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"A fool's paradise". "Too much of a good thing". | 0:00:00 | 0:00:02 | |
"Vanished into thin air". | 0:00:02 | 0:00:03 | |
Shakespeare invented phrases that we all use today - | 0:00:03 | 0:00:07 | |
and, more than that, he captured the way we behave, | 0:00:07 | 0:00:10 | |
the way we think of others, the way we think of ourselves - | 0:00:10 | 0:00:13 | |
and not just here in Britain, but right across the world. | 0:00:13 | 0:00:16 | |
Welcome to the 2016 Richard Dimbleby Lecture. | 0:00:16 | 0:00:20 | |
No terrorist campaign has ever succeeded. | 0:00:20 | 0:00:24 | |
Almost everything you touch uses the internet. | 0:00:24 | 0:00:26 | |
I'm going to talk about death. | 0:00:26 | 0:00:28 | |
We've always been fascinated by the secret services. | 0:00:28 | 0:00:31 | |
This contraption has saved millions of lives. | 0:00:31 | 0:00:34 | |
..prevailing culture of consumer power. | 0:00:34 | 0:00:36 | |
A demographic dividend or a demographic time bomb. | 0:00:36 | 0:00:39 | |
If we fail the earth, we fail humanity. | 0:00:39 | 0:00:41 | |
APPLAUSE | 0:00:42 | 0:00:44 | |
Thank you very much. It's great to see you all here. | 0:00:54 | 0:00:56 | |
I hope you are going to have a wonderful evening | 0:00:56 | 0:00:58 | |
and enjoy this lecture. We're here at the Shard - | 0:00:58 | 0:01:00 | |
the tallest building in Western Europe, | 0:01:00 | 0:01:03 | |
with a spectacular view | 0:01:03 | 0:01:04 | |
40 miles across London and beyond. | 0:01:04 | 0:01:07 | |
And from here you can actually see, on Bankside, | 0:01:07 | 0:01:11 | |
the reconstruction of the Globe Theatre, | 0:01:11 | 0:01:14 | |
where Shakespeare may himself have acted, | 0:01:14 | 0:01:17 | |
and where his plays now draw thousands each year. | 0:01:17 | 0:01:20 | |
And it's Shakespeare that we're here to celebrate tonight, | 0:01:20 | 0:01:23 | |
on the 400th anniversary of his death. | 0:01:23 | 0:01:26 | |
And we're going to hear from | 0:01:26 | 0:01:27 | |
one of the great Shakespearean directors of our time. | 0:01:27 | 0:01:31 | |
As a schoolboy, he went to Stratford-upon-Avon | 0:01:31 | 0:01:35 | |
and saw As You Like It with his mother, | 0:01:35 | 0:01:37 | |
and said to her on the way home, "That's what I want to do," | 0:01:37 | 0:01:41 | |
and do it he did. | 0:01:41 | 0:01:42 | |
He became, in his words, "a Shakespeare nut". | 0:01:42 | 0:01:46 | |
Gregory Doran first joined the Royal Shakespeare Company | 0:01:46 | 0:01:49 | |
in 1987 as an actor - later he became a director, | 0:01:49 | 0:01:53 | |
and finally, three years ago, the boss of the RSC - | 0:01:53 | 0:01:57 | |
the artistic director. | 0:01:57 | 0:01:59 | |
Now, this lecture, this annual lecture in honour of my father | 0:01:59 | 0:02:03 | |
is given because he was a pioneering broadcaster - | 0:02:03 | 0:02:06 | |
he died 50 years ago - | 0:02:06 | 0:02:08 | |
and it's been given by all kinds of prominent people | 0:02:08 | 0:02:11 | |
from many fields of human achievement. | 0:02:11 | 0:02:13 | |
We've had lawyers, people from science, economics, | 0:02:13 | 0:02:17 | |
politics, religion - and from the arts, like tonight. | 0:02:17 | 0:02:21 | |
The title of tonight's lecture is, Is Shakespeare Chinese? | 0:02:21 | 0:02:27 | |
-LAUGHTER -Not a... | 0:02:27 | 0:02:28 | |
Not a question I intend to answer - | 0:02:28 | 0:02:31 | |
I'll leave it to the artistic director | 0:02:31 | 0:02:33 | |
of the Royal Shakespeare Company - Gregory Doran. | 0:02:33 | 0:02:35 | |
"Open your ears". | 0:02:49 | 0:02:51 | |
That's surely the most arresting first line of a Shakespeare play. | 0:02:52 | 0:02:56 | |
Rumour, the chorus figure in Henry IV Part Two, | 0:02:56 | 0:03:00 | |
tells the audience to listen up. | 0:03:00 | 0:03:02 | |
"Open your ears!" | 0:03:03 | 0:03:05 | |
Ladies and gentlemen, it won't have escaped your notice | 0:03:05 | 0:03:09 | |
that this year, 2016, is the 400th anniversary of the death | 0:03:09 | 0:03:14 | |
of William Shakespeare, and I am delighted and honoured | 0:03:14 | 0:03:17 | |
to have been asked to give the Richard Dimbleby Lecture | 0:03:17 | 0:03:22 | |
in this great jubilee year. | 0:03:22 | 0:03:24 | |
How is it that his words still resonate | 0:03:24 | 0:03:28 | |
and have the power to grab you, | 0:03:28 | 0:03:30 | |
and that his philosophy still has meaning four centuries later? | 0:03:30 | 0:03:36 | |
Ben Jonson addressed his fellow playwright | 0:03:36 | 0:03:39 | |
as, "My gentle Shakespeare," | 0:03:39 | 0:03:43 | |
and I am aware that tonight's lecture is entirely subjective - | 0:03:43 | 0:03:48 | |
it's MY Shakespeare, the man whose work I have been lucky enough | 0:03:48 | 0:03:53 | |
to spend most of my career directing at Stratford-upon-Avon. | 0:03:53 | 0:03:58 | |
I've just returned from China, | 0:03:58 | 0:04:01 | |
where the RSC have been presenting both parts of Henry IV and Henry V. | 0:04:01 | 0:04:07 | |
It's the first time the company have ever visited | 0:04:07 | 0:04:10 | |
the People's Republic with plays from our main repertoire, | 0:04:10 | 0:04:14 | |
and it's the first time that cycle of plays | 0:04:14 | 0:04:17 | |
has ever been performed in China. | 0:04:17 | 0:04:20 | |
We were anxious... LAUGHTER | 0:04:22 | 0:04:24 | |
..about how they would go down. | 0:04:24 | 0:04:26 | |
Would they be perceived as some... | 0:04:26 | 0:04:29 | |
impenetrable firewall of English history? | 0:04:29 | 0:04:33 | |
Wouldn't it have been less risky to take Romeo And Juliet | 0:04:33 | 0:04:37 | |
or The Merchant Of Venice, instead? | 0:04:37 | 0:04:39 | |
Those plays are well known in China - | 0:04:39 | 0:04:42 | |
in fact, the trial scene from The Merchant | 0:04:42 | 0:04:43 | |
is studied by schoolchildren across that vast country. | 0:04:43 | 0:04:48 | |
I will admit, there was a moment during the technical rehearsal | 0:04:48 | 0:04:52 | |
in Beijing when I suddenly thought that perhaps, after all, | 0:04:52 | 0:04:57 | |
we were crazy to be touring three of these plays | 0:04:57 | 0:05:01 | |
that the Chinese had never seen before. | 0:05:01 | 0:05:04 | |
We'd heard some troubling stories about Chinese audiences - | 0:05:04 | 0:05:10 | |
that they don't act like audiences in Stratford-upon-Avon, | 0:05:10 | 0:05:15 | |
that they spend their time chatting, | 0:05:15 | 0:05:16 | |
and get up and leave after 40 minutes or so, | 0:05:16 | 0:05:19 | |
or simply record the show on their iPhones, | 0:05:19 | 0:05:23 | |
and, worse, that ushers stab audience members | 0:05:23 | 0:05:27 | |
with green laser-beam torches, but to little effect. | 0:05:27 | 0:05:31 | |
Would they follow the story? | 0:05:31 | 0:05:33 | |
Would the surtitles be precise enough? | 0:05:33 | 0:05:37 | |
On that first night in Beijing I held my breath. | 0:05:37 | 0:05:40 | |
We were about to find out. | 0:05:41 | 0:05:44 | |
But I'll come back to that. | 0:05:44 | 0:05:46 | |
Shakespeare has been a passport through my life. | 0:05:47 | 0:05:52 | |
There may be seven ages of man, | 0:05:52 | 0:05:54 | |
but, for me, there are three ages | 0:05:54 | 0:05:56 | |
in your life's journey with Shakespeare. | 0:05:56 | 0:05:59 | |
At first, as a kid, you're grabbed by his stories - | 0:05:59 | 0:06:04 | |
by tales of fairies and witches, | 0:06:04 | 0:06:07 | |
of shipwrecks and murders, of battles. | 0:06:07 | 0:06:11 | |
He is, if nothing else, | 0:06:12 | 0:06:13 | |
one of the greatest of the world's storytellers. | 0:06:13 | 0:06:17 | |
I first heard Shakespeare on an old 45 rpm record | 0:06:17 | 0:06:23 | |
of Mendelssohn's incidental music to A Midsummer Night's Dream, | 0:06:23 | 0:06:28 | |
which came with a Reader's Digest box set of Beethoven symphonies | 0:06:28 | 0:06:32 | |
which my dad had ordered - | 0:06:32 | 0:06:34 | |
I must have been about eight, I guess - | 0:06:34 | 0:06:38 | |
and I was drawn into that magical fairy wood outside Athens. | 0:06:38 | 0:06:43 | |
There was braying Bottom thumping around in the brass, | 0:06:43 | 0:06:48 | |
and in the string glissandos you could picture the fairies | 0:06:48 | 0:06:52 | |
scuttling through the forest | 0:06:52 | 0:06:54 | |
like leaves blown across a lawn in an evening breeze. | 0:06:54 | 0:06:59 | |
The music was interspersed with extracts from the play. | 0:06:59 | 0:07:04 | |
When Puck - who sounded to me like Mickey Mouse - | 0:07:04 | 0:07:09 | |
said he'd put a girdle round about the Earth... | 0:07:09 | 0:07:11 | |
MIMICS MICKEY MOUSE: "in 40 minutes..." | 0:07:11 | 0:07:13 | |
LAUGHTER | 0:07:13 | 0:07:14 | |
I was amazed. | 0:07:14 | 0:07:16 | |
My dad, a scientist, | 0:07:16 | 0:07:18 | |
had told me that just before I was born, | 0:07:18 | 0:07:20 | |
Sputnik had ignited the space race | 0:07:20 | 0:07:24 | |
by orbiting the globe in an hour-and-a-half. | 0:07:24 | 0:07:28 | |
Wow! | 0:07:28 | 0:07:30 | |
Puck was twice as fast as Sputnik. | 0:07:30 | 0:07:33 | |
LAUGHTER | 0:07:33 | 0:07:35 | |
As you grow up, after the stories, | 0:07:35 | 0:07:38 | |
it's perhaps Shakespeare's language which intoxicates you next - | 0:07:38 | 0:07:42 | |
the second stage of what will be your growing obsession. | 0:07:42 | 0:07:46 | |
Frank McCourt, the author of Angela's Ashes, | 0:07:47 | 0:07:51 | |
tells how, as a child in Limerick in the 1930s, | 0:07:51 | 0:07:54 | |
he was stricken down with typhoid fever | 0:07:54 | 0:07:57 | |
and confined to hospital, | 0:07:57 | 0:07:59 | |
where he only had a volume of Shakespeare to read. | 0:07:59 | 0:08:03 | |
But reading it, he said, "Was like having jewels in your mouth," - | 0:08:03 | 0:08:09 | |
and that is exactly how I felt. | 0:08:09 | 0:08:13 | |
I've been doing Shakespeare plays, | 0:08:13 | 0:08:15 | |
putting them on, being in them, since I was 13. | 0:08:15 | 0:08:19 | |
I was lucky enough to go to a Jesuit college | 0:08:19 | 0:08:23 | |
in Preston in Lancashire, | 0:08:23 | 0:08:25 | |
which put on an annual Shakespeare play every autumn term. | 0:08:25 | 0:08:29 | |
Now, it was a boys' school, | 0:08:29 | 0:08:32 | |
and though my twin sister went to the convent school across the road | 0:08:32 | 0:08:35 | |
in Winckley Square, girls were not invited to participate. | 0:08:35 | 0:08:40 | |
So, at 16, I gave my Lady Macbeth... | 0:08:40 | 0:08:45 | |
LAUGHTER | 0:08:45 | 0:08:47 | |
..and I felt empowered by playing her. | 0:08:47 | 0:08:51 | |
Every evening, I used to walk Ben, the family cairn terrier, | 0:08:51 | 0:08:56 | |
down a path, along a little brook | 0:08:56 | 0:08:59 | |
that led through the fields to the salt marshes of the Ribble Estuary. | 0:08:59 | 0:09:04 | |
Bats would flit noiselessly above my head, | 0:09:04 | 0:09:08 | |
and, as light thickened, I would rehearse her lines out loud. | 0:09:08 | 0:09:13 | |
"Come, you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts, | 0:09:14 | 0:09:18 | |
"unsex me here". | 0:09:18 | 0:09:20 | |
Thank God only the cows could hear. | 0:09:22 | 0:09:25 | |
LAUGHTER | 0:09:25 | 0:09:27 | |
But those words, so illicit, so daring, so disturbing, | 0:09:27 | 0:09:34 | |
for a young man struggling with his sexuality, | 0:09:34 | 0:09:37 | |
somehow whispered of empowerment. | 0:09:37 | 0:09:41 | |
Then a touring production of the Scottish play came to our school. | 0:09:42 | 0:09:46 | |
It wasn't very good. | 0:09:47 | 0:09:50 | |
When Macbeth cried, "Is this a dagger which I see before me?" | 0:09:50 | 0:09:53 | |
the witches lowered a plastic dagger on a fishing line | 0:09:53 | 0:09:57 | |
in front of his face. | 0:09:57 | 0:10:00 | |
And they replaced the porter scene with, "Knock, knock." | 0:10:00 | 0:10:03 | |
"Who's there?" "Tom." | 0:10:03 | 0:10:04 | |
"Tom who?" | 0:10:04 | 0:10:06 | |
"Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow." | 0:10:06 | 0:10:10 | |
But worst of all for me, | 0:10:13 | 0:10:15 | |
feeling understandably proprietorial about Lady M, | 0:10:15 | 0:10:18 | |
was when we got to her line, | 0:10:18 | 0:10:20 | |
"Make thick my blood, stop up the access and passage | 0:10:20 | 0:10:24 | |
"to remorse that no compunctious visitings of nature | 0:10:24 | 0:10:28 | |
"shake my fell purpose," | 0:10:28 | 0:10:31 | |
the actress changed the word "compunctious" | 0:10:31 | 0:10:35 | |
to "horrid". | 0:10:35 | 0:10:38 | |
"Let no horrid visitings of nature..." It didn't even scan. | 0:10:38 | 0:10:43 | |
LAUGHTER | 0:10:43 | 0:10:46 | |
And though I had little idea what "compunctious" actually meant, | 0:10:46 | 0:10:51 | |
my 16-year-old self could hear the word splutter | 0:10:51 | 0:10:56 | |
with disdain for petty scruples. | 0:10:56 | 0:11:00 | |
Shakespeare himself only uses the word once. | 0:11:00 | 0:11:03 | |
In fact, he probably invented it, but it prickles and fizzes | 0:11:03 | 0:11:08 | |
with plosive consonants - kuh, puh, chuh! | 0:11:08 | 0:11:13 | |
Compunctious! | 0:11:13 | 0:11:15 | |
Sound echoes sense, | 0:11:15 | 0:11:17 | |
and "horrid" didn't do it, mate. | 0:11:17 | 0:11:20 | |
At the talkback after the show, | 0:11:23 | 0:11:27 | |
with all the righteous indignation of a huffy teenager, I protested. | 0:11:27 | 0:11:33 | |
When I came to direct Harriet Walter as Lady Macbeth | 0:11:35 | 0:11:39 | |
nearly a quarter of a century later, | 0:11:39 | 0:11:41 | |
on the first night I gave her a photograph of myself in the role. | 0:11:41 | 0:11:46 | |
It was, she declared, | 0:11:48 | 0:11:49 | |
the weirdest first-night card she had ever had from her director. | 0:11:49 | 0:11:53 | |
I joined the RSC as an actor in 1987. | 0:11:57 | 0:12:00 | |
My first part in The Merchant Of Venice | 0:12:00 | 0:12:04 | |
was Solanio, known as one of the Salads. | 0:12:04 | 0:12:06 | |
They're a gossipy pair of parasites, buzzing around Antonio, | 0:12:06 | 0:12:10 | |
the merchant of Venice himself. | 0:12:10 | 0:12:13 | |
Antonio is obsessively in love with the young gold-digger, Bassanio. | 0:12:13 | 0:12:18 | |
The Salads witness Antonio's unrequited love, | 0:12:18 | 0:12:22 | |
and Solanio - my part - | 0:12:22 | 0:12:25 | |
captures his pain with aching simplicity, saying, | 0:12:25 | 0:12:29 | |
"I think he only loves the world for him." | 0:12:29 | 0:12:34 | |
As it happened, I felt exactly the same. | 0:12:35 | 0:12:39 | |
I had fallen in love too. | 0:12:39 | 0:12:42 | |
With Shylock, as it happens. | 0:12:42 | 0:12:44 | |
I realised I had reached a second age in that growing journey | 0:12:45 | 0:12:49 | |
with Shakespeare, when you can't believe that he is saying | 0:12:49 | 0:12:54 | |
what you are thinking. | 0:12:54 | 0:12:57 | |
That, somehow, as you experience attraction or love, | 0:12:57 | 0:13:01 | |
his words provide the key to your soul. | 0:13:01 | 0:13:06 | |
Who has described the absurd giddiness of falling in love | 0:13:08 | 0:13:12 | |
better than Rosalind in As You Like It, | 0:13:12 | 0:13:15 | |
when she cries to Celia, | 0:13:15 | 0:13:17 | |
"O coz, coz, coz, my pretty little coz, | 0:13:17 | 0:13:21 | |
"that thou didst know how many fathom deep I am in love, | 0:13:21 | 0:13:27 | |
"but it cannot be sounded. | 0:13:27 | 0:13:30 | |
"My affection hath an unknown bottom like the Bay of Portugal." | 0:13:30 | 0:13:35 | |
Is there a more violent descent into morbid jealousy | 0:13:37 | 0:13:40 | |
than that which afflicts Leontes in The Winter's Tale? | 0:13:40 | 0:13:44 | |
Evident in the line, | 0:13:45 | 0:13:47 | |
"Inch-thick, knee-deep, | 0:13:47 | 0:13:49 | |
"o'er head and ears a fork'd one." | 0:13:49 | 0:13:53 | |
A line so fractured and contorted, | 0:13:53 | 0:13:57 | |
it might seem to deny immediate understanding | 0:13:57 | 0:14:02 | |
but immediately conveys his nettled, jealous state of mind. | 0:14:02 | 0:14:06 | |
Perhaps no-one has described self-loathing better than | 0:14:08 | 0:14:12 | |
the lanky, lovelorn Helena in A Midsummer Night's Dream, | 0:14:12 | 0:14:17 | |
when she drags herself through the wood | 0:14:17 | 0:14:19 | |
and collapses saying, | 0:14:19 | 0:14:21 | |
"And sleep that sometime shuts up sorrow's eye, | 0:14:21 | 0:14:27 | |
"steel me a while from mine own company." Fantastic! | 0:14:27 | 0:14:32 | |
As Sam Goldwyn is reputed to have said, | 0:14:32 | 0:14:35 | |
"Fantastic, and all written with a feather!" | 0:14:35 | 0:14:39 | |
But trying to persuade anyone of Shakespeare's genius | 0:14:46 | 0:14:50 | |
by dangling quotations before them is, as Dr Johnson once said, | 0:14:50 | 0:14:54 | |
"A bit like a man trying to sell you his house | 0:14:54 | 0:14:58 | |
"by carrying a brick in his pocket as a specimen." | 0:14:58 | 0:15:02 | |
I love words. Words, words, words. | 0:15:02 | 0:15:06 | |
I love them, but Shakespeare invented them. | 0:15:06 | 0:15:09 | |
The English language, we are told, grew by 10,000 new words | 0:15:09 | 0:15:15 | |
during the century in which Shakespeare lived, | 0:15:15 | 0:15:18 | |
and 600 to 2,000 of those | 0:15:18 | 0:15:21 | |
were estimated to have been invented by him! | 0:15:21 | 0:15:25 | |
Assassination, addiction, | 0:15:25 | 0:15:29 | |
bedazzled, lacklustre, | 0:15:29 | 0:15:32 | |
moonbeam, newfangled, | 0:15:32 | 0:15:36 | |
scuffle and puking. | 0:15:36 | 0:15:38 | |
How's that for a list? | 0:15:38 | 0:15:41 | |
Language roiled and boiled in a crucible of invention. | 0:15:41 | 0:15:46 | |
The King James Bible, published in 1611, | 0:15:46 | 0:15:49 | |
uses a modest vocabulary of about 6,000 words. | 0:15:49 | 0:15:53 | |
Shakespeare's vocabulary, depending on how you count the variants, | 0:15:53 | 0:15:58 | |
is usually estimated as between 26 and 29,000 words. | 0:15:58 | 0:16:05 | |
Apparently, the growth in the language was partially ascribed | 0:16:05 | 0:16:08 | |
to the playwrights searching for novelty. | 0:16:08 | 0:16:11 | |
In 1599, the anarchic playwright John Marston, | 0:16:11 | 0:16:15 | |
in a play called Antonio And Mellida, | 0:16:15 | 0:16:18 | |
invents a new word - now get this - | 0:16:18 | 0:16:21 | |
a new word on average every 14 lines. | 0:16:21 | 0:16:25 | |
Fubbery! That's one of his. | 0:16:25 | 0:16:27 | |
"Fubbery, fubbery!" a character says in his play, The Malcontent. | 0:16:27 | 0:16:32 | |
Audacious eloquence. | 0:16:32 | 0:16:35 | |
And Shakespeare too was a man of fire-new words. | 0:16:35 | 0:16:39 | |
Indeed, like Feste, the fool, in Twelfth Night, | 0:16:39 | 0:16:42 | |
he was a corrupter of words. | 0:16:42 | 0:16:45 | |
Making nouns and adjectives press-gang themselves into verbs. | 0:16:45 | 0:16:52 | |
"He words me, girls, he words me," says Cleopatra, | 0:16:52 | 0:16:55 | |
aware that Octavius Caesar is trying to manipulate her to his will. | 0:16:55 | 0:17:00 | |
Words are physical objects to Shakespeare. | 0:17:00 | 0:17:03 | |
"You cram these words into my ears," says Alonso in The Tempest, | 0:17:03 | 0:17:08 | |
as if words are portable, and have mass and weight. | 0:17:08 | 0:17:12 | |
Words are weapons to Hamlet. | 0:17:12 | 0:17:15 | |
He promises to challenge his mother saying, | 0:17:15 | 0:17:18 | |
"I will speak daggers to her, but use none." | 0:17:18 | 0:17:21 | |
And later, in the closet scene, she cries, | 0:17:21 | 0:17:24 | |
"These words like daggers enter mine ears!" | 0:17:24 | 0:17:27 | |
No wonder, then, that Rumour tells us to "Open our ears," | 0:17:29 | 0:17:32 | |
or that the Chorus at the start of Romeo And Juliet | 0:17:32 | 0:17:35 | |
begs us "with patient ears attend", | 0:17:35 | 0:17:38 | |
or that Elizabethans talked about going to hear a play. | 0:17:38 | 0:17:42 | |
We talk of television viewers, | 0:17:42 | 0:17:45 | |
but about theatre, audiences. | 0:17:45 | 0:17:48 | |
From "audire", the Latin for "to hear". | 0:17:48 | 0:17:51 | |
The spoken word is the medium of Shakespeare's theatre, | 0:17:51 | 0:17:55 | |
for the words transport you, | 0:17:55 | 0:17:57 | |
carry you "here and there jumping o'er time," | 0:17:57 | 0:17:59 | |
and for playwrights of his day, they had to be up to scratch. | 0:17:59 | 0:18:04 | |
They had to keep the audience's attention with those words, | 0:18:04 | 0:18:08 | |
and not unsurprisingly, they found novel ways to do that. | 0:18:08 | 0:18:13 | |
Fascinating recent research at Liverpool University has shown | 0:18:13 | 0:18:18 | |
that Shakespeare's words have an actual and demonstrable | 0:18:18 | 0:18:23 | |
neurological effect on the brain. | 0:18:23 | 0:18:26 | |
"Good tickle-brain," Falstaff calls Mistress Quickly. | 0:18:26 | 0:18:30 | |
That's exactly what his words do. | 0:18:30 | 0:18:32 | |
They tickle the brain and stimulate the neurons of our brains, | 0:18:32 | 0:18:37 | |
prompting activation in the visual association cortex. | 0:18:37 | 0:18:43 | |
Did you get that? | 0:18:43 | 0:18:45 | |
The visual association cortex, | 0:18:45 | 0:18:48 | |
or what Horatio in Hamlet calls, "The mind's eye." | 0:18:48 | 0:18:52 | |
Shakespeare's words set off little electrical charges, | 0:18:54 | 0:18:57 | |
light up our minds and create a theatre of the brain. | 0:18:57 | 0:19:02 | |
So when Juliet says, "Parting is such sweet sorrow," | 0:19:02 | 0:19:07 | |
it surprises us. Or it should. | 0:19:07 | 0:19:10 | |
The conjunction of "sweet" and "sorrow" startles us. | 0:19:10 | 0:19:14 | |
The difficulty for us today, for actors today, | 0:19:14 | 0:19:17 | |
is getting beyond the overfamiliarity with those phrases | 0:19:17 | 0:19:22 | |
and recoining it afresh, as if that thought, | 0:19:22 | 0:19:25 | |
that particular conjunction of words, had just occurred to Juliet. | 0:19:25 | 0:19:30 | |
But how do you do that? | 0:19:32 | 0:19:34 | |
How do you fresh-mint some of those famous lines? | 0:19:34 | 0:19:39 | |
How do you "look with thine ears", as King Lear says. | 0:19:39 | 0:19:43 | |
Well, the late lamented Roger Rees, when he played Hamlet, | 0:19:43 | 0:19:48 | |
decided to try to surprise the audience one night | 0:19:48 | 0:19:51 | |
with perhaps the most famous line in Shakespeare, | 0:19:51 | 0:19:54 | |
"To be or not to be." | 0:19:54 | 0:19:56 | |
He would rush forward to the front of the stage | 0:19:56 | 0:19:59 | |
and deliver the line with an urgent immediacy, | 0:19:59 | 0:20:02 | |
as if it had just emerged from the quick forge | 0:20:02 | 0:20:05 | |
and working house of thought. | 0:20:05 | 0:20:07 | |
The cue came and he hurtled onto the stage... | 0:20:07 | 0:20:10 | |
..and promptly forgot the most famous line in Shakespeare. | 0:20:12 | 0:20:17 | |
Not only that, he was prompted by a member of the audience. | 0:20:17 | 0:20:22 | |
When I did a production of Hamlet with David Tennant a few years ago, | 0:20:26 | 0:20:30 | |
we discovered a rather unconventional way | 0:20:30 | 0:20:33 | |
of fresh-minting another of those famous lines | 0:20:33 | 0:20:36 | |
whose fame transcends the play. | 0:20:36 | 0:20:39 | |
As the gravedigger presents Hamlet | 0:20:39 | 0:20:41 | |
with the skull of his father's old Jester, he declares, | 0:20:41 | 0:20:44 | |
"Alas, poor Yorick!" | 0:20:44 | 0:20:47 | |
I had heard that, in the 1980s, | 0:20:47 | 0:20:49 | |
a man had actually bequeathed his own skull | 0:20:49 | 0:20:54 | |
to be used in a production, an RSC production, of Hamlet. | 0:20:54 | 0:20:59 | |
His name was Andre Tchaikowsky. | 0:21:01 | 0:21:03 | |
He was a Polish composer living in Oxford. | 0:21:03 | 0:21:06 | |
The undertaker, when it came to it, | 0:21:06 | 0:21:09 | |
had balked at the idea of removing the head from one of his customers | 0:21:09 | 0:21:15 | |
as this was not regarded as, well, normal practice, | 0:21:15 | 0:21:19 | |
and quite possibly it was illegal. | 0:21:19 | 0:21:22 | |
So, believe it or not, | 0:21:22 | 0:21:23 | |
permission had to be granted by the Home Office. | 0:21:23 | 0:21:27 | |
Eventually the local hospital had removed the head, | 0:21:27 | 0:21:31 | |
and had done the job | 0:21:31 | 0:21:33 | |
that presumably the cold clay of the grave did for Yorick. | 0:21:33 | 0:21:37 | |
Whatever the process, one day, | 0:21:37 | 0:21:40 | |
the skull arrived in the prop department at Stratford | 0:21:40 | 0:21:43 | |
in a Delsey tissue box. | 0:21:43 | 0:21:46 | |
And when it was opened, | 0:21:46 | 0:21:47 | |
Crusty, the prop shop dog, went crazy. | 0:21:47 | 0:21:50 | |
LAUGHTER | 0:21:52 | 0:21:55 | |
The skull still stank. | 0:21:55 | 0:21:58 | |
"Pah," as Hamlet says, "the gorge rises at it!" | 0:21:59 | 0:22:04 | |
So it was put in an onion bag up on the roof | 0:22:04 | 0:22:07 | |
until the weather, | 0:22:07 | 0:22:08 | |
and perhaps the birds, | 0:22:08 | 0:22:10 | |
had done the rest. | 0:22:10 | 0:22:12 | |
Then it was stored in a box on a shelf, | 0:22:12 | 0:22:14 | |
and that's where it had stayed. | 0:22:14 | 0:22:17 | |
No-one had chosen to cast poor Andre as Yorick. | 0:22:17 | 0:22:23 | |
So on our first day of rehearsals, as usual, | 0:22:23 | 0:22:28 | |
I welcomed the actors, announced what parts they'd be playing, | 0:22:28 | 0:22:31 | |
and then I said, | 0:22:31 | 0:22:32 | |
"Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to introduce you | 0:22:32 | 0:22:35 | |
"to the final member of our company," | 0:22:35 | 0:22:37 | |
and I pulled on some purple rubber gloves... | 0:22:37 | 0:22:40 | |
..opened that cardboard box, | 0:22:41 | 0:22:43 | |
and lifting out the skull, I said, | 0:22:43 | 0:22:46 | |
"This is Andre. | 0:22:46 | 0:22:48 | |
"He will be playing Yorick" | 0:22:48 | 0:22:50 | |
A silence fell on the room. | 0:22:52 | 0:22:57 | |
I offered to hand the skull to any of the team who wanted to touch it. | 0:22:57 | 0:23:02 | |
Some recoiled, | 0:23:02 | 0:23:04 | |
some were drawn towards it in grim fascination. | 0:23:04 | 0:23:08 | |
Cicely Berry, the legendary RSC voice guru, | 0:23:08 | 0:23:12 | |
still working with the company aged 90... | 0:23:12 | 0:23:15 | |
Cis was present, | 0:23:15 | 0:23:17 | |
and declined the skull with a smile, | 0:23:17 | 0:23:19 | |
saying she was close enough to that state herself, already! | 0:23:19 | 0:23:23 | |
Many were disturbed by such a vivid memento mori. | 0:23:26 | 0:23:31 | |
Whatever the reaction, that line, "Alas, poor Yorick," | 0:23:31 | 0:23:35 | |
never languished into cliche in our production. | 0:23:35 | 0:23:39 | |
The skull never became just another stage prop. | 0:23:39 | 0:23:44 | |
When David Tennant peered at the skull, | 0:23:44 | 0:23:46 | |
stared into those hollow eye sockets, | 0:23:46 | 0:23:50 | |
he saw his own mortality staring straight back at him. | 0:23:50 | 0:23:54 | |
And so did we. | 0:23:54 | 0:23:56 | |
Shakespeare came face to face | 0:23:56 | 0:23:58 | |
with this scoffing, grinning antic at the age of 52. | 0:23:58 | 0:24:03 | |
We don't actually know how he died. | 0:24:03 | 0:24:06 | |
The vicar of Holy Trinity Church, John Ward, in Stratford-upon-Avon, | 0:24:06 | 0:24:11 | |
some 40 years later, left the only account we have. | 0:24:11 | 0:24:15 | |
He writes in his diary, | 0:24:15 | 0:24:16 | |
"Shakespeare had a merry meeting with his friends | 0:24:16 | 0:24:19 | |
"Ben Jonson and Michael Drayton, | 0:24:19 | 0:24:21 | |
"drank too much, | 0:24:21 | 0:24:23 | |
"and died of a fever there contracted." | 0:24:23 | 0:24:25 | |
That's it. | 0:24:25 | 0:24:26 | |
Shakespeare's funerary monument in Holy Trinity | 0:24:26 | 0:24:29 | |
tells us he died on 23rd April, | 0:24:29 | 0:24:32 | |
which is normally accepted as the day he was born. | 0:24:32 | 0:24:35 | |
So, it would seem, | 0:24:35 | 0:24:37 | |
Bill and Ben went out with Mike on his 52nd birthday, | 0:24:37 | 0:24:41 | |
overdid it, | 0:24:41 | 0:24:42 | |
and he shuffled off his mortal coil. | 0:24:42 | 0:24:44 | |
But why are we celebrating this fatal birthday binge? | 0:24:46 | 0:24:51 | |
Why are we even still doing his plays 400 years later? | 0:24:51 | 0:24:57 | |
Let me go back to our first night of Henry IV Part One in China. | 0:24:57 | 0:25:03 | |
It was a packed house - | 0:25:03 | 0:25:05 | |
a good balance of men and women, | 0:25:05 | 0:25:08 | |
of all age groups, | 0:25:08 | 0:25:10 | |
lots of young people. | 0:25:10 | 0:25:12 | |
They were quiet in the first scene. | 0:25:12 | 0:25:15 | |
Hotspur broke the ice first. | 0:25:15 | 0:25:17 | |
He's the hot-headed action man of the play. | 0:25:17 | 0:25:22 | |
Forbidden by the king even to mention the name | 0:25:22 | 0:25:25 | |
of the rebel Mortimer, | 0:25:25 | 0:25:26 | |
he swears he will teach a starling | 0:25:26 | 0:25:29 | |
to say nothing but Mortimer | 0:25:29 | 0:25:31 | |
and give it to the king to squawk it at him day and night. | 0:25:31 | 0:25:35 | |
Laughter! | 0:25:35 | 0:25:36 | |
Recognition of the absurdity, | 0:25:36 | 0:25:39 | |
of the imaginative brain of that motormouth Harry Hotspur. | 0:25:39 | 0:25:44 | |
But then Sir John Falstaff waddled on to the Chinese stage | 0:25:44 | 0:25:50 | |
for the very first time ever. | 0:25:50 | 0:25:54 | |
One of Shakespeare's greatest creations, | 0:25:54 | 0:25:57 | |
that primal urge, that life force, | 0:25:57 | 0:26:01 | |
that gross embodiment of appetite and desire, | 0:26:01 | 0:26:04 | |
the irresistible "hill of flesh", Jack Falstaff. | 0:26:04 | 0:26:09 | |
Laughter. | 0:26:09 | 0:26:10 | |
At the Gadshill plot, where Falstaff and his henchmen | 0:26:10 | 0:26:13 | |
decide to play highwaymen | 0:26:13 | 0:26:15 | |
and rob travellers on the London road, | 0:26:15 | 0:26:18 | |
and to be hijacked in turn by the dissolute Prince Hal | 0:26:18 | 0:26:21 | |
and his mate Poins. | 0:26:21 | 0:26:23 | |
And then in the Tavern Scene | 0:26:23 | 0:26:25 | |
as Falstaff exaggerates his bravery to the prince, | 0:26:25 | 0:26:28 | |
pretending that he fought off assailants | 0:26:28 | 0:26:31 | |
in ever-increasing numbers. | 0:26:31 | 0:26:33 | |
Great waves of laughter from our Chinese audience! | 0:26:33 | 0:26:37 | |
It was as if Falstaff had always been there. | 0:26:37 | 0:26:41 | |
As if the Chinese psyche had always had him there. | 0:26:41 | 0:26:45 | |
As if he was one of the most ancient of Chinese folk characters. | 0:26:45 | 0:26:50 | |
At the end of the Battle of Shrewsbury, | 0:26:50 | 0:26:53 | |
when Prince Hal kills Hotspur in a duel, | 0:26:53 | 0:26:56 | |
Falstaff tries to take the credit for killing him - | 0:26:56 | 0:26:59 | |
to Prince Hal's face! | 0:26:59 | 0:27:01 | |
The disreputable rogue declares, | 0:27:01 | 0:27:04 | |
"Lord, Lord how the world is given to lying." | 0:27:04 | 0:27:08 | |
And the audience got the laugh even before the punchline had landed. | 0:27:08 | 0:27:13 | |
Well, of course. | 0:27:13 | 0:27:16 | |
-The world -is -given to lying, wherever you are in it. | 0:27:16 | 0:27:20 | |
"One touch of nature makes the whole world kin." | 0:27:20 | 0:27:25 | |
I had always been suspicious | 0:27:25 | 0:27:29 | |
of the sort of universalising dogma about Shakespeare - | 0:27:29 | 0:27:32 | |
the assertion, or perhaps the Great British propaganda, | 0:27:32 | 0:27:35 | |
that he is indisputably, unquestionably, | 0:27:35 | 0:27:38 | |
the world's greatest writer, | 0:27:38 | 0:27:40 | |
and to suggest otherwise is some sort of dangerous heresy. | 0:27:40 | 0:27:45 | |
But that first night in Beijing was evidence, | 0:27:45 | 0:27:50 | |
living proof of Shakespeare's genius | 0:27:50 | 0:27:53 | |
unfolding before my very ears and eyes. | 0:27:53 | 0:27:57 | |
In truth, it would seem Shakespeare has become fashionable in China. | 0:27:57 | 0:28:03 | |
Premier Wen Jiabao had started his visit to the UK in 2011 | 0:28:03 | 0:28:06 | |
by visiting Stratford-upon-Avon. | 0:28:06 | 0:28:09 | |
Last autumn, President Xi Jinping | 0:28:09 | 0:28:12 | |
had been presented with a copy of Shakespeare's Sonnets | 0:28:12 | 0:28:14 | |
by the Queen. | 0:28:14 | 0:28:16 | |
Brush up your "Shashibiya" | 0:28:16 | 0:28:19 | |
and it's an index of just how outward-looking | 0:28:19 | 0:28:21 | |
and open-minded you are - | 0:28:21 | 0:28:23 | |
proof of your cultural awareness, a lifestyle credential. | 0:28:23 | 0:28:28 | |
We just did not know if that would translate | 0:28:28 | 0:28:31 | |
into actually enjoying watching his plays in performance | 0:28:31 | 0:28:34 | |
and in English! | 0:28:34 | 0:28:36 | |
The South African actor Sello Maake Ka-Ncube | 0:28:36 | 0:28:40 | |
had once challenged me about Shakespeare. | 0:28:40 | 0:28:42 | |
We were doing a production of his early tragedy Titus Andronicus | 0:28:42 | 0:28:46 | |
at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg, | 0:28:46 | 0:28:48 | |
just at the ending of apartheid. | 0:28:48 | 0:28:50 | |
Sello was playing Aaron the Moor, | 0:28:50 | 0:28:53 | |
Shakespeare's other great black character. | 0:28:53 | 0:28:56 | |
"Greg," he said to me, | 0:28:57 | 0:28:59 | |
"you told me Shakespeare was English!" | 0:28:59 | 0:29:02 | |
"Yeah", I muttered. "Yeah, I think that's indisputable." | 0:29:02 | 0:29:07 | |
"Uh-uh!" said Sello, | 0:29:09 | 0:29:11 | |
"Shakespeare is Zulu!" | 0:29:11 | 0:29:13 | |
On that first night, | 0:29:13 | 0:29:15 | |
our first night in Beijing proved that Shakespeare is also... | 0:29:15 | 0:29:18 | |
Chinese. | 0:29:18 | 0:29:20 | |
People sometimes ask me if Shakespeare is still relevant. | 0:29:20 | 0:29:24 | |
To me, he's like a magnet | 0:29:26 | 0:29:28 | |
that attracts all the iron filings | 0:29:28 | 0:29:30 | |
of everything that's going on in the world. | 0:29:30 | 0:29:33 | |
-You don't have to -make -him relevant. | 0:29:33 | 0:29:36 | |
By looking at the world as it is, | 0:29:36 | 0:29:38 | |
he just is. | 0:29:38 | 0:29:39 | |
But perhaps this is where we come to the third age | 0:29:41 | 0:29:44 | |
in any progression though an appreciation of Shakespeare - | 0:29:44 | 0:29:48 | |
a sense of his contemporary resonance in our world today. | 0:29:48 | 0:29:53 | |
What you might call Shakespeare's ability | 0:29:53 | 0:29:56 | |
to sound the depths of our experience. | 0:29:56 | 0:29:59 | |
Shakespeare lived through a time of disillusionment and uncertainty. | 0:30:01 | 0:30:06 | |
I often feel that he speaks so directly to us today, | 0:30:06 | 0:30:10 | |
because his times echo ours. | 0:30:10 | 0:30:14 | |
Here's an example. | 0:30:15 | 0:30:18 | |
I did a production of King John at Stratford in 2001. | 0:30:18 | 0:30:24 | |
One Tuesday matinee in September, | 0:30:24 | 0:30:26 | |
shortly after the play began at 13:30, | 0:30:26 | 0:30:30 | |
a plane crashed into a skyscraper in New York. | 0:30:30 | 0:30:34 | |
Some of the company gathered round a small TV, in the crew room. | 0:30:36 | 0:30:40 | |
17 minutes later, a second plane hit a second tower. | 0:30:40 | 0:30:45 | |
The company didn't know what to do, | 0:30:45 | 0:30:49 | |
whether to stop the show or continue. | 0:30:49 | 0:30:52 | |
Just before the interval, | 0:30:52 | 0:30:54 | |
the South Tower of the World Trade Center imploded, | 0:30:54 | 0:30:58 | |
like an Apollo space rocket launch, but in terrible reverse. | 0:30:58 | 0:31:03 | |
Shortly after the North Tower collapsed, | 0:31:04 | 0:31:07 | |
one of the characters in the play said, | 0:31:07 | 0:31:10 | |
"Now... | 0:31:10 | 0:31:12 | |
"vast confusion waits, | 0:31:12 | 0:31:16 | |
"As doth a raven on a sick fallen beast." | 0:31:16 | 0:31:20 | |
And that's what we all felt, that vast confusion, | 0:31:20 | 0:31:25 | |
like some great black bird of prey, waited upon the world. | 0:31:25 | 0:31:30 | |
Now, perhaps Shakespeare is able to show the very age | 0:31:30 | 0:31:34 | |
and body of the time, its form and pressure, | 0:31:34 | 0:31:36 | |
because his society nearly experienced its own 9/11 - | 0:31:36 | 0:31:41 | |
the Gunpowder Plot, when a terrorist attack | 0:31:41 | 0:31:44 | |
nearly succeeded in smashing the whole machinery of state, | 0:31:44 | 0:31:50 | |
nearly blowing up the entire royal family, | 0:31:50 | 0:31:53 | |
and all the Lords Temporal and Ecclesiastical | 0:31:53 | 0:31:56 | |
who would have been present at the state opening of Parliament | 0:31:56 | 0:31:59 | |
on 5/11 1605. | 0:31:59 | 0:32:02 | |
The world must have seemed to have lost its moral absolutes, | 0:32:02 | 0:32:08 | |
to have loosed its moorings and be adrift in a sea of uncertainty. | 0:32:08 | 0:32:13 | |
And this prevailing sense of doom, of futility, of apprehension | 0:32:13 | 0:32:20 | |
is present not just in Shakespeare, | 0:32:20 | 0:32:22 | |
but in many of the plays of this period. | 0:32:22 | 0:32:25 | |
And perhaps that is why we recognise our own reflection | 0:32:25 | 0:32:30 | |
in the mirror of his work. | 0:32:30 | 0:32:32 | |
In Richard III, | 0:32:34 | 0:32:36 | |
there's a little scene which is often cut. | 0:32:36 | 0:32:39 | |
But John Peter, the former chief critic of The Sunday Times, | 0:32:39 | 0:32:43 | |
recalled this scene in particular, | 0:32:43 | 0:32:45 | |
in a production of the play which opened at the National Theatre | 0:32:45 | 0:32:48 | |
in his native Budapest, | 0:32:48 | 0:32:50 | |
just months after the death of Stalin. | 0:32:50 | 0:32:53 | |
It's a little speech by a little guy. | 0:32:55 | 0:32:58 | |
Shakespeare often gives potent lines to minor characters. | 0:32:58 | 0:33:03 | |
He's a scrivener, a secretary, who has been given the job | 0:33:03 | 0:33:07 | |
of writing out Lord Hastings' indictment. | 0:33:07 | 0:33:10 | |
He's shocked by the speed with which Hastings, | 0:33:10 | 0:33:14 | |
the equivalent of the Prime Minister, | 0:33:14 | 0:33:16 | |
has been brought down by Richard on trumped-up charges. | 0:33:16 | 0:33:20 | |
"Within these five hours lived Lord Hastings, | 0:33:21 | 0:33:26 | |
"Untainted, unexamined, free, at liberty." | 0:33:26 | 0:33:30 | |
But the scrivener can see how evil spreads by degrees, | 0:33:32 | 0:33:37 | |
as individuals recognise its pervasive power, | 0:33:37 | 0:33:39 | |
but do not stand up to oppose it. | 0:33:39 | 0:33:42 | |
"Here's a good world the while!" he says. | 0:33:42 | 0:33:46 | |
"Why who's so gross, That seeth not this palpable device? | 0:33:46 | 0:33:52 | |
"Yet who's so blind, but says he sees it not?" | 0:33:53 | 0:33:57 | |
In Budapest, at that line, the full house rose to their feet | 0:33:58 | 0:34:05 | |
and applauded and applauded. | 0:34:05 | 0:34:08 | |
The story of the execution of Hastings | 0:34:08 | 0:34:10 | |
was a familiar terror story. | 0:34:10 | 0:34:12 | |
A few weeks later, the National had to close Richard III. | 0:34:13 | 0:34:17 | |
The thunderous applause by every audience member every night | 0:34:18 | 0:34:23 | |
was too much for the Communist government. | 0:34:23 | 0:34:26 | |
They were right. | 0:34:26 | 0:34:27 | |
John Peter told me that that production of Richard III | 0:34:27 | 0:34:30 | |
was one of the most moving and powerful events | 0:34:30 | 0:34:34 | |
that led, within months, | 0:34:34 | 0:34:36 | |
to the Hungarian Revolution. | 0:34:36 | 0:34:38 | |
But I remember a more personal occasion when Shakespeare spoke | 0:34:39 | 0:34:44 | |
or seemed to provide the words that none of us could find. | 0:34:44 | 0:34:47 | |
We were on tour with Macbeth in Japan. | 0:34:48 | 0:34:52 | |
My partner Tony Sher and I went down to Hiroshima | 0:34:52 | 0:34:56 | |
to the Peace Park built on the site | 0:34:56 | 0:34:58 | |
where the A-bomb was dropped in 1945. | 0:34:58 | 0:35:00 | |
In the museum, there was a melted watch | 0:35:02 | 0:35:06 | |
which had stopped at 08:15, precisely the time the bomb, | 0:35:06 | 0:35:10 | |
Little Boy, had detonated that August morning. | 0:35:10 | 0:35:14 | |
A piece of granite from the front of a bank, | 0:35:15 | 0:35:18 | |
with the brown outline of a man, his shadow, | 0:35:18 | 0:35:21 | |
all that was left when his body evaporated in the explosion. | 0:35:21 | 0:35:26 | |
A photograph of a young woman with the pattern of her kimono | 0:35:27 | 0:35:31 | |
seared into her naked flesh by the nuclear flash. | 0:35:31 | 0:35:35 | |
At the end there was a visitors' book - | 0:35:36 | 0:35:41 | |
a visitors' book! - | 0:35:41 | 0:35:42 | |
for you to comment. | 0:35:42 | 0:35:44 | |
Tony and I couldn't find the words. | 0:35:47 | 0:35:50 | |
And then a speech from the play we were touring occurred to us, | 0:35:52 | 0:35:57 | |
a speech which we hadn't really registered until that moment. | 0:35:57 | 0:36:03 | |
Macbeth has returned to the Weird Sisters, | 0:36:03 | 0:36:06 | |
demanding, whatever cataclysm may ensue, | 0:36:06 | 0:36:09 | |
that they tell him more of what the future has in store. | 0:36:09 | 0:36:13 | |
"Though you untie the winds and let them fight | 0:36:14 | 0:36:17 | |
"Against the churches; though the yeasty waves | 0:36:17 | 0:36:21 | |
"Confound and swallow navigation up; | 0:36:21 | 0:36:25 | |
"Though bladed corn be lodged and trees blown down; | 0:36:25 | 0:36:30 | |
"Though castles topple on their warders' heads; | 0:36:30 | 0:36:33 | |
"Though palaces and pyramids do slope | 0:36:33 | 0:36:36 | |
"Their heads to their foundations..." | 0:36:36 | 0:36:38 | |
Then he declares, "Even till destruction sicken; | 0:36:38 | 0:36:44 | |
"Answer me to what I ask you." | 0:36:44 | 0:36:46 | |
"Even till destruction sicken." | 0:36:47 | 0:36:51 | |
As if Destruction was a greedy living entity, | 0:36:52 | 0:36:55 | |
with a seemingly limitless capacity for catastrophe. | 0:36:55 | 0:37:00 | |
Well, here in Hiroshima, | 0:37:00 | 0:37:03 | |
Destruction herself had surely sickened, | 0:37:03 | 0:37:07 | |
clutched her stomach and cried, "Enough." | 0:37:07 | 0:37:10 | |
"Even till destruction sicken". | 0:37:11 | 0:37:14 | |
And that's what we wrote | 0:37:14 | 0:37:16 | |
in the Hiroshima Peace Park visitors' book. | 0:37:16 | 0:37:18 | |
Of course, Shakespeare couldn't know how the words he wrote | 0:37:20 | 0:37:23 | |
in a play 400 years ago might help to articulate | 0:37:23 | 0:37:26 | |
our own comprehension of the world, when our own words failed to help, | 0:37:26 | 0:37:32 | |
but his capacious imagination, | 0:37:32 | 0:37:37 | |
what Thomas Hardy calls his "bright, baffling soul", | 0:37:37 | 0:37:43 | |
with his compassion for our fragility, | 0:37:43 | 0:37:45 | |
and his understanding of the powerful forces | 0:37:45 | 0:37:47 | |
that motivate us all, | 0:37:47 | 0:37:49 | |
and his 360 degree view of our frail natures, | 0:37:49 | 0:37:55 | |
somehow all this allows him to say what oft was thought, | 0:37:55 | 0:38:00 | |
but ne'er so well expressed. | 0:38:00 | 0:38:02 | |
Well, I was describing how Shakespeare has been | 0:38:04 | 0:38:08 | |
a passport through my own life, | 0:38:08 | 0:38:11 | |
how as a kid, I was lucky enough to be given that passport | 0:38:11 | 0:38:14 | |
and now, in Shakespeare's jubilee year, | 0:38:14 | 0:38:18 | |
it is one of my priorities as Artistic Director of the RSC, | 0:38:18 | 0:38:22 | |
to see that I can do all that I can for children at school today, | 0:38:22 | 0:38:27 | |
and make sure they are given the same opportunity. | 0:38:27 | 0:38:30 | |
As well as bringing our productions to new audiences in China | 0:38:30 | 0:38:34 | |
and across the world, we extend the reach of Shakespeare | 0:38:34 | 0:38:37 | |
into our own communities here in the UK, | 0:38:37 | 0:38:42 | |
and it's one of the aspects of our work of which I am most proud. | 0:38:42 | 0:38:46 | |
We now film every Shakespeare play we do, broadcast it live, | 0:38:46 | 0:38:52 | |
and provide screenings for free into classrooms around the country. | 0:38:52 | 0:38:57 | |
I can think of no better witness of the power of Shakespeare | 0:38:58 | 0:39:02 | |
to transform lives, | 0:39:02 | 0:39:04 | |
than the evidence presented to us by the head teacher | 0:39:04 | 0:39:08 | |
of a school on the coast of Kent, King Ethelbert School in Margate. | 0:39:08 | 0:39:13 | |
A few years ago, King Ethelbert School | 0:39:14 | 0:39:18 | |
was the fifth worst-performing school in the country. | 0:39:18 | 0:39:22 | |
Two years ago, the head teacher, Kate Grieg, decided to take part in | 0:39:22 | 0:39:27 | |
our Education Department's long-term partnership programme with schools. | 0:39:27 | 0:39:32 | |
Some of her parents said, "The RSC are posh people. | 0:39:33 | 0:39:37 | |
"They're not going to come to Margate". | 0:39:37 | 0:39:40 | |
Another said, "Shakespeare is for clever people. | 0:39:40 | 0:39:43 | |
"He used a lot of long words and I felt left out at school". | 0:39:43 | 0:39:48 | |
So Shakespeare had become a metaphor for the divide between them and us. | 0:39:49 | 0:39:54 | |
But Kate felt that Shakespeare belongs to everyone. | 0:39:55 | 0:39:59 | |
To cut a long story short, | 0:40:00 | 0:40:02 | |
after two years of working with the RSC, | 0:40:02 | 0:40:06 | |
teachers and pupils at King Ethelbert School | 0:40:06 | 0:40:09 | |
are getting excited about Shakespeare. | 0:40:09 | 0:40:11 | |
They got a bit of funding to bring the whole of Year 8 | 0:40:11 | 0:40:15 | |
to see The Merchant Of Venice at Stratford-upon-Avon. | 0:40:15 | 0:40:19 | |
One of the mothers rang to say her son couldn't do the trip | 0:40:19 | 0:40:23 | |
because he didn't have a passport. | 0:40:23 | 0:40:25 | |
Kate persuaded her to let her son go, and he loved it. | 0:40:27 | 0:40:32 | |
Not only that, he persuaded his mum | 0:40:32 | 0:40:34 | |
to take him back to the theatre to see it again. | 0:40:34 | 0:40:38 | |
Afterwards, the mum rang Kate and said, "Now I get it!" | 0:40:38 | 0:40:43 | |
And now the whole school gets it. | 0:40:43 | 0:40:46 | |
This summer, they're taking part in our Dream project, | 0:40:46 | 0:40:49 | |
mounting their own production of A Midsummer Night's Dream | 0:40:49 | 0:40:53 | |
in a community promenade production around Margate. | 0:40:53 | 0:40:56 | |
But they're also taking part | 0:40:56 | 0:40:58 | |
in our touring production of the play, | 0:40:58 | 0:41:01 | |
across the nation, in which local schoolchildren | 0:41:01 | 0:41:04 | |
play Titania's fairy train, and local amateurs join | 0:41:04 | 0:41:07 | |
our professional cast to play Bottom and the rude mechanicals. | 0:41:07 | 0:41:12 | |
But the benefits of opening up to Shakespeare | 0:41:12 | 0:41:15 | |
at King Ethelbert School have been great, | 0:41:15 | 0:41:18 | |
and most importantly, the shift in the level of aspiration | 0:41:18 | 0:41:24 | |
of the whole school community has been massive. | 0:41:24 | 0:41:27 | |
Now parents say to the head teacher, | 0:41:27 | 0:41:30 | |
"It's my RIGHT to learn about Shakespeare", | 0:41:30 | 0:41:34 | |
and, perhaps most illuminatingly, one said, | 0:41:34 | 0:41:39 | |
"I'm going to vote, because I feel we're important now." | 0:41:39 | 0:41:43 | |
Now, that is what I call cultural ownership. | 0:41:43 | 0:41:50 | |
I was very lucky to have been offered the passport | 0:41:50 | 0:41:53 | |
that the arts give to enrich your journey through life. | 0:41:53 | 0:41:56 | |
In this jubilee year, | 0:41:56 | 0:41:59 | |
there can be no greater legacy of Shakespeare's ability | 0:41:59 | 0:42:03 | |
to enhance our lives than to grant every child that passport. | 0:42:03 | 0:42:08 | |
Like the kids at King Ethelbert, they not only deserve that, | 0:42:08 | 0:42:13 | |
it's their inheritance. | 0:42:13 | 0:42:15 | |
Our provision of access to Shakespeare, to drama, | 0:42:15 | 0:42:20 | |
to literature, to art, to culture, | 0:42:20 | 0:42:23 | |
is an index by which we judge ourselves to be civilised. | 0:42:23 | 0:42:28 | |
Deny that, | 0:42:28 | 0:42:30 | |
to disregard that, to underfund that, | 0:42:30 | 0:42:34 | |
is to cheat ourselves and our children | 0:42:34 | 0:42:38 | |
and deny them their birthright. | 0:42:38 | 0:42:42 | |
I've been privileged enough | 0:42:42 | 0:42:45 | |
to direct three-quarters of the plays in the canon, | 0:42:45 | 0:42:49 | |
most at Stratford-upon-Avon. | 0:42:49 | 0:42:51 | |
But I've never tackled King Lear until this summer. | 0:42:51 | 0:42:57 | |
I began tonight by saying there were three stages | 0:42:57 | 0:43:00 | |
in your life's travel with Shakespeare. | 0:43:00 | 0:43:03 | |
But there's perhaps a final stage. | 0:43:03 | 0:43:06 | |
It's one I feel I've only just begun to discover. | 0:43:06 | 0:43:11 | |
Shakespeare encompasses a vast panorama of human experience, | 0:43:11 | 0:43:16 | |
and that includes the clear and unsentimental way | 0:43:16 | 0:43:21 | |
in which he addresses our fear of death. | 0:43:21 | 0:43:25 | |
How he recognises our puzzlement, as Hamlet puts it, | 0:43:25 | 0:43:29 | |
by "the dread of something after death, | 0:43:29 | 0:43:33 | |
"the undiscovered country | 0:43:33 | 0:43:35 | |
"from whose bourn no traveller returns". | 0:43:35 | 0:43:39 | |
In truth, King Lear is a play I could not watch | 0:43:41 | 0:43:45 | |
for over a decade, | 0:43:45 | 0:43:47 | |
as before he died, | 0:43:47 | 0:43:49 | |
my own father declined into dementia. | 0:43:49 | 0:43:52 | |
Dad wasn't violently irrational or susceptible to fierce rages, | 0:43:53 | 0:43:59 | |
like Lear is, | 0:43:59 | 0:44:01 | |
but his awareness of his fading memory, | 0:44:01 | 0:44:04 | |
and his attempts to hide his incapacity, | 0:44:04 | 0:44:08 | |
and his occasional moments of lucidity | 0:44:08 | 0:44:12 | |
echoed Lear's journey too acutely for me to watch. | 0:44:12 | 0:44:17 | |
It was too painful, too accurate, too damn true. | 0:44:17 | 0:44:23 | |
When mad Lear meets the blinded Gloucester | 0:44:25 | 0:44:28 | |
in the fields near Dover, | 0:44:28 | 0:44:30 | |
he has one of those sudden rare moments of clarity | 0:44:30 | 0:44:33 | |
which I recognised in my own father. | 0:44:33 | 0:44:37 | |
"I know thee well enough. Thy name is Gloucester. | 0:44:37 | 0:44:42 | |
"Thou must be patient. We came crying hither. | 0:44:42 | 0:44:48 | |
"Thou know'st, the first time that we smell the air, we wawl and cry." | 0:44:48 | 0:44:54 | |
And then he says, with bleak and desolate simplicity, | 0:44:54 | 0:44:59 | |
"When we are born, we cry that we are come | 0:44:59 | 0:45:03 | |
"to this great stage of fools." | 0:45:03 | 0:45:06 | |
Understand that, the absurd existential joke, | 0:45:07 | 0:45:13 | |
that we are required to play a part | 0:45:13 | 0:45:15 | |
on this great stage of fools, | 0:45:15 | 0:45:18 | |
that indeed all the world's a stage, as Jaques says, | 0:45:18 | 0:45:22 | |
and that we all have our exits and our entrances. | 0:45:22 | 0:45:25 | |
That life is but a walking shadow, as Macbeth discovers, | 0:45:25 | 0:45:30 | |
a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage | 0:45:30 | 0:45:35 | |
and then is heard no more. | 0:45:35 | 0:45:37 | |
Or, if you prefer, more gently, as Prospero suggests, | 0:45:37 | 0:45:42 | |
that we are such stuff as dreams are made on, | 0:45:42 | 0:45:46 | |
and our little life is rounded with a sleep. | 0:45:46 | 0:45:51 | |
Then our fear of death seems easier to bear. | 0:45:51 | 0:45:57 | |
So, King Lear. | 0:45:57 | 0:46:00 | |
We start rehearsals in three months' time. | 0:46:00 | 0:46:03 | |
A thought-provoking and nerve-racking thought, | 0:46:03 | 0:46:08 | |
thrilling too. | 0:46:08 | 0:46:09 | |
Someone asked me, "How are you going to do Lear?" | 0:46:09 | 0:46:12 | |
As if you have to do something with Shakespeare to make him work. | 0:46:12 | 0:46:16 | |
I answered, "I'm going to try and do it | 0:46:17 | 0:46:19 | |
"as well as Shakespeare wrote it." | 0:46:19 | 0:46:21 | |
SOME LAUGHTER | 0:46:21 | 0:46:22 | |
That's challenging enough. | 0:46:22 | 0:46:25 | |
Now, centenaries seem to demand redefinitions. | 0:46:25 | 0:46:30 | |
Here in this most iconically contemporary of buildings, | 0:46:31 | 0:46:36 | |
the Shard, the Bard's crusty heritage associations | 0:46:36 | 0:46:41 | |
must be shaken off. | 0:46:41 | 0:46:43 | |
This vertical city is the perfect location | 0:46:43 | 0:46:47 | |
to celebrate Shakespeare as robustly and defiantly contemporary. | 0:46:47 | 0:46:53 | |
Today he's translated into | 0:46:53 | 0:46:56 | |
every language from Armenian to Yakut, | 0:46:56 | 0:46:59 | |
from hip-hop to Klingon. | 0:46:59 | 0:47:02 | |
He's been excitingly appropriated and reinvented | 0:47:04 | 0:47:07 | |
by different cultures all over the world. | 0:47:07 | 0:47:10 | |
Now we reinterpret him, relocate him, | 0:47:10 | 0:47:14 | |
rewrite him, regender him. | 0:47:14 | 0:47:17 | |
All fine. | 0:47:17 | 0:47:18 | |
He's tough, he can take it. | 0:47:18 | 0:47:20 | |
He's for today and for everyone. | 0:47:20 | 0:47:24 | |
So a new definition? | 0:47:24 | 0:47:25 | |
Well, Shakespeare requires none - | 0:47:25 | 0:47:28 | |
mainly because his mate Ben Jonson has said it all first. | 0:47:28 | 0:47:32 | |
In the dedicatory epistle he wrote | 0:47:32 | 0:47:35 | |
for the publication of Shakespeare's First Folio, | 0:47:35 | 0:47:39 | |
Jonson called his fellow playwright "soul of the age", | 0:47:39 | 0:47:43 | |
"sweet swan of Avon", | 0:47:43 | 0:47:45 | |
and, one of my favourites, "thou star of poets". | 0:47:45 | 0:47:49 | |
But perhaps most memorably, Jonson said, | 0:47:49 | 0:47:53 | |
"He was not for an age but for all time." | 0:47:53 | 0:47:57 | |
As Shakespeare roars into his fifth century, | 0:47:57 | 0:48:01 | |
that assertion seems pretty indisputable. | 0:48:01 | 0:48:06 | |
As for "my Shakespeare", I guess it's the way | 0:48:06 | 0:48:11 | |
he maps our hearts which keeps me returning to him, | 0:48:11 | 0:48:14 | |
even if in a play like Lear he provides | 0:48:14 | 0:48:17 | |
a sort of spectral analysis for our capacity | 0:48:17 | 0:48:21 | |
for cruelty and violence that can be challenging to face. | 0:48:21 | 0:48:25 | |
In the end, for me, he is, | 0:48:25 | 0:48:27 | |
as someone once said, the prophet of the soul. | 0:48:27 | 0:48:31 | |
And I find more sustenance, more profundity, | 0:48:31 | 0:48:35 | |
more compassion, more philosophy and more simple truth in Shakespeare | 0:48:35 | 0:48:41 | |
than I have ever found in the Bible. | 0:48:41 | 0:48:45 | |
Sartre said that in a secular age, | 0:48:45 | 0:48:47 | |
most people feel a God-shaped hole in their consciousness. | 0:48:47 | 0:48:53 | |
I here declare, I filled mine with Shakespeare. | 0:48:53 | 0:48:57 | |
On the other hand, the late, great actor Donald Sinden once quipped, | 0:48:57 | 0:49:03 | |
"Man cannot live by Bard alone." | 0:49:03 | 0:49:06 | |
LAUGHTER | 0:49:06 | 0:49:07 | |
But it's given me an immense amount of joy to do so, | 0:49:07 | 0:49:10 | |
and to deliver tonight's lecture. | 0:49:10 | 0:49:13 | |
As Shakespeare said, and we should give the last word to him, | 0:49:13 | 0:49:18 | |
"To business that we love we rise betime, | 0:49:18 | 0:49:21 | |
"and go to't with delight." | 0:49:21 | 0:49:24 | |
Thank you. | 0:49:24 | 0:49:26 |