[ Music ]
>> Hello. Welcome.
And thank you for sharing with me these
extracts from One Man in His Time,
the show I'll be performing next year
to celebrate, somewhat belatedly,
the 30th anniversary of the
Bell Shakespeare Company,
and also to celebrate the
language of Shakespeare.
"I know a bank where the wild
thyme blows, where oxlips
and the nodding violet grows, quite
over-canopied with luscious woodbine,
with sweet musk-roses and with
eglantine: there sleeps Titania sometime
of the night, lull'd in these
flowers with dances and delight;
and there the snake throws
her enamell'd skin,
weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in."
Now, you can't translate that.
You can translate the
names of the flowers,
you can translate Shakespeare's
ideas and philosophy,
but you can't translate those sounds,
those cadences, the word music.
You can't translate the
Shakespeare of it.
I was overwhelmed by Shakespeare's
language at an early age,
and by the time I was 15 I decided
I was going to be an actor and go
on stage and speak that language.
But it wasn't just the language,
there were other things too.
I was struck by Shakespeare's humanity,
his deep understanding of the workings
of the human mind and heart.
He had an interest in all levels
of society and that often led him
to empathise with the underdogs,
the outcasts who were discriminated
against by society, people like
Othello, the black man, Caliban,
the so-called savage, and Shylock,
the Jewish money lender
in The Merchant of Venice.
All his life, Shylock
has been victimised
by the Christian community,
mocked, reviled, spat on.
And so, when he's asked why he wants
to be revenged on his chief antagonist,
Antonio, Shylock answers, "He
hath disgraced me, and hindered me
of half a million; laughed at my losses,
mocked at my gains, scorned my nation,
thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends,
heated mine enemies;
and what's his reason?
I'm a Jew.
Hath not a Jew eyes?
Hath not a Jew hands,
organs, dimensions,
senses, affections, passions?
Fed with the same food,
hurt with the same weapons,
subject to the same diseases, cured
by the same means, warmed and cooled
by the same winter and
summer, as a Christian is?
If you prick us, do we not bleed?
If you tickle us, do we not laugh?
If you poison us, do we not die?
And if you wrong us,
shall we not revenge?
If we are like you and the rest,
we will resemble you in that.
If a Jew wrong a Christian,
what is his humility?
Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew,
what should his sufferance
be by Christian example?
Why, revenge.
The villainy you teach me, I will
execute, and it shall go hard,
but I will better the instruction."
Another example of Shakespeare's empathy
is seen in the play of Sir Thomas Moore,
which Shakespeare co-authored.
And this piece is remarkable
not just for its content
but because it's the only
page we have surviving
in Shakespeare's own handwriting
and it makes it very special.
And in this piece, Sir Thomas
Moore confronts the rioters
who want all refugees and
strangers removed from England.
"Grant them removed.
And grant that this your noise hath
chid down all the majesty of England;
imagine that you see the wretched
strangers, their babies at their backs
and their poor luggage, plodding to the
ports and coasts for transportation,
and that you sit as kings in your
desires, authority quite silent
by your brawl, and you in ruff of your
opinions clothed; what had you got?
I'll tell you.
You had taught how insolence
and strong hands should prevail,
how order should be quelled;
and by this pattern not one
of you should live an aged man, for
other ruffians as their fancies wrought,
with self same hand, self reasons,
and self right, would shark on you,
and men like ravenous fishes
would feed on one another."
"What country, by the nature of your
error, should give you harbour?"
"Why, you must needs be strangers.
Would you be pleased to find a nation
of such barbarous temper, that,
breaking out in hideous violence,
would not afford you an abode on Earth,
whet their detested knives against
your throats, spurn you like dogs."
"What would you think to be thus used?
This is the strangers' case; and
this your mountainish inhumanity."
Shakespeare asks a lot of serious
questions about power and authority.
He's sometimes regarded as
an apologist for royalty,
but that is a shallow reading.
He was, after all, living in
an age of absolute monarchy
where treason was regarded as the most
serious and severely punished of crimes
so writers had to be careful.
Nevertheless, Shakespeare
often sails close to the wind.
In Richard II, he challenges
the notion of divine right.
Richard is a feeble and arrogant
monarch who believes that God
and his angels will come to his
aid when rebellion threatens.
Well, they don't.
And Richard is forced to abdicate
and face up to his common humanity.
"For God's sake, let us sit upon the
ground and tell sad stories of the death
of kings; how some have been
deposed, some slain in war,
some haunted by the ghosts they have
deposed, some poison'd by their wives,
some sleeping kill'd, all murder'd:
for within the hollow crown
that rounds the mortal temples
of a king keeps death his God
and there the antic sits, scoffing
his state and grinning at his pomp,
allowing him a breath, a little
scene, to monarchize, be fear'd,
and kill with looks, infusing him with
self and vain conceit, as if this flesh
which walls about our life, were brass
impregnable, and humour'd thus comes
at the last and with a little pin bores
through his castle wall,
and farewell king!
Cover your heads and mock not flesh
and blood with solemn reverence:
throw away respect, tradition, form
and ceremonious duty, for you have
but mistook me all this while: I live
with bread like you, taste grief,
feel want, need friends: subjected thus,
how can you say to me, I am a king?"
Authority is challenged
all the way down the line.
It's not just kings and dukes who have
power, but country magistrates as well.
We meet a couple of them in Henry IV.
They don't add much to the story,
but they do add an extra colour
to Shakespeare's portrait of
Mediaeval/Elizabethan England.
Their names are Justice Shallow
and his cousin, Justice Silence.
"Come on, come on, come on, sir.
Give me your hand, sir;
give me your hand, sir:
an early stirrer, by the rood!
And how doth my good cousin Silence?"
"Good morrow, good cousin Shallow."
"And I say, sir, how doth
my cousin, your bedfellow?
And your fairest daughter and
mine, my god-daughter, Ellen?"
"Alas, a black ousel, cousin Shallow!"
"An ousel?"
"She's a [inaudible]."
"Ah, is she?
She's a [inaudible].
By yea and nay, sir.
I dare say my cousin, William,
has become a good scholar.
He's at Oxford still, is he not?"
"Indeed, sir.
To my cost."
"Oh, well, yeah Oxford.
He must then to the Inns
of Court shortly.
I was once of Clement's Inn,
where I think they will
talk of mad Shallow yet."
"You were called 'Lusty
Shallow' then, cousin."
"By the Mass, I was called anything,
and I would have done
anything too, and roundly too.
There was I and little John Doit of
Staffordshire, and black George Barnes,
and Francis Pickbone, and
Will Squele, a Cotswold man.
You had not four such swinge-bucklers
in all the Inns of Court again.
And I may say to you, we knew where
the bona robas were and had the best
of them all at commandment.
And then there was Jack
Falstaff, now Sir John.
He was a boy then and page to
Thomas Mowbray, the Duke of Norfolk.
I sawn him break Scoggin's
head at the court gate,
when he was a crack not thus high;
and the very same day did I fight
with one Sampson Stockfish, a
fruiterer, behind Grey's Inn.
Oh, Jesu, Jesu, the mad
days that I have seen.
And to see how many of me
old acquaintance are dead."
"We shall all follow, cousin."
"Oh, certain, certain;
very sure, very sure.
Oh, yes, death, as the Psalmist
saith, is certain to all.
Oh, yeah, all shall die.
Yes, yeah.
How much is a yoke of
bullocks at Stamford Fair?"
"Truly cousin, I wasn't there."
"Oh, you weren't?
Yeah alright.
Yeah. Yeah, death is certain.
Is old Dooble of your town living yet?"
"Dead, sir."
"Dead? Oh, but he was only --
-- I suppose he would be.
Yeah. Dead!
Oh. Oh, he drew a good bow.
He shot a fine shoot.
Oh, John o'Gaunt loved him well,
and betted much money on his head.
Dead!
How much is a flock of ewes now?"
"Thereafter as they be, a good flock
of ewes might cost you 10 pounds."
"Ten? Ten pounds.
[inaudible] oh.
And is old Dooble dead?"
"Dead, sir."
"Oh."
[ Sighing ]
Through these two old magistrates
we meet Sir John Falstaff,
one of Shakespeare's
greatest characters.
Falstaff is a liar and
a thief and a coward,
but he's also a great life force full of
wits and humour and a canny pragmatism.
When he's called upon to fight for
king and country, Falstaff decides
that discretion is the
better part of the valour.
"[inaudible] honour pricks me on.
Yea, but what if honour
pricks me off when I come on?
What then?
Can honour set to an arm?
No. Or a leg?
No. Or take away the grief of a wound?
No. Oh. Honour hath no
skill in surgery, then?
No. What is honour?
A word. And what is in that word honour?
Air. That is a trim reckoning.
Who hath it?
He that died on Wednesday.
Doth he hear it?
No. Doth he feel it?
No. 'Tis insensible, then?
Yea, to the dead.
Ah, but will it not live
with the living?
No. Detraction will not suffer it.
Well then, I'll none of it.
Honour is merely words on a tombstone.
And so ends my catechism."
We've been going through a pretty
tough time this last six months
or so with COVID-19.
It's been a time of great uncertainty.
I've had my bouts of
depression and anxiety,
which I'm assured is quite normal.
But across society at large we have
seen an increase in alcoholism,
domestic violence, and suicide.
In 1942, the French philosopher
Albert Camus wrote,
"There is only one really
serious philosophical question
and that is suicide.
Judging whether life is or
is not worth living amounts
to answering the fundamental
question of philosophy."
Four-hundred years earlier,
Hamlet said the same thing.
"To be or not to be.
That is the question."
When life seems meaningless
and devoid of purpose,
is suicide the only rationale response?
What did Camus decide?
What does Hamlet decide?
And what does Shakespeare
think about it?
Those are some of the issues I'll be
looking at in One Man in His Time.
Some people will say, but we can't know
what Shakespeare thought because he's
so ambivalent and so
hidden inside his works,
but I think that all great
art is autobiographical.
It moves us because it reveals something
so intimate, so profoundly secret,
that we are grateful for the
integrity and the honesty.
And some people say, well, we don't
know what Shakespeare was like.
We don't know what he thought.
But I think we know everything
about Shakespeare.
We know everything that he saw,
heard, thought, loved, hated,
it's all there in the
plays and the sonnets.
But then, of course, Shakespeare
was an actor, a fabulist.
So, it's usually very hard to
decide when it's Shakespeare talking
and when it's one of his
characters because he was
so deeply immersed in them.
So, what about his last
play, The Tempest?
Is that autobiographical?
How could it be otherwise?
Consider, a great magician is leaving
his magic island and giving up his art.
He releases his creative spirit, Ariel.
He confronts his dark side, Caliban.
He forgives his enemies, bequeaths all
to his children, and resigns himself
to retirement, old age, and death.
As an actor, Shakespeare was famous for
playing the noble roles in his plays,
the kings and dukes and so on.
So, I think it's more-than-likely that
he played the role of Prospero himself.
What better way of saying
farewell to his audience?
"Our revels now are ended.
These our actors, as I foretold
you, were all spirits and are melted
into air, into thin air: and, like
the baseless fabric of this vision,
the cloud-capp'd towers, the
gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples,
the great globe itself, yea, all
which it inherit, shall dissolve and,
like this insubstantial pageant
faded, leave not a rack behind.
We are such stuff as dreams are made on,
and our little life is
rounded with a sleep."
