Shakespeare Magazine 07

My Shakespeare
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.”
24 SHAKESPEARE magazine