Gregory Doran: Is Shakespeare Chinese? The Richard Dimbleby Lecture


Gregory Doran: Is Shakespeare Chinese?

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"A fool's paradise". "Too much of a good thing".

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"Vanished into thin air".

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Shakespeare invented phrases that we all use today -

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and, more than that, he captured the way we behave,

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the way we think of others, the way we think of ourselves -

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and not just here in Britain, but right across the world.

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Welcome to the 2016 Richard Dimbleby Lecture.

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No terrorist campaign has ever succeeded.

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Almost everything you touch uses the internet.

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I'm going to talk about death.

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We've always been fascinated by the secret services.

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This contraption has saved millions of lives.

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..prevailing culture of consumer power.

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A demographic dividend or a demographic time bomb.

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If we fail the earth, we fail humanity.

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APPLAUSE

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Thank you very much. It's great to see you all here.

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I hope you are going to have a wonderful evening

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and enjoy this lecture. We're here at the Shard -

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the tallest building in Western Europe,

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with a spectacular view

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40 miles across London and beyond.

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And from here you can actually see, on Bankside,

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the reconstruction of the Globe Theatre,

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where Shakespeare may himself have acted,

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and where his plays now draw thousands each year.

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And it's Shakespeare that we're here to celebrate tonight,

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on the 400th anniversary of his death.

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And we're going to hear from

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one of the great Shakespearean directors of our time.

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As a schoolboy, he went to Stratford-upon-Avon

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and saw As You Like It with his mother,

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and said to her on the way home, "That's what I want to do,"

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and do it he did.

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He became, in his words, "a Shakespeare nut".

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Gregory Doran first joined the Royal Shakespeare Company

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in 1987 as an actor - later he became a director,

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and finally, three years ago, the boss of the RSC -

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the artistic director.

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Now, this lecture, this annual lecture in honour of my father

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is given because he was a pioneering broadcaster -

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he died 50 years ago -

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and it's been given by all kinds of prominent people

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from many fields of human achievement.

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We've had lawyers, people from science, economics,

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politics, religion - and from the arts, like tonight.

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The title of tonight's lecture is, Is Shakespeare Chinese?

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-LAUGHTER

-Not a...

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Not a question I intend to answer -

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I'll leave it to the artistic director

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of the Royal Shakespeare Company - Gregory Doran.

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"Open your ears".

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That's surely the most arresting first line of a Shakespeare play.

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Rumour, the chorus figure in Henry IV Part Two,

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tells the audience to listen up.

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"Open your ears!"

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Ladies and gentlemen, it won't have escaped your notice

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that this year, 2016, is the 400th anniversary of the death

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of William Shakespeare, and I am delighted and honoured

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to have been asked to give the Richard Dimbleby Lecture

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in this great jubilee year.

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How is it that his words still resonate

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and have the power to grab you,

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and that his philosophy still has meaning four centuries later?

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Ben Jonson addressed his fellow playwright

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as, "My gentle Shakespeare,"

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and I am aware that tonight's lecture is entirely subjective -

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it's MY Shakespeare, the man whose work I have been lucky enough

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to spend most of my career directing at Stratford-upon-Avon.

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I've just returned from China,

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where the RSC have been presenting both parts of Henry IV and Henry V.

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It's the first time the company have ever visited

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the People's Republic with plays from our main repertoire,

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and it's the first time that cycle of plays

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has ever been performed in China.

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We were anxious... LAUGHTER

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..about how they would go down.

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Would they be perceived as some...

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impenetrable firewall of English history?

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Wouldn't it have been less risky to take Romeo And Juliet

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or The Merchant Of Venice, instead?

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Those plays are well known in China -

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in fact, the trial scene from The Merchant

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is studied by schoolchildren across that vast country.

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I will admit, there was a moment during the technical rehearsal

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in Beijing when I suddenly thought that perhaps, after all,

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we were crazy to be touring three of these plays

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that the Chinese had never seen before.

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We'd heard some troubling stories about Chinese audiences -

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that they don't act like audiences in Stratford-upon-Avon,

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that they spend their time chatting,

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and get up and leave after 40 minutes or so,

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or simply record the show on their iPhones,

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and, worse, that ushers stab audience members

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with green laser-beam torches, but to little effect.

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Would they follow the story?

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Would the surtitles be precise enough?

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On that first night in Beijing I held my breath.

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We were about to find out.

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But I'll come back to that.

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Shakespeare has been a passport through my life.

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There may be seven ages of man,

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but, for me, there are three ages

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in your life's journey with Shakespeare.

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At first, as a kid, you're grabbed by his stories -

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by tales of fairies and witches,

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of shipwrecks and murders, of battles.

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He is, if nothing else,

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one of the greatest of the world's storytellers.

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I first heard Shakespeare on an old 45 rpm record

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of Mendelssohn's incidental music to A Midsummer Night's Dream,

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which came with a Reader's Digest box set of Beethoven symphonies

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which my dad had ordered -

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I must have been about eight, I guess -

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and I was drawn into that magical fairy wood outside Athens.

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There was braying Bottom thumping around in the brass,

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and in the string glissandos you could picture the fairies

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scuttling through the forest

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like leaves blown across a lawn in an evening breeze.

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The music was interspersed with extracts from the play.

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When Puck - who sounded to me like Mickey Mouse -

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said he'd put a girdle round about the Earth...

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MIMICS MICKEY MOUSE: "in 40 minutes..."

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LAUGHTER

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I was amazed.

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My dad, a scientist,

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had told me that just before I was born,

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Sputnik had ignited the space race

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by orbiting the globe in an hour-and-a-half.

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Wow!

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Puck was twice as fast as Sputnik.

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LAUGHTER

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As you grow up, after the stories,

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it's perhaps Shakespeare's language which intoxicates you next -

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the second stage of what will be your growing obsession.

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Frank McCourt, the author of Angela's Ashes,

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tells how, as a child in Limerick in the 1930s,

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he was stricken down with typhoid fever

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and confined to hospital,

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where he only had a volume of Shakespeare to read.

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But reading it, he said, "Was like having jewels in your mouth," -

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and that is exactly how I felt.

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I've been doing Shakespeare plays,

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putting them on, being in them, since I was 13.

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I was lucky enough to go to a Jesuit college

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in Preston in Lancashire,

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which put on an annual Shakespeare play every autumn term.

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Now, it was a boys' school,

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and though my twin sister went to the convent school across the road

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in Winckley Square, girls were not invited to participate.

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So, at 16, I gave my Lady Macbeth...

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LAUGHTER

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..and I felt empowered by playing her.

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Every evening, I used to walk Ben, the family cairn terrier,

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down a path, along a little brook

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that led through the fields to the salt marshes of the Ribble Estuary.

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Bats would flit noiselessly above my head,

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and, as light thickened, I would rehearse her lines out loud.

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"Come, you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts,

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"unsex me here".

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Thank God only the cows could hear.

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LAUGHTER

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But those words, so illicit, so daring, so disturbing,

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for a young man struggling with his sexuality,

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somehow whispered of empowerment.

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Then a touring production of the Scottish play came to our school.

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It wasn't very good.

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When Macbeth cried, "Is this a dagger which I see before me?"

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the witches lowered a plastic dagger on a fishing line

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in front of his face.

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And they replaced the porter scene with, "Knock, knock."

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"Who's there?" "Tom."

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"Tom who?"

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"Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow."

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But worst of all for me,

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feeling understandably proprietorial about Lady M,

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was when we got to her line,

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"Make thick my blood, stop up the access and passage

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"to remorse that no compunctious visitings of nature

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"shake my fell purpose,"

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the actress changed the word "compunctious"

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to "horrid".

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"Let no horrid visitings of nature..." It didn't even scan.

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LAUGHTER

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And though I had little idea what "compunctious" actually meant,

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my 16-year-old self could hear the word splutter

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with disdain for petty scruples.

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Shakespeare himself only uses the word once.

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In fact, he probably invented it, but it prickles and fizzes

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with plosive consonants - kuh, puh, chuh!

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Compunctious!

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Sound echoes sense,

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and "horrid" didn't do it, mate.

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At the talkback after the show,

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with all the righteous indignation of a huffy teenager, I protested.

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When I came to direct Harriet Walter as Lady Macbeth

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nearly a quarter of a century later,

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on the first night I gave her a photograph of myself in the role.

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It was, she declared,

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the weirdest first-night card she had ever had from her director.

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I joined the RSC as an actor in 1987.

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My first part in The Merchant Of Venice

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was Solanio, known as one of the Salads.

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They're a gossipy pair of parasites, buzzing around Antonio,

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the merchant of Venice himself.

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Antonio is obsessively in love with the young gold-digger, Bassanio.

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The Salads witness Antonio's unrequited love,

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and Solanio - my part -

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captures his pain with aching simplicity, saying,

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"I think he only loves the world for him."

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As it happened, I felt exactly the same.

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I had fallen in love too.

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With Shylock, as it happens.

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I realised I had reached a second age in that growing journey

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with Shakespeare, when you can't believe that he is saying

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what you are thinking.

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That, somehow, as you experience attraction or love,

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his words provide the key to your soul.

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Who has described the absurd giddiness of falling in love

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better than Rosalind in As You Like It,

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when she cries to Celia,

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"O coz, coz, coz, my pretty little coz,

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"that thou didst know how many fathom deep I am in love,

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"but it cannot be sounded.

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"My affection hath an unknown bottom like the Bay of Portugal."

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Is there a more violent descent into morbid jealousy

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than that which afflicts Leontes in The Winter's Tale?

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Evident in the line,

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"Inch-thick, knee-deep,

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"o'er head and ears a fork'd one."

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A line so fractured and contorted,

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it might seem to deny immediate understanding

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but immediately conveys his nettled, jealous state of mind.

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Perhaps no-one has described self-loathing better than

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the lanky, lovelorn Helena in A Midsummer Night's Dream,

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when she drags herself through the wood

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and collapses saying,

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"And sleep that sometime shuts up sorrow's eye,

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"steel me a while from mine own company." Fantastic!

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As Sam Goldwyn is reputed to have said,

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"Fantastic, and all written with a feather!"

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But trying to persuade anyone of Shakespeare's genius

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by dangling quotations before them is, as Dr Johnson once said,

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"A bit like a man trying to sell you his house

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"by carrying a brick in his pocket as a specimen."

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I love words. Words, words, words.

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I love them, but Shakespeare invented them.

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The English language, we are told, grew by 10,000 new words

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during the century in which Shakespeare lived,

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and 600 to 2,000 of those

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were estimated to have been invented by him!

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Assassination, addiction,

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bedazzled, lacklustre,

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moonbeam, newfangled,

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scuffle and puking.

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How's that for a list?

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Language roiled and boiled in a crucible of invention.

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The King James Bible, published in 1611,

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uses a modest vocabulary of about 6,000 words.

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Shakespeare's vocabulary, depending on how you count the variants,

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is usually estimated as between 26 and 29,000 words.

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Apparently, the growth in the language was partially ascribed

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to the playwrights searching for novelty.

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In 1599, the anarchic playwright John Marston,

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in a play called Antonio And Mellida,

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invents a new word - now get this -

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a new word on average every 14 lines.

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Fubbery! That's one of his.

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"Fubbery, fubbery!" a character says in his play, The Malcontent.

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Audacious eloquence.

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And Shakespeare too was a man of fire-new words.

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Indeed, like Feste, the fool, in Twelfth Night,

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he was a corrupter of words.

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Making nouns and adjectives press-gang themselves into verbs.

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"He words me, girls, he words me," says Cleopatra,

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aware that Octavius Caesar is trying to manipulate her to his will.

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Words are physical objects to Shakespeare.

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"You cram these words into my ears," says Alonso in The Tempest,

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as if words are portable, and have mass and weight.

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Words are weapons to Hamlet.

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He promises to challenge his mother saying,

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"I will speak daggers to her, but use none."

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And later, in the closet scene, she cries,

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"These words like daggers enter mine ears!"

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No wonder, then, that Rumour tells us to "Open our ears,"

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or that the Chorus at the start of Romeo And Juliet

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begs us "with patient ears attend",

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or that Elizabethans talked about going to hear a play.

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We talk of television viewers,

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but about theatre, audiences.

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From "audire", the Latin for "to hear".

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The spoken word is the medium of Shakespeare's theatre,

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for the words transport you,

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carry you "here and there jumping o'er time,"

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and for playwrights of his day, they had to be up to scratch.

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They had to keep the audience's attention with those words,

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and not unsurprisingly, they found novel ways to do that.

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Fascinating recent research at Liverpool University has shown

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that Shakespeare's words have an actual and demonstrable

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neurological effect on the brain.

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"Good tickle-brain," Falstaff calls Mistress Quickly.

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That's exactly what his words do.

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They tickle the brain and stimulate the neurons of our brains,

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prompting activation in the visual association cortex.

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Did you get that?

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The visual association cortex,

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or what Horatio in Hamlet calls, "The mind's eye."

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Shakespeare's words set off little electrical charges,

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light up our minds and create a theatre of the brain.

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So when Juliet says, "Parting is such sweet sorrow,"

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it surprises us. Or it should.

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The conjunction of "sweet" and "sorrow" startles us.

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The difficulty for us today, for actors today,

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is getting beyond the overfamiliarity with those phrases

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and recoining it afresh, as if that thought,

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that particular conjunction of words, had just occurred to Juliet.

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But how do you do that?

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How do you fresh-mint some of those famous lines?

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How do you "look with thine ears", as King Lear says.

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Well, the late lamented Roger Rees, when he played Hamlet,

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decided to try to surprise the audience one night

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with perhaps the most famous line in Shakespeare,

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"To be or not to be."

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He would rush forward to the front of the stage

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and deliver the line with an urgent immediacy,

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as if it had just emerged from the quick forge

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and working house of thought.

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The cue came and he hurtled onto the stage...

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..and promptly forgot the most famous line in Shakespeare.

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Not only that, he was prompted by a member of the audience.

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When I did a production of Hamlet with David Tennant a few years ago,

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we discovered a rather unconventional way

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of fresh-minting another of those famous lines

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whose fame transcends the play.

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As the gravedigger presents Hamlet

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with the skull of his father's old Jester, he declares,

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"Alas, poor Yorick!"

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I had heard that, in the 1980s,

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a man had actually bequeathed his own skull

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to be used in a production, an RSC production, of Hamlet.

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His name was Andre Tchaikowsky.

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He was a Polish composer living in Oxford.

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The undertaker, when it came to it,

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had balked at the idea of removing the head from one of his customers

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as this was not regarded as, well, normal practice,

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and quite possibly it was illegal.

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So, believe it or not,

0:21:220:21:23

permission had to be granted by the Home Office.

0:21:230:21:27

Eventually the local hospital had removed the head,

0:21:270:21:31

and had done the job

0:21:310:21:33

that presumably the cold clay of the grave did for Yorick.

0:21:330:21:37

Whatever the process, one day,

0:21:370:21:40

the skull arrived in the prop department at Stratford

0:21:400:21:43

in a Delsey tissue box.

0:21:430:21:46

And when it was opened,

0:21:460:21:47

Crusty, the prop shop dog, went crazy.

0:21:470:21:50

LAUGHTER

0:21:520:21:55

The skull still stank.

0:21:550:21:58

"Pah," as Hamlet says, "the gorge rises at it!"

0:21:590:22:04

So it was put in an onion bag up on the roof

0:22:040:22:07

until the weather,

0:22:070:22:08

and perhaps the birds,

0:22:080:22:10

had done the rest.

0:22:100:22:12

Then it was stored in a box on a shelf,

0:22:120:22:14

and that's where it had stayed.

0:22:140:22:17

No-one had chosen to cast poor Andre as Yorick.

0:22:170:22:23

So on our first day of rehearsals, as usual,

0:22:230:22:28

I welcomed the actors, announced what parts they'd be playing,

0:22:280:22:31

and then I said,

0:22:310:22:32

"Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to introduce you

0:22:320:22:35

"to the final member of our company,"

0:22:350:22:37

and I pulled on some purple rubber gloves...

0:22:370:22:40

..opened that cardboard box,

0:22:410:22:43

and lifting out the skull, I said,

0:22:430:22:46

"This is Andre.

0:22:460:22:48

"He will be playing Yorick"

0:22:480:22:50

A silence fell on the room.

0:22:520:22:57

I offered to hand the skull to any of the team who wanted to touch it.

0:22:570:23:02

Some recoiled,

0:23:020:23:04

some were drawn towards it in grim fascination.

0:23:040:23:08

Cicely Berry, the legendary RSC voice guru,

0:23:080:23:12

still working with the company aged 90...

0:23:120:23:15

Cis was present,

0:23:150:23:17

and declined the skull with a smile,

0:23:170:23:19

saying she was close enough to that state herself, already!

0:23:190:23:23

Many were disturbed by such a vivid memento mori.

0:23:260:23:31

Whatever the reaction, that line, "Alas, poor Yorick,"

0:23:310:23:35

never languished into cliche in our production.

0:23:350:23:39

The skull never became just another stage prop.

0:23:390:23:44

When David Tennant peered at the skull,

0:23:440:23:46

stared into those hollow eye sockets,

0:23:460:23:50

he saw his own mortality staring straight back at him.

0:23:500:23:54

And so did we.

0:23:540:23:56

Shakespeare came face to face

0:23:560:23:58

with this scoffing, grinning antic at the age of 52.

0:23:580:24:03

We don't actually know how he died.

0:24:030:24:06

The vicar of Holy Trinity Church, John Ward, in Stratford-upon-Avon,

0:24:060:24:11

some 40 years later, left the only account we have.

0:24:110:24:15

He writes in his diary,

0:24:150:24:16

"Shakespeare had a merry meeting with his friends

0:24:160:24:19

"Ben Jonson and Michael Drayton,

0:24:190:24:21

"drank too much,

0:24:210:24:23

"and died of a fever there contracted."

0:24:230:24:25

That's it.

0:24:250:24:26

Shakespeare's funerary monument in Holy Trinity

0:24:260:24:29

tells us he died on 23rd April,

0:24:290:24:32

which is normally accepted as the day he was born.

0:24:320:24:35

So, it would seem,

0:24:350:24:37

Bill and Ben went out with Mike on his 52nd birthday,

0:24:370:24:41

overdid it,

0:24:410:24:42

and he shuffled off his mortal coil.

0:24:420:24:44

But why are we celebrating this fatal birthday binge?

0:24:460:24:51

Why are we even still doing his plays 400 years later?

0:24:510:24:57

Let me go back to our first night of Henry IV Part One in China.

0:24:570:25:03

It was a packed house -

0:25:030:25:05

a good balance of men and women,

0:25:050:25:08

of all age groups,

0:25:080:25:10

lots of young people.

0:25:100:25:12

They were quiet in the first scene.

0:25:120:25:15

Hotspur broke the ice first.

0:25:150:25:17

He's the hot-headed action man of the play.

0:25:170:25:22

Forbidden by the king even to mention the name

0:25:220:25:25

of the rebel Mortimer,

0:25:250:25:26

he swears he will teach a starling

0:25:260:25:29

to say nothing but Mortimer

0:25:290:25:31

and give it to the king to squawk it at him day and night.

0:25:310:25:35

Laughter!

0:25:350:25:36

Recognition of the absurdity,

0:25:360:25:39

of the imaginative brain of that motormouth Harry Hotspur.

0:25:390:25:44

But then Sir John Falstaff waddled on to the Chinese stage

0:25:440:25:50

for the very first time ever.

0:25:500:25:54

One of Shakespeare's greatest creations,

0:25:540:25:57

that primal urge, that life force,

0:25:570:26:01

that gross embodiment of appetite and desire,

0:26:010:26:04

the irresistible "hill of flesh", Jack Falstaff.

0:26:040:26:09

Laughter.

0:26:090:26:10

At the Gadshill plot, where Falstaff and his henchmen

0:26:100:26:13

decide to play highwaymen

0:26:130:26:15

and rob travellers on the London road,

0:26:150:26:18

and to be hijacked in turn by the dissolute Prince Hal

0:26:180:26:21

and his mate Poins.

0:26:210:26:23

And then in the Tavern Scene

0:26:230:26:25

as Falstaff exaggerates his bravery to the prince,

0:26:250:26:28

pretending that he fought off assailants

0:26:280:26:31

in ever-increasing numbers.

0:26:310:26:33

Great waves of laughter from our Chinese audience!

0:26:330:26:37

It was as if Falstaff had always been there.

0:26:370:26:41

As if the Chinese psyche had always had him there.

0:26:410:26:45

As if he was one of the most ancient of Chinese folk characters.

0:26:450:26:50

At the end of the Battle of Shrewsbury,

0:26:500:26:53

when Prince Hal kills Hotspur in a duel,

0:26:530:26:56

Falstaff tries to take the credit for killing him -

0:26:560:26:59

to Prince Hal's face!

0:26:590:27:01

The disreputable rogue declares,

0:27:010:27:04

"Lord, Lord how the world is given to lying."

0:27:040:27:08

And the audience got the laugh even before the punchline had landed.

0:27:080:27:13

Well, of course.

0:27:130:27:16

-The world

-is

-given to lying, wherever you are in it.

0:27:160:27:20

"One touch of nature makes the whole world kin."

0:27:200:27:25

I had always been suspicious

0:27:250:27:29

of the sort of universalising dogma about Shakespeare -

0:27:290:27:32

the assertion, or perhaps the Great British propaganda,

0:27:320:27:35

that he is indisputably, unquestionably,

0:27:350:27:38

the world's greatest writer,

0:27:380:27:40

and to suggest otherwise is some sort of dangerous heresy.

0:27:400:27:45

But that first night in Beijing was evidence,

0:27:450:27:50

living proof of Shakespeare's genius

0:27:500:27:53

unfolding before my very ears and eyes.

0:27:530:27:57

In truth, it would seem Shakespeare has become fashionable in China.

0:27:570:28:03

Premier Wen Jiabao had started his visit to the UK in 2011

0:28:030:28:06

by visiting Stratford-upon-Avon.

0:28:060:28:09

Last autumn, President Xi Jinping

0:28:090:28:12

had been presented with a copy of Shakespeare's Sonnets

0:28:120:28:14

by the Queen.

0:28:140:28:16

Brush up your "Shashibiya"

0:28:160:28:19

and it's an index of just how outward-looking

0:28:190:28:21

and open-minded you are -

0:28:210:28:23

proof of your cultural awareness, a lifestyle credential.

0:28:230:28:28

We just did not know if that would translate

0:28:280:28:31

into actually enjoying watching his plays in performance

0:28:310:28:34

and in English!

0:28:340:28:36

The South African actor Sello Maake Ka-Ncube

0:28:360:28:40

had once challenged me about Shakespeare.

0:28:400:28:42

We were doing a production of his early tragedy Titus Andronicus

0:28:420:28:46

at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg,

0:28:460:28:48

just at the ending of apartheid.

0:28:480:28:50

Sello was playing Aaron the Moor,

0:28:500:28:53

Shakespeare's other great black character.

0:28:530:28:56

"Greg," he said to me,

0:28:570:28:59

"you told me Shakespeare was English!"

0:28:590:29:02

"Yeah", I muttered. "Yeah, I think that's indisputable."

0:29:020:29:07

"Uh-uh!" said Sello,

0:29:090:29:11

"Shakespeare is Zulu!"

0:29:110:29:13

On that first night,

0:29:130:29:15

our first night in Beijing proved that Shakespeare is also...

0:29:150:29:18

Chinese.

0:29:180:29:20

People sometimes ask me if Shakespeare is still relevant.

0:29:200:29:24

To me, he's like a magnet

0:29:260:29:28

that attracts all the iron filings

0:29:280:29:30

of everything that's going on in the world.

0:29:300:29:33

-You don't have to

-make

-him relevant.

0:29:330:29:36

By looking at the world as it is,

0:29:360:29:38

he just is.

0:29:380:29:39

But perhaps this is where we come to the third age

0:29:410:29:44

in any progression though an appreciation of Shakespeare -

0:29:440:29:48

a sense of his contemporary resonance in our world today.

0:29:480:29:53

What you might call Shakespeare's ability

0:29:530:29:56

to sound the depths of our experience.

0:29:560:29:59

Shakespeare lived through a time of disillusionment and uncertainty.

0:30:010:30:06

I often feel that he speaks so directly to us today,

0:30:060:30:10

because his times echo ours.

0:30:100:30:14

Here's an example.

0:30:150:30:18

I did a production of King John at Stratford in 2001.

0:30:180:30:24

One Tuesday matinee in September,

0:30:240:30:26

shortly after the play began at 13:30,

0:30:260:30:30

a plane crashed into a skyscraper in New York.

0:30:300:30:34

Some of the company gathered round a small TV, in the crew room.

0:30:360:30:40

17 minutes later, a second plane hit a second tower.

0:30:400:30:45

The company didn't know what to do,

0:30:450:30:49

whether to stop the show or continue.

0:30:490:30:52

Just before the interval,

0:30:520:30:54

the South Tower of the World Trade Center imploded,

0:30:540:30:58

like an Apollo space rocket launch, but in terrible reverse.

0:30:580:31:03

Shortly after the North Tower collapsed,

0:31:040:31:07

one of the characters in the play said,

0:31:070:31:10

"Now...

0:31:100:31:12

"vast confusion waits,

0:31:120:31:16

"As doth a raven on a sick fallen beast."

0:31:160:31:20

And that's what we all felt, that vast confusion,

0:31:200:31:25

like some great black bird of prey, waited upon the world.

0:31:250:31:30

Now, perhaps Shakespeare is able to show the very age

0:31:300:31:34

and body of the time, its form and pressure,

0:31:340:31:36

because his society nearly experienced its own 9/11 -

0:31:360:31:41

the Gunpowder Plot, when a terrorist attack

0:31:410:31:44

nearly succeeded in smashing the whole machinery of state,

0:31:440:31:50

nearly blowing up the entire royal family,

0:31:500:31:53

and all the Lords Temporal and Ecclesiastical

0:31:530:31:56

who would have been present at the state opening of Parliament

0:31:560:31:59

on 5/11 1605.

0:31:590:32:02

The world must have seemed to have lost its moral absolutes,

0:32:020:32:08

to have loosed its moorings and be adrift in a sea of uncertainty.

0:32:080:32:13

And this prevailing sense of doom, of futility, of apprehension

0:32:130:32:20

is present not just in Shakespeare,

0:32:200:32:22

but in many of the plays of this period.

0:32:220:32:25

And perhaps that is why we recognise our own reflection

0:32:250:32:30

in the mirror of his work.

0:32:300:32:32

In Richard III,

0:32:340:32:36

there's a little scene which is often cut.

0:32:360:32:39

But John Peter, the former chief critic of The Sunday Times,

0:32:390:32:43

recalled this scene in particular,

0:32:430:32:45

in a production of the play which opened at the National Theatre

0:32:450:32:48

in his native Budapest,

0:32:480:32:50

just months after the death of Stalin.

0:32:500:32:53

It's a little speech by a little guy.

0:32:550:32:58

Shakespeare often gives potent lines to minor characters.

0:32:580:33:03

He's a scrivener, a secretary, who has been given the job

0:33:030:33:07

of writing out Lord Hastings' indictment.

0:33:070:33:10

He's shocked by the speed with which Hastings,

0:33:100:33:14

the equivalent of the Prime Minister,

0:33:140:33:16

has been brought down by Richard on trumped-up charges.

0:33:160:33:20

"Within these five hours lived Lord Hastings,

0:33:210:33:26

"Untainted, unexamined, free, at liberty."

0:33:260:33:30

But the scrivener can see how evil spreads by degrees,

0:33:320:33:37

as individuals recognise its pervasive power,

0:33:370:33:39

but do not stand up to oppose it.

0:33:390:33:42

"Here's a good world the while!" he says.

0:33:420:33:46

"Why who's so gross, That seeth not this palpable device?

0:33:460:33:52

"Yet who's so blind, but says he sees it not?"

0:33:530:33:57

In Budapest, at that line, the full house rose to their feet

0:33:580:34:05

and applauded and applauded.

0:34:050:34:08

The story of the execution of Hastings

0:34:080:34:10

was a familiar terror story.

0:34:100:34:12

A few weeks later, the National had to close Richard III.

0:34:130:34:17

The thunderous applause by every audience member every night

0:34:180:34:23

was too much for the Communist government.

0:34:230:34:26

They were right.

0:34:260:34:27

John Peter told me that that production of Richard III

0:34:270:34:30

was one of the most moving and powerful events

0:34:300:34:34

that led, within months,

0:34:340:34:36

to the Hungarian Revolution.

0:34:360:34:38

But I remember a more personal occasion when Shakespeare spoke

0:34:390:34:44

or seemed to provide the words that none of us could find.

0:34:440:34:47

We were on tour with Macbeth in Japan.

0:34:480:34:52

My partner Tony Sher and I went down to Hiroshima

0:34:520:34:56

to the Peace Park built on the site

0:34:560:34:58

where the A-bomb was dropped in 1945.

0:34:580:35:00

In the museum, there was a melted watch

0:35:020:35:06

which had stopped at 08:15, precisely the time the bomb,

0:35:060:35:10

Little Boy, had detonated that August morning.

0:35:100:35:14

A piece of granite from the front of a bank,

0:35:150:35:18

with the brown outline of a man, his shadow,

0:35:180:35:21

all that was left when his body evaporated in the explosion.

0:35:210:35:26

A photograph of a young woman with the pattern of her kimono

0:35:270:35:31

seared into her naked flesh by the nuclear flash.

0:35:310:35:35

At the end there was a visitors' book -

0:35:360:35:41

a visitors' book! -

0:35:410:35:42

for you to comment.

0:35:420:35:44

Tony and I couldn't find the words.

0:35:470:35:50

And then a speech from the play we were touring occurred to us,

0:35:520:35:57

a speech which we hadn't really registered until that moment.

0:35:570:36:03

Macbeth has returned to the Weird Sisters,

0:36:030:36:06

demanding, whatever cataclysm may ensue,

0:36:060:36:09

that they tell him more of what the future has in store.

0:36:090:36:13

"Though you untie the winds and let them fight

0:36:140:36:17

"Against the churches; though the yeasty waves

0:36:170:36:21

"Confound and swallow navigation up;

0:36:210:36:25

"Though bladed corn be lodged and trees blown down;

0:36:250:36:30

"Though castles topple on their warders' heads;

0:36:300:36:33

"Though palaces and pyramids do slope

0:36:330:36:36

"Their heads to their foundations..."

0:36:360:36:38

Then he declares, "Even till destruction sicken;

0:36:380:36:44

"Answer me to what I ask you."

0:36:440:36:46

"Even till destruction sicken."

0:36:470:36:51

As if Destruction was a greedy living entity,

0:36:520:36:55

with a seemingly limitless capacity for catastrophe.

0:36:550:37:00

Well, here in Hiroshima,

0:37:000:37:03

Destruction herself had surely sickened,

0:37:030:37:07

clutched her stomach and cried, "Enough."

0:37:070:37:10

"Even till destruction sicken".

0:37:110:37:14

And that's what we wrote

0:37:140:37:16

in the Hiroshima Peace Park visitors' book.

0:37:160:37:18

Of course, Shakespeare couldn't know how the words he wrote

0:37:200:37:23

in a play 400 years ago might help to articulate

0:37:230:37:26

our own comprehension of the world, when our own words failed to help,

0:37:260:37:32

but his capacious imagination,

0:37:320:37:37

what Thomas Hardy calls his "bright, baffling soul",

0:37:370:37:43

with his compassion for our fragility,

0:37:430:37:45

and his understanding of the powerful forces

0:37:450:37:47

that motivate us all,

0:37:470:37:49

and his 360 degree view of our frail natures,

0:37:490:37:55

somehow all this allows him to say what oft was thought,

0:37:550:38:00

but ne'er so well expressed.

0:38:000:38:02

Well, I was describing how Shakespeare has been

0:38:040:38:08

a passport through my own life,

0:38:080:38:11

how as a kid, I was lucky enough to be given that passport

0:38:110:38:14

and now, in Shakespeare's jubilee year,

0:38:140:38:18

it is one of my priorities as Artistic Director of the RSC,

0:38:180:38:22

to see that I can do all that I can for children at school today,

0:38:220:38:27

and make sure they are given the same opportunity.

0:38:270:38:30

As well as bringing our productions to new audiences in China

0:38:300:38:34

and across the world, we extend the reach of Shakespeare

0:38:340:38:37

into our own communities here in the UK,

0:38:370:38:42

and it's one of the aspects of our work of which I am most proud.

0:38:420:38:46

We now film every Shakespeare play we do, broadcast it live,

0:38:460:38:52

and provide screenings for free into classrooms around the country.

0:38:520:38:57

I can think of no better witness of the power of Shakespeare

0:38:580:39:02

to transform lives,

0:39:020:39:04

than the evidence presented to us by the head teacher

0:39:040:39:08

of a school on the coast of Kent, King Ethelbert School in Margate.

0:39:080:39:13

A few years ago, King Ethelbert School

0:39:140:39:18

was the fifth worst-performing school in the country.

0:39:180:39:22

Two years ago, the head teacher, Kate Grieg, decided to take part in

0:39:220:39:27

our Education Department's long-term partnership programme with schools.

0:39:270:39:32

Some of her parents said, "The RSC are posh people.

0:39:330:39:37

"They're not going to come to Margate".

0:39:370:39:40

Another said, "Shakespeare is for clever people.

0:39:400:39:43

"He used a lot of long words and I felt left out at school".

0:39:430:39:48

So Shakespeare had become a metaphor for the divide between them and us.

0:39:490:39:54

But Kate felt that Shakespeare belongs to everyone.

0:39:550:39:59

To cut a long story short,

0:40:000:40:02

after two years of working with the RSC,

0:40:020:40:06

teachers and pupils at King Ethelbert School

0:40:060:40:09

are getting excited about Shakespeare.

0:40:090:40:11

They got a bit of funding to bring the whole of Year 8

0:40:110:40:15

to see The Merchant Of Venice at Stratford-upon-Avon.

0:40:150:40:19

One of the mothers rang to say her son couldn't do the trip

0:40:190:40:23

because he didn't have a passport.

0:40:230:40:25

Kate persuaded her to let her son go, and he loved it.

0:40:270:40:32

Not only that, he persuaded his mum

0:40:320:40:34

to take him back to the theatre to see it again.

0:40:340:40:38

Afterwards, the mum rang Kate and said, "Now I get it!"

0:40:380:40:43

And now the whole school gets it.

0:40:430:40:46

This summer, they're taking part in our Dream project,

0:40:460:40:49

mounting their own production of A Midsummer Night's Dream

0:40:490:40:53

in a community promenade production around Margate.

0:40:530:40:56

But they're also taking part

0:40:560:40:58

in our touring production of the play,

0:40:580:41:01

across the nation, in which local schoolchildren

0:41:010:41:04

play Titania's fairy train, and local amateurs join

0:41:040:41:07

our professional cast to play Bottom and the rude mechanicals.

0:41:070:41:12

But the benefits of opening up to Shakespeare

0:41:120:41:15

at King Ethelbert School have been great,

0:41:150:41:18

and most importantly, the shift in the level of aspiration

0:41:180:41:24

of the whole school community has been massive.

0:41:240:41:27

Now parents say to the head teacher,

0:41:270:41:30

"It's my RIGHT to learn about Shakespeare",

0:41:300:41:34

and, perhaps most illuminatingly, one said,

0:41:340:41:39

"I'm going to vote, because I feel we're important now."

0:41:390:41:43

Now, that is what I call cultural ownership.

0:41:430:41:50

I was very lucky to have been offered the passport

0:41:500:41:53

that the arts give to enrich your journey through life.

0:41:530:41:56

In this jubilee year,

0:41:560:41:59

there can be no greater legacy of Shakespeare's ability

0:41:590:42:03

to enhance our lives than to grant every child that passport.

0:42:030:42:08

Like the kids at King Ethelbert, they not only deserve that,

0:42:080:42:13

it's their inheritance.

0:42:130:42:15

Our provision of access to Shakespeare, to drama,

0:42:150:42:20

to literature, to art, to culture,

0:42:200:42:23

is an index by which we judge ourselves to be civilised.

0:42:230:42:28

Deny that,

0:42:280:42:30

to disregard that, to underfund that,

0:42:300:42:34

is to cheat ourselves and our children

0:42:340:42:38

and deny them their birthright.

0:42:380:42:42

I've been privileged enough

0:42:420:42:45

to direct three-quarters of the plays in the canon,

0:42:450:42:49

most at Stratford-upon-Avon.

0:42:490:42:51

But I've never tackled King Lear until this summer.

0:42:510:42:57

I began tonight by saying there were three stages

0:42:570:43:00

in your life's travel with Shakespeare.

0:43:000:43:03

But there's perhaps a final stage.

0:43:030:43:06

It's one I feel I've only just begun to discover.

0:43:060:43:11

Shakespeare encompasses a vast panorama of human experience,

0:43:110:43:16

and that includes the clear and unsentimental way

0:43:160:43:21

in which he addresses our fear of death.

0:43:210:43:25

How he recognises our puzzlement, as Hamlet puts it,

0:43:250:43:29

by "the dread of something after death,

0:43:290:43:33

"the undiscovered country

0:43:330:43:35

"from whose bourn no traveller returns".

0:43:350:43:39

In truth, King Lear is a play I could not watch

0:43:410:43:45

for over a decade,

0:43:450:43:47

as before he died,

0:43:470:43:49

my own father declined into dementia.

0:43:490:43:52

Dad wasn't violently irrational or susceptible to fierce rages,

0:43:530:43:59

like Lear is,

0:43:590:44:01

but his awareness of his fading memory,

0:44:010:44:04

and his attempts to hide his incapacity,

0:44:040:44:08

and his occasional moments of lucidity

0:44:080:44:12

echoed Lear's journey too acutely for me to watch.

0:44:120:44:17

It was too painful, too accurate, too damn true.

0:44:170:44:23

When mad Lear meets the blinded Gloucester

0:44:250:44:28

in the fields near Dover,

0:44:280:44:30

he has one of those sudden rare moments of clarity

0:44:300:44:33

which I recognised in my own father.

0:44:330:44:37

"I know thee well enough. Thy name is Gloucester.

0:44:370:44:42

"Thou must be patient. We came crying hither.

0:44:420:44:48

"Thou know'st, the first time that we smell the air, we wawl and cry."

0:44:480:44:54

And then he says, with bleak and desolate simplicity,

0:44:540:44:59

"When we are born, we cry that we are come

0:44:590:45:03

"to this great stage of fools."

0:45:030:45:06

Understand that, the absurd existential joke,

0:45:070:45:13

that we are required to play a part

0:45:130:45:15

on this great stage of fools,

0:45:150:45:18

that indeed all the world's a stage, as Jaques says,

0:45:180:45:22

and that we all have our exits and our entrances.

0:45:220:45:25

That life is but a walking shadow, as Macbeth discovers,

0:45:250:45:30

a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage

0:45:300:45:35

and then is heard no more.

0:45:350:45:37

Or, if you prefer, more gently, as Prospero suggests,

0:45:370:45:42

that we are such stuff as dreams are made on,

0:45:420:45:46

and our little life is rounded with a sleep.

0:45:460:45:51

Then our fear of death seems easier to bear.

0:45:510:45:57

So, King Lear.

0:45:570:46:00

We start rehearsals in three months' time.

0:46:000:46:03

A thought-provoking and nerve-racking thought,

0:46:030:46:08

thrilling too.

0:46:080:46:09

Someone asked me, "How are you going to do Lear?"

0:46:090:46:12

As if you have to do something with Shakespeare to make him work.

0:46:120:46:16

I answered, "I'm going to try and do it

0:46:170:46:19

"as well as Shakespeare wrote it."

0:46:190:46:21

SOME LAUGHTER

0:46:210:46:22

That's challenging enough.

0:46:220:46:25

Now, centenaries seem to demand redefinitions.

0:46:250:46:30

Here in this most iconically contemporary of buildings,

0:46:310:46:36

the Shard, the Bard's crusty heritage associations

0:46:360:46:41

must be shaken off.

0:46:410:46:43

This vertical city is the perfect location

0:46:430:46:47

to celebrate Shakespeare as robustly and defiantly contemporary.

0:46:470:46:53

Today he's translated into

0:46:530:46:56

every language from Armenian to Yakut,

0:46:560:46:59

from hip-hop to Klingon.

0:46:590:47:02

He's been excitingly appropriated and reinvented

0:47:040:47:07

by different cultures all over the world.

0:47:070:47:10

Now we reinterpret him, relocate him,

0:47:100:47:14

rewrite him, regender him.

0:47:140:47:17

All fine.

0:47:170:47:18

He's tough, he can take it.

0:47:180:47:20

He's for today and for everyone.

0:47:200:47:24

So a new definition?

0:47:240:47:25

Well, Shakespeare requires none -

0:47:250:47:28

mainly because his mate Ben Jonson has said it all first.

0:47:280:47:32

In the dedicatory epistle he wrote

0:47:320:47:35

for the publication of Shakespeare's First Folio,

0:47:350:47:39

Jonson called his fellow playwright "soul of the age",

0:47:390:47:43

"sweet swan of Avon",

0:47:430:47:45

and, one of my favourites, "thou star of poets".

0:47:450:47:49

But perhaps most memorably, Jonson said,

0:47:490:47:53

"He was not for an age but for all time."

0:47:530:47:57

As Shakespeare roars into his fifth century,

0:47:570:48:01

that assertion seems pretty indisputable.

0:48:010:48:06

As for "my Shakespeare", I guess it's the way

0:48:060:48:11

he maps our hearts which keeps me returning to him,

0:48:110:48:14

even if in a play like Lear he provides

0:48:140:48:17

a sort of spectral analysis for our capacity

0:48:170:48:21

for cruelty and violence that can be challenging to face.

0:48:210:48:25

In the end, for me, he is,

0:48:250:48:27

as someone once said, the prophet of the soul.

0:48:270:48:31

And I find more sustenance, more profundity,

0:48:310:48:35

more compassion, more philosophy and more simple truth in Shakespeare

0:48:350:48:41

than I have ever found in the Bible.

0:48:410:48:45

Sartre said that in a secular age,

0:48:450:48:47

most people feel a God-shaped hole in their consciousness.

0:48:470:48:53

I here declare, I filled mine with Shakespeare.

0:48:530:48:57

On the other hand, the late, great actor Donald Sinden once quipped,

0:48:570:49:03

"Man cannot live by Bard alone."

0:49:030:49:06

LAUGHTER

0:49:060:49:07

But it's given me an immense amount of joy to do so,

0:49:070:49:10

and to deliver tonight's lecture.

0:49:100:49:13

As Shakespeare said, and we should give the last word to him,

0:49:130:49:18

"To business that we love we rise betime,

0:49:180:49:21

"and go to't with delight."

0:49:210:49:24

Thank you.

0:49:240:49:26

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