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I think the amazing thing about Shakespeare is that whatever situation you find yourself
in or think about, Shakespeare has been there before you and he’s thought about it, and
he’s written something about it, and it could be a line or a scene or an entire play
that sums up your situation; any aspect of the human condition: triumph, disaster, joy,
despair, he will have something to say about it. For example, a couple of days ago I had
an email exchange with a friend about a series of problems I’d had and he came back instantly
with a line from Hamlet, which was: “When sorrows come, they come not single spies but
in battalions” and that seemed to sum it all up instantly and brilliantly. So when
I think of Shakespeare I think of another writer, I think of the 18th century poet Alexander
Pope, who had this wonderful phrase, “What oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed,”
meaning “Here’s an idea that a lot of people have had through the centuries but
no one has managed to put it in words quite so well” and I think that’s true of Shakespeare
in countless situations.
To me there’s something extraordinary about the power of somebody in a society, a civilization,
so remote from our own being able to speak to us across the centuries in ways that make...
that matter for our experience now, that enable us to understand ourselves better, or to recognize
points about ourselves. If you look at other writers of his time – Ben Jonson, even Marlowe,
John Marston, George Chapman, Philip Massinger, say – I mean, they’re remarkable writers
and there’s a great deal that we can still respond to, but all the time when we watch
them we think this is somebody of the late 16th or early 17th century, and that’s the
world from which they speak to us, and we’re interested and we draw what we can from them,
but they’re not our contemporary. You remember Jan Kott wrote a book called Shakespeare Our
Contemporary – actually, I think not a very good book, but! – and because there is that
sense that he’s here for us now, and he can, through his speeches, pierce through
our defences, our attitudes, and reach our innermost experiences: pain, anxiety, happiness,
bliss, love and so on.