fallen in love

with Shakespeare's dramatic poetry

and have played some of his most famous roles.

Here at the Old Vic, one of the oldest theatres in London,

from 1818.

I have always found it incredibly exciting to be in theatres,

whether they're empty or filled or watching a performance.

The last performance I saw here of Shakespeare's was Twelfth Night.

It was here in 1937 that my grandfather, Sir Michael Redgrave,

was doing a production of Hamlet,

with Sir Laurence Olivier playing Hamlet

and my grandfather playing Laertes.

At the curtain call, Laurence Olivier stopped

and said to the audience,

"Tonight, a great actress is born. Laertes has a daughter."

And that was the night my mother, Vanessa, was born.

And it was announced on this stage.

Dear Celia, I show more mirth than I am mistress of.

My mother, Vanessa Redgrave, was just 24

and starting out on her acting career

when she played Rosalind in As You Like It in 1961.

What think you of falling in love?

Marry, I prithee, do, to make sport withal.

So, Mum, what was your first experience of Shakespeare?

-Was it reading it or performing it?

-Reading.

I found, looking along the bookshelf, because I learned to read

when I was four, when I was around seven

I found something called The Merchant Of Venice.

"That sounds exciting!" I opened it and read it from start to finish.

I became enthralled with the story of this merchant,

and Portia and Shylock.

I was really caught by Portia's great speech.

"The quality of mercy is not strained,

"it droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath.

"It is twice blest."

Because that, to my imagination,

sounded like what should happen in life.

And I'd got a nanny who somewhat punished me.

And I felt the quality of mercy was missing!

THEY LAUGH

Given my family, maybe it's not surprising I ended up acting.

But in Shakespeare's case, there was nothing in his background

to prepare him for life in the theatre.

Born in the rural town of Stratford,

he first tried to make a living running his father's glove business.

By the tender age of 18,

he was already married to an older woman, Anne Hathaway.

It was a shotgun wedding. She was three months pregnant.

The interesting thing is, of course,

that she was the right age to be married, at 26.

He was the one who was all wrong. He was 18. But he was Shakespeare.

He wasn't an ordinary man. He was an extraordinary man.

And I tend to think it does him more credit

to think that he was attracted to an extraordinary woman.

Extraordinary woman or not, it seemed a very ordinary start

for the man who would become the most famous playwright in history.

Two years after the birth of their daughter, Susanna,

the Shakespeares had twins who were baptised in Stratford Church

on February 2nd 1585.

The children were named Hamnet and Judith Shakespeare.

Not long after this,

Shakespeare more or less disappears from the records in his hometown.

It's these lost years that sometimes raise questions

about the true authorship of the plays.

But any investigation of that question

is still a celebration of the work.

There is a big gap. We don't know what he was doing.

But he clearly gained a great deal of theatrical experience.

This is, again, one of the reasons why I think people are talking

a lot of nonsense when they suggest the plays

were written by an aristocrat,

without any experience in the theatre.

The plays are the work of somebody

who was totally steeped in professional theatre.

He couldn't earn a living in Stratford.

Stratford was a town of 2,000 people.

Most towns of 2,000 people can't support a poet.

So I figure that she said to him,

"Well, I can't bear to see you like this.

"There's no future for you here. Go to London."

And that's what he did.

The next we actually know of him

is that he was working as an actor in late 16th-century London,

so he had left his wife and his three children behind him.

I mean, what's special about Shakespeare is the poetry.

To expect him to be a nice bloke, I think, might be pushing it.

'Is not your name, sir, called Antipholus?

'And is not that your bondman, Dromio?'

Certainly, almost as soon as he starts his new career,

Shakespeare seems to demonstrate a precocious skill.

One of his very first plays is The Comedy Of Errors.

This is someone who has a consummate sense of theatre

and theatrical value from the moment he starts writing.

The structure of an early play like Comedy Of Errors is phenomenal.

It's a farce and nobody puts a foot wrong in terms of coming and going,

as the plot is always the wrong person on stage at the wrong time.

To be able to do that as, technically,

apprentice work is astonishing.

And while Shakespeare's family

and his new twins might have been out of sight,

they certainly don't appear to be out of mind,

as twins are the central comic device of this play.

LAUGHTER

I see...two husbands!

LAUGHTER

There are occasional twins elsewhere in the drama of the period,

inherited from the classical tradition.

But no other writer is as interested in twins as Shakespeare is.

And that must, at some level, be because he had twins himself.

Which of you two did dine with me today?

LAUGHTER

I, gentle mistress.

And are not you my husband?

No.

Shakespeare uses that as the basis for his early comedy,

The Comedy Of Errors.

But, in a typical Shakespearean way,

he decides it's not enough to have one pair of twins, he has two.

So we get the Antipholus brothers and they each have a slave,

called Dromio.

And they, too, are identical twins.

Immediately, the potential for comedy, for farce,

for mistaken identity, is doubled.

Methinks you are my glass, and not my brother.

I see by you I am a sweet-faced youth.

Shakespeare was immediately recognised as a playwright of skill.

And, when he returned to the subject of twins

some six or seven years later in Twelfth Night,

it seems that his family were even more on his mind.

The twins in this play, like his own, are a boy and a girl,

Viola and Sebastian.

But there was a tragic dimension to the presence of twins in this play.

In 1596, one of Shakespeare's twins, his son, Hamnet,

died at the age of 11.

We know so little about that relationship with his son.

But it was such a huge thing to have a son.

The son was the vouchsafe of immortality.

The son, the heir, that keeps the name going.

To have lost your only son, it was an enormous thing for Shakespeare.

Shakespeare's plays are never directly autobiographical

but all writers draw on their own experience and feeling.

It can't be a coincidence that Twelfth Night,

this bitter-sweet comedy,

in which the idea of the loss of a brother is so central,

it can't be a coincidence that that is written

only a few years after the death of Shakespeare's only son, Hamnet,

who was one of a pair of twins.

Viola is a girl twin who believes that her brother is lost.

And that loss is central to the mood of the play.

What country, friends, is this?

This is Illyria, lady.

And what should I do in Illyria?

My brother, he is...

..in Elysium.

The overlap between comedies and tragedies is palpable.

Death hangs over comedies frequently,

just as much as it concludes tragedies.

Alone in a foreign land,

her brother and protector apparently drowned.

Viola, to preserve her safety, chooses to disguise herself

as a man and seek employment with the local Duke,

the Governor of Illyria, Orsino.

"Conceal me what I am and be my aid,

"For such disguise as haply shall become the form of my intent.

"I'll serve this duke."

I shall present me as a boy to him.

At the start of Twelfth Night, you have Viola dressing up,

not just as a boy, but as her brother.

You don't need to read Freud to know where that is coming from.

Freud says classic first stage of mourning is you want to

incorporate the lost person into yourself.

She does that in terms of costume.

-Who saw Cesario, hm?

-On your attendance, my lord, here.

Taking the name Cesario, Viola succeeds in gaining employment

with the duke.

In several of the comedies, a basic motif is the idea

that when you go on a journey to a new environment,

a dangerous environment, disguise is often necessary.

Disguise becomes a form of liberation.

You can sort of discover yourself through disguise.

But, whatever the self discoveries, much of the comedy

comes from the problems the disguised character encounters.

Viola, disguised as a man,

almost immediately falls in love with the duke.

But she just can't show it,

even when the duke questions her

about the person Cesario has fallen for.

Young though thou art,

thine eye hath stay'd upon some favour that it loves.

Hath it not, boy?

-A little, by your favour.

-What kind of woman is't?

-Of your complexion.

-She is not worth thee, then.

The duke has no idea that this boy is a girl.

And, just to complicate matters further,

he is already in love with another woman.

One of Shakespeare's great themes,

the idea of falling in love with the wrong person or the idea of

falling in love with the person who's fallen in love with somebody else.

It can be dangerous, because, A, it can be really exposing.

But, B, it can land you in all sorts of strange situations.

And tying them all and making them

resolve is partly what makes these plays so fascinating to watch.

The mask that she puts on allows Viola,

even though she's dressed as Cesario,

to lose her self-consciousness a little bit.

At the replica of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London,

actors are rehearsing the scene in which Viola,

dressed as the boy Cesario, talks to Orsino about love.

The question is whether being disguised as a man

actually liberates her to talk about her feelings in a way

she couldn't, if Orsino knew she was a woman.

She's got the physical mask on her.

So maybe she doesn't have to do anything emotionally or mentally to block how she's actually feeling.

Is it the fact that here's a man who is pontificating

about the pain that he's in, all that kind of stuff?

Is that what it is?

I thought I'd come in on the pain of love.

I thought that was a good cue!

See? Perfect.

I've come to sit in on rehearsals.

So, where were you in the scene? I'm really excited!

Young though thou art,

thine eye hath stay'd upon some favour that it loves.

-Hath it not, boy?

-A little, by your favour.

-What kind of woman is't?

-Of your complexion.

She is not worth thee, then.

What years, i' faith?

About your years, my lord.

Too old, by heaven!

It's a very direct response.

"What kind of woman is it?" "Of your complexion."

It's kind of, "Oh, OK."

Just a second, with the whole subject of dressing up

and opposite sexes, men playing women, women playing men etc.

What does any of this mean?

Just talking and watching, it suddenly occurred to me that I think the general message

is that age, gender, etc, none of it matters.

That's what's so useful about the disguise.

Because we get to love each other best just from one essence to another.

Whatever might happen in this scene, whether this person's a boy

or this person is a girl, as you say, it's sort of irrelevant.

She pricks his pomposity.

Then it goes another layer, doesn't it?

It's not only the deception of disguises but our deceptions of ourselves.

Because then the person that he does end up falling in love with is next to him

and is none of the things that he thinks he loves.

And that is why it's all so clever because the story surprises everyone, including themselves.

So now, still oblivious to his servant's feelings,

Orsino instructs Cesario to woo the woman he loves, Olivia, on his behalf.

Get thee to yond same sovereign cruelty...

Stand at her doors and tell them, there thy fixed foot shall grow till thou have audience.

The idea of female characters dressing up as young men may have been a comic device

but it had practical advantages.

In Shakespeare's time, women did not play professional roles.

Professional actresses weren't known until 50 or 60 years after Shakespeare died.

So female parts were always played by men.

Do what women do when they put lipstick on. They go...

-What, that?

-Yes.

You've got boys playing the part of girls.

If you can have a boy playing the part of a girl who then dresses up as a boy,

it becomes kind of easier for your boy actors.

It allows you to make a series of jokes about gender,

cross-dressing, boys playing girls.

The tradition of boys playing the parts of girls

continues to this day at Dulwich College in south London.

It's a school which was founded by one of Shakespeare's contemporaries

and which may well have trained boy actors for the early 17th-century stage.

Today, they are also trying out the scene in which Orsino commands Viola, as Cesario,

to visit Olivia and use his charms to win her over to Orsnio's love.

Cesario, address thy gait unto her.

She never will admit me.

Shakespeare and the audience always know that Cesario is really Viola,

that the boy is really a girl.

But Shakespeare and the audience also know that Viola

is really a boy actor, that the girl is really a boy.

So there's a lot of language to do with impersonating the voice of the other gender.

Thy small pipe is as the maiden's organ, shrill and sound.

There is a real fascination with the beautiful, androgynous teenager

that both men and women fall in love with.

The honourable lady of the house, which is she?

Viola, dressed as the young man Cesario, then has to visit Olivia on the duke's behalf.

This will turn out to be a crucial scene in the unfolding narrative.

Perhaps the closest we get to this gender-bending tradition today

is when the whole cross-dressing device is turned on its head in a traditional pantomime.

Oh, look at me.

Here, the Prince Charming, the hero, is always played by a girl

and as with Shakespeare's audience, the device has a frisson of sexual ambiguity.

Anyway, I don't suppose the Prince would look twice at me.

I bet he's a toffee-nosed, stuck-up, chinless wonder.

LAUGHTER

Well, actually, he's not like that at all.

-And how do you know?

-How do I know? That's a laugh.

I know because I AM the Prince.

AUDIENCE: Ooh!

People react very differently to a girl playing a boy

than they do a girl playing a girl

in that you can almost get away with more as a boy.

You can get away with being cheekier,

you can get away with a bit of a sort of a swagger.

I think it's more freeing. You can definitely do more with it.

And it does unnerve me slightly that as the run goes on,

there are an increasing number of dads in the front row.

-Or men with no kids!

-Men of a certain age.

Yeah, who don't have children with them. That's it. Exactly.

Sort of thinking... Or one child between three men.

You're sort of thinking, not quite sure how that happened.

APPLAUSE

Of course, men still do play female roles even in the 21st-century

but it's largely used for comic effect emphasising the ludicrous nature of the pretence.

NORTHERN ACCENT: To be not to be.

My horse, my horse, a kingdom for a horse.

Fan-dabby-dozy...

Even now, men who impersonate women have endless theatrical opportunity.

Why? Because I'm worth it...

AUDIENCE LAUGHS

..you knobhead.

Why do people think they're so funny?

And women apparently think they're funny too.

I don't find them funny.

I actually think if they were in blackface,

there'd be hell to pay.

But they're in MY face so it's OK?!

In Shakespeare's time, it seems that the audiences were quite capable of enjoying the jokes

but also of taking the cross-dressed love story seriously at the same time.

Viola is deeply conflicted. In love with the Duke herself,

she's now supposed to persuade Olivia to accept his suit.

The honourable lady of the house, which is she?

Speak to me, I shall answer for her, your will.

Most radiant, exquisite and unmatchable beauty,

I pray you tell me if this be the lady of the house for I never saw her.

I would be loath to cast away my speech for besides

that it is excellently well penned, I have taken great pains to con it.

Viola's in a very interesting situation

because she is in some ways quite unfree.

Whence came you, sir?

I can say little more than I have studied and that question's out of my part.

She is trapped in her disguise. She falls in love with Orsino

and doesn't feel that she can declare her love

because she's supposed to be disguised as a man, as Cesario.

Are you a comedian?

No, my profound heart and yet by the very fangs of malice

I swear I am not that I play.

Are you the lady of the house?

If I do not usurp myself, I am.

Olivia is also trapped.

Shakespeare even does this so beautifully,

to make the two women analogous to one another.

Each has a brother. Olivia's brother has died.

She is mourning him so she's trapped in this memorial moment.

Good madam, let me see your face.

Have you any permission from your Lord to negotiate with my face?

And the surprising arrival of Viola dressed as Cesario somehow frees Olivia.

You're now out of your text

but we shall draw the curtain and show you the picture.

She draws the curtain, shows her face

and this is, in a way, the reawakening of Olivia.

Now she herself is vulnerable.

Now she herself is willing to learn to love.

Look you, sir, such a one I was this present, 'tis not well done?

Excellently done, if God did all.

'Tis in grain, sir. 'Twill endure wind and weather.

There's so much about proving love and the challenges of love,

rather than a straightforward narrative.

-How does he love me?

-With adorations, fertile tears.

With groans that thunder love, with sighs of fire.

Your Lord does know my mind, I cannot love him.

It's as though the characters are constantly challenging each other

about, "How would you love me?"

"I will prove to you how I love you."

Also the woman can only declare her love

if she's pretending to be someone else.

True.

Viola can only declare her love by creating somebody else.

And when she goes to woo Olivia, Viola, the young man says,

"Build me a willow cabin at your gate,"

and that's one of the most beautiful Shakespeare speeches.

The famous willow cabin speech emerges when Olivia challenges Cesario

to say just what he would do if he loved her as much as Orsino claims to.

If I did love you in my master's flame.

Why, what would you?

Make me a willow cabin at your gate and call upon my soul within the house.

Write loyal cantons of contemned love and sing them, loud,

even in the dead of night.

Viola is, of course, talking as much about her own love for Orsino

as she is pretending to talk about his love for Olivia,

and her sincerity will have comic consequences.

Olivia.

Oh, you should not rest

between the elements of air and earth but you should pity me.

You might do much.

And with that, Olivia falls in love with the messenger

and not the message.

Cesario, by the roses of the spring,

by maidhood, honour, truth and everything, I love thee so.

And just in case all this mistaken identity and misplaced love isn't complicated enough,

in this play Shakespeare also introduces one of his most famous and popular subplots.

Shakespeare's imagination was so fertile that he could never resist

weaving many different elements into each play.

So there are some examples where what ostensibly seems to be the subplot

just brought on for comic relief almost takes over the play itself.

HE SINGS

In Twelfth Night, the subplot involves a character called Malvolio.

Malvolio is the pompous steward of Olivia's household.

Is there no respect of place, persons nor time?

The rest of the household have a plan to cut him down to size.

For actors and audiences alike,

Malvolio is one of the most popular roles in Shakespeare.

She shall know of it by this hand.

GIGGLING

Olivia's steward Malvolio is persuaded that Olivia

has in fact fallen in love with him.

Lie thou there.

Some of the other members of the household write a letter

that he picks up and thinks it's a love note addressed by Olivia to him.

What dish o'poison has she dressed him?

"I may command where I adore..."

Why, she may command me, I serve her, she is my lady.

And undergoes this profound and humiliating experience

of coming out dressed in a special costume that the letter

has told him to dress in

and Olivia, of course, is completely bemused.

-How now, Malvolio?

-Sweet lady, ho ho!

The whole story of Malvolio is supposed to be the subplot,

the background, the comic relief.

But the evidence of all the early performances is it's that

Malvolio is what people remembered.

The popularity of the Malvolio story helped to make Twelfth Night

one of the very first Shakespeare plays ever filmed, silently in 1910,

with the distinguished actor Charles Kent in the role of Malvolio.

Malvolio almost becomes the star of the play.

Indeed, when King Charles I bought a copy

of Shakespeare's collected plays,

on the contents list, he crossed out some of the titles

so Twelfth Night, he crossed it out and called it "Malvolio".

In fact, the joke goes a bit too far for my taste

and Malvolio is driven almost mad.

But by the end of the play, all is resolved.

Viola's brother, Sebastian, appears and Olivia,

now thinking HE is Cesario, promptly marries him.

If you mean well, now go with me

and with this holy man, into the chantry by.

Viola is revealed to be a woman

and Orsino, realising his mistake, falls in love with her.

Do I stand there?

And the twins, Viola and Sebastian, are movingly reunited.

The end of Twelfth Night is infallibly moving, infallibly overwhelming,

but what's overwhelming is the reconciliation of the twins.

What's overwhelming is the image of the two twins finding each other

and knowing each other not to be dead.

And given the recent death of Shakespeare's own son,

one of his twins, one can only wonder at the emotion

the playwright invested in this resolution.

In the work of the imagination, in the play, the story,

you can have a magical recovery.

That which is lost can be found.

You can have a kind of resurrection

and, of course, this is what happens at the end of Twelfth Night.

The brother and sister are restored.

You don't have to be some kind of Freudian psychoanalyst

to see a real sense of wish fulfilment in Shakespeare

as he writes that.

But Shakespeare's comedies haven't survived 400 years

just because of cross-dressing and mistaken identity.

They've also lasted because of the strong female roles

and, of course, the women who eventually played them.

In 1660, 44 years after Shakespeare's death,

women were finally allowed to act in public.

I've come to the National Portrait Gallery in London

to find out how the first actresses left their mark on the stage.

This is an extraordinary period in theatre history

because it was after 1660, with the restoration of Charles II,

that women were first allowed to perform on stage.

There was a charter that they should perform all the female roles.

So the charter came about because of...what?

Well, there are all sorts of reasons.

First of all, Charles II loved the theatre

and the court and the theatre were very close during this period.

-Right.

-But he was also very fond of some budding actresses.

Perhaps the best-known is Nell Gwyn,

with whom he had quite a long affair.

JOELY LAUGHS

And she bore him two children.

From the historical records, we know that Nell Gwyn

was not only bright, she was clever, witty and she was a good actress.

Samuel Pepys said she was a brilliant comic actress

and what helped her... if you like, fame,

what helped her profession was also portraiture.

It's extraordinary, isn't it?

This is a wonderful portrait of the actress Dorothea Jordan,

who was one of the most successful comic actresses of her time

and she was renowned for her breeches roles,

for her cross-dress roles

and, here, she's playing Rosalind in As You Like It

and of course, Rosalind was one of the biggest and juiciest roles...

-Still is!

-Still is.

..cross-dress roles in Shakespeare's comic dramas.

And she was famous for this role. She was loved by audiences.

Of course, the idea that they were exposing their thighs,

their ankles and their calves in this way

generated a huge kind of moral debate...

Oh, that it was still so easy!

..about the dissolute, decadent theatre. Exactly.

But also women's sexuality was on the line

in a way that men's sexuality wasn't.

One wonders what Shakespeare would've made of the first actresses

to play his roles.

I think Shakespeare regarded women as people,

which doesn't mean that he was a feminist.

Shakespeare thought that women were endowed with sexuality

and that that sexuality was active.

The women in the comedies are highly sexed...

physically generous,

eloquent, active.

I think, when it comes to certain things,

Shakespeare thought women were superior to men.

In their constancy, for one. In their common sense, for another.

Shakespeare's female characters seem to be older,

more world-wise and smarter than the boys.

When I think of strong women in Shakespeare,

I automatically think of the comedies

and one play in particular - As You Like It.

The play is set in the Forest of Arden, on the fringes of Stratford.

Of all of Shakespeare's plays,

this is probably the one that is closest to home.

But what makes this comedy particularly special for me

is that it's here that Shakespeare gives us

one of his strongest female roles.

The feisty, fabulous and beguiling Rosalind.

The little strength that I have...

..I would it were with you.

I think As You Like It is the play

where Shakespeare is in utterly full command

of all his comic resources.

There's almost a kind of musical, operatic quality to it.

Now Hercules be thy speed, young man!

As You Like It is, at its heart, a simple love story

between Rosalind and a young man called Orlando.

Rosalind's a special character because she leads that play.

Orlando beats the giant wrestler.

Oh, excellent young man!

And in doing, so he meets Rosalind

and Rosalind falls instantly for him.

Wear this...

for me.

Rosalind was the breakthrough role for my mother

when the Royal Shakespeare Company production of the play

was shown on television in 1963.

It made her a star.

One out of suits with fortune that could give more

but that her hand lacks means.

There's a famous story, isn't there, about you playing Rosalind?

-What's that?

-About during the previews.

-Oh, yes.

-Your director came to you and said, "Vanessa, we've got a problem!"

-Yes!

He said, "Vanessa, if you don't give yourself to this play,

"you're going to ruin the entire production

"and everything in it."

-And...

-But did you know what he meant by that?

Didn't you already feel that you were giving yourself to the play

in every available way?

I knew that he had to be right.

JOELY LAUGHS

I knew that he had to be right.

And I suddenly thought, "All right, I'll just go on as you go on

"when you're going to do a high dive into a swimming pool."

You abandon all thoughts of controlling,

of how you're going to be.

You just give yourself to the water.

In that sense, I understood it and I guess it happened.

Oh, how full of briers is this working-day world!

Come, come.

Wrestle with thy affections.

Oh, they take the part of a better wrestler than myself.

Rosalind is the daughter of a banished duke.

Her uncle has deposed her father and taken his title.

Mistress, dispatch you with your safest haste.

And now he intends to banish her.

Me, uncle?

You, cousin.

Within these ten days, if that thou be'st found

so near our public court as 20 miles, thou diest for it.

I...

I do beseech your grace, let me the knowledge of my fault bear with me.

Thou art thy father's daughter, there's enough!

So was I when Your Highness took his dukedom,

so was I when Your Highness banished him.

She completely lays it on the table.

You, niece, provide yourself.

It's really something. I haven't ever seen this before.

I've seen one clip and they always show the same one

but I haven't seen any of this.

Given that Shakespeare was writing for an all-male acting company -

the female parts were played by the apprentices, the junior actors -

it's quite astonishing and unprecedented

that the role of Rosalind is so huge.

It's by far the biggest role in the play,

it's one of the very biggest roles

in the whole of the Shakespearean canon

and she completely dominates the action of the play.

Banished from the palace, Rosalind - here played by Helen Mirren -

must come up with a plan enabling both her and her cousin

to escape to the forest in safety.

I wanted to play Rosalind

because it's a very famous Shakespearean character.

One of the really great, great female roles.

Would it not be better, because that I am more than common tall,

that I should suit me all points like a man?

Somehow, Shakespeare found a way round this issue with women,

of putting women into men's clothing

and therefore giving them this ability to speak in a free way.

Will you bear with me?

He found a way to give women a voice.

It's a great gift to womankind in many ways.

They're all so smart, Shakespeare's women.

Well...

..this is the Forest of Arden.

Aye.

So once again, our heroine is dressed as a boy

and, as usual, Shakespeare makes the most of the sexual innuendos.

Shakespeare likes dropping little hints.

When Rosalind cross-dresses as a boy,

she chooses the name "Ganymede".

Now Ganymede was the name of the cupbearer of Jupiter

but in various classical sources, there was a strong suggestion

that Ganymede didn't only bear Jupiter's cup,

that he also provided him with some sexual services

and so the term "Ganymede" became slang for the boy-lover of a man.

Rosalind's adventures in unconventional love now continue.

She meets a shepherd, Silvius, and the woman he loves, Phebe.

Of course, Phebe will fall in love with the young man, Ganymede.

'Od's my little life, I think she means to tangle my eyes, too!

No, faith, proud mistress, hope not after it.

These are the typical comic devices of Shakespearean theatre,

filmed here, in 1978, on location in a real forest.

30 years later, the acclaimed theatre director, Thea Sharrock,

presented the play on the kind of stage

that was perhaps most suitable, Shakespeare's Globe.

But as always, it was the character of Rosalind that was centre stage.

Well, this is the Forest of Arden.

Aye!

Therefore, courage, good Aliena.

I pray you, bear with me, I cannot go no further.

LAUGHTER

Rosalind is everything. She is funny, she's witty, she's clever.

She's quick.

You know, she's got unbelievable strength.

She's loyal.

She's independent.

She, you know, she...

She's all of these complex things that all of us are, really.

But she could run the country at the same time.

What did he when thou sawest him? What said he? How looked he? Wherein went he? What makes he here?

Did he ask for me? Where remains he? How parted he with thee? And when shalt thou see him again?

Answer me in one word!

LAUGHTER

She's a lot bigger than most of us are.

And it is incredible how Shakespeare has managed to put

all of those characteristics into one person,

and, of course, the fact it's a lady makes it even more interesting.

Sway!

By this stage in the play,

Orlando has gone to the forest to find Rosalind,

not knowing, of course, that she is now disguised as a man.

He's been pinning poems about her on all the trees.

But he meets the play's most cynical and unromantic character, Jaques.

Mar no more trees with writing love-songs in their barks.

I pray you, mar no more of my verses with reading them ill-favouredly.

-Rosalind is your love's name?

-Yes, just.

I do not like her name.

LAUGHTER

In the forest, Rosalind starts discovering these poems on trees.

Who on earth has written these poems,

"deifying the name of Rosalind" as she says?

Orlando?

Orrrlaaaandoooo!

SHE SCREAMS

And instead of just going, "I'm here!

"It's all going to be all right!"

Rosalind thinks, "Wait a minute, I'll test him.

"I'll keep my disguise as Ganymede."

Do you hear, forester?

LAUGHTER

"And I will give him lessons in love."

There is a man haunts the forest that abuses our young plants

by carving "Rosalind" in their barks.

Rosalind's determination to test Orlando's love

leads to one of Shakespeare's most famous comic scenes,

in which, still dressed as a boy, she offers to pretend to be a girl

who will behave so badly, she will cure Orlando of his love.

I swear to thee, youth, by the white hand of Rosalind, I am that he.

That unfortunate he.

I swear to thee, youth,

by the white hand of Rosalind, I am that he, that unfortunate he.

I profess curing it by counsel.

Of course, Rosalind's contention is that she can,

pretending she's Ganymede, not Rosalind,

that she can cure Orlando of his love

because she declares love is merely a madness.

Have you ever cured any so?

Yes, one. And in this manner.

He was to imagine me his love, his mistress,

and I set him every day to woo me.

At which time would I, being but a moonish youth,

grieve, be effeminate, changeable, longing and liking, proud,

fantastical, apish, shallow, inconstant,

full of tears, full of smiles,

for every passion something,

and for no passion, truly anything.

As boys and women are, for the most part, cattle of this colour,

would now like him, now loathe him, now entertain him,

then forswear him.

-Now weep for him, then...

-Spit at him.

That I drave my suitor from his mad humour of love to a living

humour of madness.

Which was, to forswear the full stream of the world,

and to live in a nook merely monastic.

And thus I cured him.

And this way will I take upon me to wash your liver as clear

as a sound sheep's heart, that there shall not be one spot of love in't.

I would not be cured, youth.

I would cure you.

That is a wonderful scene.

It's one of the most wonderful, teasing, merry,

heartfelt scenes that were ever written for a woman.

These days, of course,

we're used to seeing Rosalind being played by an actress.

But now we've come full circle.

There have been various all-male revivals of the play.

The most critically acclaimed was Cheek By Jowl's production in 1991.

-These burs are in my heart.

-Hem them away.

I would try, if I could cry "hem" and have him.

Come, come, wrestle with thy affections.

O, they take the part of a better wrestler than myself!

-O, a good wish upon you!

-Oh, stop there.

I thought that was quite brilliant. And what a line, what's that?

I would cry "hem" and have him? That's a sexy line!

That's a very sexy line.

What was great about it as well was whenever we went near

any lines that described, I'm a woman, I must do this, or him

or that, the audience, it was as if we were all in on the same joke.

That's what was brilliant about the play.

Actually, in some ways,

I think it was the best job I've ever been involved in.

-Really?

-We were young, it was great. And we travelled the world.

We were 21, and I remember trying to sleep with as many women as I could.

To get to know them better, Tom?

Possibly, we talked about Alice bands,

and "Isn't it difficult sitting in a dress?"

That was his seduction line!

When we got to rehearsals,

didn't we have a while trying to play every woman?

And it hit me over the weekend, and this was a real turning point for me.

I thought, no, you're playing this girl.

She's bookish, and that's when the glasses came in. She's overly tall.

She feels she's flat-chested, she feels she's got a deep voice.

I thought to myself, take your own physical presence,

your own placing in life, and imagine you were a woman with that.

We worked on the premise that Celia was the gorgeous one,

she was the one with the power.

-Her dad was in charge.

-I was twinset and pearls. I was the princess.

I was a dykey Sloane, that's what I was.

We did a lot of movement with Sue Lefton.

Was it feminine gestures, was it comportment?

There was a technical aspect, which was we wanted to do enough

for the audience to forget that we were men.

But not so much feminised movement that they were aware

that we were men because we were doing drag,

which is a caricature of femininity.

So we identified something, some neutral zone.

I think we felt awkward at the beginning and then we discovered

that we'd transformed ourselves into something,

it was a great experience, acting experience.

One of those ones where you discover that you can do something

that you didn't know you were capable of.

There is something slightly provocative about the idea of having

a boy player, who's going to play a woman, but then having that woman

dress up as a man and in the case of Rosalind,

then pretend to be a woman.

Because it subverts the idea, that was very strong

in the Renaissance, of men and women being different creatures.

It seems that As You Like It has had a magical effect on actors,

whether male or female, who have played the roles.

And also on the audiences who have seen the play.

It's believed that Shakespeare wrote it in the cold winter of 1599,

while the company were building their open-air theatre, the Globe,

on London's Bankside.

The modern replica now stands near that site.

Here I am, my first time ever

on this incredible stage here at the Globe.

I always feel that there's something very magical about stages,

they're almost like churches or something.

They always send shivers up my spine.

And we're all shivering, because it's snowing!

It's really stunning, the detail here.

I always feel that there is an element in theatres of

some of the energy of the productions

and the audience that have been here, you feel the history.

And I think that synthesis of performers

and audience is what theatre's all about.

And obviously, especially during Shakespeare's time, 400 years ago...

Sorry, this is just so beautiful, this swirling snow!

I think that synergy would have been completely maximised,

because in those days audiences were so much more vocal.

People could've been heckling or crying or shouting with joy.

And I think that would have elevated, you know,

like a sports arena or gladiators.

It raised the stakes.

As part owner of the theatre,

Shakespeare was a show-business impresario.

And As You Like It was a hit.

Now, as then, the Globe theatre seems to magnify the experience.

How now, Orlando?

'At its climax, Rosalind proposes a fake marriage ceremony which,

'much to the audience's delight,

'is sealed with a kiss for Orlando from a character whom

'the audience knows is Rosalind but he still thinks is a boy.'

I take thee, Rosalind, for wife.

'The love story in As You Like It is the central narrative, isn't it?

'And the joy of watching two people'

magnetically fall in love with each other is a complete joy.

And watching that every night with 1,000 people was a complete delight

from beginning to end.

'We know that eventually it will work out.

'But it's hugely complicated,'

because Rosalind is dressed as a man,

Orlando doesn't even realise that it's Rosalind, Rosalind's busy

wooing him in the guise of Ganymede, pretending to be Rosalind.

'Meanwhile, Phebe, the shepherdess,'

has fallen in love with Rosalind, thinking that she's a man.

And Silvius is in love with Phebe.

So we've got this ridiculous love quartet that has to be resolved,

and we know it will be because it's a Shakespeare comedy.

Down on your knees.

And thank heaven fasting for a good man's love, for I must tell you,

friendly, in your ear, sell when you can, you are not for all markets.

Cry the man mercy, love him.

But it takes some engineering on Rosalind's part, and she says,

"You'll all meet me here tomorrow, and then it will be sorted out."

Tomorrow, meet me altogether.

I will marry you, if ever I marry a woman,

and I shall be married tomorrow.

I will satisfy you, if ever I satisfied man.

And you shall be married tomorrow.

I will content you, if what pleases you contents you, and you shall be married tomorrow.

There are certain moments of convenience,

but it seems to me the important thing is somehow when people

come to the Forest of Arden, there is some element of transformation.

As You Like It will close with four weddings and no funerals,

but that won't please the play's great voice of cynicism, Jaques.

He's another one of Shakespeare's relatively small

but very potent characters.

There is, sure, another flood toward.

And these couples are coming to the Ark.

Jaques at the end of As You Like It is still a satirist.

He doesn't approve of all these marriages.

He's got a wonderful acerbic comment about, there must be another

flood coming cos all these couples are coming towards the Ark.

He's invited to participate in the dancing at the end.

For your pleasures, I am for other than for dancing measures.

And he says, "I am for other than for dancing measures."

Count me out of this one.

Jaques! Stay!

He is at least consistent.

Jaques is the voice in the play that has constantly sought to belittle

the joys of love with a healthy dose of a unromantic realism.

One man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages.

Jaques' most famous speech, the seven ages of man,

when you go through those seven ages you get to the end

and there's a real sense of bitterness and emptiness.

His big manly voice, turning again towards childish treble,

pipes and whistles in his sound.

The last stage, mere oblivion, sans teeth, sans eyes,

sans everything, a sense that for all the joy of the comedy,

in the end what you're left with is death,

what you're left with is a skull.

We're not so far away from Hamlet after all.

Sans everything.

I think Shakespeare believed in love,

and in making a marriage that's to do with love.

When actually the idea of marrying for love was quite peculiar.

Shakespeare almost always talks about marriage

as love, love matches.

But he's very, very conscious of the fact

that love is a tricky thing.

They can be a bit funny, Shakespeare's endings

cos sometimes you have a feeling

that some of these marriages won't last.

Marriages do fail in Shakespeare.

Underlying much of what he's doing

is a determination to treat

marriage as a taxing and sometimes heroic way of life,

in which men are more likely to fail than women.

Because women have what it takes.

The constancy and the endurance and the patience.

I personally feel that Shakespeare, in some ways for us, he is a Bible.

For all actors. He is, isn't he, male and female.

For us women, they're incredible roles.

Yes, and if you hope to one day be on a Beethoven level of playing,

you'd better learn to play Beethoven, and Shakespeare's like Beethoven.

And actually if you think about it,

within every Shakespearean heroine role

are the seeds for any performance of an actress

that we've ever seen in any role.

-And different versions of the same woman.

-Yes.

And Shakespeare showed every single side of women,

that's why the roles are so rich.

-Yes.

-He championed us.

-He clearly loved women.

Do you not know why I'm a woman? When I think I must speak.

Shakespeare's great comic heroines are comic and they are romantic.

But there's so much more than that.

For all their fairy-tale qualities,

the comedies also retain an edge of doubt and cynicism.

One of the important things about Shakespeare

is he's not trying to say anything.

He's not trying to tell you how to think.

What he is saying to you is - think.

Even the greatest theatre is a piece of make-believe.

A play is called a play for a reason.

This is the source of their power,

we enter the theatre like Viola washed up on the shore of Illyria,

or Rosalind arriving in the forest, ready to pretend.

Yet we unexpectedly encounter something real.

At the heart of these plays is a tale that we can all relate to,

one person trying to love another.

It's got to be the oldest story of all,

but it's never been more beautifully told than by Shakespeare.

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