Shakespeare Magazine 07

At last! A magazine with all the Will in the world 

SHAKESPEARE 

FREE 

Issue 7 

Great 

Shakespeare 

Actors 

Kenneth Branagh is the 

latest in a 400-year line of 

Shakespeare Superstars 

Antony Sher 

His new book is a 

love letter to Falstaff, 

Stratford and Shakespeare 

From Russia 

with love 

David Tennant superfans make 

a new edition of Richard II 

My 


Behind the scenes of the 

stellar documentary series 

Plus! 

Shakespeare in Turkey 

As You Like It 

The Essex Plot 

Shakespearean Opera

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Literary Fiction Book Review 

Published in the USA by Ram Press 

Available in paperback, Kindle, Audible Audio, and iTunes Editions 

On sale at Amazon.com, B&N, Books-A-Million, Indie Bound, et al

Welcome 

Welcome 

to Issue 7 of Shakespeare Magazine 

Photo: David Hammonds 

For many of us, the reason we get interested in 

Shakespeare in the first place is because of actors. 

So it was only a matter of time before we ran an issue 

with the theme of Great Shakespeare Actors. 

As it happens, the venerable Stanley Wells has just published a book 

with that very title, so I hopped on a train to Stratford-upon-Avon to 

ask him what it really takes to rank among the very best. 

Not only that, I had the pleasure of interviewing Antony Sher, one 

of very few living actors – our cover star Kenneth Branagh is another – 

who feature in Stanley’s book. Antony told me about his experience of 

playing the mighty role of Falstaff, as documented in his warm-hearted 

and witty memoir Year of the Fat Knight. 

In addition, I had an enthralling, often hilarious conversation with 

Richard Denton, producer of the My Shakespeare TV series (which 

is fronted by A-List actors like Kim Cattrall, Hugh Bonneville and 

Morgan Freeman). 

This issue also features some wonderful contributions by writers 

from the UK, America, Turkey and Russia. Each article has enhanced 

my understanding of Shakespeare and brought a smile to my face – I 

hope this is the case for you too. 

As always, Shakespeare Magazine is completely free. Drop me a 

line via shakespearemag@outlook.com if you’d like to advertise, make a 

donation, or just say hello. 

Enjoy your magazine, 

Pat Reid, Founder & Editor 

SHAKESPEARE magazine 3

At last! A magazine with all the Will in the world 

SHAKESPEARE 

FREE 

Issue 7 

Antony Sher 

Why his new book is a 

love letter to Falstaff, 

Stratford and Shakespeare 

Great 


actors 

Stanley Wells tells us 

what it takes to make 

a Shakespeare superstar 

From Russia 

with love 

David Tennant fans create 

their own edition of Richard II 

My 


Behind the scenes of the 

stellar documentary series 

Contents 

Plus! 

Shakespeare in Turkey 



Shakespearean Opera 

Shakespeare Magazine 

Issue Seven 

June 2015 

Founder & Editor 

Pat Reid 

Art Editor 

Paul McIntyre 

Staff Writers 

Brooke Thomas (UK) 

Mary Finch (US) 

Contributors 

Francis RTM Boyle 

Julia Fedotova 

Rebecca Franks 

Anastasia Koroleva 

Cansu Kutlualp 

Maryna Reznikova 

Anna Ryzhova 

Chief Photographer 

Piper Williams 

Thank You 

Mrs Mary Reid 

Mr Peter Robinson 

Ms Laura Pachkowski 

Master Thomas Xavier Reid 

Web Design 

David Hammonds 

Contact Us 

shakespearemag@outlook.com 

Facebook 

facebook.com/ShakespeareMagazine 

Twitter 

@UKShakespeare 

Website 

www.shakespearemagazine.com 

The Fat Knight Rises 6 

Antony Sher tells us all about Year of the Fat Knight, his 

elegantly-written memoir of playing Shakespeare’s Falstaff. 

“The actors are at hand...” 12 

Voice. Presence. Imagination… Stanley Wells tells us 

what it takes to become a Great Shakespeare Actor. 

 

4 SHAKESPEARE magazine

Contents 

The Remaking 

of Richard 16 

How a group of David Tennant 

fans crafted a truly original tribute 

to their Shakespeare hero. 

 

Small screen 

Shakespeare 22 

Produced by Richard Denton 

and fronted by A-List actors, 

My Shakespeare is Top of the Docs. 

 

Lost in 

Arden 30 

British actress Zoe Waites heads 

to the USA to tackle one of 

Shakespeare’s great roles: Rosalind. 

 

“Sweet airs, that 

give delight...” 36 

This pocket guide to Shakespeare’s 

Greatest Opera Hits will surely 

be music to your ears… 

 

Eastern 

promise 38 

What has Shakespeare done to 

Turkey? (And what has Turkey 

done to Shakespeare?) 

 


and sedition 42 

Unravelling the tangled web 

that links Shakespeare to the 

ill-fated Essex Plot of 1601. 

 


Anthony Sher 


Anthony Sher 

 

Left: Antony Sher 

as Falstaff. Right: 

 

In one of the landmark UK 

Shakespeare productions 

of recent years, Gregory 

Doran directed his partner 

Sir Antony Sher as Falstaff 

in the RSC’s Henry IV Parts 

1 and 2. The actor’s diaries 

and drawings have now been 

published as Year of the Fat 

Knight, a revealing and highly 

entertaining account of an 

epic theatrical adventure. 

Interview by Pat Reid 

Illustrations by Sir Antony Sher 

The Fat 

Knight Rises 


Anthony Sher 

Reading Year of the Fat Knight, 

what really comes across is 

the scale of the challenge. It’s 

practically the last page before you 

allow yourself to say ‘I’ve done it. 

Falstaff is mine’. 

“Falstaff was simply not a part I’d ever dreamed 

of playing. It just wasn’t on the radar, so I had 

an enormous mental challenge to start off, to 

decide whether I should try for it. And once I 

had, at every stage I was still dealing with the 

challenge: was I succeeding or wasn’t I? I think 

long before the last page I knew it was okay, I 

knew I was doing it and it was going to work, 

but it certainly took a very long time.” 

I’m taken aback by the sheer 

amount of preparation you did 

– academic research, historical, 

physical, looking at alcoholism – 

before we even get to rehearsals. 

And you’re drawing and sketching 

out your thoughts all the time 

as well as writing about it. Is this 

normal when you approach a 

Shakespeare role? 

“There are certain parts where really all you 

need to do is bring your heart and soul to it. 

Research isn’t really going to make a lot of 

difference. For example, the part I’m playing 

at the moment, Willy Loman in Death of a 

Salesmen. I suppose I could have done a lot 

of research into being a travelling salesman in 

the ’40s in America. But it wouldn’t really have 

affected the playing of the role because it’s all 

about the man’s humanity, and you just have 

to bring your own humanity to that. 

But certain parts – and Falstaff was certainly 

one – need an awful lot of extra work.” 

“The plays are a love letter 

to an earlier England. Not 

Henry IV’s England, but 

Shakespeare’s England” 

Mistress Quickly 

(Paola Dionisotti) 

and Falstaff 

(Antony Sher). 

I was intrigued by some of the 

Falstaffs that didn’t make it to 

the stage. This idea of playing 

him as a Vietnam veteran... Is 

there a moment when you decide 

something is absolutely wrong and 

you’re not going to proceed with it? 

“Good ideas and bad ideas are sometimes quite 

close together and it’s difficult to tell them 

apart. The classic example of that for me was 

when I played Richard III back in 1984 for the 

RSC, and there was this idea to play him on 

crutches. It was really quite difficult to work 

out whether that was a very good or a very 

bad idea. And the experimentation continued 

through rehearsals, in consultation with the 

director and the designer about whether these 

crutches were going to work. I think that’s a 

healthy part of the creative process, that you 

can discuss or try out certain things and say 


Anthony Sher 

‘No, that isn’t going to work’ or ‘Yes, this is a 

bit dangerous, a bit risky, but it could work, so 

let’s keep with it. 

“The Falstaff as a Vietnam vet was from 

that period when Greg and I were considering 

whether one could do a modern dress 

production of the Henrys. And we’ve come to 

the conclusion that you can’t, or that we can’t. 

The plays are like a love letter to an earlier 

England. As Greg points out, it’s not Henry 

IV’s England, it’s Elizabethan England, it’s 

when Shakespeare was writing, and that’s what 

we ended up embracing and doing.” 

Difficult to talk about Falstaff 

without mentioning the F-word: 

fat. Having to wear a body suit 

Antony Sher’s 

Falstaff in full 

 

and having to get into that mind 

space was one of the challenges, 

especially with back pain as well. 

“Almost all Falstaffs wear a fat suit. Even Orson 

Welles, who was a very large man. In his film 

about Falstaff, Chimes at Midnight, I believe 

even he wore padding. Maybe this was a kind 

of vanity on his part that he wasn’t fat enough. 

But it’s certainly pretty regular for Falstaffs to 

have to wear what I prefer to call a body suit. 

I suppose it depends how they’re made. They 

could be made very very lightweight so that 

they wouldn’t be that burdensome, but in 

discussions with the designer, Stephen Brimson 

Lewis, he pointed out that if the fat suit was 

to work well it did need to be weighted in 

different sections so that it moved more like 

our bodies do, and so that did create a weight 

for it. And then of course Falstaff has to wear 

armour in the Shrewsbury battle sequences, so 

the weight was increased. And it was just an 

ongoing thing for me. After consulting with 

an orthopaedic specialist about my back we 

did lessen the weight of the fat suit but it was 

still weighted to some extent and it leads to 

a big discomfort factor in the performance. I 

sweated a great deal in every performance, just 

because you’re carrying this weight round with 

you, and you get very tired, you really have to 

sit down between scenes. There was always a 

special chair on either side of the stage which 

was mine.” 

And to complicate matters you 

then started to lose weight... 

“One of the great ironies is I had inadvertently 

discovered something called the Falstaff diet. 

If you wear a fat suit – and there’s the added 

pressure of course of playing this huge and 

famous part – you start to lose weight rapidly. 

But during about a year of playing it I stopped 

losing weight and I was quite surprised by how 

the body just adjusted to this new situation it 

was in.” 

The book’s very funny. The tale of 

breaking wind on a child minder 

made me laugh so hard I thought I 

was going to rupture something. 


Anthony Sher 

“Theatre is hard and one can get very serious 

about it, and yet in reality there’s also a lot of 

laughter in rehearsals and backstage all the 

time and it’s important to catch that.” 

You seem intensely interested in 

everyone else in the production. 

You’re always doing sketches of 

them, in pictures and also in words. 

The descriptions of the activity, 

the production process and the 

armies of personnel are very vivid. 

“It’s important that readers understand the 

amount of people that go into a production. 

Audiences only ever see the people who 

appear on stage, the actors, but there is a vast 

amount of people behind the scenes. From 

stage management and stage crew to people in 

offices. It’s a huge organisation, the RSC, with 

people working on the production, promoting 

it, selling tickets. It’s a massive operation.” 

Falstaff jests with 

princely partnerin-crime 

Hal 

(Alex Hassell). 

From Falstaff to Willy Loman… 

Do you kind of wipe yourself clean 

between roles, or do you carry 

some of Falstaff over with you? 

“No, there’s no part that overlaps with another 

part, I’ve never known that to happen. A play 

or a part comes to an end and that’s it, it’s put 

away. Although in this case we are reviving 

the Henrys later this year, so not entirely put 

away, but normally it is. Now, as it happens, 

Falstaff and Willy Loman have something in 

common which is that they’re both fantasists. 

Some of the time they both live in their minds, 

in a fantasy world. But even that aspect is very 

different in the two plays. 

“Interestingly Alex Hassell who played Hal 

in the Henrys, is playing my son Biff in Death 

of a Salesman, and Willy and Biff have a very 

intense relationship. But it’s much closer to 

Hal’s relationship with his real father, the King, 

Henry IV than it is to his surrogate father 

Falstaff.” 

You mentioned that the Henrys 

are a love letter to Shakespeare’s 

England. Your book reads like a 

love letter to Greg, to Stratford, 

and also to Shakespeare 

himself. You never lose sight of 

Shakespeare all the way through it. 

“I do feel an enormous affection, love for the 

Royal Shakespeare Company. It’s where I’ve 

spent most of my career, it’s been the most 

wonderfully rich experience. I’ve been so lucky 

to have been playing all these great Shakespeare 

parts – and other classical parts, because the 

RSC does Jacobean playwrights as well. And 

the way things work, my partner Greg actually 

ended up becoming the Artistic Director of 

the company. It’s a beautiful completion of the 

circle. The company I love is now run by the 

person that I love.” 

I have to ask you about Henry 

IV Part 2. It must have been like 

climbing Mount Everest to find 

there’s another mountain that 

you’ve got to climb next. And 

Part 2 is a famously difficult play. 


Anthony Sher 

“It is a different and much more difficult play 

and it took much harder work to make it 

work. I think in the end we did make it work 

and I feel proud of how we fought through 

that problem and, I think, solved it. But I 

think the times when Part 2 really works at 

its best is when we played the double days, 

we played Part 1 and Part 2 and you were 

aware that the same audience would stay for 

the whole marathon. When you go the whole 

distance with the two plays, when you get the 

whole story told, Part 2 really comes into its 

own. The souring of things that goes on in 

Part 2 becomes a much sadder, much more 

melancholy play. 

“And of course the journey that Hal and 

Falstaff go on through the two plays is a 

remarkable thing, that they start Part 1 as the 

absolute best of buddies and they end Part 

2 with Hal actually banishing Falstaff. It’s 

an extraordinary and wonderful and painful 

journey to go on, both for the actors and for 

the audience.” 

Clearly a very powerful bond 

developed with Alex Hassell 

when you were doing the Henrys. 

“There are certain relationships in certain 

plays where you really strike lucky. At the 

moment in Death of a Salesman it’s Harriet 

Walter who I’d already had a fantastically 

good time with when we played Macbeth. 

You just get that knowing one another so well 

in the way that husbands and wives do. The 

Falstaff and Hal relationship is another one of 

those relationships where if you really have a 

chemistry with the other actor you sort of get 

things for free, as it were, that the audience can 

sense and feel even if they can’t fully explain. 

There’s something happening on stage between 

the two actors that is particularly rich. 

“It was a great discovery one day in 

rehearsals when Alex and I discovered that in 

the sections where the two characters insult 

one another that it’s a kind of game and they 

enjoy it, and the characters would make one 

another laugh by being as insulting as possible. 

And that’s something you can only discover 

with an actor you’re really cooking with.” 

“Falstaff and Willy Loman 

have something in common 

in that they’re both fantasists. 

But they’re very different” 

You are one of very few living 

actors included in the new Stanley 

Wells book Great Shakespeare 

Actors – congratulations! 

“Oh, thank you, I’ll look forward to looking 

at that, because Stanley Wells has been a great 

influence here at the RSC, on the board and as 

an advisor. To have one of the world’s leading 

Shakespeare scholars living locally here in 

Stratford and being so available to the RSC has 

been a very rich part of our history.” 

Have you thought about what will 

be your next Shakespeare role? 

“We have planned to do King Lear next year 

with Greg directing, here at Stratford. Beyond 

that, I don’t think there’s any left that I can 

play. I greatly regret that I never did Hamlet. It 

was purely my own fault. I grew up believing 

Hamlet had to be a tall, blonde, handsome 

character like in Olivier’s film and I sort of 

scuppered myself by sticking to that idea. And 

then of course other actors like Simon Russell 

Beale have proved that it doesn’t matter what 

Hamlet looks like, he can be anything. So I’m 

sorry I was so stupid about that.” 

The blood, sweat and tears of the 

Henrys… Has it all been worth it? 

“Absolutely yes. It could so easily have not been 

me, so I’m just enormously grateful. I would 

not have missed this experience for the world.” 

 

Year of the Fat Knight is available 

from Nick Hern Books priced £16.99 


Great Shakespeare Actors 

“The 

actors 

are 

at hand…” 

Covering four centuries of thespian excellence from Richard 

Burbage to Kenneth Branagh, Great Shakespeare Actors is the 

latest book by pre-eminent Shakespeare scholar Stanley Wells. 

Shakespeare Magazine visited the author in Stratford-upon-Avon 

 


The book had its origins in your 

writing for The Stage. Is there 

much of yourself in there? 

“It draws a lot on personal memory – I’ve been 

going to see Shakespeare for well over 60 years 

and I’ve seen some of the great Shakespeare 

actors myself. The earliest one in the book 

chronologically that I saw is Edith Evans. 

Donald Wolfit I saw. And of course Gielgud, 

Olivier, Ralph Richardson, Peggy Ashcroft, 

right through to all the moderns – Ken 

Branagh and Simon Russell Beale.” 

What kind of source material did 

you use for the book? 

“I’ve drawn heavily on actors’ biographies – 

which are very patchy, actually. There are some 

very good ones, like Alan Strachan’s of Michael 

Redgrave, for example, and Jonathan Croall 

has done good ones of Gielgud and Sybil 

Thorndike. So I’ve drawn on those especially 

for the earlier actors, like Helen Faucit, for 

example, or Ira Aldridge or Edmund Kean, 

some of the really great figures of the past. 

“But also I’ve been able to draw on the 

resources here at the Shakespeare Centre 

in Stratford-upon-Avon. The Shakespeare 

Birthplace Trust has cuttings books of reviews 

which go back a long way, so for the actors 

who’ve appeared at Stratford I’ve used those. 

There’s a lot of Michael Billington in the book, 

for example, and the earlier JC Trewin, who 

wrote for the Birmingham Evening Post, was a 

very good Shakespearean.” 


Great Shakespeare Actors 

 

Above: Author and 

Shakespeare authority 

Stanley Wells. 

Left: Kenneth Branagh’s is 

 

Were there any actors who went 

up or down in your estimation? 

“Yes, some people went out altogether, I’m 

afraid. I’ll tell you one, because he’s not a living 

actor… The American Edwin Forrest, I did 

some work on, I thought hard about him. But 

after reading more I began to feel he was just an 

old barnstormer and that he didn’t really deserve 

to be counted along with Edwin Booth who 

was his contemporary, who was a much more 

seriously good actor. 

“Charles Laughton was a bit of a dicey one, 

actually. He wasn’t a good verse speaker and one 

review of his early season at the Old Vic said 

‘Mr Laughton would be a great actor if he could 

keep his mouth shut’, which I thought was the 

ultimate insult. But he did an Angelo which was 

obviously very fine, he did a Macbeth which I 

think was probably patchy but great. I saw him 

here in Stratford when he did Lear not very 

well. But he did a very good performance as 

Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. So 

he got in, in the end.” 

Is there an actor inside you? 

Is that a different path you 

could have taken? 

“All teachers are failed actors, I think, ha ha. 

No, I haven’t got the temperament to act. 

I hope I have an actor somewhere within my 

head because in writing about Shakespeare – 

and especially editing Shakespeare – one does 

need to be very conscious of the actorliness 

of the texts, of the fact that Shakespeare 


Great Shakespeare Actors 

Above: The “technically 

perfect” Judi Dench. 

Right: Ian McKellen is 

“a questing actor with 

a strong improvisatory 

streak”. 

himself was an actor. My first entry is on ‘Was 

Shakespeare the first great Shakespeare actor?’ 

And the answer is no, but I thought it was a 

question worth asking.” 

But you did tread the boards 

at the Globe last year… 

“That was just a bit of fun. Patrick 

Spottiswoode, Director of Education at the 

Globe, asked me to read the part of Old 

Knowell in Ben Jonson’s Every Man in His 

Humour in their series Read Not Dead, where 

you don’t memorise the role, you read it. And 

I agreed to do it. It was rather more arduous 

than I had expected it to be because it was a 

whole-day event. And also I was a bit surprised 

when I got there and looked around because 

some of these were rather eminent actors. 

However I think I held my own…” 

Is there one figure from the whole 

four centuries who you think is the 

most pivotal? Perhaps one who is 

not obvious… 

“The greatest? I think the obvious ones 

probably are the greatest. Edmund Kean I’d 

love to have seen. There was that famous 

remark about him by Coleridge: ‘seeing him 

act Shakespeare was like reading Shakespeare 

by flashes of lightning’. It’s not entirely a 

compliment, it implies that there wasn’t a 

degree of continuity within the characters that 

he played. But I’m sure he was a terrifically 

exciting actor. The only one I can compare 


Great Shakespeare Actors 

him with in that way is Laurence Olivier, 

whom I did see. And I would say that the 

greatest performance I’ve seen myself is 

Laurence Olivier as Coriolanus here in 1959, 

when Edith Evans was also fine as Volumnia. 

She was a little bit old for the role but she gave 

a great performance too.” 

Tell us about some of your 

personal favourites. 

“I’ve been lucky to see and indeed to know 

some of the great actors. Donald Sinden was 

a friend. One who there’s a rather sad story 

about is Richard Pasco who died not long ago. 

He lived not far from here, I talked to him a 

lot when he was here, and I did talks with him 

and Ian Richardson, especially when they were 

playing Richard II, when they were alternating 

the roles of Richard and Bolingbroke in John 

Barton’s great production here. 

“I knew that Dickie had Alzheimer’s and I 

happened to see his wife Barbara Leigh-Hunt, 

herself a very fine Shakespeare performer, and 

I said ‘I’ve just written an essay about him’. She 

said could she read it, so I sent her the book. 

After he died she told me that she read the 

essay to him twice. She said that it moved him 

to tears. He wasn’t able to remember a word of 

it an hour afterwards, but I was so pleased that 

I had both written it and sent it to him.” 

You mentioned that some actors 

would be great if they kept their 

mouths shut. How does it divide 

between the physicality, the voice 

and other things? 

“What are the qualities that go towards 

making a great Shakespeare actor? They 

include presence, the ability to stand still, the 

ability to be silent, to listen silently, the ability 

to speak eloquently, movement, gesture are 

all important. But ultimately there’s a quality 

which is indefinable and which sometimes 

defies the rules. Henry Irving was clearly a 

very great actor, but he had a terrible voice 

and his diction was very eccentric. There are 

a lot of rather funny remarks that I quote 

about Irving’s diction, from Henry James for 

example. Even Ellen Terry, his partner – in 

acting and in real life too – in her wonderful 

“Coleridge said that seeing 

Kean act Shakespeare was 

like reading Shakespeare 

by flashes of lightning” 

book of memoirs has a transcript of an 

American journalist’s attempt to transcribe 

Irving’s very eccentric pronunciation. 

“So ultimately there’s a quality which you 

can’t define, a quality of genius, the quality 

of responding to the language. In our own 

time Judi Dench has it, for example. She is 

somebody who is more technically perfect and 

adept than some of the others. There’s also 

this quality of imagination, the ability to think 

yourself into a role. 

“And yet there’s a lovely quotation from 

Donald Sinden about how when he was 

playing Malvolio he had both to be inhabiting 

the character but at the same time to be 

standing aside from the character. He said that 

if at any point he actually became Malvolio he 

lost control over the audience. And I think that 

is a good definition of the way that an actor 

has to be both in and out of the part at the 

same time.” 

It must have been hard to make 

your final selection… 

“Because of the difficulty of choosing, among 

living actors especially, I’ve dedicated the book 

‘to all the great Shakespeare actors who are not 

in this book’, which I hope is tactful…” 

 

Great Shakespeare Actors by Stanley Wells 

is available from Oxford University Press, 

priced £16.99 

William Shakespeare: A Very Short 

Introduction by Stanley Wells is also available 

from Oxford University Press, priced £7.99 


Richard II 

For some Shakespeare fans, getting a poster or an autograph is an adequate 

souvenir of their favourite stage production. This group of David Tennant 

fans in Moscow, however, were slightly more ambitious. They decided to 

create their own bespoke hardcover edition of Richard II…. 

Words by Anastasia Koroleva. Translated into English by Maryna Reznikova and Julia Fedotova. 

Illustrations by Anna Ryzhova 

The 

Remaking 

of 

Richard 


Richard II 

David Tennant’s 

Richard II and his 

hollow crown. 


Richard II 

“As luck would have it, a passer-by took a photo 

at the moment I was passing the book to David” 

Two years ago, Gregory Doran, the Artistic 

Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, 

put on Shakespeare’s Richard II in Stratfordupon-Avon 

with David Tennant in the title 

role. In January 2014 the filmed performance 

was shown in Russian cinemas. 

This broadened the audience of the 

production, as it became available to thousands 

of people, and then tens of thousands more 

when the DVD was released in May. This 

made it possible to start our project. While 

many of us actually travelled to the UK from 

Russia especially to see the play, without the 

video our book project would not have gained 

such support. 

It all started with a post on the Russian 

social network VKontakte on 18 May 2014 

in which artist Anna Ryzhova published 

her drawings inspired by the production of 

Richard II. 

I posted a comment saying it would be 

great to publish Shakespeare’s play with those 

drawings and the translated text edited by 

us. My idea was accepted with enthusiasm 

The book’s 

illustrations are 

rich in symbolism. 

and it immediately set the wheels in motion. 

We opened a bank account specifically for 

the project, calculated the potential expenses 

and started to raise money for layout and 

printing. From the very start the project was 

crowdfunded and purely non-profit. 

We had to take English and Russian 

texts and edit them. We chose not simply to 

publish a parallel version of the play in the 

two languages, but also to mark the parts 

which had been omitted from the original 

play by Gregory Doran in his production. 

This was complicated by the fact that the text 

had to be literally ‘parallel’ – that is, the same 

lines had to be placed on the same level. And 

since Russian translation of the line is almost 

always longer, this was not an easy task. It was 

necessary to watch the recording very carefully 

(and rewatch and rewatch and rewatch) and 

meticulously mark them in the text. 

The Russian translation of Richard II by 

A. Kurosheva was the most precise available, 

but for some lines we needed more. We had 

a lot to rack our brains about, and sometimes 


Richard II 

The team set 

out to make an 

artefact that was 

both beautiful 

and educational. 


Richard II 

it took months to find a worthy translation 

equivalent. 

The book also contains commentaries and 

notes. We gathered them from existing Russian 

publications and wrote a couple on our own. 

A remarkable foreword was written by 

Natalia Fomintseva, who did tremendous work 

researching literary sources. Her sophisticated 

text intertwines a review of Gregory Doran’s 

production with a concise version of Richard 

II’s real life. We translated the foreword into 

English (our thanks to Natalia Koroeva and 

Maryna Reznikova). The book doesn’t include 

the foreword in English, but we sent it to 

everybody interested, and also passed it on to 

Gregory Doran, the RSC and David Tennant. 

Artist Anna Ryzhova worked on the 

drawings, and this also turned out to be 

a tricky task. Since from the very start we 

planned to publish not only a digital edition, 

but also a hardcover book, we had to figure 

out how the illustrations would look on paper 

– because they were originally made on music 

paper. We went to a printing house to see 

for ourselves, and eventually the music paper 

version had to be rejected. As a result, all the 

drawings, even those that had been sketched, 

were made from scratch. 

We chose to print the half-title pages (a 

half-title is a page which opens a chapter or 

Holding the mirror 

up to David Tennant’s 

Richard II. 

part of a book), end leaves and cover in colour. 

The other drawings are black and white with 

one or two colours added. 

Although we decided not to go with a 

universally recognised crowdfunder platform 

like Kickstarter, we were able to raise the 

money without incident. Thank you to all the 

members who have trusted us. We remind you 

once again that the project was crowdfunded, 

the organisers have not earned a penny, and all 

the money raised went towards printing and 

postage costs. 

The book happily reached many 

different countries and we received dozens of 

enthusiastic comments. 

“The books arrived already!!! I did not expect 

them to be here SO fast! They look wonderful 

and I am so impressed with your work. 

I am a typesetter and my family publishes 

magazines, so my daily life is about printing 

and preparing stuff to be printed. Therefore 

I know for real how good your book is – not 

just from a fan-view. I thank you again very 

much for allowing me to get these two copies. 

It means a lot to me to have them.” 

– Marion, Germany 

“I can’t believe when I saw the book at 

first because it’s much better than what I 


“A remarkable foreword to the book was written 

by Natalia Fomintseva who did tremendous 

work researching literary sources” 

Richard II 

expected! Really awesome, magnificent and 

I’m gonna love it! I can see the efforts of you 

and your team put into in everywhere. Such a 

masterpiece.” – Yaewon, Korea 

“The beautiful book arrived in Colorado on 

11 February 2015. I can’t wait to sit down 

and really go through it!!! Great job to all 

involved!!!” – Sue, Colorado, USA 

And yet Gregory Doran and David 

Tennant’s own words became the best 

recognition for us. On 12 January 2015 

David was supposed to host a live broadcast 

on Absolute Radio. I went to London, having 

From Russia with 

Shakespeare Love… 

taken three copies of the book – for Gregory 

Doran, RSC’s archives and, naturally, Mr 

Tennant himself. I was going to pass David his 

copy after the show, while the other two were 

to be left at the RSC’s London office. 

David kindly spared a minute after the live 

broadcast to sign autographs, and that was 

when he was handed his copy of the book. 

He stared at the book cover in roundeyed 

wonder, literally, and a sincere “Oh my 

goodness!” slipped out. “From Russia?” he 

asked again in amazement, as if he found it 

hard to believe it had been made in Russia. 

“Is it for ME?” David asked. “Or do you want 

me to sign it?” As luck would have it, a passerby 

took a photo at the exact moment I was 

passing the book to David. 

It was not the end of the story. On 15 

February the What’s On Stage Awards was 

held in London, and I attended. David 

Tennant had been nominated for Best Actor 

for his part in Richard II, and Gregory Doran 

for Best Direction. As you’ll know, David won. 

And I was exceptionally lucky to have a chat 

with Gregory and David before the start of the 

show. Gregory called the book “extraordinary”, 

while David’s epithet was “amazing”. This is 

the best reward we could hope to receive. 

FAST FACTS 

Five months of work in our 

spare time, on weekends, on 

vacation, and often at night. 

More than 30 illustrations. 

220 pages of Russian and 

English text. 

Raised 193,000 RUB (about 

$4,000) to print 130 copies. 

Over 125 people from Russia, 

Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, 

Germany, USA, Great Britain 

and Korea participated. 

The copies, fresh from print, 

weighed 86 kilos. 

The books were sent to 

owners in 50 cities around 

the world. 

Director Gregory Doran and 

actor David Tennant each 

received a copy as well. 

 

Anastasia and her friends are now working on a 

new edition of Hamlet (based on Gregory Doran’s 

2008 RSC production starring David Tennant). 

You can enjoy the digital version of their Richard 

II book here: http://issuu.com/anastasiako/ 

docs/richard_ii._the_book 


My Shakespeare 

Veteran documentary maker 

Richard Denton wanted 

to make a series that, like 

himelf, was evangelical 

about the Bard. The result 

was My Shakespeare (titled 

Shakespeare Uncovered in 

the USA). Smart, accessible, 

and fronted by A-List actors, 

it’s a TV triumph… 



“I remember telling 

my schoolteacher 

‘I don’t buy that 

Shakespeare’s any 

better than anybody 

else, it’s just you lot 

saying he is’” 

Above: 

Documentary 

maker and Bard 

Evangelist 

Richard Denton. 

Left: Morgan 

Freeman 

presented the 

episode on The 

Taming of the 

Shrew. 

How did this project begin for you? 

“It began about five years ago when I was 

listening to a programme about King Lear on 

the radio, and I just went ‘God, we should do 

documentaries about every single play. Why 

hasn’t anybody ever done that? You know the 

old Prefaces to Shakespeare books by Granville 

Barker? Why not do it on television?’ So I 

started putting that together as a project, 

originally with the intention of covering 

all 37, but realising that would probably 

be impossible. I came up with a project 

to do about 20, and I went initially to the 

Americans, to PBS, WNET in America, 

and they said ‘Yeah, you got me at Prefaces’. 

So that was easy, they were game. And then it 

took me two-and-a-half years to persuade the 

BBC to do it.” [laughs] 

“That’s been the weird part of the journey, 

I suppose. The huge enthusiasm of the 

transatlantic and world audience for these 

My Shakespeare 

 

films, and the relative indifference to them in 

the UK. It’s very, very odd. When the BBC 

took the first series they then rather reluctantly 

put them out at obscure times. I remember 

one of the reviewers saying ‘What custard 

brain at the BBC decided to transmit this 

gem at ten past eleven on a Tuesday?’ So it 

was something of a nightmare. And then they 

didn’t want to have another series, they only 

wanted the first six. So then Sky Arts took on 

the second six, but obviously there’s a limit to 

how far their budgets go… 

“And to be honest with you, I don’t think 

it’s got a particularly large audience in the UK. 

It’s got a very nice audience in America and – 

I will say this – the people who did watch it 

in the UK were hugely enthusiastic about it. 

It’s separated out a group of people and given 

them something they’ve absolutely loved, 

but it’s not as large a group as we had hoped 

originally. 



How would you describe the 

programme’s format? 

“Basically the idea was we would take a play, 

we would find a presenter. It wasn’t necessarily 

going to be an actor but the easiest and most 

obvious thing was to take either an actor or 

director – who either knew it or wanted to 

know it, had an enthusiasm for it – and then 

investigate… Why did Shakespeare write it? 

Where did he get it from, since very few of his 

stories are original? How was it when it was 

first shown? What’s happened to it since?” 

What was behind your personal 

enthusiasm for Shakespeare? 

“I studied English and American Literature 

when I was at university, I went to Stratford 

when I was at school. I remember telling my 

schoolteacher ‘I don’t buy that Shakespeare’s 

any better than anybody else, it’s just you lot 

saying he is’. Then he made me read Beaumont 

and Fletcher, and I went ‘Oh yeah, you’re 

Derek Jacobi 

presented the 

episode on 

Richard II. 

right. He’s much better, isn’t he? Sorry! Beg 

your pardon…’ 

“But as I’ve got older I suppose my passion 

has grown for it. I feel almost evangelical 

about it. It’s the most extraordinary repository 

of wisdom about humanity ever written. 

It’s vastly entertaining. I challenge you to 

go to the Globe and see a Shakespeare play 

– even a tragedy – and not just be hugely 

entertained by it. It’s much less difficult than it 

seems – although initially it seems incredibly 

difficult, and I do understand that. And I feel 

passionately that everybody should know this 

stuff. And the world would be a better place if 

we all did.” 

You’ve basically just summed 

up the manifesto of Shakespeare 

Magazine. 

“Absolutely!” 

The format you’ve come up with 

works like a dream, especially 

having these great talents who are 

also household names fronting the 

programme. Can you tell me about 

some of the personalities involved? 

“Oddly enough, it’s proved much more 

difficult to get them than you would think. 

And the reason, I think, is that a lot of 

actors feel terribly self-conscious about being 

themselves, and they don’t want to be accused 

of being luvvies. I constantly had to reassure 

them ‘I’m not going to have you [adopts 

mournful thespian voice] emoting about how 

moving and how difficult it is. We’re going to 

have fun. We’re going to take it seriously, but 

we are going to have fun’. 

“So I think a lot of actors felt terribly 

uneasy about it, and there were quite a few 

who turned it down because they just didn’t 

feel comfortable. And even the ones who did 

it had their moments of ‘Oh, I don’t feel I’m 

entitled to say any of this’. And yet they did in 

the end.” 

You had a tight-knit team… 

“There were only a few directors working on 

the show. One was my partner Nicola Stockley 

who did Macbeth, Othello, Hamlet and Lear – 

all the four big bastards.” 



Above: David Tennant 

chats about Hamlet 

with Jude Law. 

Below: Jeremy Irons 

tackled both Henry IV 

and Henry V. 

“David 

Tennant on 

Hamlet was 

a complete 

copybook 

example of 

how to do it. 

He had a lot of 

fun with it but 

he also took it 

seriously” 



“The 

Above: David 

Harewood gave us 

his take on Othello. 

Below: Joseph 

Fiennes delved into 

Romeo and Juliet. 

appetite 

for Shakespeare 

in America is 

unquenchable. 

And they love 

to celebrate 

Shakespeare. 

We in England 

are really crap 

at celebrating 

things” 



 

Sorry, did you just refer to 

Shakespeare’s four great 

tragedies as ‘the big bastards’? 

“The point is you have to take them seriously 

but you can’t get up yourself when you’re 

talking about them because you just put people 

off. That’s why I thought David Tennant on 

Hamlet was a complete copybook example of 

how to do it. He had a lot of fun with it but he 

also took it seriously.” 

It can’t have been easy finding all 

the A-listers to front the episodes. 

“It was tricky trying to get hold of the talent. 

Do you know the easiest one? Morgan 

Freeman. I rang his agent, his agent said ‘I’ll 

ask him’. Came back the next day, said ‘Yeah, 

he’ll do it’. That was it – no questions asked. 

[laughs] This is a man who normally doesn’t 

get out of bed for a couple of million, and he 

was doing it for literally peanuts.” 

Kim Cattrall 

celebrated 

her favourite 

Shakespeare role: 

Cleopatra. 

That was a great episode as well… 

“It was fun. We didn’t have a lot of time 

with him but he invited us to his house and 

we filmed him in LA, and also he’s hugely 

enthusiastic about it.” 

The format also allows for 

interesting personal revelations, 

like the moment when Tracey 

Ullman told Morgan Freeman, ‘You 

don’t know this, but in England I’m 

seen as common. I don’t get asked 

to do Shakespeare…’ 

“Yes, I think she touched on something. 

The appetite for Shakespeare in America is 

unquenchable. They absolutely love it. And 

they’re not embarrassed by it, they’re not 

ashamed by it. And they love to celebrate 

Shakespeare. We in England are really crap 

at celebrating things. Especially if they’re our 

own. You know, in America they have a series 



Richard 

“The easiest one was 

Morgan Freeman. 

This is a man who 

normally doesn’t 

get out of bed for a 

couple of million…” 

called American Masters where they make a 

film about Leonard Bernstein or Philip Roth 

or whoever. But in England if I try to make 

‘Shakespeare: Isn’t He Just Wonderful?’ I get 

‘Oh. Um. Er. That’s a bit boring’. I don’t really 

understand it. Very odd. 

“When Nicola and I went to America for 

the launch of the first series – and indeed the 

second series – we felt quite giddy because 

people were coming up to us and just saying 

‘It’s so wonderful, thank you so much for 

making it’. Whereas most people we were 

putting the programmes to in England were 

like ‘It’s all right’. Very strange.” 

Well, as a Shakespeare fan I can 

tell you it’s a brilliant series. 

Speaking of ‘The Four Big 

Bastards’, I had to psych myself up 

to watch the Othello and King Lear 

episodes because I thought they 

were going to be really heavy. So I 

made myself watch them early on 

and discovered they were actually 

very entertaining episodes. 

“Aren’t they just? The wonderful King Lear 

with the happy ending done in Restoration 

comedy style. Christopher Plummer was just 

wonderful, he was a lovely man to work with. 

And David Harewood’s take on Othello was 

really interesting. That lovely meeting with 

him and Adrian Lester talking about people 

criticising the [19th century Ira Aldridge 

version of] Othello. Oh my goodness, that was 

quite something.” 

Denton 

(right) with 

Morgan Freeman: 

“We’re going to 

take it seriously, 

but we are going 

to have fun.” 

Two excellent actors and some 

very serious issues, but it was great 

that they found humour in it. That 

was an excellent way of dealing 

with the whole thing. 

“In a sense, what I hoped the series would do 

– and only time can tell, I suppose – is that 

for people who knew a bit of Shakespeare and 

liked Shakespeare, like yourself, they would be 

entertaining and they would provide a couple 

of new things that you might not know. But 

at the same time you may notice that the 

actual format involves going through the play 

absolutely chronologically in the story. 

“So if you’ve never read the play you’ll 

know what the story is by the time you get 

to the end of the film. But we won’t do it in 

such a way that it’s incredibly boring. It sort of 

emerges as you go along, so that if you’ve never 

seen the play you’ll end the film thinking ‘I’d 

quite like to see that’. 

“And if we’ve done those two things, we’ve 

cracked it.” 

 



Lost in 

Arden 

When director Michael Attenborough took on 

the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s recent 

production of As You Like It, he was adamant 

about two things: it didn’t need to be funny, 

but it did need an utterly brilliant Rosalind… 

Words: Mary Finch 


As You Like It 

 

Melancholy Jaques 

(Derek Smith) 

interrupts the Duke 

(Timothy D. Stickney) 

and his merry men 

of the forest. 



“Were it not 

better... that I did 

suit me all points 

like a man?” 

Zoe Waites as 

Rosalind. 

rying for the final 15 minutes 

of a comedy hardly seems 

reasonable. But when it 

comes to Shakespeare and 

me, reason has no place. This 

happened last December, and 

the production in question 

was As You Like It by the 

Shakespeare Theatre Company 

in Washington DC. 

Last season, the STC’s Henry IV Parts 1 

& 2 swept me away, and even though As 

You Like It couldn’t be a more different play, 

I felt the same emotional tightness in my 

chest as the curtain fell. Despite already 

loving this play – something about sassy 

androgynous female characters just really 

speaks to me – I was completely caught off 

guard by the production. But considering 

the story of how it came to be, that 

powerful result is hardly surprising. 

This As You Like It was the fruit of a 

partnership between STC Artistic Director 

Michael Kahn and Michael Attenborough, 

who is well known for his work as Associate 

Director of the Royal Shakespeare 

Company in Stratford-Upon-Avon and 

artistic Director of the Almeida Theatre in 

London’s Islington. 

When Kahn first invited Attenborough 

across the pond as a guest director, all 

parties were willing, but the schedules were 

not permitting. After patiently staying in 

touch for several years, the stars – and dates 

– aligned and plans were made. 

The only snag in the production was 



finding the perfect Rosalind. Discussing the 

search, Attenborough recalls: “I actually said 

at one point, ‘Michael, we shouldn’t do this 

play, if we don’t have a brilliant Rosalind’.” 

Luckily for audiences, they found one in 

Zoe Waites. 

The casting wasn’t exactly chance, 

though. Waites and Attenborough first 

worked together in 1998, when he cast her 

as the titular heroine in the RSC’s Romeo 

and Juliet. Even then, at 22, she displayed 

the emotional bravery that would manifest 

in Rosalind. 

“She is absolutely fearless, particularly, 

emotionally fearless,” says Attenborough. 

“The more you stretch her, the more she 

likes it.” 

Both Attenborough and Waites are 

originally from the UK, so this production 

had the additional challenge of bringing 

them to a city and a country far from home. 

“It was great fun, being in a rehearsal 

room with him outside of our comfort 

zone,” says Waites. “There was something 

“Now I am in 

Arden!” Rosalind, 

Celia (Adina Verson) 

and Touchstone 

(Andrew Weems) 

rough it in the forest. 

very liberating about it for both of us.” 

As I mentioned, this production had 

me weeping at the end. While it is not 

uncommon for Shakespeare to make me 

cry, generally that emotion occurs during 

tragedies, or merely manifests through a 

subtle mistiness in the eyes. The emotional 

punch of this comedy, however, came 

through the vulnerability of the characters. 

Before the main action of the play, 

Rosalind and Orlando (Andrew Veenstra) 

shared a moment of grief on stage – since, 

as described by Attenborough, they are 

“two people in the depths of despair”. 

The actors created this tragic 

vulnerability because their director freed 

them from the burden of comedy. 

“On day one,” Michael Attenborough 

explains, “I said to the company: ‘I hereby 

am giving you all absolute, unqualified 

permission not to be funny. I don’t want 

anyone straining to be funny’.” 

Speaking of characters straining for laughs, 

Attenborough couldn’t resist sharing an 



Two characters 

in search of four 

happy endings: 

Rosalind and Celia. 

“Zoe Waites is 

absolutely fearless. The 

more you stretch her, 

the more she likes it” 

Michael Attenborough 



anecdote. “A friend of mine – I think he’s 

quite well known in America as well, a guy 

named David Tennant – said to me once, 

‘Do you know what the loneliest place in 

the world is?’ And I said, ‘What’s that?’ He 

said, ‘Playing Touchstone, because he’s just 

not very funny’.” 

However, in this production Corin fully 

enjoys Touchstone’s courtly antics, and 

the shepherd’s simple, infectious laughter 

spread through the entire theatre. So there 

were still many moments of genuine ribbreaking 

humour, and the more serious bits 

in between only amplified the funny ones. 

In the end, all of the comedy and 

tragedy pulled together to tell the story 

of Rosalind, for she truly was the centre of 

this production. Interviewed separately, 

both Attenborough and Waites describe 

Rosalind as smart, witty, and terrified of 

being in love. 

“She’s a cerebral girl who is completely 

astonished and overwhelmed by these 

feelings of sexual attraction and desire, and 

this thing that feels like love,” says Waites. 

For all her intelligence, though, Waites’ 

“Rosalind is completely 

astonished and overwhelmed 

by sexual attraction and 

desire, and this thing that 

feels like love” 

Zoe Waites 

Rosalind and Orlando 

(Andrew Veenstra). 

Our heroine puts his 

commitment – and 

her own – to the test. 

Rosalind never had everything figured 

out – far from it. She flew between joy and 

grief, love and suspicion, hope and doubt. 

As Waites saw it: “Rosalind’s just sort of 

improvising and taking advantage of the 

moment.” 

Attenborough sees this complexity 

as reminiscent of Hamlet, arguably the 

Bard’s greatest character: “Hamlet is split 

between action and inaction,” he says, “his 

conscience and his duty. Rosalind is almost 

more profound. She is split between her 

heart and her brain – or to be more vulgar, 

her groin and her brain.” 

For Attenborough, that duality and 

uncertainty is not only the central conflict 

for Rosalind, but also for Shakespeare. 

“Shakespeare is almost built – 

structured linguistically – on the idea 

of antithesis. You can almost look at 

any speech and it is structured around 

antithetical nouns, adjectives, ideas.” 

Despite all of the conflict and vulnerability 

that happens along the way, the characters 

do get happy endings, in the form of four 

simultaneous weddings, a dukedom restored, 

and families reunited. But for Waites it is not 

just the multiple happy endings that draw the 

audience in. “We are intrigued and excited 

watching these characters go to Arden,” she 

says, “and bumble around, finding themselves 

and falling in love. Because that is what we’re 

doing, or what we would like to be able to do.” 

 


Opera 

“Sweet airs, 

that give 

delight...” 

It’s time for a spot of Desert Island Discs, as our esteemed Music 

Correspondent chooses the eight best bits from operas inspired by 

Shakespeare. With selections from Verdi, Berlioz, Purcell, Britten 

and Bernstein, this is Shakespeare music with a real wow factor… 

Words: Rebecca Franks 

After hearing composer Ambroise 

Thomas’s Hamlet, Verdi is reported to 

have said: “Poor Shakespeare, how they 

have mistreated him.” It’s a comment 

that could apply to a good number of 

operas inspired by the Bard. Despite 

the eternal allure of Shakespeare for 

composers, only a handful of the 200 

plus works have gone on to become 

true classics. And working out why this 

should be is probably a whole other 

story in itself. 

But when it all comes together, the 

combination of Shakespearean drama 

and character with the rich musical 

world of opera is utterly sublime. 

Here are eight of the truly great 

moments to listen to. 

Hector Berlioz 

‘Nuit paisible et sereine’ 

From Béatrice et Bénédict (1863) 

Imagine it’s night. The moon is shining and there’s a 

gentle breeze. It’s peaceful, apart from the soothing 

sounds of insects and birds. It’s that moment of blissful 

stillness that Berlioz captures to perfection in ‘Nuit 

paisible et sereine’, a duo that comes at the end of 

the first act of his Much Ado About Nothing opera, 

Béatrice et Bénédict. 

Heró and her lady-in-waiting Ursule have been 

busy matchmaking but here all the high jinks pause. 

Their voices intertwine as they sing to ‘la lune, douce 

reine’ – ‘the moon, sweet queen’. 

Ralph Vaughan Williams 

‘Fantasia on Greensleeves’ 

From Sir John in Love (1929) 

‘Let the sky rain potatoes, let it thunder to the tune 

of Greensleeves,’ said Falstaff in The Merry Wives of 

Windsor, the play that inspired Vaughan Williams’s 

Sir John in Love. And it’s the Fantasia on Greensleeves, 

adapted by Ralph Greaves from that very opera, that’s 

become one of the work’s best-known moments. 

Vaughan Williams’s setting of the already haunting 

Greensleeves, a ballad popular since the 16th century, 

is big on atmosphere: a flute and harp conjure up a 

pastoral English feel, before the strings wordlessly sing 

the melody, accompanied by a harp strumming as if it 

were a lute in the Tudor court. 


Opera 

Charles Gounod 

‘Juliet’s Waltz’ 

From Roméo et Juliette (1867) 

This is an intoxicatingly joyous whirlwind of a waltz. 

Juliet sings of her dreams of love and her zest for life in 

an aria that sparkles and dances. Sung just before her 

fateful meeting with Romeo, Juliet has declared she’s not 

interested in marriage. This moment is all about youthful 

hopes and innocent pleasures, yet when she sings that 

love might destroy happiness, there’s a hint of the tragedy 

to come. Even though it was a last-minute addition by 

Gounod, ‘Je veux vivre’ (I want to live) became one of 

the most popular parts of his opera. 

Giuseppe Verdi 

‘La luce langue’ 

From Macbeth (1847) 

Just as Juliet’s Waltz finds no counterpart in Shakespeare’s 

original play, the aria ‘La luce langue’ (the light is 

languishing) was of Verdi’s own creation. It’s a passionate, 

almost violent outpouring of emotion from Lady 

Macbeth, as she sings of the anticipated murder of 

Banquo, a ‘fatal deed that must be done’. This point in 

the opera marks the height of her power and the start of 

her downfall: it’s a moment that shows us how dark her 

desires are. 

Leonard Bernstein 

‘Somewhere’ 

From West Side Story (1957) 

Bernstein’s West Side Story must be one of the most 

memorable Shakespeare-inspired settings by a classical 

composer. Though not technically an opera, a fair few 

opera singers have performed it – and even recorded it 

in the unfortunate case of soprano Kiri te Kanawa and 

tenor José Carreras. There are almost too many standout 

moments to mention in this modern-day Romeo and 

Juliet: Maria’s lively solo ‘I feel pretty’, the sassy fingerclicking 

‘Cool’ or the heartfelt duet ‘One hand, one 

heart’. But the song ‘Somewhere’ is hard to beat, and also 

takes its cues from Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto and, 

aptly enough, Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet. 

Henry Purcell 

‘The Plaint’ 

From The Fairy Queen (1692) 

It’s a little lament that’s one of the most moving 

moments of The Fairy Queen (1692), Purcell’s music 

for A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In Act V, Oberon 

asks for ‘the plaint that did so Nobly move, When 

Laura Mourn’d for her departed Love’. He’s rewarded 

with melancholic music of true beauty, a melody that 

unfurls over a repeating bass line – one of Purcell’s party 

tricks. But carry on exploring the rest of this piece: 

Purcell didn’t simply write an opera but instead five 

masques – or semi-operas – to be performed between 

the acts of the play. It contains some of the British 

composer’s best music. 

Benjamin Britten 

‘I know a bank where the 

wild thyme blows’ 

From A Midsummer Night’s Dream 

(1960) 

There’s something hypnotic, magical and ever so 

slightly menacing about this air, in which Oberon 

sings of his plan to drug Tytania with a magic herbal 

potion. Britten has carefully chosen his instrumental 

colours for his astute portrait of the king of the fairies: 

dark, sinuous cellos, a twinkling celesta, and a harp that 

seems to cast spells of enchanted notes. And then there’s 

the voice of Oberon himself. Britten wrote this role for 

a countertenor, a high male voice that has a strange, 

otherworldly quality quite unlike any other sound. 

Thomas Adès 

‘How good they are, how bright, 

how grand’ 

From The Tempest (2004) 

This is a simply gorgeous quintet, in which five main 

characters finally join together in luminous music of 

reconciliation. It comes towards the end of Adès’s The 

Tempest, its lyricism hinted at in a love duet between 

Ferdinand and Miranda earlier on. Mozart was the 

master of the operatic ensemble, but here Adès steals 

one of Purcell’s tricks: he uses a repeated bass line 

that helps build the tension in this short but sublime 

moment. 

Rebecca has made a special Spotify playlist to go with her selections. Enjoy it here: 

https://play.spotify.com/user/1138333090/playlist/6xmKy9rQA9llmhUmRMItMp 


Shakespeare Guide: Turkey 

Eastern 

Continuing our investigations 

into how Shakespeare is regarded 

in different countries around 

 

the historic meeting-place of 

East and West that is Turkey. 

Words: Cansu Kutlualp 

Promise 


Shakespeare Guide: Turkey 

The Bosphorus has bewitched countless artists including 

ancient poets like Homer that inspired the Bard himself… 

T 

o William Shakespeare, the Turks were 

a strange people in a far-off land, an 

eastern empire largely unknown and 

seemingly irreconcilable. The orient 

stood for something frighteningly 

antagonistic that was also exotic and mysterious. 

This antagonistic attitude was mutual, but many 

aspects of European culture crossed over the Bosphorus 

to Turkey, and perhaps the most perpetual one has 

been Shakespeare. Both the Ottoman Empire and 

Turkish Republic – although with very different 

worldviews – took Shakespeare and interpreted him 

in different fashions. Over the centuries, Shakespeare 

has become truly embedded into Turkish culture. 

A production of Hamlet in 2014 by the 

 

on the stage, one for each character, so that 

even when their parts are over the actors 

could stay on the stage for the entire play. 

Ümmiye Koçak is the founder of the Arslanköy 

Woman Theatre. A farmworker with a 

primary school education, Koçak has written 

and directed many plays that have received 

international recognition. 

Could you rephrase that? 

Translations of Shakespeare plays first 

appeared in the 19th century, before the end 

of the Ottoman Empire and the formation 

of the Republic. Most of the plays were 

translated into Ottoman Turkish, except 

for the The Two Gentlemen of Verona and 

The Sonnets. However these translations are 

nothing like the ones Turkish readers tackle 

today. Due to alphabet and language reforms 

in 1928, Ottoman Turkish has become 

obsolete to readers, as modern-day Turkish 

is very different. It was after the 1940s that 

translations as Turkish readers know them 

today first started appearing. 

 


Shakespeare Guide: Turkey 

Renamed Hamit, Arslanköy 

Woman Theatre’s all-female 

Hamlet brought a distinctly 

 

Shakespeare’s Turk 

“The Turk” does feature quite a lot in 

Shakespeare, and not always in a friendly 

manner – see Othello where the proverbial 

Turk is referred to as “a malignant and a 

turban’d Turk” and “the circumcised dog”. 

The Turk stood for “infidel” or “unbeliever” 

as Shakespeare’s Europe regarded the Muslim 

Ottoman Empire with fear and suspicion. 

However, negative references to Turks did not 

stop the Turkish people of the 19th century 

from exploiting the plays’ dramatic potential. 

The translations removed the offending 

phrases and replaced them with words like 

“ruffian” or “rowdy”. Turkish translations 

today do contain the phrase “Turk”, as in the 

original. However, some still prefer to use 

other words. 

Can’t get enough of the Bard 

The first recorded Hamlet production in 

Turkey dates back to the latter days of the 

Ottoman Empire in 1911. Plays were staged 

by private companies formed by enthusiasts, 

some of whom persuaded the authorities 

to establish a municipal theatre after the 

foundation of Turkish Republic in 1923. 

This Municipal Theatre started the 

tradition of opening each new season with a 

Shakespeare play, a tradition that continues 

to this day. Shakespeare productions at the 

Municipal Theatre range from classic to postmodern. 

Including productions by private 

companies, Turkish fans can always catch at 

least one Shakespeare play per season. 

Turkish Shakespeare 

Turkey owes much of its Shakespearean 

heritage to Talat Sait Halman (1931-2014), 

who in 1971 became Turkey’s first Minister of 

Culture. Among his many achievements, he 

translated Macbeth into Turkish using aruz, 

an old Arabic system of versification used in 

the Ottoman Empire. He wrote a solo play 

called Kahramanlar ve Soytarılar (Heroes and 

Jesters) which he later adapted to a book called 


Shakespeare Guide: Turkey 

Above: Impressively dedicated, 

the members of the Arslanköy 

Woman Theatre only get to 

meet up and rehearse their 

plays after spending a full day 

 

Left: We call these devilishly 

delicious sweet treats Lokum. 

To the rest of the world, 

however, they go by another 

name – Turkish Delight. 

A 2014 Macbeth production 

at the Ankara Municipal 

Theatre by Professor 

Bozkurt Kuruç, an esteemed 

name in Turkish theatre. 

“Turkish” Shakespeare. According to Halman 

it is called Turkish Shakespeare because of 

the impact that Shakespeare had on Turkish 

culture and thus theatre. He summarizes 

this view in his poem called A Halmanic 

Paean To The Bard by saying “The Bard is the 

playwright for Turks of all ages / In Turkey, 

‘all the world’s a stage’ on all stages”. 

Feminist Approach 

In 1976, famous Turkish filmmaker Metin 

Erksan adapted Hamlet into a movie 

called The Angel of Vengeance – The Female 

Hamlet. With Hamlet as a female character, 

Shakespeare’s story is interpreted through the 

lens of 1970s Turkey. In 1994, Işıl Kasapoğlu 

directed an acclaimed production of The 

Merchant of Venice in Trabzon, a rural city in 

the North-sea Region. Staged at the Trabzon 

State Theatre, this version featured a female 

Shylock. In 2009 the Mediterranean city 

of Mersin saw Arslanköy Women’s Theatre 

Community produce an all-female Hamlet. 

Renamed Hamit, it featured traditional 

Turkish costumes, with crowns and skulls 

made out of cabbages from local farms. 

A Street of Shakespeare 

An actor named Kamil Rıza Bey who lived 

in İstanbul in 1920s was one of the first 

actors to play Othello on the Turkish stage. 

Legend has it that during the suicide scene 

when Othello stabs himself, Kamil Rıza Bey 

used to tie an animal’s lungs near his throat 

to produce a horrifically realistic spurt of 

blood. He was so memorable as Othello that 

he was nicknamed Otello Kamil. Today there 

is a street named after him in Mecidiyeköy, a 

district of İstanbul. 

 



During 

the age of 

Elizabeth a play such 

as Richard II could be 

regarded as seditious. 


The Essex Plot 

 


and Sedition 

It’s the much-repeated stuff of Shakespeare 

legend: how the Bard’s theatre company got 

tangled up in the 1601 Essex Plot to topple 

Queen Elizabeth I. But what really happened? 

Words: Francis RTM Boyle 

Illustration: Mary Finch 

n 7 February 1601, 

O 

Shakespeare’s company, the 

Lord Chamberlain’s Men, 

stages a command performance 

of Richard II at the Globe 

playhouse. Robert Devereaux, 

2nd Earl of Essex and fallen 

favourite of Queen Elizabeth I, arranged for 

the special performance and is in attendance. 

Richard II, an older Shakespeare play, features 

the deposition of the weak and vacillating King 

Richard II by the Duke of Lancaster – who 

steals the throne to become King Henry IV – 

as well as Richard’s murder by Henry’s agents. 

The next day, 8 February, Essex leads a rebellion 

against the Queen. Essex fails. 

Months later, on 4 August, after having 

Essex and the closest of his co-conspirators 

executed, the Queen says the following to 

William Lambarde, Keeper of the Records 

at the Tower of London, “I am Richard the 

Second, know ye not that?” 

This sequence of events has led many to 

conclude that Shakespeare actually conspired 

with Essex. Generations of professors, editors, 

and theatre artists passed along this theory as 

fact. It is a good story, a compelling story; I was 

taught it as fact in university, and my thesis 

advisor was taught it in Oxford and always 

presumed it was true. Unfortunately for the 

compelling story, it is simply false. 

It is a common maxim among historians 

that history is to be studied forwards, 

not backwards. If you look backwards at 

these events, it is easy to conclude that 

Shakespeare had a hand in Essex’s rebellion, 

and then marvel at Shakespeare’s escape from 

punishment. Reading history backwards is not 

merely poor study, but poor logic. 

The “false cause” fallacy states “if B is 

preceded by A, A caused B.” The fact that 

Essex’s revolt was preceded by a command 

performance of Richard II does not prove 

Shakespeare had anything to do with the 

rebellion. The circumstances of 7-8 February 

1601 might well be simple coincidence. 



“Staging the deposition of a 

king in front of a fickle mob 

could have been politically if 

not physically dangerous” 

The earliest records of Shakespeare’s play 

Richard II have caused scholars to date its 

composition to 1595, six years before the 

failed revolt. Until 8 February 1601, the 

day of Essex’s revolt, no evidence exists that 

indicates the Crown was interested in Richard 

II. On this day, Augustine Phillips, one of 

the members of the Lord Chamberlain’s 

Men, testified before Queen Elizabeth’s Privy 

Council, her cabinet of royal advisors, that 

subordinates of Essex contracted the players 

to: “have the play of the deposing and killing 

of King Richard II to be played… promising 

to get them [forty shillings] more than 

their ordinary to play it… and so played it 

accordingly.” 

Richard II was an old play; the two rival 

theatres of the day presented plays in repertory, 

with rotating schedules including new plays. 

As Richard II was six years old, the players, 

who had learned and presented many more 

plays in the intervening years, protested. But 

Essex’s men would have no other play. The 

Lord Chamberlain’s Men would not play 

Richard II unless they had extra payment to 

defray the anticipated loss. Being paid forty 

shillings for a command performance would 

be a considerable sum. Philip Henslowe, 

manager of rival company The Lord Admiral’s 

Men, kept an assiduous diary of daily incomes 

for his theatre, and this diary has survived. In 

it we find that forty shillings was a common 

but sporadic catch in the London theatre at 

the time. Henslowe’s Diaries note that, in 

December 1594, seven plays made at least 

a forty shilling gate in a single showing, 

and many plays which made this sum were 

premiers of new works. In the case of the Essex 

performance, The Lord Chamberlain’s Men 

were paid as much as a successful opening 

performance, and those forty shillings were in 

addition to the “ordinary to play it”, or the fee 

for a command performance, which could be 

considerably more. 

The Lord Chamberlain’s Men, in securing 

more money for their play may well have saved 

their lives. If they had truly been conspirators, 

then their politics might have taken a turn 

away from financial concerns. Rebellion 

would likely take precedence over personal 

income. If the Privy Council also followed 

this reckoning, then the forty shillings was 

evidence for the innocence of the players. 

If the Lord Chamberlain’s Men were truly 

dedicated to Essex’s cause, they likely would 

not have pointed out the possible financial 

risk. To the Privy Council, a group of players 

concerned about their incomes agreed to play 

Richard II providing they received a security 

from monetary loss. Because Richard II was 

of no great matter to the players other than as 

a matter of income, they were likely not Essex 

supporters. The Lord Chamberlain’s Men, in 

insisting upon a financial surety against loss, 

proved more interested in the gate than the 

state and so indicated their innocence. 

The Lord Chamberlain’s Men had 

every reason to avoid offending the Crown. 

Playwriting in the English Renaissance was 

dangerous business, and William Shakespeare 

knew it. In 1597, his fellow playwright 

Thomas Nashe fled the country following 

his arrest after the controversial and nowlost 

play The Isle of Dogs. His writings were 

subsequently suppressed and burned. Ben 

Jonson was also imprisoned for The Isle of 

Dogs and would return to the clink in 1605 

with Marston and Chapman for Eastward 

Ho. In 1625, the Crown imprisoned Thomas 

Middleton and all of the actors from A Game 

At Chess, as the play satirised the Spanish 

Ambassador. These playwrights and actors’ 

accusers put them in jail for mere slander. 

For possible sedition, which meant in that 

time “a concerted movement to overthrow an 

established government”, Shakespeare would 

have been charged with High Treason. Had 

Shakespeare served at all as an accomplice to 

treason, his head would have wound up on a 

spike over Traitor’s Gate. 


The Essex Plot 

 

Neither Shakespeare nor any of his friends 

faced trial or were imprisoned. Elizabeth’s 

Privy Councilors did not see Shakespeare or 

his fellow players as a threat, or they would 

have been tried as co-conspirators. Despite the 

conclusion of the authorities, there are two 

more facts that give this myth extended life. 

The first: Richard II was censored. 

In 1608, the fourth quarto printing of 

Richard II debuted and the front page read: 

“With new additions of the Parliament Scene, 

and the deposing of King Richard”. The scene 

referred to, the deposition of the King, had 

never before been printed. Though the Crown 

did not see Shakespeare as a threat, the missing 

deposition scene still intrigues. 

Compared to Shakespeare’s other works 

from 1595 and 1608, the construction of the 

scene is much closer in composition style to 

writings from 1595, indicating the scene was 

written for and excised from the original text. 

The Lord 

Chamberlain’s 

Men had every 

reason to avoid 

offending the 

Crown. 

At Shakespeare’s time, and until 1968, plays 

to be presented on the London stages were 

subject to inspection and censorship. In 1595, 

the Master of Revels, Edmund Tilney, was 

responsible for these matters. Staging the 

deposition of a king in front of a fickle mob 

could have been politically if not physically 

dangerous; a likely reason for Tilney to insist 

Shakespeare cut the scene. While Tilney’s 

interference would have been in accordance 

with his duty to Queen Elizabeth, no known 

record exists of Tilney’s work on Richard II. 

The fourth quarto printing of 1608, with 

the restored deposition scene was the first 

printing of Richard II after Elizabeth’s death. 

It may well be that the fears of the scene’s 

troubles died with Elizabeth, but this is merely 

speculation. 

With the deposition scene’s absence 

possibly solved, only one aspect of the myth of 

the seditious Shakespeare remains: Elizabeth’s 

quote itself. On 4 August, Queen Elizabeth 



In 

reportedly said “I am Richard II, know 

ye not that?” But she was not referring to 

Shakespeare’s play. Amazingly, another author 

is to blame. 

The day Essex launched his ill-fated revolt 

Elizabeth sent a delegation of Privy Councilors 

to the Earl. They had heard of the previous 

day’s theatrics and knew Essex’s plan. They 

carried a summons of High Treason for Essex, 

a summons that specifically references “his 

underhand permitting of that most treasonous 

book of John Hayward’s Henry the fourth to be 

printed and published.” 

Historian and lawyer John Hayward 

published a history of Henry IV in 1599, and 

in the book’s dedication was extravagant in his 

praise of the Earl of Essex. A furious Elizabeth 

had Hayward imprisoned in the Tower. In 

the interrogation of Hayward, the Crown’s 

attorney claimed, “Dr. Hayward intended the 

application of this book to the present time, 

the plot being that of a King who is taxed 

for misgovernment... deposed and in the end 

murdered.” To the Crown, Hayward would 

have Essex overthrow and murder Elizabeth, 

just as Henry did to Richard. 

At this point in her reign, Elizabeth 

had endured numerous attempts to remove 

or assassinate her, and she would allow no 

challenger. The most famous proof of this 

comes from 1587, when Elizabeth had her 

cousin and fellow monarch Mary, Queen of 

Scots executed for attempting to take over 

England. The next year, Elizabeth prevailed 

against the famed Spanish Armada. By 1599, 

a troublesome lawyer was easily dealt with: 

Hayward would stay in the Tower until the 

months following Essex’s execution. 

Shakespeare was no seditious playwright. 

Elizabeth’s fury with the Richard II comparison 

originated with John Hayward’s book and 

not Shakespeare’s play. The evidence strongly 

suggests that when he wrote Richard II 

Shakespeare was requested or required to 

remove the deposition scene, and he did so. 

When Augustine Phillips was called to the long 

carpet at the Privy Council, he was able to give 

testimony that was verified, and there were no 

reprisals against him or any other member of 

securing more 

money for their 

play, the Lord 

Chamberlain’s 

Men may have 

saved their lives. 

the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. 

The myth of the seditious Shakespeare has 

been perpetuated throughout the years. The 

myth was likely born of a commonly used 

logical fallacy, but its intrigue likely kept it 

alive. Told and retold so often, and sounding 

possibly true, the legend has fallen into the 

special category of accepted fact. However, as is 

so often the case with Shakespeare, the truth is 

a far more interesting and complex beast. 

 

This article is based on research from my 

2006 Masters of Letters thesis. However, 

as I worked on the article, I learned that 

Oxford professor Jonathan Bate included 

his own account of the creation of the 

Richard II myth in his excellent 2008 

book Soul of the Age: A Biography of the 

Mind of William Shakespeare. Needless to 

say, our work had no intentional crossover. 

Indeed, this kind of thing happens fairly 

often in our field, with so many minds 

labouring to find new information from 

evidence some four centuries old. 


Contributors 

Mary Finch Our US Staff Writer 

studied English at Messiah College 

in Pennsylvania, and is furthering her 

obsession at Mary Baldwin College 

in Virginia, earning her Masters in 

Shakespeare and Performance. Her 

interest in the Bard ranges from 

the theatrical to the educational to 

the literary. Besides William, Mary 

has a strong affinity for succulents, 

typography, and limericks. Find her 

on Twitter: @DaFinchinator 

Francis RTM Boyle has worked 

in the theatre for 20 years. He 

discovered his love for Shakespeare 

by reading Julius Caesar when he 

was ten. He went on to earn a BFA 

in Theatre from the University of 

Rhode Island and an MLitt and 

MFA in Shakespeare and Renaissance 

Literature in Performance from the 

Mary Baldwin College/American 

Shakespeare Center partnership. 

Find him on Twitter: 

@FrancisRTMBoyle 

Cansu Kutlualp is in her third year 

studying Comparative Literature at 

Istanbul Bilgi University. She has 

always loved literature but one day 

when she was in elementary school 

she discovered a sonnet by a bard 

who lived centuries ago. She couldn’t 

help but read it ten times and then 

just sat there, spellbound. After her 

Shakespeare lectures she is often left 

utterly smitten, unable to speak for 

hours. Find her on Twitter: 

@ckutlualp 

Meet thy makers... 

Just some of the contributors to this issue of Shakespeare Magazine 

Anastasia Koroleva fell in love 

with Hamlet at 17, watching 

Kozintsev’s film of Shakespeare’s 

play. She went on to read Hamlet 

in English and all available Russian 

translations. Anastasia graduated from 

the Faculty of Philology of Moscow 

State University and worked in the 

media as an Editor. She rediscovered 

Shakespeare in 2013, and Richard 

II: The Book and www.dtbooks.net 

blog were born. Hamlet: The Book is 

already on its way. Find her on Twitter: 

@korolami 

Rebecca Franks is an arts journalist 

and reviews editor of BBC Music 

Magazine. She’s loved Shakespeare 

since her schooldays, when a local 

theatre’s workshops first revealed 

the magic of Twelfth Night. While 

studying music at Cambridge, she 

helped commission Shakespeare 

Deranged, three short operas based 

on mad scenes in the Bard’s plays. 

She loves classical music and books, 

as well as film and theatre, and blogs 

at www.beccamusic.blogspot.co.uk. 

Find her on Twitter: @Becca_JF21 


Next issue 

We hope you’ve enjoyed Issue Seven of Shakespeare Magazine. 

Here’s a taste of what we have coming up next time… 

Stratford-upon-Avon 

The magic of Shakespeare’s birthplace. 

 

Paul Edmondson 

Re-examining the Shakespeare myths. 

 

Painting Shakespeare 

 

On the canvas with artist Ros Lyons. 

Screen Burn 

 

Exploring Shakespeare in video games.

Shakespeare Magazine 07

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