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Introduction
Shakespeare, Shakespeare, Shakespeare: now four hundred years dead, he seems more than ever to haunt our very sense of who we are. Long before I was an actor – for as long as I can remember, in fact – the very name has seemed hedged about with a glamour, a promise of excitement and an aura of mystery. I got all of that at my very first encounter with him, seated on the ample lap of kindly, hairy Mrs Birch, mother of the headmaster of the school of which my mother was secretary, as we listened to Macbeth on the radio in her fuggy room. Of course I can have grasped little or nothing of it, but I listened with ears on stalks and my mind was for ever after filled with terrible but strangely compelling images – of dead men walking, of forests on the move, cackling hags and a demented warrior-king. Having learned to read I applied myself at the age of eight to Dr Dibelius’s four-volume edition of the Collected Works which sat, hitherto unread, on my grandmother’s bookshelves. I spoke the words out loud and somehow – though again, I can barely have understood what I was saying – caught the emotional power of it, and wept bitter, copious tears. When I was about nine, Olivier’s film of Richard III gave me nightmares, but nonetheless I demanded to see it again, having rather fallen in love with Crookback’s evil glamour. Shakespeare seemed to be everywhere in my childhood, even when I went with my family to live in Africa. There, in Lusaka, capital of Northern Rhodesia, as it then was, I saw an amateur production of The Merchant of Venice in a church hall and was bewitched by the succession of different worlds contained within the one play. The great discovery was the very funny man called Launcelot Gobbo: Shakespeare was funny! I had had no idea.
Back in England I had the revelation of reading Shakespeare’s work out loud with others. We had no school plays, but even in the classroom the cut-and-thrust exchange of speeches, the experience of the growing urgency of scenes, the vivid differentness of the characters even in our stumbling, boyish renditions, were thrilling, as exciting as – much more exciting than – any game of football or tennis forced on us.
And at home on television, the BBC was mounting great cycles of the plays transmitted across months:
The Age of Kings,
The Spread of the Eagle, the RSC
Wars of the Roses. In the theatre, there were solid, lucid productions at the Old Vic in its last days before it was overtaken by the glamour of Olivier’s National Theatre, where Shakespeare suddenly, before my very eyes, became sexy, especially with Zeffirelli at the helm and Maggie Smith a dazzling and vulnerable Beatrice in
Much Ado About Nothing or Olivier prowling the stage like a black panther as Othello. Shakespeare seemed infinitely flexible; at the RSC, a wholly different, equally thrilling, approach was on offer: one rooted in the rough truths of politics and history, owing a great deal on the one hand to the textual rigour of the teaching of English Literature at Cambridge University, where its founding fathers, Peter Hall and John Barton, had sat at the feet of F. R. Leavis, and on the other to the radical populism of Joan Littlewood at Theatre Workshop in the East End of London. And it was possible to catch, here and there, just surviving, the dying gasp of a much older tradition of playing Shakespeare, neither glamorous nor intellectual, neither realistic nor stylized, a throwback to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century traditions, the sort of thing that the old actor-managers had peddled round the provinces year in and year out, scorned and sent up by Modern Actors, but exercising a strange and almost primitive power if you let your defences down. Donald Wolfit, immortalized as ‘Sir’ in Ronald Harwood’s play
The Dresser, was the supreme exemplar of this, but as late as the mid-1960s Ralph Richardson unleashed a Shylock on the West End such as cannot have been seen since the days of Irving at the Lyceum, ringleted, hooked-nose, lisping, and, in his short-lived court-room triumph, implacable, savage, homicidal, terrible. This was Shakespeare too, no question about it. Not just the range of the plays but the range of responses to them were almost bewildering in their richness and variety.
