Shakespeare Magazine 12

shakespeare
At last! A magazine with all the Will in the world
FREE
Issue 12
HARRIET
WALTER
JUDI
DENCH
SOPHIE
OKONEDO
MARGARET
ATWOOD
& JADE
ANOUKA
Shakespeare’s
Sisters
Plus Benedict Cumberbatch Hugh Bonneville Reduced Shakespeare Company

shakespeare
At last! A magazine with all the Will in the world
FREE
Issue 12
HARRIET
WALTER
JUDI
DENCH
SOPHIE
OKONEDO
MARGARET
ATWOOD
JADE
ANOUKA
Shakespeare’s
Sisters
Plus Benedict Cumberbatch Hugh Bonneville Reduced Shakespeare Company

Welcome
Welcome
to Issue 12 of Shakespeare Magazine
These are interesting times on Planet Shakespeare. In the Bard’s
day, the female roles in his plays would have been played by
boys and young men. Today, however, we’re seeing an increasing
number of women of all ages playing Shakespeare’s male roles.
And the daddy of them all is Harriet Walter (I’m sure she wouldn’t
mind me using that phrase, as she confessed to channelling Ray
“I’m the Daddy” Winstone while performing Henry IV). Actually,
the daddy of them all is probably Glenda Jackson, 14 years Harriet’s
senior, who recently played King Lear at London’s Old Vic. But
Harriet’s headlining of the all-female Donmar Shakespeare Trilogy
certainly places her in a similar firmament.
Apart from our exclusive conversation with Harriet, this issue also
features the voices and thoughts of Judi Dench, Sophie Okonedo,
Margaret Atwood and Jade Anouka. Borrowing a famous phrase from
Virginia Woolf, we’re calling them Shakespeare’s Sisters. And long may
the Shakespearean tradition of creative cross-dressing continue.
On another point, people have been asking me what advice would
Shakespeare give to President Trump as he enters office? My guess is it
would probably be something like: “Beware the Ides of March”.
Enjoy your magazine.
Photo: David Hammonds
Pat Reid, Founder & Editor
Donate to Shakespeare Magazine
Donate here
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At last! A magazine with all the Will in the world
shakespeare
FREE
Issue 12
Contents
HARRIET
WALTER
JUDI
DENCH
SOPHIE
OKONEDO
& JADE
ANOUKA
Shakespeare Magazine
Issue Twelve
January 2017
Founder & Editor
Pat Reid
Art Editor
Paul McIntyre
Contributing Writers
Jade Anouka
Gwilym Jones
Scott Newstok
Photographers
Marc Brenner
Matt Cashore
Helen Maybanks
John Wildgoose
Teresa Wood
Holly Wren
Web Design
David Hammonds
Contact Us
shakespearemag@outlook.com
Facebook
facebook.com/ShakespeareMagazine
Twitter
@UKShakespeare
MARGARET
ATWOOD
Shakespeare’s
Sisters
Plus Benedict Cumberbatch Hugh Bonneville Reduced Shakespeare Company
Website
www.shakespearemagazine.com
Newsletter
http://tinyletter.com/shakespearemag
Donate
http://www.shakespearemagazine.
com/2016/03/donate-toshakespeare-magazine/
8
Harriet Walter
An exclusive interview with
the veteran actress, telling us
about the Donmar Shakespeare
Trilogy and her new book
Brutus and Other Heroines.
16
Jade Anouka
The youthful Donmar
Shakespeare co-star talks us
through a gallery of images from
the three plays.
21 Reduced Shakespeare
Company
The world’s funniest and
longest-running Bard-spoofers
tell us about their ludicrously
entertaining new show.
27
John Foxx
The musical innovator
who also designed the striking
Arden Shakespeare cover art.
33
The Hollow
Crown: The Wars
of the Roses
A quartet of production
interviews with Shakespeare
stars Sophie Okonedo,
Judi Dench, Hugh Bonneville
and Benedict Cumberbatch.
44 Margaret Atwood
The beloved novelist and
thinker turns her mighty mind
to Shakespeare, The Tempest
and the penal system.
50
How to Think
like Shakespeare
Scott Newstok’s essay advocates
a Renaissance approach to
education and creativity.
58 Shakespeare’s Storms
Globe Book Award-winner
Gwilym Jones looks at how
sea-storms evolve throughout
Shakespeare’s plays.
64
Doctor Strange
Benedict Cumberbatch
plays the Marvel superhero, and
we reckon he’s a dead ringer for
Shakespeare’s Prospero.
shakespeare magazine 5

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SHAKESPEARE SHAKESPEARE
Celebrating
450 years of the
English language’s
greatest-ever
wordsmith
Launch issue
Character'd
on thy skin..."”
"”
Blood meets ink in the world
of Shakespeare Tattoos
Aussie Rules
Shakespeare!
A double bill of the
Bard in sunny Sydney
King David
From Doctor Who to Hamlet and
Richard II, David Tennant is a 21st
century Shakespeare superstar!
At last! A magazine with all the Will in the world At last! A magazine with all the Will in the world At last! A magazine with all the Will in the world At last! A magazine with all the Will in the world
SHAKESPEARE SHAKESPEARE SHAKESPEARE SHAKESPEARE
Tom
Hiddleston
Coriolanus
Benedict
Cumberbatch
Hamlet
London
Calling
Why the city that made
Shakespeare
still rocks the world
Martin
Freeman
Richard III
Issue 4
Off with
their heads!
Shakespeare and the
Tower of London
Issue 5
Muse of Fire
Two men. One epic journey. How
Giles and Dan made the ultimate
Shakespeare documentary!
Golden
Virginia
Join us on a trip
to the American
Shakespeare
Center
FREE
Hamlet
Alone?
Exploding
the myth of
“To be or
not to be…”
Art
thou
Grumio?
Our college
girl takes on
The Taming
of the Shrew
Set in stone
Five great exclusive
Shakespeare interviews!
Shakespeare Hero Ben Crystal Clever Comedian Sara Pascoe
The Tutor novelist Andrea Chapin Ki l Shakespeare’s Anthony Del Col
Superteacher Phil Beadle meets Bard Evangelist Ben Walden
Issue 6
Big Books
Giveaway!
Brilliant Bard
Books up for
grabs inside!
FREE
Antony Sher
Why his new book is a
love letter to Falstaff,
Stratford and Shakespeare
Great
Shakespeare
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 I
My
Shakespeare
Behind the scenes of the
stellar documentary series
Plus!
Shakespeare in Turkey
As You Like It
The Essex Plot
Shakespearean Opera
Issue 7
At last! A magazine with all the Will in the world
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Painting
the Bard
The haunting
Shakespeare art
of Rosalind Lyons
Sweet
Home
Shakespeare’s
Stratford-upon-
Avon: it’s our
essential guide!
Hamlet
Shakespeare’s hottest ticket:
BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH
is Burning at the Barbican
Issue 8
Native
Tongues
The sound of
Shakespeare
in Scotland
Screen
Savers
Video Games:
The future of
Shakespeare?
At last! A magazine with all the Will in the world
SHAKESPEARE
FREE
TOM
HIDDLESTON
From Henry V to Coriolanus:
Say Hello to Shakespeare’s
Secret Weapon!
Special issue
Issue 9
Annus
Horribilis
James Shapiro on
1606: Wi liam
Shakespeare and
the Year of Lear
SHAKESPEARE AT THE CINEMA
Coriolanus
Hiddleston
finds his
ki ler instinct
Macbeth
A movie epic with
Michael Fassbender
and Marion Coti lard
Bill
Shakespearean
comedy from the
Horrible Histories crew
Hamlet
Benedict
Cumberbatch
on the big screen!
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Harriet Walter
Harriet Walter at
London’s King’s Cross
(Photo by Holly Wren).
8
shakespeare magazine

Harriet Walter
All the
Daughters of
My Father’s
House
It’s been an incredible year for veteran actress
Harriet Walter. On stage, she’s anchored
director Phyllida Lloyd’s highly-praised Donmar
Shakespeare Trilogy. On page, she’s published an
insightful new book, Brutus and Other Heroines.
We asked her about her unique experience of
playing Shakespeare’s male and female roles.
Interview by Pat Reid
shakespeare magazine 9

Harriet Walter
Left: Harriet in
rehearsal for
the Donmar
Shakespeare
Trilogy (Photo
by Helen
Maybanks).
Right: Harriet’s
book, Brutus and
Other Heroines.
After a lifetime spent exploring
Shakespeare’s worlds, what’s your take on
that historical moment when the female
parts were played by young men?
“My take on it is just that in some ways it distances
me, because I think: ‘Well, Shakespeare was never
writing for me to play’. But at the same time, it
makes me realise that had he been writing for
female actors, who would have still been thought –
if we’ve got anything to go by when they did come
on the stage – to be slightly dubious in morality,
he might have written different parts, words and
lines, because he might have felt he had to deal
with the immodesty of it, and not let them say
such bold things or have any sexual innuendo in
their speeches. Or he might have made them out to
be more decorous and less passionate, to conform
with the morality of the day.
“That’s what I wonder. It’s totally unknowable,
it’s frustratingly unknowable. But in another way
it gave us the right to change the gender of the
performers because we realised that he was in no
way being naturalistic in his own day. The speeches
are for all of humanity, really. And therefore in
some ways it gives you licence to take up the roles
for yourself.”
You say in your book that you get to add
something of your own to Shakespeare’s
female roles because he never imagined
an actual female playing them. But there’s
a famous line where Cleopatra predicts
the future: ‘Some squeaking Cleopatra boy
my greatness…” Is there a sense here that
Shakespeare is owning up to the limitations
of boy actors playing great female roles?
“Yes, that’s a very interesting point. It’s very hard to
imagine what the acting was like in Shakespeare’s
day. There can’t have been that many Laurence
Oliviers around, there must have been often quite
amateurish and… I don’t know, it’s very hard
to speculate. But if you think about it, London
“Shakespeare is a voice of humanity and morality.
He penetrates deep into our psychology. He deals
with universal themes that haven’t changed”
10
shakespeare magazine

Harriet Walter
would have been more like a provincial rep now.
There wouldn’t have been that many players to call
on because it wasn’t a long-standing art form or
practice. I’m absolutely never going to patronise the
skills of the people in those days – they probably
had amazing capabilities. But they would not have
had the sophisticated psychological techniques
that we have now. And they wouldn’t have been
demanded by an audience. The audience would
have gone to see the spectacle, to hear the story and
to laugh at the jokes, to cry at the sad bits.
“Perhaps the acting was much more signaled,
we don’t know, much more over the top. It would
have been full of large gestures just to reach the
back of a rather rowdy audience. They wouldn’t
have needed to develop the subtlety or techniques
that I can add to it – to do with my own life
experience – that I can put into the emotions and
the mentality of a character. The art of acting
would have been more to do with copying,
imitating, demonstrating rather than inhabiting the
character. That’s my speculation.”
Your chapter on Lady Macbeth is possibly
the most idea-crammed and philosophical,
and also the most visceral…
“One of the reasons it’s more in detail is that it
came originally from a book I wrote about Lady
Macbeth. When I worked with Patrick Stewart
and Antony Sher, I felt that all the time we kept
developing the character that was both of us. It’s
Harriet’s Prospero watches Antonio, Alonso and
Sebastian in The Tempest (Photo: Helen Maybanks).
Harriet as Brutus with Portia (Clare Dunne)
in Julius Caesar (Photo: Helen Maybanks).
almost like the two of them made up a person.
Which doesn’t mean that individually they’re
half a person, that the parts aren’t fully fleshed
out. It’s just that you can watch one another and
understand more about your part because what he
was going through, I was going through.
“Up to a certain point. There’s a point in the
play where he takes off on his own and they get
more and more separate. We split apart because he’s
actually done the deed and you learn that doing
something, it separates you because nobody else can
actually have done the murder. So once he’s done
the murder he becomes separate from me because
I can’t really experience that, I can’t experience the
guilt. And they become more and more estranged.
“And what I find interesting is the man is
the one who does things and the woman is the
one with the conscience, sometimes, in many
plays. And somehow [Lady Macbeth] can’t be the
conscience, because she’s been party to it, she’s been
an aider and abetter, so she can’t be the normal
wife who criticises, the mirror to her husband that
Portia is to Brutus. She loses her role because she
can’t be the conscience and she can’t join in in the
lead. It’s a lonely role. She doesn’t have a female
shakespeare magazine 11

Harriet Walter
companion or anyone to talk to. It’s quite unlike
any other role really because she’s so alone.”
Thinking about opportunities for older
actors, I’m always reading about famous
Victorian actors who were still playing
Romeo and Juliet when they were a hundred.
It always seems weird, but of course it’s just
supply and demand. They would only do that
if audiences would still pay for it. And I think
that I’d pay for the equivalent of that now…
“In doing this all-female trilogy, one of the things
people have been excited about is that we’ve
opened up the plays of Shakespeare to be played
by people that conventionally would never have
played them. I mean, that’s been going on a long
time. I’m thinking particularly of black actors
playing major Shakespeare roles, which wouldn’t
have happened 50 years ago, even 30 years ago it
was strange. And that is now completely the norm,
we’ve normalised all sorts of things in our presentday
acting tradition. But it’s awfully crowded now,
and I’m thinking ‘If I start playing Juliet, when are
the young girls going to get a chance to play Juliet?’
So it’s lovely to open it up but it also means that
you’ve got to step back yourself, because you can’t
have it all.
Hal (Clare Dunne) and King Henry (Harriet Walter)
in Henry IV (Photo by Helen Maybanks).
“What we’re all playing on is the fact that
Shakespeare is a voice of humanity and morality,
and he penetrates deep into our psychology even
now because he deals with the universal themes
that haven’t changed. And therefore, unlike,
say, a television drama that’s just about the way
we behave now, anybody can play Shakespeare
theoretically because he’s the voice of humanity.
And therefore he’s not naturalistic in that sense.
He doesn’t need you to look like the character you
play – you know, like sometimes at the beginning
of a modern play it says ‘Jane, blonde, 38’. He
doesn’t do any of that, and therefore it’s up for
grabs in many ways, anybody can do it. Just act
well and use his language well.
“There was a rather closed-off period early
in the last century when it was exclusively white
men who played the heroes and decorative white
women who played the heroines. And that gave my
generation the idea that it was all rather exclusive.
But if you look back into history there were women
playing men, there were 90-year-old women
playing young girls, it was almost freer because it
wasn’t such an institution in a way. Shakespeare
became much more of an institution. And we’re
really opening it up again, in the way that the
Victorians and the Georgians were messing about
with it all the time.”
Your book is full of rich little nuggets and
insights. For example you mention that
a defining characteristic of Imogen from
Cymbeline is that she’s self-dramatising…
“I think Imogen is a slight precursor of Cleopatra,
although she was written later. She’s a young
Cleopatra in a way. She’s not exclusively Cleopatra,
I think I say in the book there’s bits of Viola in
her, there’s bit of Cressida in her, there’s bits of
Rosalind in her, there’s bits of Hermione in her.
She’s a wonderfully round character, and I rather
like the fact that recently at the Globe they called
the play Imogen, because it’s very definitely about
Imogen, that play. There aren’t any plays by
Shakespeare where the title role is a female. There’s
male and female – Romeo and Juliet, Troilus and
Cressida, Antony and Cleopatra – but there’s no play
called Imogen or Lady Macbeth or Rosalind, and I
wonder why. There were contemporary plays like
The Duchess of Malfi, and certainly so many of the
12
shakespeare magazine

Harriet Walter
“Doing this all-female trilogy, we’ve opened up the
plays of Shakespeare to be played by people that
conventionally would never have played them”
Greek dramas – Antigone, Electra. But somehow
Shakespeare didn’t do that, and I don’t know why
that is. And the great thing, why we keep writing
about him, is that we can never know, but it’s very
tantalising.”
Antony Sher said that Henry IV was a
problematic role because you needed a
really good actor, but really good actors
often didn’t want to play it…
“That’s a real problem for actresses as well. Lots of
people don’t want to play Antony to your Cleopatra
or Bassanio to Portia. And sometimes somebody
comes to be in the role because the A-List didn’t
want to do it. And then the role gets a reputation
for not being very colourful because it’s been played
by somebody who maybe hasn’t brought all the
colours to it. Do you see what I mean? It becomes a
vicious circle.
“But I was so lucky I got Patrick Stewart
because he’d been in the play and he saw the
possibilities of the character of Antony and he
brought them all out. Antony’s a longer role than
Cleopatra, it’s just that Cleopatra is the one people
talk about. Maybe because she has the last act all to
herself, maybe because it’s an unusually large and
rounded role for a female and therefore is attractive
to star actresses. And maybe the men don’t feel
comfortable playing opposite what they think of as
the better part.
“With Henry, the context gave me a lot of
colour. In my life I’ve played a lot of noble people
– queens and duchesses, empresses. And there I
was being asked to play King Henry IV, but it was
in the women’s jail. And in the women’s jail, first
of all I wanted to play a contrast to Brutus who
I’d played in the same situation, who was rather a
noble man – all noble spirits and noble thoughts
and fine sensibilities. And then there was Henry,
who historically was not a bad chap, really. I mean,
he’d got the throne in a dubious way, but so did a
lot of other people. And again the tradition was for
Julius Caesar: Martina Laird as Cassius and
Harriet as Brutus (Photo: Helen Maybanks).
the rather refined John Gielgud type. And actually
we were dealing with the Wars of the Roses and
mediaeval warlords really. Who could rustle up the
largest army and take over the most land and hold
onto power?
“And so I thought, I don’t want to be a refined
person. I can be a… not brutal, but quite a
thuggish person, somebody who had been a thug.
And within the prison context the women are
looking at male characters that they’ve known in
their lives and behaviour that they’ve been used to
within the prison. And we were focusing on gangs
and people who lorded it over other people in the
prison system, which is a common behaviour. So
one of the prisoners gives me a packet of M&Ms
because within the prison currency that is a great
gift of homage. When the Earl of Northumberland
comes to meet me he brings that as an offering of
homage, and I sit there with slicked-back, greasedback
hair, behaving like… I don’t know, who was
I modelling myself on? I mention in the book, it
might have been Tom Bell or some criminal type
[I think it was Ray Winstone – Ed]. And so I was
very freed up to play around and have quite a
shakespeare magazine 13

Harriet Walter
Buy
different sort of character, which gave me rather a
rich line through the play and made the part more
attractive to me. But I do see what Tony’s saying,
you know, compared to all the fun they had in the
pub I felt I was quite humourless, and there wasn’t
even any great nobility or virtue in the man. But
he had the most wonderful speeches, and I just
used that. It was a novelty for me to play a striding,
strutting, puffed-up military leader, which maybe
a man would take for granted and not find so
interesting.”
And I was very interested in your chapter on
Brutus, because again he’s not that popular
as a character in the UK. Whereas in the US
they seem to relate to him much more and
see him as the soul of the play.
“I didn’t really have any preconceptions about
Brutus. To be honest, I’d never really loved the play.
I’d seen lots of productions of it, but nothing really
cohered for me. I know that in lots of political
situations across the world over history that has
been the play people have played to articulate their
own situation. In Yugoslavia under communism
Mark Antony would have had a different
symbolism. Or sometimes Julius Caesar was the
hero. And in our current climate people have been
identifying with Cassius, and ‘Brutus, oh he’s the
sort of Liberal/Obama’. But there’s been great
sympathy for my Brutus, and I’ve taken that to
mean that now we’re thinking ‘Gosh, Brutus, you
can’t afford to be like that. The world isn’t made
like that. There is no room for noble behaviour,
we’ve got to be cut-throat, come on!’ It shifts all the
time, that play. Brutus, again, is the longest role,
but Julius Caesar is the title role. Brutus has always
been a great part, he’s the Hamlet of the play.”
In the epilogue to your book, you mention
the As You Like It speech where Shakespeare
begins ‘All the world’s a stage, And all the
men and women merely players…’ but then
forgets about the women! It’s as if there’s a
second verse that he forgot to write…
“The trouble is, it comes out of Jaques’ mouth,
so he’s not going to worry about the life story of
a woman. And it’s a pattern you see now. This is
what we are up against, that men have been in
charge of the narrative. And it’s not that women
Harriet Walter: A Dame at the top of her game.
haven’t done things, written things, created things,
thought things, changed people’s minds at the
time they were living. It’s just that it hasn’t been
chronicled, it hasn’t been remembered in history
books. It was not considered necessary to include
women in history.
“And Shakespeare’s culpable in that direction
too, but it’s understandable, totally understandable.
I can’t really wag a finger at him, except to say, ‘If
you were writing now, you probably would be more
interested in our story’. And that’s sad, that he’s not
around to do that.”
Brutus and Other Heroines by Harriet Walter is
available now from Nick Hern Books at £10.39
the book
The Donmar Shakespeare Trilogy is now at
St. Ann's Warehouse, Brooklyn until 19 February.
http://stannswarehouse.org/show/the-tempest/
14
shakespeare magazine

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www.Illuminationsmedia.co.uk

Jade Anouka
One of the rising young stars of
Phyllida Lloyd’s acclaimed Donmar
Shakespeare Trilogy, multi-talented
Jade Anouka talks us through an
action-packed gallery of images by
photographer Helen Maybanks
A Very
Valiant Rebel
Jade Anouka
as Hotspur
in Henry IV.
16
shakespeare magazine

Jade Anouka
Left: “This is actually
during a scene change in
Henry IV. Karen Dunbar
live DJs throughout the
show. But she is in the
next scene so I take over
the decks at this point.”
Below: “During the song ‘Come Unto These
Yellow Sands’ in The Tempest. The whole
company perform the song with a mix of
instruments including guitar, drums, harmonica
and trumpet. Joan Armatrading composed
the music for Shakespeare’s words. At this
point I am rapping – our director got me to
write some spoken word for the show to
help bring moments up to date. As a poet, I
relished the opportunity.”
Jade as Ariel in The Tempest.
shakespeare magazine 17

Jade Anouka
“In Julius Caesar I begin
Mark Antony’s ‘Friends,
Romans, Countrymen’
speech face down with
the rest of the company/
Romans pointing guns
to my head. From this
completely vulnerable
point, it is amazing how
Shakespeare’s words
can move the crowd to
follow Antony.”
Jade as Mark Antony
in Julius Caesar.
“This is Hotspur in an
early scene of Henry IV.
He is talking to the King,
explaining that there
was a misunderstanding,
and at this point he is
asking not to let this
misunderstanding get
in the way of their
relationship.”
As Hotspur in Henry IV.
18
shakespeare magazine

Jade Anouka
The Earl of Douglas
(Leah Harvey) spars with
Hotspur in Henry IV.
“As Ariel, here I am performing
another of my penned raps. This is
in place of a rhyming couplet that
Shakespeare wrote about how fast and
efficiently Ariel says he and his sprites
will fulfill Prospero’s tasks. I wrote a
version, and it is performed just before
the wedding.”
“Hotspur recruits The Earl of Douglas
to his side, and in this moment they are
sparring – a sort of test or initiation to
make sure Douglas is up to it. He proves
he is more than capable!”
“Here is an action shot
in the big fight and only
meeting of Prince Hal
and Hotspur in the play.
They are forced to fight
to the death in order
to win the war. It starts
off as a stylised boxing
match and descends into
a grapple where a knife
gets involved. I loved
doing the stage combat!
Thanks to Kombat Kate
for choreographing.”
As Ariel in The Tempest.
Prince Hal (Clare Dunne)
battles Hotspur in Henry IV.
shakespeare magazine 19

SHAKE-SPEARES
SONNETS
Once again Imprinted
by W.S.
2015
“Will Sutton, already a great Shakespeare actor and sonnet performer,
has now created a compelling new volume of the Bard’s 154 sonnets.
In place of the historical essays and analyses of topics and themes often
found in such collections, Sutton begins with a brief explanation of his
color-coding system that guides both experienced and novice readers
through the actions, thoughts, and structural components of each poem.
The volume is brilliant in its simplicity. With it, I am re-exploring works I
have been reading, performing, and teaching for decades.”
David Alan Stern, PhD
Professor of Dramatic Arts
University of Connecticut
Order your copy here

Reduced Shakespeare Company
The
Art of
Reduction
Comedy mavericks the Reduced Shakespeare
Company are one of the world’s longest-running
Bard-related outfits. So it was high time we
asked them the secret of their Shakespearean
success. Austin Tichenor gamely stepped
forward to answer our questions.
Interview by Pat Reid Photos by Teresa Wood
shakespeare magazine 21

Reduced Shakespeare Company
“Our hope is that audiences realize we could do serious
Shakespeare if we wanted to, and many of us have”
You’ve just been to China. I know there’s
a great deal of interest in Shakespeare
there, but what kind of audiences did you
have, and do they ‘get’ the show?
“We performed our very first show, The Complete
Works of William Shakespeare (abridged) [revised]
in Beijing, Shanghai, Xiamen and Nanjing, and
Chinese audiences loved it. We call Shakespeare
‘America’s greatest living playwright’ – the truth
behind the joke is that Shakespeare belongs to the
world, and his works are alive everywhere 400 years
after his death. In both Beijing and Shanghai our
performances were part of a series of Shakespeare
exhibitions and performances. The only thing that’s
hard to convey cross-culturally is the improvisatory
spirit that drives our shows. When everything
we’re supposedly coming up with on the spur of
the moment is translated and broadcast onto giant
screens on either side of the stage, it’s hard to sell
the illusion that we’re flying by the seat of our
pants and making it up as we go along. So that
aspect of the performance gets a little lost.”
You’ve been with the RSC for 24 years now.
Can you share with us your best and worst
Shakespearean moments, please?
“Yikes. I try to suppress the worst moments. That
being said... when I first joined the RSC in 1992
at the Arts Theatre in London, I do recall a sudden
attack of ‘King George III’s Revenge’ in the middle
of my ‘To be, or not to be’ speech – not pretty.
There are many best moments, the most recent
being while performing William Shakespeare’s Long
Lost First Play (abridged) at the Folger Theatre last
April. Unlike the RSC’s previous nine scripts, Long
Lost is driven more by narrative than vaudeville,
so to hear the audience gasping at story twists and
character revelations is as wonderful and gratifying
as getting a huge laugh.”
The line-up of RSC has changed a bit over the
years. Who’s in it at the moment, and what
are the members’ respective strengths?
“Reed Martin and I have been the directors of
the RSC for almost a quarter of a century – Reed
actually joined the company in 1989. Teddy
Spencer joined us last year to become our third
member for Long Lost, and we have a stable of
actors in both the US and UK who know different
shows in our repertoire. We have a variety of skills
– Reed has an MFA in Acting and was a circus
clown with Ringling Brothers for several years. My
MFA’s in Directing, and for many years I played
doctors and lawyers on TV – but all of our actors
combine serious theatre training with improv skills
and comic instincts.
“Our hope is that audiences realize we could
all do serious Shakespeare if we wanted to… and
many of us have! We have a deep bench of UKbased
actors, and two veterans of the Potted Potter
plays will join one of our RSC guys to tour Long
Lost around the UK starting in February.”
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shakespeare magazine

Reduced Shakespeare Company
Above: Reduced
Shakespeare Company
as the Weird Sisters in
William Shakespeare’s
Long Lost First Play
(abridged).
“Toupee, or not
toupee?” asks the
Prince of Demark
(Austin Tichenor) in
William Shakespeare’s
Long Lost First Play
(abridged).
shakespeare magazine 23

Reduced Shakespeare Company
I believe you’ve been accused of blasphemy
in the past. But that was for infringing God
rather than Shakespeare?
“Sigh… yes, our production of The Bible: The
Complete Word of God (abridged) was accused of
blasphemy by a very tiny group of people in the
lovely Belfast suburb of Newtownabbey. They
hadn’t seen the show, of course, and believe their
way is the only way to celebrate the Good Book.
I’ve been with my wife for over 30 years and love
her to pieces, and we tease each other every day.
You think I’m not going to make fun of a book?”
2016 saw you performing your new show,
William Shakespeare’s Long Lost First
Play (abridged), at the hallowed Folger
Shakespeare Library in Washington DC.
Tell us all about that?
“It was a fantastic leap of faith on the Folger’s part
because they agreed to bring us in before a word
was written, based simply on our concept and title.
As the script continued to develop, they decided to
bring us in for a full three-week run that opened
on the very April 23rd weekend when the global
Shakespearean 400th Deathiversary hoopla was at
its peak. It’s such a privilege to be part of the Folger
community, where scholarship and performance are
celebrated in such equal measure.”
We don’t really have renaissance faires in
the UK, but they sound like great fun. And I
believe this is where Reduced Shakespeare
Company first honed its act and found fame?
“It was indeed. The three so-called founding
members of the RSC – Daniel Singer (whose idea
it was in the first place), Jess Winfield and Adam
Long – cut their teeth busking at Ren Faires and
developing a fast, funny and physical performance
style that continues to inform the work we’ve been
doing since the early ’90s.”
Is there such a thing as an average RSC fan?
Do they tend to be hardcore Shakespeare
heads, or non-Shakespeareans?
“The average RSC fan tends to be highly intelligent
and dead sexy. Our hardcore fans like anything we
reduce – literature, history, even sports – but it’s
always fun when experts in any of those fields show
up. They love that we’re irreverently celebrating
their chosen topic, and appreciate the fact that we
always try to get our facts right when we’re not
getting them wrong on purpose. But if our social
media traffic is any indicator, we get waaay more
response when we post Shakespeare-related stuff
– or anything related to Stars Trek or Wars, or
Doctors Who.”
King Lear (Reed Martin) meets Dromio of Syracuse
(Teddy Spencer) from The Comedy of Errors.
How did you view Shakespeare when
you were a youngster? Was it something
that always appealed to you, or was it an
acquired taste?
“I was lucky – I grew up in the San Francisco
Bay Area and got to see fantastic Shakespeare at
SF’s American Conservatory Theatre, where I saw
their commedia-inspired Taming of the Shrew –
later filmed for PBS – and powerful versions of
Othello and Julius Caesar. And, probably because
I was already a theatre nerd, I knew that I only
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shakespeare magazine

Reduced Shakespeare Company
“Because I was a theatre nerd, I knew that I only
understood Shakespeare when I read it aloud”
is that Shakespeare’s first play would take one
hundred hours to perform and this abridgment
takes only two. We believe there are forty-nine
other abridgments we could cull from Shakespeare’s
original!”
A decade or so again you published a book,
Reduced Shakespeare: The Complete Guide
For The Attention Impaired (abridged). Do
you think that people have become even
more attention impaired since then, or have
we always lived in a world of distractions?
“There are more distractions than ever before, but
now people seem to be at least admitting – and
even embracing – their need for help getting to
the point. (We know the need goes on because our
book is still in print!)
“In fact, the trick now is to get them when
they’re young, which is why we’re writing a
Shakespeare pop-up book all about his life, plays
and poetry. It’s created and illustrated by the
amazing Jennie Maizels and will be published in
September 2017 by Walker Books. It’s beautiful – I
can’t wait for you to see it!”
Richard III (Austin Tichenor) woos Beatrice
(Teddy Spencer) in Shakespeare’s Long Lost First Play…
understood Shakespeare when I read it aloud. His
language was always a cool instrument I wanted to
learn how to play – and I’m still learning.”
The concept of the Long Lost First play as a
kind of Shakespearean mash-up sounds very
appropriate, as Shakespeare often mashes
up other plays – and even his own plays.
Has the show ended up changing or evolving
over the year?
“We’ve updated some of Shakespeare’s 400-yearold
puns and cultural references, and they vary
depending on whether we’re in the US or the UK.
After the initial workshop productions in 2015,
we did continue to tighten the script – the premise
Finally, do the Royal Shakespeare Company
ever threaten to get all Jacobean on you for
calling yourselves the RSC?
“You mean those upstarts in Stratford who stole
our initals? Being American, we’re totally thinking
of suing. Actually, they’ve been amazingly tolerant
of our impertinence, and even invited us to
perform in the Barbican lobby in 1990. We’d love
to come back!”
Click below to immerse yourselves in the
marvellously madcap world of the…
Reduced Shakespeare Company
shakespeare magazine 25

John Foxx
The
Mind’s
Construction
The original vocalist with
Ultravox, John Foxx is renowned
as an electronic music innovator.
But under his original name of
Dennis Leigh, he also created an
impressive body of artwork for
one of the world’s most famous
Shakespeare publishers…
Interview by Pat Reid
Special thanks to Martin Smith at metamatic.com for help with this article.
shakespeare magazine 27

John Foxx
There’s a recurring use of classical statues in
your Arden covers, which seems apt. Statues
are mentioned in Antony and Cleopatra,
Coriolanus, Julius Caesar and Pericles – and a
statue plays a key role in The Winter’s Tale…
“Absolutely, I think statues provide a useful motif.
They can indicate fixed values – universally
accepted, seemingly stable tenets of civilisation. At
the same time, they are beautiful but passive, and
also carry the evidence of history in their scars, and
are often ruined or broken.”
was familiar with your music, and knew
that you were involved in art and academia.
But I was surprised and impressed to learn
that, over the course of two decades, you
designed a whole series of covers for the
famous Arden Shakespeare books. How did
that come about?
“Someone who worked for the design company
Newell and Sorrell took my images in at the
start of discussions on the project – so I was
inadvertently involved from the beginning.”
Did you read the plays and research
Shakespeare before you designed the
covers? Or was it a more instinctive process?
“I read them all. But it was instinctive, too. There
is always such a huge visceral and sensual core in all
Shakespeare’s work, and I do believe engaging with
that provides the access to a richer understanding.”
Your Arden Shakespeare designs include
four Roman plays, and most of the other
plays are set around the Mediterranean
during classical antiquity. Was this planned?
It does seem to impose an overall theme on
the designs…
“It wasn’t planned, but I was very aware of it.
You know, I think Shakespeare was actually a
classicist. He localised universal concerns, often by
re-using ancient stories as his frame. Subverting
or reconsidering notions of classicism is the
normal preoccupation of many artists. Look at
Picasso, Dali, Magritte, Ernst – they all altered
conventional subjects in order to produce startling
and apposite results.”
Along with your fascination for classical
statues and imagery, you’ve always been
interested in using the most up-to-date
technology. Can you tell us about the
techniques and materials you used for the
Shakespeare covers?
“As with many of the best things, it all began by
accident. When I was touring around Europe with
the band, I’d taken a lot of photographs of statues
and textured walls, etc., on 35mm slide film –
simply stuff that interested me at the time. I was
wondering what to do with it all. Actually, I was on
the point of throwing it out.
“Then, by accident, I picked up two slides
together and saw something that seemed magical –
richer colours, beautiful textures and otherworldly
superimpositions. This seemed to offer limitless
potential for creating a new sort of imagery. A true
Eureka moment. It altered my way of working
completely.
“That was around 1981, before computer
imaging got underway, A little later, again by sheer
coincidence, I got to use one of the first computer
imaging systems, a Barco system, in Soho, London.
I’m pretty sure I was the first ever to use digital
technology in this way, as a collage/superimposition
tool. I was also very lucky to witness that entire
evolution at first hand. It taught me a great deal
about technology and social change.
“I scanned all my slides into digits and some
were later worked on using Photoshop. But I still
think the best were made using 35mm slide film
and old chemical technology.
You often get to the point of realising that
you’re missing something when you convert to
entirely new processes.”
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shakespeare magazine

John Foxx
“Statues are
beautiful but
passive. They
often carry
the evidence
of history in
their scars,
and are often
ruined or
broken”
John Foxx: musician, artist, designer,
photographer and teacher.
A suitably powerful cover
design for Shakespeare’s
most brutal play, Titus
Andronicus.
shakespeare magazine 29

John Foxx
John
Foxx’s recurring
use of statue imagery
creates a haunting
theme across his
different Arden designs.
30
shakespeare magazine

John Foxx
When I was at school in the ’80s we had the
Arden Shakespeares with covers designed
by the Brotherhood of Ruralists. What did
you think of those? Were you determined to
take your designs in a different direction?
“Oh, I always admired them – Peter Blake’s work
in particular. But I’m the opposite of a ruralist,
so whatever I did was always going to arrive from
a completely different angle. I guess each era will
always interpret Shakespeare in its own way.”
The Brotherhood of Ruralists’ covers were
haunting and sometimes unsettling – a
tradition which you continued for some of
Shakespeare’s darkest and most violent
plays. Do you have a favourite of your
Arden covers?
“I think the Antony and Cleopatra image was
perhaps the most successful – in terms of an
integrated image. I always like the way that sort
of imagery can be capable of conveying even
huge and terrible events through a sort of calm,
almost impassive dignity. Well, that’s what you
hope for.”
Has Shakespeare been an influence on your
music or lyrics at all? (One of my favourite
Ultravox songs is ‘Hiroshima Mon Amour’,
which is lyrically evocative of TS Eliot…)
“Thanks, I love Eliot’s work too and I confess
I was reading his work around the time I wrote
that song. Apart from Shakespeare’s wider themes,
those beautiful distilled phrases come to mind.
Once you hear them, they remain with you
forever, a sort of measure of irreducible perfection
– you know, ‘a rose by any other name would
smell as sweet’. That sort of joyous precision
eventually leads you to measure everything you
might do against it.”
Did you have much awareness of
Shakespeare when you were younger? I’ve
noticed that quite a few musicians who
grew up in the ’50s were impressed by
Laurence Olivier’s Richard III, and actors like
Richard Burton…
“Oh yes, I had to go to the cinema with my
school to see Othello, but I’ve got to confess I
developed an instinctive aversion to Olivier. He
The concept for Foxx’s designs arose by accident
when he picked up two photo slides at the same time.
seemed glottal, egotistical and serpentine.
I liked Burton much better. He was so effortlessly
powerful, but utterly vulnerable at the same time.”
Will we see any more Shakespeare-related
art from you in the future?
“Oh, I think it’s all Shakespeare-related in some
way. He’s such a point of gravity. Makes you
proud to share the language. He went from being
a brave new re-interpreter for his age, almost a
drama punk, to becoming classical himself. The
measure of our present concept of classicism, in
fact. He’d no doubt relish that particular irony –
and use it.”
More on John Foxx
More on Arden Shakespeare
shakespeare magazine 31

TIMELESS
PORTRAITURE
Award-winning, Lancashire-based Photography service
Portraits, Headshots, Theatrical Events
www.timelessportraiture.co.uk
07938 950 700
Info@timelssportraiture.co.uk

The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses
Between
the Red Rose
and the White
Eight months after it graced the UK’s screens,
Shakespeare TV epic The Hollow Crown: The Wars of
the Roses has just been broadcast to hugely appreciative
audiences in the USA. Which gives us the perfect excuse
to dig out these revealing production interviews with
stellar cast members Sophie Okonedo, Judi Dench,
Hugh Bonneville and Benedict Cumberbatch.
I
shakespeare magazine 33

The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses
SOPHIE OKONEDO as MARGARET
What did you think of Margaret?
“I was surprised I didn’t know about the character
before. I don’t have a huge knowledge of
Shakespeare – I’ve done a bit but not loads. I’m
more familiar with the famous plays. I was amazed
that there was such an extraordinary character. She
becomes extraordinary throughout the whole cycle
but one play on its own wouldn’t give you a sense
of how she really is.”
What role does she play in the stories?
“She’s quite strong in the beginning but she doesn’t
realise how Henry is going to behave until she
gets to England and spends some time there. She
realises that she has to take charge all the time
because he’s got quite a spiritual nature and finds
it hard to be forceful. The crown was thrust upon
him at a very young age, so he’s very different from
his father. She’s had to fill the gap and steer the
ship to what she feels is the rightful place.”
Is she frustrated with the politics of the day?
“She is particularly frustrated at the beginning
because Gloucester seems to have such a powerful
influence and Henry is treated like a child. They’re
married, so she feels he should be allowed to rule
with her alongside him. She feels a lot of the people
around him are unruly and don’t treat him like a
king, as they would have done with Henry V. She’s
very unhappy about the situation she finds herself
in. It’s not what she dreamt when she was on the
boat coming to marry the king. She’s very savvy
and has a quick instinct. She’s fearless, particularly
for that time as a woman. She’s… got balls.”
The Wars of the Roses is essentially a family
feud, with intensely familial relationships.
“That’s always the case with Shakespeare, or at
least with the bits that I’ve done. People are always
the same, no matter what the period is. The
same thoughts and feelings, inconsistencies and
ambiguities still occur and Shakespeare goes to the
heart of that.”
What do you think Dominic Cooke has
brought to this production?
“Dominic is my all-time favourite director anyway,
so working with him on his first TV film is
fantastic. I’ve seen his previous projects and I’m a
massive fan of his theatre work. He’s a person that
I would say yes to absolutely anything he asked me
to do. Also, he gave me the top part in this, so it
was a double whammy! He’s intensely intelligent,
coupled with a great instinct for humanity and
what it is to be human, the human condition.
He pours all that into his work. It’s always done
with the utmost authenticity. He’s also a decent
chap and quite a laugh. All of those qualities are
probably why he’s got the cast he has, because a lot
of people know him. I just can’t imagine another
director getting this cast, but it’s because a lot of
people simply want to work with him.”
Does it inspire you when you’re working with
actors of this calibre?
“I think it brings quite a lot of relaxation. Everyone
knows what they’re doing and they’re at the stage
in their career when they’re no longer trying to
prove things. It’s a relaxed atmosphere because
you’re working with the best, and everybody is
there to serve the play. It’s quite a laugh too, which
is important to me – I love the work, but it’s
important to have a laugh as well. It’s been brilliant
working with Benedict. I’ve known him for years
anyway and have worked with him before. He’s
pretty much the same as he was back then.”
Have you worked with Tom Sturridge before?
“No but I love working with him. He’s brilliant
and a genius actor. We have a really good working
relationship – I can throw anything at him and he’s
really loose. I think he’s got an interesting journey.
The way I’m playing Margaret, she really loves him
and is just a bit disappointed sometimes with his
behaviour. I do try to put love into every character
I play.”
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shakespeare magazine

The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses
Sophie Okonedo as
Margaret of Anjou.
“Margaret is particularly frustrated at the beginning
because Gloucester has such a powerful influence”
shakespeare magazine 35

The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses
Judi
“I was hoping that Richard III would be buried
in York Minster, but we’ve lost him to Leicester”
Dench as Cecily, the
Duchess of York.
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shakespeare magazine

The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses
JUDI DENCH
as DUCHESS
OF YORK
How did you get involved in The Hollow
Crown: The Wars of the Roses?
“The Hollow Crown scripts were sent to me while I
was busy with Esio Trot. I thought it was interesting
but I put it to one side because I was busy. Then
I went to Hay-on-Wye to do an interview with
Richard Eyre and he asked me if I remembered
any lines from the Shakespeare plays I’ve done. He
wanted me to perform some scenes but I told him
that there are a couple of moments when I need a
line feeding first.
“During rehearsals, Benedict Cumberbatch
walked into the room and said he would do
them. So, at the event, Richard surprised the
audience and introduced him on stage with me, to
tumultuous applause. During the Q&A afterwards,
Benedict Cumberbatch suddenly asked if I would
be in the production of Richard III that he was
going to do. I was completely floored. I thought
about it and said yes and that was it. It’s all thanks
to Benedict.
“It’s thrilling and lovely to play the Duchess of
York, which is where I come from. I remembered
seeing the plays at Stratford with Peggy
Ashcroft, Brewster Mason and Donald Sinden. I
remembered the Henry VI plays terribly well but
I’ve never done this one before.”
Tell us about the character you’re playing in
The Hollow Crown?
“I play this old bag, Cecily the Duchess of York.
Everybody she loves has been killed – her husband,
her children. She knows who’s done it and is a kind
of Miss Marple! If anyone says, ‘I’m in a terribly
bad way’, she says: ‘You may be in a bad way,
just wait until you hear what’s happened to me!’
That’s the Duchess of York in Richard III. I was
passionately hoping that Richard III’s body would
be buried in York Minster, but we’ve lost him to
Leicester.”
Why do you think Benedict’s right for the
part of Richard III?
“He’s a terrific actor and he did the most
spectacular reading of it. He’d just come back from
the Toronto Film Festival the night before, after
doing all those crazy junket interviews, walked
in and then read the whole of the Henry VI plays
followed by Richard III, He was wonderful.
“He has that ability not to take himself too
seriously, as well as being a terrific actor. I was at
Central and his mother was the year ahead of me.
I think I met him when he was a little boy because
I opened a theatre at Brambletye School, where he
was before he went to Harrow.”
How does director Dominic Cooke work with
the text?
“Everybody does it in a different way. I would be
upset if not enough attention was being paid to the
text. That’s because I come from the school of Peter
Hall, Trevor Nunn and John Barton, where the text
was of paramount importance. But Dominic is like
that too. He pays incredible attention to the metre
and the verse.”
shakespeare magazine 37

The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses
HUGH
BONNEVILLE as
GLOUCESTER
Were you familiar with these plays before
you came to do The Hollow Crown: The Wars
of the Roses?
“It was one of the plays I was least familiar with.
They are quite exciting because they are rough
and sprawling, being written early in the career of
Shakespeare. I had seen them on the stage in the
History Cycles. They are about England tearing
itself apart and trying to work out what it is.
“The plays have been condensed from four
plays to three films. At the time they were
performed, the characters would have been vivid
in the audience’s imagination and they would have
understood the references. Artistic licence has been
necessary – this is very much a version of the story,
a clear one.
“I enjoyed reading the scripts more than the
original plays, which is a terrible thing to say
about Shakespeare! They have been condensed to
have a clear narrative line, which is only for the
better. It is interesting to see the seeds and themes
of Shakespeare growing and being revisited across
plays. Richard III is a one-man narrative of a
descent into evil and madness. We see Shakespeare
honing his craft.”
What do you think of your character, the
Duke of Gloucester?
“He’s a simple character. Shakespeare thinks he’s a
good man. He is caught between the political and
the emotional. The history plays are fascinating
because they are about family. You see Gloucester
devoted to his nephew, devoted to the memory of
his brother, Henry V. His downfall is ultimately
because his wife Eleanor enjoys using the credit
card too much!
“There’s fantastic tension in that Gloucester is
unable to let go, but Henry VI is also clearly not
ready. Meanwhile Gloucester has also created power
himself. You can see the same thing in modern-day
situations, from a dictatorship to a boardroom. The
plays explore the nature of power. Henry VI would
like to dismiss it all and devote himself to higher
thoughts. Richard III couldn’t give a toss about
higher thoughts, he just wants power!
“It is Gloucester’s death that unleashes the
Wars of the Roses. The stability he represented was
a certain kind of peace. You take out the central
pillar of any society, then you create a vacuum. I’m
not making grand claims for this, but you see it in
Yemen, or Iraq, or Syria. In the play, you see the
dukes piling in, and chaos begins. This is the heart
of the Wars of the Roses.
Dominic [Cooke] and Ben [Power] said that
the central question of these films is: ‘How many
bad decisions does it take before a madman is in
power?’ You are taken from the glory of Henry V,
to civil war, to a madman in power in Richard III.
History has repeated itself in that vein.”
38
shakespeare magazine

The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses
Hugh Bonneville as
Humphrey, Duke of
Gloucester.
“Gloucester’s downfall is ultimately because his wife
Eleanor enjoys using the credit card too much”
shakespeare magazine 39

The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses
“Richard III is an anti-hero because he lures us in.
He’s very funny… Audiences revel in his villainy”
Benedict Cumberbatch as
Richard III.
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shakespeare magazine

The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses
BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH
as RICHARD III
How did you connect with the character?
“In terms of tackling the real historical figure
versus the fictionalised version in Shakespeare, I
think we’re smart enough as audiences that the
two can coexist. The script does all the heavy
lifting. Richard tells the audience about how
wrong he feels in his body, about being dejected
and overlooked, and about being unable to be part
of a royal courtly life with the Plantagenets. In
mediaeval England if you were not born perfect,
you were often drowned at birth. It was a terrible
social taboo. In Shakespeare’s story, Richard is
fostered at a distance from the Kennedy-like family
of perfect specimens. There’s very little care for
him. His deep-seated anger and hurt leads to his
ambition and everything we know of him. That
was our way into humanising him.”
So do you see Richard III as a villain or as an
anti-hero?
“His arc is hugely brilliant. In Richard III he gives
a speech about how he’s going to go and kill the
king, Henry, and how this ties into his feelings
about himself as a disabled man. I think that
humanises him. As an actor you have to flesh out
your character. You can’t pantomime with the
daggers and the looks, because that gets really dull.
“There’s such humour in other moments
where Richard relishes his plans. He’s an anti-hero
because he lures us in. He’s very funny, hopefully.
Audiences don’t necessarily side with him but they
revel in his villainy! I also don’t want to burden
Freudian analysis onto him and make him more
understandable. I don’t want to say, ‘Oh, he’s
just a victim of this cruel world. Oh, what other
choice did he have?’ Of course he had choices. He
very clearly makes the wrong ones, and suffers the
ultimate downfall for that.”
What do you think of Ben Power’s scripts?
“Richard III is often performed stand-alone,
because you can mention it in the same breath as
Macbeth and Othello, if not, say, Hamlet. It is a
stand-alone of the histories in a way that the Henry
VIs aren’t. What Ben has done is to create a sense of
through line in the themes across the plays. He has
created a real sense of urgency.”
How did it feel having Judi Dench playing
your mother?
“I’ve never worked with her before and it was
amazing that she got to play my mum. She’s very
close in age and in friendship to my mum. They’ve
known each other for a long time, since drama
school. I rather embarrassingly publicly asked Judi
to give us the nod at the Hay Festival last year and
she was very game and agreed, which bagged us a
Dame! She is just an absolute delight. You’ve heard
it all before, but she’s funny as hell, just an utter
inspiration to be around. I crave the days when
she’s on the call sheet and wish there were more.
To watch her work is privilege enough, but to work
with her in scenes is heavenly.”
shakespeare magazine 41

Next issue
We hope you’ve enjoyed Issue Twelve of Shakespeare Magazine.
Here’s a taste of what we have coming up next time…
Shakespeare with Attitude
New TV series Will promises thrills, spills and quills
with its fictionalised take on Young Shakespeare.
Shakespeare’s Faith
The new book from Graham Holderness puts
Shakespeare’s Christianity in context.
Good Tickle Brain
Let us marvel at the Shakespearean stick
drawing genius of Mya Gosling.
Shakespeare in Detroit
The remarkable tale of Sam White and her
crusade for the Bard in the Motor City.

Margaret Atwood
This Thing of
Darkness
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Margaret Atwood
Canadian literary superstar Margaret Atwood
has deftly reworked The Tempest as part of the
ongoing Hogarth Shakespeare series. The resulting
novel, Hag-Seed, is both a warmly affectionate
tribute to Shakespeare and a characteristically
humane and pertinent argument for prison reform.
Left: Literary magician Margaret Atwood.
Above: The Tempest staged at the University of
Notre Dame, 2016 (Photo by Matt Cashore).
shakespeare magazine 45

Margaret Atwood
ike Shakespeare in general, he gives you a lot
of unanswered questions, he gives you a lot of
possibilities with each of the characters. Who are
they really? And starting at the end, with that very
peculiar epilogue which ends with three words ‘set
me free’, you think ‘What are you asking to be set
free from?’ So I went backwards from that, and
when you do that you realise everybody in the play
is in prison. That’s why it’s set in a prison. Every
single one of them is imprisoned in some way. So
there is a reason why objectively that might be a
good setting to put on that play in.
“After I’d finished the book I was told that
in Italy a man who was in prison and put on
The Tempest while he was there found it such a
transformative experience that now that he has
gotten out of prison he has made a career of
going and teaching Shakespeare in prisons. And
he’s written a book about it that I long to have
translated so I can read it.”
Margaret Atwood speaking to The Canadian Press,
October 2016
Above: Artist Zach Lieberman
created a digital art installation
based on the text of Margaret
Atwood’s Hag-Seed. Here
we see Margaret physically
interacting with her own text
on the big screen.
Watch it now
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shakespeare magazine

Margaret Atwood
Left: Shakespeare
Magazine attended
Margaret Atwood’s
October 2016
performance in Bath.
Below: The Tempest
directed by West Hyler
at the University of
Notre Dame (Photo
by Matt Cashore).
“It’s part of the Hogarth Shakespeare Project to
honour the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s
death, and to celebrate that they asked a number
of writers to choose a play of Shakespeare and to
revisit that play in the form of a modern novel.
And apart from that, there weren’t any special
instructions.
“People have been asking me why I chose
The Tempest, apart from the fact that it’s about a
weather event and Canada’s very big on weather.
We have a big choice of tempests every year.
So I chose The Tempest for several reasons, one
was that I had thought about Prospero quite a bit
before. He’s in a book called A Writer on Writing in
a chapter about Devious Magicians because he is a
devious magician.
“He’s quite sort of magisterial but he has a
guilty side and he has a very vengeful side. In fact,
the whole beginning of the play is the beginning of
his vengeance plan, he wants revenge on the people
who have kicked him out of his beautiful life and
tried to kill him. The Tempest is driven by his desire
for revenge.”
Margaret Atwood speaking in Bath, England in
October 2016
“Prospero is a devious magician. He’s quite magisterial,
but he has a guilty side. And he has a vengeful side”
shakespeare magazine 47

Margaret Atwood
“There’s a very good book about teaching Shakespeare
in prisons. It’s called Shakespeare Saved My Life”
On the Bard’s
home turf:
Margaret’s
Stratford-upon-
Avon tour date
coincided with
Bookshop Day.
Below: UK cover
art for Hag-Seed.
“Everybody in that play is imprisoned, constrained,
un-free in some way for some part of the play,
except possibly Miranda who, although she’s on an
island she can’t get off of, doesn’t know anything
better, so doesn’t feel she’s imprisoned. I might
point out that on this island there’s no butter.
I toted up the things they had to eat and they were
fairly limited, so you can see why Prospero might
want to get back to Milan, his home town.
As for teaching Shakespeare in prisons, that has
gone on more than you might think. There’s a very
good book called Shakespeare Saved My Life, which
is about a female college professor who went into
a maximum security all-male prison and taught
Shakespeare. She said that she got better papers
from them than she got from her college students,
because those people had been there and done that.
They had assassinated Duncan.”
Margaret Atwood speaking to Big Think,
November 2016
Watch it now
Buy Hag-Seed
48
shakespeare magazine

How to think like Shakespeare
How to think
like Shakespeare
David Mitchell plays William
Shakespeare in Ben Elton’s
BBC comedy Upstart Crow.
50
shakespeare magazine

How to think like Shakespeare
Scott Newstok believes
that today’s students
have been cheated of
their right to a complete
education. Addressing
the Class of 2020 at
Rhodes College in
Memphis, Tennessee,
Newstok argues that
following the example of
Shakespeare is one way
for students – and all of
us – to reclaim what is
truly ours.
shakespeare magazine 51

How to think like Shakespeare
Now your education is in your own hands. And my
advice is: Don’t let yourself be cheated anymore,
and do not cheat yourself. Take advantage of the
autonomy and opportunities that college permits
by approaching it in the spirit of the 16th century.
You’ll become capable of a level of precision,
inventiveness, and empathy worthy to be called
Shakespearean.
Building a bridge to the 16th century must
seem like a perverse prescription for today’s ills.
I’m the first to admit that English Renaissance
pedagogy was rigid and rightly mocked for its
domineering pedants. Few of you would be eager
to wake up before 6 a.m. to say mandatory prayers,
or to be lashed for tardiness, much less translate
Latin for hours on end every day of the week. It
would be hard to design a system more antithetical
to our own contemporary ideals of studentcentered,
present-focused, and career-oriented
education.
Yet this system somehow managed to nurture
world-shifting thinkers, including those who
launched the Scientific Revolution. This education
fostered some of the very habits of mind endorsed
by both the National Education Association and
the Partnership for 21st Century Learning – critical
thinking, clear communication, collaboration
and creativity. (To these ‘Four Cs’ I would add
‘curiosity’.) Given that your own education has
fallen far short of those laudable goals, I urge you
to reconsider Shakespeare’s intellectual formation:
that is, not what he purportedly thought – about
law or love or leadership – but how he thought.
An apparently rigid educational system could,
paradoxically, induce liberated thinking.
So how can you think like Shakespeare?
His mind was shaped by rhetoric, a term that
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How to think like Shakespeare
you probably associate with empty promises –
things politicians say but don’t really mean. But
in the Renaissance, rhetoric was nothing less than
the fabric of thought itself. Because thinking
and speaking well form the basis of existence in
a community, rhetoric prepares you for every
occasion that requires words. That’s why Tudor
students devoted countless hours to examining
vivid models, figuring out ways to turn a phrase,
exercising elaborate verbal patterning.
You take it for granted that Olympic athletes
and professional musicians must practice
relentlessly to perfect their craft. Why should you
expect the craft of thought to require anything
less disciplined? Fierce attention to clear and
precise writing is the essential tool for you to foster
independent judgment. That is rhetoric.
Renaissance rhetoric achieved precision through
a practice that might surprise you: imitation.
Like ‘rhetoric’, ‘imitation’ sounds pejorative
today – a fake, a knockoff, a mere copy. But
Renaissance thinkers – aptly, looking back to the
Roman Seneca, who himself looked back to the
Greeks – compared the process of imitation to
a bee’s gathering nectar from many flowers and
then transforming it into honey. As Michel de
Montaigne put it:
“The bees steal from this flower and that, but
afterward turn their pilferings into honey, which is
their own… So the pupil will transform and fuse
together the passages that he borrows from others,
to make of them something entirely his own; that is
to say, his own judgment. His education, his labor,
and his study have no other aim but to form this.”
The honey metaphor corrects our naïve notion
that being creative entails making something from
nothing. Instead, you become a creator by wrestling
with the legacy of your authoritative predecessors,
standing on the shoulders of giants. In the words of
the saxophone genius John Coltrane, “You’ve got to
look back at the old things and see them in a new
light.” Listen to Coltrane fuse experimental jazz,
South Asian melodic modes and the Elizabethan
Scott Newstok delivers his 2016 address
urging students to think like Shakespeare.
ballad ‘Greensleeves’ and you’ll hear how engaging
with the past generates rather than limits.
The most fascinating concept that Shakespeare’s
period revived from classical rhetoric was inventio,
which gives us both the word ‘invention’ and the
word ‘inventory’. Cartoon images of inventors
usually involve a light bulb flashing above the
head of a solitary genius. But nothing can come of
nothing. And when rhetoricians spoke of inventio,
they meant the first step in constructing an
argument: an inventory of your mind’s treasury of
knowledge – your database of reading, which you
can accumulate only through slow, deliberate study.
People on today’s left and right are misguided
on this point, making them strange bedfellows.
Progressive educators have long been hostile
to what they scorn as a ‘banking concept’ of
education, in which teachers deposit knowledge
in passive students. Neoliberal reformers act
as if cognitive ‘skills’ can somehow be taught
in the abstract, independent of content. And
some politicians seem eager to get rid of teachers
altogether and just have you watch a video.
“Shakespeare’s education fostered critical thinking, clear
communication, collaboration, creativity and curiosity”
shakespeare magazine 53

How to think like Shakespeare
You, having been born when Google was founded,
probably take it for granted that you can always
look something up online.
But knowledge matters. Cumulatively, it
provides the scaffolding for your further inquiry.
In the most extreme example, if you knew no
words in a language, having a dictionary wouldn’t
help you, since every definition would simply list
more words you didn’t know. Likewise, without an
inventory of knowledge, it’s frustratingly difficult
for you to accumulate, much less create, more
knowledge. As the Italian novelist Elena Ferrante
said, “There is no work… that is not the fruit of
tradition.”
Tradition derives from the Latin traditio – that
which is handed down to you for safekeeping.
I think part of our innate skepticism of tradition
derives from our good democratic impulses – we
don’t want someone else telling us what to do,
we want to decide for ourselves. In other words,
you rightly reject a thoughtless adherence to
tradition, just as you rightly reject (I hope) the
thoughtlessness that accompanies authoritarianism.
However, as the political philosopher Hannah
Arendt insisted, education “by its very nature…
cannot forgo either authority or tradition, and yet
must proceed in a world that is neither structured
by authority nor held together by tradition.”
Educational authority is not the same thing as
political authoritarianism.
You simply cannot transform tradition
(a creative ideal) without first knowing it (a
conserving ideal). Making an inventory must
precede making an invention. Just imagine how
startling it must have been for Shakespeare, the
child of a small-town glove maker, the first time
he encountered Seneca’s blood-drenched tragedies,
or Lucretius’ treatise on the nature of the material
world, or Ovid’s exquisite tales of shape-shifting.
Shakespeare’s education furnished him with an
inventory of words, concepts, names and plots
that he would reinvent throughout his career.
Immersion in distant, difficult texts enlarges your
mind and your world, providing for a lifetime
of further inquiry. Devote the time in college to
develop your growing inventory.
You’ve repeatedly heard the buzz phrase
‘critical thinking’ during your orientation. Who
could be against such an obvious good? Yet we
might do better to revive instead the phrase
‘negative capability’, what the poet John Keats
called Shakespeare’s disposition to be “capable of
being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts.” In the
Renaissance, the rhetorical tradition encouraged
such “play of the mind” through the practice of
disputation. Students had to argue from multiple
perspectives rather than dogmatically insist upon
one biased position.
The 2016
CBeebies
production of
A Midsummer
Night’s Dream
had William
Shakespeare
(Steven Kynman)
explain his
own play to
an audience of
children.
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How to think like Shakespeare
“Shakespeare made the most of his team’s talents,
with an eye toward long-term continuity. And profit!”
Once you are familiar with Shakespeare’s training
in disputation, you can easily see how it would
lead to the verbal give-and-take that constitutes
the heart of drama. As Zadie Smith marvels,
“Shakespeare sees always both sides of a thing…
In his plays he is woman, man, black, white,
believer, heretic, Catholic, Protestant, Jew,
Muslim… He understood what fierce, singular
certainty creates – and what it destroys. In
response, he made himself… speak truth plurally.”
Now that’s the kind of critical thinking you should
aspire to – speaking truth plurally.
All well and good, you say, but my parents
are worried about what I’m going to do after I
graduate. There, too, Shakespeare can be a model.
When he was born, there wasn’t yet a
professional theater in London. In other words,
his education had prepared him for a job that
didn’t even exist. You should be encouraged to
learn that this has been true for every generation.
Four of today’s largest companies did not exist
when I was born, 43 years ago. One of them,
Apple, was co-founded by someone who said that
the most important topic he ever studied was not
engineering but calligraphy.
In short, the best way for you to prepare for
the unforeseen future is to learn how to think
intensively and imaginatively. Abraham Flexner, a
legendary reformer of American medical education,
was adamant about the “usefulness of useless
knowledge”. According to Flexner, “the really great
discoveries” have “been made by men and women
who were driven not by the desire to be useful
but merely the desire to satisfy their curiosity.”
To cultivate such curiosity, you should think of
yourself as apprenticing to the craft of thought.
As the intellectual historian Mary Carruthers puts
it: “people do not ‘have’ ideas, they ‘make’ them.”
As with rhetoric, imitation and inventory, you
might not think very highly of apprenticeship
these days. But it was crucial for skilled labor
in Renaissance Europe. It required an exacting,
collaborative environment, with guidance from
people who knew more than you did. When
Tom Stourton plays the youthful Bard in
Horrible Histories: Sensational Shakespeare.
Shakespeare arrived on the London theater scene,
he entered a kind of artistic studio, or workshop,
or laboratory, in which he was apprenticing himself
to experienced playwrights. Note that playwright is
not spelled w-r-i-t-e. It’s spelled w-r-i-g-h-t.
A maker, like a wheelwright, who crafts wheels, or
a shipwright, who crafts ships. A playwright crafts
plays.
After collaborating with other dramatists,
Shakespeare soon graduated to crafting his own
plays, yet still collaborating with the members of
his company, in which he owned a share. That is,
he received revenue from every ticket purchased.
As Bart van Es has shown, Shakespeare wrote with
specific actors in mind, making the most of the
talents of his team, with an eye toward long-term
continuity. And profit! At the age of 33, he could
already afford to buy the second-biggest house in
prosperous Stratford. He soon acquired another
home, purchased more than 100 acres of land,
and retired before the age of 50. Who says rhyme
doesn’t pay?
Part of what made Shakespeare collaborate so
well with others was his radical sense of empathy.
shakespeare magazine 55

How to think like Shakespeare
He probably would have called it fellowship.
Researchers “have found evidence that literary
fiction improves a reader’s capacity to understand
what others are thinking and feeling.” Shakespeare
developed his empathy through his schoolboy
exercises of ‘double translation’ when he was
impersonating the voices of others, as explored
in Lynn Enterline’s work on character making
(ethopoeia).
A letter I recently received from a former
student renewed my appreciation for the indirect
ways in which empathy can be developed.
Christopher Grubb, who double-majored in
chemistry and music at Rhodes College, is now
enrolled in Columbia University’s College of
Physicians and Surgeons. He recalled the opening
quatrain of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73, which he
had memorized for my seminar. An aging speaker
compares his declining life to a tree shedding its
leaves:
That time of year thou mayst in me behold,
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.
It would be hard to think of something more
irrelevant to a medical student interviewing a
patient than some ambiguous 400-year-old poem.
Talk about useless knowledge! Or is it? Remarkably,
Shakespeare enacts a double empathy here –
that is to say, the speaker imagines the addressee
imagining the speaker: “That time of year thou
mayst in me behold.” Reading this poem as an
undergraduate, for an elective course, contributed
in some small but genuine way to Chris’s capacity
for empathy.
As Chris observed, medical schools are
introducing liberal-arts approaches into their
curricula, but he wonders whether this is “too little,
too late. If a person has spent an entire academic
life striving for scientific advancement, how can we
expect that person to become, suddenly, expert at
conversations about end-of-life care or existential
pain?”
He’s far from the first to lament the creeping
preprofessionalism in our schools – in fact,
Shakespeare’s contemporary Francis Bacon
complained that among the many “colleges in
David Mitchell’s comedic portrayal of an
all-too-human Shakespeare in Upstart Crow.
Europe, I find strange that they are all dedicated to
professions, and none left free to arts and sciences
at large.” Our word ‘college’ derives from the Latin
legal term collegium. It means a group of people
with a common purpose, a body of colleagues, a
fellowship, a guild.
Class of 2020: welcome to college, your
workshop for thought. You have an enviable
chance to undertake a serious, sustained intellectual
apprenticeship. You will prove your craft every
time you choose to open a book, every time you
choose to settle down to write without distraction.
Every time you choose to listen, to consider, and to
contribute to a difficult yet open conversation.
Do not cheat yourselves.
While the Latin curriculum has long since
vanished, you can still bring precision to your
words, invention to your work, and empathy to
your world.
A longer version of this article originally appeared in
The Chronicle of Higher Education in August 2016.
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shakespeare magazine

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a short selection
from Shakespeare?
The 30-Minute Shakespeare
Anthology contains 18 abridged
scenes, including monologues, from
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Every scene features interpretive stage
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The 30-Minute Shakespeare Anthology
includes one scene with monologue
from each of these plays:
As You Like It • The Comedy of Errors
Hamlet • Henry IV, Part I • Julius Caesar
King Lear • Love’s Labor’s Lost
Macbeth • The Merchant of Venice
The Merry Wives of Windsor
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Much Ado About Nothing • Othello
Romeo and Juliet • The Taming of the
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The 30-Minute Shakespeare series is available in print and ebook format at retailers
and as downloadable PDFs from 30MinuteShakespeare.com.

Shakespeare’s Storms
“An original and imaginative book
that punches far above its weight”
– Professor Laurie Maguire.
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shakespeare magazine

Shakepeare’s Storms
For those
in Peril
on the Sea
Scholar and author Gwilym Jones won the
2016 Shakespeare’s Globe Book Award for his
monograph Shakespeare’s Storms. In this exclusive
guest essay for Shakespeare Magazine, he places
Shakespeare’s Sea-Storms in perspective.
shakespeare magazine 59

Shakespeare’s Storms
“The primary function of Shakespeare’s storms is to
separate characters, most obviously with a shipwreck”
Storm clouds gather
above the stage at
Shakespeare’s Globe
(Photo by John
Wildgoose).
hakespeare was remarkably fond of storms,
not only in the stage effects he so often calls
for, but in the metaphors and similes he gives
to his characters. In fact, if such images are
included, there is some instance of storm in every
Shakespearean play. Perhaps this shouldn’t be
surprising; the storm is a trope that has carried
across literature from ancient epic to twenty-first
century narrative non-fiction, from Aeneid to
Zeitoun. Readers of Shakespeare Magazine will
no doubt be aware of Shakespeare’s storms as
individual moments in plays, but what happens if
we take the panoramic view?
If Shakespeare’s storms are to be thought of
as functional, then their primary function is to
separate characters. Most obviously, this separation
is achieved when the storm causes a shipwreck, as
in The Comedy of Errors, Twelfth Night, Pericles and
The Tempest. In Othello, a storm splits the Venetian
fleet without splitting the ships themselves, with
the effect that characters are divided briefly.
The sea is not necessary for a storm to separate –
in King Lear, the weather divides characters into
indoor and outdoor groups – but it is tempting
to view the shipwreck storms as motifs. This
temptation is amplified if we concentrate on
The Comedy of Errors, Twelfth Night and The
Tempest, and the chronological detail that these
plays date from the beginning, middle and end
of Shakespeare’s playwriting career. But these
storms cannot be dismissed so neatly. Shakespeare,
rather than re-use the same storm for each play,
approaches each play with distinct requirements
and concerns, drawn out in the texts and the
storms themselves.
There is, though, a pattern. If Shakespeare’s seastorms
are approached in chronological order then
we see an increasing interest in bringing the storm
into a more immediate, and thereby dramatic and
threatening, presentation. In the development of
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shakespeare magazine

Shakepeare’s Storms
Shakespeare’s storms, there is, indeed, a calm before
the storm. To illustrate this, here are those seastorms
in the order in which they were written.
In The Comedy of Errors, the storm is long in
the past. It is digested and given narrative structure
with a definite beginning, middle and end. Thus,
Egeon starts his story: ‘In Syracusa was I born’,
before eventually devoting thirty lines to the storm
(1.1.36; 61–91). Compelling though Egeon’s story
may be, he has over four fifths of the lines in the
scene. It is perhaps unsurprising that Shakespeare
presents the next storm of separation differently.
In Twelfth Night the fallout of the shipwreck is still
happening: it is staged. The narrative is fragmented
and the narrators unsure: ‘Perchance he is not
drown’d: what think you sailors?’ (1.2.5). Rather
than discover the characters’ situations before
they appear, as in The Comedy of Errors, we see
them in the immediate aftermath, washed ashore
and separated. Indeed, so great is the emphasis
on the present, that we are not told what caused
the shipwreck: we tend to assume it is a storm – I
suspect because of those in other plays – but an
assumption it remains. Instead we have the lived
experience of the survivor acted out on stage.
In Othello, this immediacy is taken one step
further: The sea-storm is happening, though off
stage. Again the narrative is fragmented, but is now
Pericles battles a storm, Sam Wanamaker
Playhouse, 2015 (Photo by Marc Brenner).
Ariel (Colin Morgan) in the 2013 Shakespeare’s Globe
production of The Tempest (Photo by Marc Brenner).
also unfinished. For the first time in Shakespeare,
the sea-storm has spectators, both in the characters
– chiefly Desdemona – and in the audience
themselves. Next comes Pericles, and the process
of bringing the storm closer to the dramatic action
continues. In Act 2, Scene 1, there are spectators in
the Fishermen, and Pericles enters ‘wet’ (2.1.0sd).
In Act 3, Scene 1, the sea-storm is staged. Here, the
audience actually experiences the storm, and the
separation of characters, along with the characters
involved. This is the earliest surviving scene in
English drama in which a ship in a storm is on
stage.
When we come to The Winter’s Tale, we find
the sea-storm happening, off stage. The increasing
immediacy peaked with Pericles, but this is partly
the point. The separation of characters in the play
is not a consequence of the storm, but rather is
figuratively reinforced by the storm. As the Mariner
puts it, ‘In my conscience, | The heavens with that
we have in hand are angry | And frown upon’s’
(3.3.4–6). The separation of parents and daughter
has already happened – the audience have seen it
unravel in detail – the storm is a staged, symbolic,
consolidation of it. Although the shipwreck is
not staged, however, it is anticipated from dry
land, which is a novelty in Shakespeare (3.3.3;
8–11). Again, there is a spectator, the Clown, who
shakespeare magazine 61

Shakespeare’s Storms
“We tend to assume the shipwreck in Twelfth Night
is caused by a storm, but an assumption it remains”
Act I, Scene 1 of
The Tempest.
Engraving by
Benjamin Smith
(1797). Based
on a painting by
George Romney.
(Via Wikimedia
Commons)
provides the story of the death of those on the
ship, whom we have just seen on the stage. In his
phrases, the immediacy is emphasised: ‘Now, now:
I have not winked since I saw these sights: the men
are not yet cold under water’ (102–3).
Finally, in The Tempest is the conflation of
everything we have seen so far. The sea-storm
is staged, the mariners wet. The ship is wrecked
before our eyes: ‘We split, we split, we split!’
(1.1.62). Afterwards, several narrators give slightly
different versions of the wreck, and each in turn
is different from the version seen by the audience.
There are survivors, of course, who are separated.
The play’s opening storm consolidates each element
of Shakespeare’s earlier storms of separation.
If we look at these sea-storms as a whole, then,
we see that Shakespeare is not simply deploying
them functionally, but is, rather, invested in
developing their dramatic immediacy. From
their literary roots in ancient poetry, Shakespeare
wrestles them into a new form, in the public
theatres of London. Towards the end of his career,
the audience are made spectators of the storm,
rather than listeners, as in The Comedy of Errors, or
tardy witnesses, as in Twelfth Night. We become,
like Desdemona, the Clown or Miranda, onlookers
as the storms of separation rage.
Gwilym Jones was the winner of the 2016
Shakespeare’s Globe Book Award, presented biennially
by Globe Education and a panel of academics to a
new Shakespeare scholar for their first monograph.
Gwilym’s book Shakespeare’s Storms, published by
Manchester University Press, is the first comprehensive
study of the feature in Shakespeare’s work.
More on Globe Education
Shakespeare’s Storms
is available from Manchester University Press
priced £14.99 paperback
62
shakespeare magazine

Doctor Strange
Created by Stan Lee and
Steve Ditko in 1963, Marvel’s
Doctor Strange somewhat
resembles Prospero from
Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
“’Tis time
I should inform thee farther.
Lend thy hand,
And pluck my magic
garment from me…”
Act I, Scene 2
64
shakespeare magazine

Doctor Strange
Man,
Myth and
Magic
Benedict Cumberbatch is a sensation as Marvel’s
supernatural superhero Doctor Strange.
But in our parallel Shakespearean universe,
he’s actually starring as another legendary
magician – namely Prospero – in a blockbuster
screen version of The Tempest!
Images from Doctor Strange courtesy of Marvel Studios
shakespeare magazine 65

Doctor Strange
Mads Mikkelsen plays
renegade mystic
Kaecilius.
“…I loved
my books, he
furnish’d me
From mine
own library
with volumes
that I prize
above my
dukedom”
Act I, Scene 2
“Go release
them, Ariel:
My charms
I’ll break, their
senses I’ll restore,
And they shall
be themselves”
Act V, Scene 1
66
shakespeare magazine

Doctor Strange
Tilda Swinton as
Strange’s mentor
The Ancient One.
“But this rough magic
I here abjure…
I’ll break my staff,
Bury it certain
fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did
ever plummet sound
I’ll drown my book”
Act V, Scene 1
shakespeare magazine 67

Doctor Strange
“Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes…”
Act I, Scene 2
“There’s nothing
ill can dwell in
such a temple:
If the ill spirit have
so fair a house,
Good things will
strive to dwell
with’t”
Act I, Scene 2
Rachel McAdams
plays surgeon
Christine Palmer.
68
shakespeare magazine

Doctor Strange
“As I told thee
before, I am
subject to a
tyrant, a sorcerer,
that by his
cunning hath
cheated me of the
island”
Act III, Scene 2
British actor Benedict
Wong plays Strange’s
fellow mystic Wong.
“Twelve year
since, Miranda,
twelve year since,
Thy father was
the Duke of
Milan and
A prince of power”
Act I, Scene 2
shakespeare magazine 69

Doctor Strange
Chiwetel Ejiofor
(left) plays mystic
master Mordo.
“Now does my project
gather to a head:
My charms crack not;
my spirits obey;
and time
Goes upright with
his carriage.
How’s the day?”
Act V, Scene 1
70
shakespeare magazine

The Folger Shakespeare Library is the world’s largest repository of Shakespeareana
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Literary Fiction Book Review
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