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Hardcore Literature
Ep 87 - Appreciating Shakespeare on My Birthday
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Benjamin McAvoy
Welcome back to Hardcore Literature. Your favourite book club deep dives into the greatest books ever written. Provocative poems, evocative epics and life changing literary analyses. We don't just read the great books, we live them together. We'll suck the marrow out of Shakespeare, Homer, Tolstoy and many more. We'll relish the most moving art ever committed to the page and stage from every age. Join us as and me, your host, Benjamin McAvoy on the Reading adventure of a lifetime with Hardcore Literature. Hello everybody, how are you doing today? I hope you're keeping well and I hope your reading is going well. Today. I wanted to do something a little bit different and a little bit special. As it is my birthday, I thought, what do I want to do on my birthday? I want to spend some time with you and I want to spend some time with my favorite writer of all time and that is Mr. William Shakespeare. It's a very special time of year because at the Hardcore Literature Book club we are finally approaching the end of the Shakespeare project where we have sought to read through the entire works of Shakespeare in chronological order. And what an incredible journey it has been. It has been my personal favourite read through and and lecture series that we have ever done. And that's saying something because we have tackled a lot of really special books and we've met a lot of incredible writers together. And if you would like to join that journey, you can do so and you can listen to the lectures as part of the back catalogue and join the ongoing conversation@patreon.com hardcore literature. And I'm feeling a little bit bittersweet as we approach the end of this project. Of course this is not going to be the end of our loving engagement with Shakespeare and I'm going to be making some recommendations for people for how they might continue to deepen their relationship with the Bard over the years. And we're going to have a ranking video that's going to go up on the YouTube channel and that's going to be a lot of fun. I've been wanting to do this for years and we will continue talking about Shakespeare, but today let us have a little bit of a celebration and let's have a little bit of a read through of some of my personal favourite speeches, my favourite soliloquies from the complete works of Shakespeare. I have my trusty complete works in front of me. In fact, I have a lot of different editions that are special to me when it comes to Shakespeare. Special for different reasons. The one that I have right now is the complete Works of Shakespeare Illustrated Edition published by Collins and Collins really do a fabulous job, especially the older books, they really don't make works like this any more. I actually came across a four volume kind of pocket set. Although it's not small, it's actually perfect size. A really sort of flexible faux leather sort of paperback collection. Four sets divided up into comedies, histories, tragedies, the poems and so forth. And the order is set out according to the First Folio. And I'll be talking about this at the hardcore literature book club. The First Folio challenge. It's a fun way to engage with Shakespeare after you've done a chronological read through or maybe instead of. But we'll talk about that another time. This four volume set is just divine and Peter Alexander, who along with Lois Potter really helped to form my personal opinions on when the different plays were written. Peter Alexander has prefacing introductory essays before each and every play. So I love that collection. I also have a 19th century, late 19th century, really rare collection of the complete works, split into about eight volumes, compiled and edited by Sir Henry Irving, legendary theatre manager and actor, close friend of Bram Stoker. This is as well, and this is a treat. I came across it at a National Trust site that had a bookshop and I snapped it up. I snapped a few volumes up and then sourced the rest of the volumes for myself. Those are just a few examples of the different Shakespeare editions that I have. But all that being said, let's dive in and let's start with a really cheery number. A really optimistic and liberating soliloquy from Macbeth. I'm joking of course. I say that in jest, but the reason I'm starting with this one is this is the one that I have possessed most fully and kept and memorised and run over the most in my mind. It is this soliloquy from Macbeth and also multiple soliloquies from Hamlet. We'll get to Hamlet in a moment. But this soliloquy really is extraordinary. It comes at the very end of Macbeth, the Scottish play, and Macbeth has just received news that his wife has died. The guilt has become too much, it's too overwhelming for the both of them. She's had her famous scene in which she cannot get the spots of blood out of her hands that she sees in her mind's eye. Similar to her husband, who earlier, before the murder of King Duncan, that his wife had nudged him into and helped him with and assisted him with, he would see a dagger before his eyes. This is a dagger that I see before me, and Macbeth's mind would become full of scorpions. That's what he would say. Full of scorpions is my mind. Towards the end of the play, Lady Macbeth has been sleepwalking, and now the news has come to her husband that she is dead. And all the prophecies are looking to be fulfilled. And that's not a good thing, because he's about to be undone when he receives news that his wife has passed away. And indeed, it's worth considering, as Harold Bloom has pointed out, and I believe Harold Goddard said something similar, that the best couple in Shakespeare, the couple that has the best marriage, ironically, is Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. And that is true. Villainous though they might be, their support and love for one another is quite clear. Receiving the news that his wife has died, Macbeth says, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day to the last syllable of recorded time. And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle. Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Isn't that extraordinary? There is a masterclass, a Shakespearean masterclass by Sir Ian Mackellen, available on YouTube, in which he runs through this soliloquy. And do you know what he advised with this? He said, with the repetition of tomorrow three times over, you don't put the emphasis on the word tomorrow. You put the emphasis on the word and. And that is genius. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. It really does convey the sense of futility that Macbeth is feeling at this time. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, just on and on and on, and there is no hope any longer. Creeps in this petty pace from day to day. It really does sound like time is dragging and tomorrow's never going to be here. Petty pace. I love the alliteration there. To the last syllable of recorded time. And Macbeth goes from tomorrow to yesterday. We are so rarely in the present. We always live in either a projected future or we are living in the realm of the past. If we are preoccupied with the future, what is not yet, what is not here, then that's a state of anxiety. We were in a state of anxiety. If we're always thinking about tomorrow, of course, Jesus famously, in the Sermon on the Mount, would tell his disciples and all of us to let. Let tomorrow worry about tomorrow and let it take care of itself, focus on today. It's great advice. And if we are trapped in the past, that's a depressive realm where we mull over what had been and what could have been and what went wrong and what we should have done. All our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death. That's quite a depressing outlook. Shakespeare in the tragic procession, during a burst of dark creative energy, he, across maybe 14 months during Jacobean lockdown, penned a string of the greatest tragedies back to back. The greatest tragedies we've ever seen. Macbeth and Othello and Anthony and Cleopatra and King Lear. They were all composed at roughly the same time and they all contain the same existential anxiety. We are crawling, creeping from cradle to grave. All our yesterdays have come to this death. Out, out, brief candle. And then we get the most extraordinary figuration, the most extraordinary extended metaphor that I've ever seen in literature. Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player. We're going to see this in a minute because I'm going to read Jacques's as you like it speech. All the world's a stage from as yous Like It. My grandmother's favourite play and her favorite character was Rosalind, a poor player. Of course Shakespeare's going to see the world and humanity in terms of his own profession, his vocation. He's a playmaker. We all do this. We see constantly. He sees the world as a stage and we are players. Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage. An hour is quite brief. That's quite a brief glimpse of time and then is heard no more. It is a tale. Yeah, a tale. What is the story of your life? What's the story you're telling yourself and others? Life's a tale told by an idiot. Who can say they haven't felt like this? In the grips of depression, who could possibly say when faced with the death of someone you love, you wouldn't feel like this? I think it would be entirely natural to feel exactly like this. Shakespeare really did capture the human condition at its most extreme. Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. At time of recording, we are currently reading Madame Bovary at the book club by Gustave Flaubert. But our next big read is going to be a work by William Faulkner, the Sound and the Fury. He takes that title from this speech signifying nothing. That is one of Shakespeare's all time favorite words, nothing. Shakespeare was quite a nihilistic fellow in my opinion. And the word nothing is so pregnant with all different shades and permutations of meaning across the course of his career, we might think of Much Ado About Nothing. Yeah, and nothing was a bawdy pun in the time of Elizabeth and James. No thing. It means female genitalia signifying nothing. That's quite bleak, isn't it? That's very, very bleak. And let us continue wallowing in existential angst, and let's turn to what I believe to be the greatest play of all time, and that is Hamlet. I am going to spoil for you my ranking video when it comes out, and I'll tell you right here and right now that Shakespeare's Hamlet is at the number one spot for me. I think it's an unbelievable accomplishment. Of course, T.S. eliot would say that it was an aesthetic failure. He would prefer Coriolanus, which is an excellent play and deserves much more love than it gets, although it's gotten more love in recent years. But again, as the great bardolator Harold Bloom would say, if Hamlet is an aesthetic failure, then what is an aesthetic success? Hamlet is one of the most rereadable works of all time. It is a poem unlimited, as Polonius would say. I recently saw a production of Hamlet in which Polonius decided to not say that part of the speech. He kind of dispatched with it. And I don't know, I love that line. He rattles off all the different genres. And of course, Shakespeare would bend and blend genres and subvert generic expectations. Tragical, comical, historical, pastoral scene indivisible and poem unlimited. That is what Hamlet is. It is a book of essays, and you can read it every day of your life. It's scripture. It's secular scripture, and read it every day of your life. It's poetry. It's great drama. It is everything a work can be and more. And you can never get to the end of it. It is inexhaustible. And I say all of that. And I take us to Hamlet's first soliloquy in the play. Act one, Scene two. The Prince of Denmark, who, suffering from the pain of having lost his father, King Hamlet, and hard upon his father's death, his mother has remarried with his uncle, King Claudius now. And of course there's been some dodgy business going on here. And Claudius has a heavy conscience because he dispatched the king, didn't he? The play is the thing in which I'll catch the conscience of the king, as Hamlet says. He arranges later in the play to put on a performance that shows the poisoning in the ear that King Claudius did in order to get the throne. And Hamlet's really a play of two halves. The first half, Hamlet cannot make up his mind. He's frantic and frenetic. And then in the second half of the play, he is bounding from one hasty, reckless action to another. But the first speech that we get from him really does capture the pain that he is experiencing. He says, oh, that this too too solid flesh would melt, thaw and resolve itself into a dew. Or that the Everlasting had not fixed his cannon gainst self slaughter. O God. God, how weary, stale, flat and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world. Fie on it. Ah, fie. It is an unweeded garden that grows to seed. Things rank and gross in nature possess it merely. That it should come to this. But two months dead. Nay, not so much, not two. So excellent a king. There was to this Hyperion to a satyr, so loving to my mother that he might not pertem the winds of heaven visit her face too roughly. Heaven and earth, must I remember? Why, she would hang on him as if increase of appetite had grown by what it fed on. And yet within a month. Let me not think on it. Frailty, thy name is woman. A little month, or ere those shoes were old with which she followed my poor father's body like Niobe, all tears. Why she, even she. O God. A beast that once discourse of reason would have mourn'd longer. Married with my uncle, my father's brother, but no more like my father than I to Hercules. Within a month, Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears had left the flushing in her galld eyes she married. O most wicked speed. To post with such dexterity to incestuous sheep. It is not, nor it cannot come to good. It's an absolutely extraordinary speech. And what's fascinating is we have multiple different versions of Hamlet. And that first line can be said in multiple different ways. Oh, that this too too solid flesh would melt. Now, some editions don't say solid flesh. Some say sullied flesh, which I rather like. Sullied, of course, means dirtied. Yeah. Begrimed, besmirched, unclean. And some editions say sullied. Cervantes, one of the three horsemen of the Renaissance. You've got Cervantes, Shakespeare and Montaigne. Spain, England and France. Representing in Cervantes, Don Quixote. His knight errant would sally forth and tilt at wind. Windmills of the mind, windmills that he took to be monsters. We sally forth on adventures. I love the fact that this word orally contains all of those connotations. I like the idea of maybe choosing a different one each night if you were to perform Hamlet. And I think I've said before that I don't really have many acting pretensions. I don't want to be an actor. Although I would love to do voice acting and narration. I would love to read stories. I think it's such a beautiful craft. Makes me so happy to listen to a good story being told. Or I'm most happy when I'm reading some stories aloud from the likes of Dickens or Austin. I don't have acting pretensions, but in my life I would love to play Hamlet just once. No other role, just Hamlet. There are as many Hamlets as there are people and we are all Hamlet. And it's difficult to find a performance that will gel with you because we always find ourselves in the Prince of Denmark. Doesn't matter who we are, man or woman, young or old, doesn't matter where in the world we find ourselves. We can all see something of the Prince of Denmark, the ambassador of death. Hamlet is the ambassador of death. Falstaff from Henry IV would say, give me life. And both of these characters are two halves of Shakespeare's psyche. We all find ourselves in Hamlet. And so I would love to play him. It's a role of a lifetime. The role of a lifetime. As the saying goes, by the time you're old enough to play Hamlet, you're too old to play him. I love that. Oh, that this too too solid flesh would melt. Now solid makes sense because he's talking about it melting. And we have this motif of flesh in Hamlet. Thaw and resolve itself into a Jew. Now this is fascinating. A Jew. Now orally, this contains the meaning of adieu. You know, you bid adieu, say goodbye, farewell to somebody. We see this word quite significantly over the course of Hamlet, the ghost. His father comes to him and then he says, adieu, adieu, Remember me a Jew. So what's he saying here? He's saying, oh, I wish I would just melt Thor and evaporate, go into the ground, into the dust and back up into the elements. He's got a death wish. Yeah. Freud would divide the human impulses into two. You've got Eros, that's the libido, that's the life drive, sex urge. And then you've got Thanatos, which is the death drive. And that's a self destructive drive. And Hamlet is walking a line between both. He is really fixated on death, which we might think is quite normal because he's just suffered the death of his father. Freud again would say that the death of one's father is the most significant moment in a man's life, though indeed that death need not be a physical one and it can be a spiritual one. And so he's wishing that the Everlasting had not fixed his canon against self slaughter. So he's ruminating on taking his life. Yeah. Oh, that it weren't a sin to do so. How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable. I love that. What a great catalogue. What a great line of descriptors. Unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world. And then in a line that would foreshadow the character Iago in Othello. And A.C. bradley would say that there are four inexhaustible protagonists in Shakespeare. You've got Hamlet, Cleopatra, Falstaff and the Machiavellian webspinner that is Iago. In a line that anticipates Iago, who is playwright surrogate Hamlet says, tis an unweeded garden that grows to seed. Things rank and gross in nature possess it merely. So he's disgusted by the world around him. And once again, this is quite despairing, but I think we've all been there. And then, of course, he moans and laments that his father's only two months dead and she's already married. And then he corrects himself, nay, not so much, not too. Actually, he adjusts how long his father's been dead over the course of the play, and it gets shorter and shorter and we're kind of disoriented by it all. As he says, the time is out of joint. It's so true. The time is out of joint when we're experiencing grief. And he thinks about how loving his mother had been to his father. And yet, look at this. My father was a great man. And what has he come to? He's dust. And now his memory is disgraced. His mother has moved on way too swiftly, in Hamlet's opinion. Now. Now the marriage. Now, of course, we keep in mind that Claudius did his brother in, but it's worth bearing in mind that this was very much protocol at the time. They wanted to keep the power in the family. They don't want a power vacuum opening up. So you would see this sort of thing. Henry viii, for example, would marry his first wife, Catherine. He married her, and she was actually his brother's widow. And he did so to keep the political alliance between England and Spain, Frailty, thy name is woman. Like Niobe, all tears you were. And look at this. What's fantastic is you can see a lot of Ovidianism in Shakespeare. The most Ovidian aspect of Shakespeare is this idea of all being flux, all being in flux, all is change and all are changeable. His characters most certainly are. But he also just has plain allusions to mythological figures that he would have read about in Ovid. And we very recently read through Ovid's Metamorphoses at the hardcore literature book club. So if you've read that with us, you'll know who Niobe was. It's a great story. And Hamlet is a funny individual. He's a witty fellow and he used to be quite light hearted, believe it or not. I know he's played very depressively and he's giving voice to this angst, this existential angst, but everybody upon the fact that he used to be different. And the prince is much changed. We get glimmers of who he used to be, come in with things that he says and he says, my uncle is no more like my father than I to Hercules. He can put eyes on himself. He's very ironic and self aware. He's funny and he's very good at thinking through the human condition. Perhaps too good. Indeed, Nietzsche would say that Hamlet's tragedy is not that he thinks too much, but that he thinks much too well. Now let's read perhaps the most famous speech of all time. And that is the to be or not to be speech. To be or not to be. That is the question whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them. To die, to sleep no more. And by a sleep to say we end the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to. Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep. To sleep, perchance to dream. Ay, there's the rub. For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, when we have shuffled off this mortal coil, must give us pause. There's the respect that makes calamity of so long life. For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, the oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely, the pangs of despis'd love, the law's delay, the insolence of office, and the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes, when he himself might his quietus make with A bare bodkin. Who would these fardels bear to grunt and sweat under a weary life, but that the dread of something after death, the undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveller returns, puzzles the will and makes us rather bear those ills we have than fly to others we know not of? Thus conscience does make cowards of us all. And thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, and enterprises of great pitch and moment, with this regard their currents turn awry and lose the name of action. What is incredible is how Shakespeare was to take one of the most operative and innocuous verbs in the English language, to be. I am, you are, he, she is. To be. He took this verb that does a lot of heavy lifting. It's a foundational piece of lexis, and it stitches us sentences together, but it goes unnoticed. Typically, there'll be another word in a sentence, a noun, a concrete noun, or a really evocative abstract notion that we focus on. And we so rarely see the bees in our sentences. But here there is great drama in this line. To be or not to be. This is ontological anxiety like we have never seen before. To be or not to be. To exist or not exist. And what he's saying is essentially to cease to exist, that is, to make myself cease to exist. That is the question. Do I go on living or do I put a stop to it? To be or not to be, that is the question. And there are endless ways to pose that question. Everybody's Hamlet is different. Whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. So should I just put up with it? Should I do the stoic thing and just bear the ills that oppress me? Or is it nobler to take arms against a sea of troubles? Isn't that an extraordinary phrase? Shakespeare has just located, discovered, uncovered, concocted the greatest figurations that have ever been set down on the page or expressed on the stage. And he's put them one after the other, line after line after line after line. This is one of the most inspired pieces of literature I have ever come across. Do we put an end to it all? And he repeats the question because he's trying to wrangle with death. Yes, this is an ontological anxiety. Anxiety about being, being in the world. And it's existential, but it's also epistemological. That's to do with knowledge. What. What do we know? What can we know? What is death? Is it like asleep to die, to sleep. No more, just asleep. That ends the heartache and the thousand natural shocks. That flesh. We got that word, flesh again, is heir to. But it's not about the flesh, is it? Hamlet isn't tortured physically. He is mentally tormented. Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep. To sleep, perchance to dream. And Shakespeare's protagonists are thinking aloud, and they catch themselves thinking. And it is thrilling for us to actually listen to them. A thought process going on. His characters think more deeply than so many real people ever do or ever will. It must have been thrilling, but also disorienting to have seen Richard Burbage in the role of Hamlet for the very first time in the opening season of the Globe Theatre, 1599, striding about the stage and posing that question. Oh, my goodness, what I wouldn't give to be able to have a time machine and to go back to 1599 and be in the audience for that. Hamlet thinks, well, if I die, it's just like a sleep. And I might even dream. Aye, there's the rub. He's answering himself. For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come when we've shuffled off this mortal coil, that must give us pause. And this is why we bear our lives and the calamity that we put up with. Because who would put up with everything that goes wrong in this world? And the list is a long way. The oppressor's wrong, the pangs of despised love, the law's delay, the insolence of office, all of this, when we could put an end to it all with a bare bodkin. He's talking about self slaughter there. Because who would put up with all of this if not for the dread of something after death which we know not of? And he refers to death as the undiscovered country from whose bourne and born means limit. No traveler returns. That is an incredible figuration, isn't it? All of this puzzles the will, and therefore we put up with the ills we have, then fly to others that we know not of. We know this, don't we? The devil you know. We talk about this. We put up with the devil we know rather than the one we do. That is what he's thinking through. Thus, conscience does make cowards of us all. And when Shakespeare says conscience back in the Renaissance era, this means consciousness. Now, yes, it did have the meaning of conscience. That is your moral compass, too. But here, Hamlet means consciousness. Our consciousness, our awareness, our self reflection, being self aware, being able to detach and Philosophize about our position in the world. Being able to do all of this to reason and logic through everything. Makes cowards of us all. Interestingly, it's often referred to as the cowards way out when somebody takes their life. But here Hamlet's saying, well, maybe there's something heroic about it. Because there's nothing noble about putting up with this. That's what he thinks. There's nothing noble about that. And so I remain and he loses the name of action. Yeah, this is what he's wrangling with. He's saying to himself, why don't I just do it? Because I am a coward. Now, this next speech from Hamlet is a particular personal favorite of mine. Of course, we all love the to be or not to be speech. We love Hamlet's soliloquies. But personally, I absolutely adore this passage in Act 2, Scene 2. When Hamlet speaks not in poetry, but in prose. And he speaks to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who have been sent to keep tabs on him by the new king and the Queen, Hamlet's mother. And Hamlet is shrewd and perceptive. And he knows people, so he knows what's going on. And of course, he is rather Don Quixote, like feigning at madness, playing the madman. And indeed, we wonder the degree to which he is playing. He knows that all the world's a stage and all the men and women are merely players. Just like Jacques, who we'll get to in a moment. He was a precursor, that character from as yous Like It, a precursor for Hamlet. But Hamlet, speaking to his old friends, tells them, I know all about the secret discussions and goings on with the king and queen. And he explains himself, I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises. And indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition. That this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory. This most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament. This majestical roof fretted with golden fire. Why, it appeareth nothing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man. How noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving, how express an admiration. In action, how like an angel, in apprehension, how like a God. The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals. And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me. No, nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so. And Rosencrant says, my lord, there was nothing such stuff in my thoughts. And Hamlet says, why did you laugh then when I said man delights, not me? This is a tremendous speech. Firstly, just on a basic lexical level. You probably know this if you've been reading Shakespeare. But the word wherefore means why. So when Juliet asks, wherefore art thou, Romeo? She's not saying, where are you Romeo? She's saying, why are you Romeo? Why are you called Romeo? And when Hamlet says, I have of late, but wherefore I know not, but why? I don't know, lost all my mirth. This really is English prose at its absolute sublime heights. And there's a real meta fictional, metatheatrical quality to this. Where of course, Hamlet knows that he's a character in a play, or almost, because indeed we all are. But he varies self consciously points to the Globe Theatre when he talks of this goodly frame, the earth. The goodly frame, of course, is the structure of the theatre. This most excellent canopy, the air, this brave overhanging firmament. And when he points out this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, he is essentially pointing out the intricate decoration, the ornamentation in the eavesdrop of the theatre. He would have been pointing this out to the audience and there would have most certainly been a little bit of dialogue essentially between actor and audience, actor on stage and those in the pit. There was not really a fourth wall. And it's really interesting because theatrical conventions today are a far cry from the those of the Elizabethan and Jacobean era. Today we go to Shakespeare or we watch an opera and we sit in hushed, reverential silence. Or at least we used to. Because indeed audiences have gotten quite bad recently, in my opinion. Not all the time. It really depends where and when, what you're seeing and so forth. But audiences have gotten a little bit more, more laissez faire with their behavior. But it used to be back in Shakespeare's day, going to the theatre would be very much like going to a pantomime. Yeah, if you live in the United Kingdom, then you know what the pantomime is. He's behind you. There's a lot of audience participation. Indeed, back in the day, people would talk amongst themselves if they were bored. Indeed, there was no intermission. And a play like Hamlet would run for several hours. No intermission. It would run at break neck speed. The actors would speak very, very, very quickly. And because there was no toilet, people would just relieve themselves, maybe in a Corner, if you're lucky, and relieve themselves into the sawdust on the floor. It was a stinky, noisy, overcrowded affair. And I would love to do a project at some point in the future where we try to recover those lost Elizabethan stage conventions where there isn't a fourth wall. Not so much throughout, Endlessly in the plays, you see chorus like figures or characters address the audience and tell them to flex their imagination, see it all. I'm gonna need to solicit your help. And as Samuel Taylor Coleridge would say, I need you to willingly suspend your sense of disbelief. There was participation going on. Yeah, we were in collaboration with the actors and the playwright on stage. I would love to do a project where we recreate what it was like to see a Shakespearean play during his lifetime. Do you know what that would mean? That would mean that all the players were men. And that makes a lot of the commentary, the social commentary, the commentary about men and women that runs relentlessly through Shakespeare's plays because he is a fierce proto feminist. That would make that all the more profound and the gags all the more funny and the cross dressing all the more confusing because you'd often have a man dressed up as a woman dressed up as a man and so forth. And Shakespeare, I believe, as Kenneth Branagh clearly believes, if you watch his film with Judi Dench, All Is True, which takes place after the Globe theaters burnt down during that production of Henry viii and Will retires and goes back to Stratford. I believe, like Branagh, that Shakespeare would have wanted women on the stage, as was the custom on the continent. But England would have to wait a little while. Not until the theatres would be shut down for a stretch of time and then reopened during the Restoration. England would have to wait some decades before that came to be. But Hamlet is absolutely stuffed with meta theatrical commentary. Of course, you've got the play within the play. You've also got Hamlet giving voice to Shakespeare's disapproval or feelings of upset and annoyance at his comic lead. At this time, when Hamlet tells the players to speak the speech as he's written it, as it's been laid down, not trippingly on the tongue. Don't saw the air with motion. Don't add all of this stuff that's not in the script. That's Shakespeare coming through. Yeah, we like to say that Shakespeare's everywhere and nowhere in his works. Jorge Luis Borges says this. Although once you've read all of Shakespeare chronologically, as we've done at the hardcore literature book club, you do Start to see Will you see yourself? Yes. You see people that you know, but you do see him there. He's not that invisible. And that's one of the most exciting things that I've discovered, reading through the complete works with everyone at the book club. But Shakespeare's giving voice to his annoyance at Will Kemp, who was his comic lead around this time. And they had a bit of a falling out, we can assume, and then Kemp would leave and we'd enter a new era of Shakespeare's troupe. There's also a really wonderful moment in Hamlet that I've not seen anybody else talk about. I've found this out through some extensive research. But when they are awaiting the performance in Hamlet of the play Polonius, who's one of my favourite characters of all time, he is fantastic. Polonius talks about how he had done some acting back in the day and had been very well received. And he says that he had actually played Caesar in Julius Caesar. Brutus killed me, he says he was killed in the Senate. Now, why is this funny? This is funny back in the day because the year for Hamlet's first performance is 1600, maybe 1601. He would have been writing it a bit earlier than that. The globe opened in 1599. They actually transported it from one side of London to the other when they did not want to agree to the land rent increases. So they broke it apart and they carried it across London. Then they rebuilt it in the freezing cold during the Christmas period. James Shapiro has an excellent book on this called 1599 that I highly recommend. It's a great vintage year for Shakespeare, 1599. And the Globe opened and we saw a procession of absolutely phenomenal plays in all different genres, all modes. In that opening season, we saw as yous like it, we saw Henry V, we saw Julius Caesar, and it wouldn't be much more time before we saw Hamlet, but during Julius Caesar, the actor who would play Polonius did indeed play Caesar. And so that's a little metatheatrical nod to the audience who most certainly would have known that, believe it or not, it was actually quite a common thing to do to go to the theatre around this time. It was affordable. You could pay your penny and you could muck in with everybody else in the pit and you could enjoy some entertainment. And the theatre was ferociously popular. And so the troops, the companies would have to write at breakneck speed and they'd constantly have to get new plays in rotation, revive old plays and really just have a bustling roster because the demand was Very, very high. Most people would be up to date with the latest play anyway. Hamlet, then, in that speech, goes on to give voice to the Renaissance anxiety, the anxiety of what it means to be a human in the world. What a piece of work is a man. And you've got multiple meanings here. That can sound like a good thing. Yeah. What a piece of work, like man is a creation and man has been sculpted by a divine creator. How beautiful, how incredible. But the thing about Hamlet is he never says exactly what he means. You need to apprehend irony in order to appreciate Hamlet. And thinking ironically and understanding irony, along with thinking in metaphor, is one of the most important things when it comes to great literature. Indeed, Aristotle would say that thinking in metaphor is the highest form of cognition. So learn to read metaphor, learn to appreciate irony, and Shakespeare and the world will open up to you. So it's got that meaning. But of course. What do we mean when we say that man's a piece of work? Oh, you are a piece of work. It's not a good thing, is it? So he's not actually being complimentary about the state of mankind and the human condition. What a piece of work is a man. How noble in reason. So we take it that whatever he's saying, he's meaning the opposite. How infinite in faculties. It's ironic if he were to mean the opposite there, because indeed, Hamlet, just like Cleopatra, has an infinite variety about him. And in action, how light like an angel. In apprehension, how like a God. The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals. Now, in the Renaissance era, man was tightrope walking, or seen to be tightrope walking. Between the condition of being like an angel and the condition of being like a beast. There was that concern that we can do divine things, but we can also find ourselves susceptible to more bestial behavior too. And it was up to man to determine his own limits in the world. And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Yeah, we've got the constant recurring motif of flesh and dust. Ashes to ashes and dust to dust. Man delights not me. No, nor woman neither. That's fantastic, isn't it? Now, seeing as we have mentioned Jacques from As yous Like It. As I said, my grandmother's favourite play. And I do wish that I could have spoken to her more when I was older about Shakespeare, because she influenced me and the direction of my life without her even being here. She died when I was quite young. Up until the age of 10, 11, I was not a reader. And then, thanks to My grandmother, because of the way she used to talk about poetry and how she used to talk about going to the theatre in Dublin as a young girl. And she made it all sound so magical. The atmosphere of it all, the beauty of it all. She even wrote her own poetry. Because of that, I went from not reading anything to going to the public library and getting the complete works of Shakespeare. And thanks to her, I also read Tolkien. She gifted me the Lord of the Rings. I read the Hobbit, I read Charles Dickens. I went through all of Dickens at a very young age. But Shakespeare. I remember getting hold of this big dusty book and just tracing my finger down the contents page and marveling at this catalogue of stories that seemed like a catalogue of exotic animals. All's well that ends well. As you like it. The Merchant of Venice. I was enamoured just from the titles of these plays and reading the actual plays. I believe I started with Romeo and Juliet and then. Then I went to the Merchant of Venice and a few others, reading them through. Of course, I did not understand very much at that age. It felt like I was reading a book of spells. But I intuited that there was something powerful in Shakespeare's words. But anyway, let's speak about as yous like it, and there's a good argument to be had for this light comedy. This is said to be Shakespeare's lightest work. But it's interesting. There's a lot of darkness running under it. Believe it or not, this light comedy could potentially have been the play that opened the Globe Theatre in 1599. Because indeed, we get more metatheatricality. Here's Jacques, who says all the world's a stage and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances. And one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages. At first, the infant mewling and puking in the nurse's arms. Then the whining schoolboy with his satchel and shining morning face, creeping like snail unwillingly to school. Then the lover sighing like a furnace with a woeful ballad made to his mistress's eyebrows. Then a soldier full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard, jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel, seeking the bubble reputation even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice in fair round belly with good capon lined with eyes severe and beard of formal cut, full of wise saws and modern instances. And so he plays his part. Part. The sixth age shifts into the lean and slippered pantaloon with spectacles on nose and pouch on side. His youthful hose well saved a world too wide for his shrunk shank and his big manly voice turning again toward childish treble pipes and whistles in his sound. Last scene of all that ends this strange eventful history is second childishness and mere oblivion. Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything. Isn't that phenomenal? There's a reason why that is one of the most anthologized speeches in all of Shakespeare. That and to be and not to be and tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. I love that ending. Last scene of all that ends this strange eventful history. Emerson, who was a great reader of Shakespeare, and he would say that the majesty of Shakespeare comes in the fact that our own rejected thoughts return to us with an alienated majesty when we read Shakespeare. And thus we are forced to take our thoughts from another. Shakespeare manages to tell us things that we already knew and we didn't even know we knew them. And he is great wisdom literature. And he makes us feel at home in a strange world. I find that writers either make you feel strange in a familiar world or familiar in a strange world. Shakespeare's art is the latter. Emerson believed that you can see all of history in the individual. And we think that he would have taken this insight it from Shakespeare quite gleefully. This strange eventful history. So he runs through all of the parts that we play with such beautiful poetry. And that ending's quite ominous, isn't it? The ending that is second childishness and mere oblivion sans teeth. That means without teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything. What does sans everything mean? Without everything? That means nothing. He could have said nothing. Shakespeare's favorite word. It all ends in nothing. And perhaps our life is a nothing. We make much ado about nothing. Shakespeare was a melancholy fellow, I think, but he did have a sense of humor too. And this. This foreshadows and anticipates this light play, foreshadows one of his darkest plays. And that, of course, is the Tragedy of King Lear. And Lear was the play that got me into Shakespeare. Though indeed there was a teacher who got me into Lear. And I have so much respect for good teacher. Where would I be today if it were not for a handful of great English teachers? Specifically, they spoke to me. And this teacher really got me into King Lear. I remember the classes that we had around this tragedy were just electrifying. We used to have these debates on the binary nature of good and evil and how you cannot have evil without good. And it was just exhilarating and As a class, we even went and attended a production together. And I do remember, remember that he and I, after the play, gleefully walking down the streets through the streets of London, ahead of the rest of the class, just indulging our love of what we had seen. I owe him a lot when it comes to Shakespeare and also Dickens as well. I'd love to talk to him at some point. I think that would be a really good podcast. I wonder if he'd be interested. Now, what would I read from King Lear? It would have to be the storm on the heath scene. Such a momentous scene, such an absolutely incredible scene. Now, I am not going to give it the power that it deserves and should have. I do like to give my readings some theatrical flair. I used to really love the Stanislavskian thing, you know, the method acting thing. But I think that can go bit too far when it comes to Shakespeare. And I do think you need to bring an overtly performative aspect to the play. But it's a bit of a balancing line, isn't it? You don't want to be cringeworthy, but you also want to give the work the reverence it deserves as a piece of art that you admire. So you've got to really emphasize the poetry of it all and you want to emphasise the psychological complexity of it all. Now, King Lear is a really devastating play. It's really funny as well. Just like Hamlet. It's one of the funnier plays. I can say that for Anthony and Cleopatra, too. One of the most exciting things about Shakespeare is that his tragedies are typically more funny than his comedies. And his comedies can often be just as cruel as his tragedies. But it's quite devastating, as you may know. Learn divides his kingdom in three, or tries to amongst his daughters. Now, of course, you cannot do that. You cannot split a kingdom three ways. And two of his daughters, Goneril and Regan, are monsters and nefarious and not really working in their father's best interest. Whereas Cordelia, that's the good daughter, that's the one who actually loves her father. And in Lear, we see that there really is a distinct split between totally evil characters and really, really benevolent and good characters. And though Lear is being very unreasonable right from the get go, and it can be hard to sympathize with him for the first couple of acts, I think it says a lot about him that the eminently good and benign characters, the benevolent characters are on his side and speak him up. That says a lot of who he used to be. Just like with Hamlet, we get two central protagonists, we get the leer before us and the leer that used to be. Now, as one of his daughters says, he hath always but slenderly known himself. But it's gotten worse. And many modern productions really make this a play about dementia, about losing oneself faculties in old age, which can make it a very difficult play to watch for anyone who's had personal experience with that. It's. It's a real tragedy that I think is quite close to home for far too many people, sadly, but it's an absolute masterpiece. It is a sublime peak in the mountain range that is the works of Shakespeare. And I want to read the storm on the heath scene. And that goes like. Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks. Rage, blow, you cataracts and hurricane os spout till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks, you sulphurous and thought executing fires vaunt couriers of oak, cleaving thunderbolts singe my white head, and thou all shaking thunder strike flat the thick rotundity of the world. Crack nature's moulds. All Germans spill at once. That makes ingrateful man rumble thy belly full, spit fire, spout, rain, nor rain, wind, thunder, fire. Ah, my daughters, I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness. I never gave. Gave you kingdom, called you children. You owe me no subscription. Then let fall your horrible pleasure. Here I stand, your slave, a poor, infirm, weak and despised old man. This is painful. This is a man who once had total power. He ruled absolutely over his kingdom, but he is no longer competent. And unfortunately, he doesn't have people around him who can pick up where he left off and do so in a way that keeps him respected. He cannot let go of his rule. He wants to kind of keep ruling, but without the obligations, without the burdens of rule. And that doesn't work in the same way that splitting your kingdom up several different ways, depending on who flatters you the most, also does not work. He's struggling with this stage in his life and letting go. And he feels impotent. And he's in this storm and he's raging at the heavens, thinking that he has some control. He issues these imperatives, telling the storm to blow and the thunder to crack, crack your cheeks. Yes, that is a little bit of a bawdy, naughty pun. Lear talks frequently about cheeks. He speaks of his man cheeks. Yeah, he's. He's a little bit of a silly man sometimes. But the thing is, he's telling a storm to rage that is already in the process of raging. So he did not cause it. And he's telling the storm to wipe the world out. Yes, very biblical. Wipe this world down to nothing. But then he comes to a moment of anagnariasis and realization. And he realizes that he is a poor, infirm, weak, despised old man. He's not running anything. He is a slave. And he even says, despite the harshness of the elements, I can't fault you for it. I cannot fault the gods and elements themselves, because you're just doing what you do. I never called you daughters. This is the problem. My daughters are not treating me well. They're treating me worse than the storms themselves. And it's a painful, painful scene. And it's been done very well by many different actors. Paul Schofield, Pete Postlethwaite, he's my favorite. Sir Ian McKellen. He's a very good one as well. There are so many great moments in Lear. You can quote the whole play. I probably have most of the play committed to memory. And there's a lot of metatheatricality, as per usual in King Lear. I think of the cliff scene at the cliffs of Dover. One of the most brutal scenes in all of Shakespeare comes when poor Gloucester is blinded. He has his eyes gouged out. And I would say you've got Titus Andronicus as the most sickening play in the canon. A very early rudimentary work that I struggle with. And I did say I didn't want to return to it for a very long time, though. In indeed, the RSC are going to put on a production of Titus with Simon Russell Beale, whose full staff in the Hollow Crown is absolutely superb. So I'm gonna have to see it. And we're gonna have to see what they did with that. Titus is brutal, and then King Lear is absolutely brutal, too. Those two reign supreme, in my opinion. After Gloucester's blinded his good son Edgar. He's got two sons. You've got the good son Edgar, and then you got the bastard Edmund tries to look after him. Gloucester wants to hurl himself off a cliff, off a hill, off a mountain. And his son's not going to let that happen. But he makes him think that he's taken him to the top of a cliff, when indeed he has not. And he's describing it all to him. The birds and how everybody looks as small as mice down below. And what's tremendous with that is in the theatre, in the Jacobean theatre, the stage would have been quite bare, and there would have been very little difference between doing that with a real cliff and a fictional one. If indeed he were said to be climbing a steep cliff or hill, it would amount to the same thing. Shakespeare and other playwrights needed to use were to create the visual depiction. So that's very funny. But there's endless commentary as well, social commentary and political commentary in this play. Lear is the play in which we get the sublime line, a dog's obeyed in office, and tis the times plague when madmen lead the blind. When is that ever not true? But let's take a look at another play that's riven through with political commentary. And let's go from England to Rome, and we have a speech here that I want to appreciate from Julius Caesar. Shakespeare has Roman histories and he has English histories, and he makes very similar political commentary in both. Evergreen commentary, that is. But typically, people will gravitate towards one over the other. They'll have a preference for the Roman histories or the English histories. I love the scene after Caesar is brutally offed in the Senate, stabbed repeatedly by multiple senators and betrayed by his friend Brutus. And the best Caesar I have ever seen is Sir John Gielgud. I love Gielgud. If you can find the film version with Gilgud of Caesar, you're in for a treat. And the best Mark Anthony surely has to be Marlon Brando. And his speech, the famous speech over Caesar's dead body, is the best that I've ever heard. I'm definitely not going to best it myself. The interesting thing about Mark Antony is once again, we get that idea of one individual having two lives or being two people being changed. Except we see that with Mark Anthony not in a single play, but a cross plays. Because Shakespeare during the Elizabethan era would write Julius Caesar with Mark Antony in there. And then during the Jacobean era, he would write Antony and Cleopatra. And of course, Mark Antony and Cleopatra's love affair was famed throughout the world. And he's quite a different man in Julius Caesar. He's this great orator, whereas in Anthony and Cleopatra he is wanton and drunken and a slave to his love and lust for Cleopatra. But this speech in Julius Caesar comes in Act 3, Scene 2, and he says, friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears. I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. The evil that men do lives after them. The good is, is oft interred with their bones. So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus hath told you Caesar was ambitious. If it were so, it was a grievous fault and grievously hath Caesar answered it here under leave of Brutus and the rest. For Brutus is an honourable man. So are they all, all honourable men. Come I to speak in Caesar's funeral. He was my friend, faithful and just to me. But Brutus says he was ambitious, and Brutus is an honourable man. He hath brought many captives home to Rome, whose ransoms did the general coffers fill. Did this in Caesar seem ambitious? When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept. Ambition should be made of sterner stuff. Yet Brutus says he was ambitious, and Brutus is an honorable man. And he goes on like this. And of course, we once again see Shakespearean irony crafted with great care. A really superb sense of irony comes through here. We start to distrust that word ambitious, don't we? And we start to think that when he says Brutus was an honorable man, he's actually saying the opposite. The issue that people had with Caesar at the time was that he was getting too powerful, too autocratic. He made himself dictator for life. And Rome at this time, these are the last days of the Roman Republic. Rome did not want a king, they didn't want to go back to that. They didn't want another king, they didn't want an emperor, they didn't want one dictator ruling all. And Caesar was a great general, a very accomplished strategian and tactician, and the people loved him. But the old guard, those in positions of power, did not, because they felt threatened by him. And so they offed him. And what would happen after that is Rome and the Roman Republic would be plunged into civil war and civil turmoil and brawls that would only end when Octavian, who was the adopted son of Caesar, defeated Mark Antony and Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium, extraordinary naval battle. And then he would become Rome's first emperor, ushering in the Roman Empire. So there was this painful transitional period. But this is an extraordinary speech and he makes a great point, doesn't he, when he says the evil that men do lives after them. The good is often turred with their bones. That is so powerful and so true. He's trying to tell people to remember the good of this man who was his friend. And he says he was a friend. Caesar was a friend to the people. And this is an extraordinary part of the play, because Mark Anthony's speech then sparks something and we see civil brawls unfold and Brutus and Cassius, the conspirators who killed Caesar, have to get out of there. And, of course, they meet an untimely end. Now let's read a speech from Anthony and Cleopatra. This is the character Eno Barbas, who Patrick Stewart played phenomenally well in Trevor Nunn's version. This is Eno Barbas describing the moment that Mark Anthony first saw Cleopatra and met her. The barge she sat in like a burnished throne burned on the water. The poop was beaten gold purple, the sails and so perfumed that the winds were love sick with them. The oars were silver, which to the tune of flutes kept stroke and made the water which they beat to follow faster as amorous of their strokes. For her own person it beggared all description. She did lie in her pavilion cloth of gold, of tissue, o'erpicturing that Venus where we see the fancy outwork nature. On each side her stood pretty dimpled boys like smiling cupids with divers coloured fans whose wind did seem to glow. The delicate cheer cheeks which they did cool and what they undid did. That's phenomenal. There's a great painting that captures this scene. Shakespeare himself was working very closely from Plutarch. Plutarch's Lives. If you want to read what Will was reading, he had a small little personal library, an influential personal library of go to books that he goes back to time and again throughout his plays. And they are Plutarch's Lives. Yeah, for the Roman stuff, Ovid's Metamorphoses, for just so much. So much of his magical poetry and imagery and mythology comes from Ovid. And then you've also got Holinshed's histories for his English histories. Indeed, he was influenced by Chaucer most certainly. We're going to see that at the hardcore literature book club, particularly when we meet the Wife of Bath, who is very much a Falstaff precursor. Indeed she's a precursor for so many great characters. I absolutely adore the Wife of Bath. So that's going to be such a fun discussion to have with book club readers. He, of course, would have also been influenced by the Geneva Bible. And then come the era of James, that's towards the end of his career, you had the King James Bible, which is up there with Shakespeare. Shakespeare in the King James Bible are the greatest works of poetry and prose ever rendered into English. What I love about Anthony and Cleopatra is the fact that Shakespeare was so defiant when it came to the classical unities. This was a time in which playwrights thought they needed to adhere to the classical unities of time, space and action. That means the events of the play take place over the course of 24 hours or thereabouts. Taking place in one location and there's one central action and Shakespeare basically went, no nonsense and I'm not doing that. And this got him a lot of criticism. He got a lot of flack for this. But he created a play with Anthony and Cleopatra that just takes over the entire world. It takes place over years and years and ranges from rogues to Alexandria with his two larger than life demigod like characters, Anthony and Cleopatra. And he really just created a play that would really be most suited for a sprawling six hour long cinematic experience or something like that. Indeed, John Dryden, who I like, tried to rewrite Anthony and Cleopatra, imposing the classical unities onto this sprawling, overflowing play. And like I said though, I like Dryden. They're just two different plays and it really does show the difference and it really emphasizes the genius of Shakespeare and his artistic intuition. What Shakespeare would do is he would take stories from history and mythology and all of that. He would use source material and use it very, very closely. But what he added was his delivery of it, his characters, his psychologically complex characters, the poetry, the imagery, how he delivered the story. This was a time in which originality was not the demand. You didn't go to a new play to see what was going to happen very often. You knew exactly what was going to happen from the get go. You just wanted to see how this troupe or this playwright did the story you're familiar with. The idea of staying away from spoilers is a really rather modern preoccupation. And indeed, when we say modern, I actually do mean a couple hundred years. I do even include the Victorian era in that the 19th century through to the 21st century. That's when we started thinking more like how we think today versus how we thought in the Renaissance era and then how we thought in the medieval era. So originality was not the demand, though. Indeed, Shakespeare did deliver some original play with A Midsummer Night's Dream and the Tempest and there he's much closer to the classical unities. But it's interesting when Shakespeare's ultimately original, he gives us something that's rather plotless. He just gets these characters, puts them in a silly situation and lets them roam about either in the forest and the undergrowth in A Midsummer Night's Dream, or on an island shipwrecked like in the Tempest. And indeed, let's have a look at the Tempest. Now, the Tempest was Shakespeare's last solo work and this was his farewell to the theatre where he pretty overtly says goodbye to the stage. And he essentially expresses his fatigue, how tired he is, and his desire to be released from the bondage of being a playmate. Yeah, he ends that play by asking the audience to clap their hands and thus release him. He is Prospero the wizard, shaman, mage, figure. And this wizard breaks his staff and drowns his book. And indeed, we might think that the staff is a symbol for the pen. Shakespeare, his name contains the meaning of warrior ancestors shaking their spear. But for him, his spear was the pen. And he proved that the pen is mightier than the sword. We spoke about the Tempest in depth at the hardcore literature book club, as we have for all of his plays. So if you're interested in a deep dive into anything that we have spoken about today, then do check out patreon.com hardcore literature. But there's a fantastic speech in the Tempest where Prospero dissolves this mud like entertainment to celebrate the betrothal of his daughter Miranda with Ferdinand. But what he says applies to the theatre, that the audience was in itself. And I believe at this time, Shakespeare had basically done everything that he thought he could do. He'd written the greatest things ever. He did a little bit more experimentation with romance towards the end of his career. And then I think there came a moment where he said, I'm going to give it a year or so. I'm going to write something phenomenal. And then I'm stepping back. And he did exactly that with the Tempest, though indeed we would see that he couldn't leave that easily. He couldn't leave theatrical life that easily because he would continue doing a couple more collaborations with John Fletcher. But in The Tempest, Act 4, Scene 1, Prospero says, Our revels now are ended. These, our actors, as I foretold you, were all spirits and are melted into air, into thin air. And like the baseless fabric of this vision, the cloud capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself, yea, all which it inherits spirit shall dissolve and like this insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep. Isn't that beautiful? So again, he's pointing to the great globe itself. And he's speaking, of course, of the earth, but also the Globe Theatre. Everything before us, the theatre is just a product of our imagination. All spirits. And when the play ends, it will all fade and melt into air, into thin air, which was Hamlet's wish. Oh, that this too, too solid flesh would melt Thor and resolve itself into a dew. This insubstantial pageant faded. And I love that line. We are such st stuff as dreams are made on and our little life is rounded with a sleep. What does it mean to die? What does it mean to depart? We have our entrance and our exit. Where do we go? What is that undiscovered country? Is it like a dream? What is the next part of the journey after our little life? Do we just go back to sleep? It's an absolutely incredible piece of poetry there, and a really fitting way for Shakespeare to say goodbye to the theatre that he had given himself so powerfully too. And perhaps that's a good place for me to leave off there. My goodness. However, there are so many more great passages in Shakespeare that will have to linger over in the future together. There's great speeches in Othello with Iago, another one of the inexhaustible protagonists, as A.C. bradley would say. Of course, you've got the English history plays, you've got the really famous Richard iii. Opening now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of York and all the clouds that lowered upon our house in the deep bosom of the ocean buried. Such a fantastic speech. Who else do we have? There's a great speech in King Henry V, which I absolutely adore. The Henriad cycle. If you haven't seen the Hollow Crown, I highly recommend it. Don't just read one of the history plays, don't just read Richard III or King Henry V, don't just read the Henry IV plays, parts one and two. Those plays I take together as a sublime whole and they're in my top five personal favourites. But the most rewarding experience you can have when it comes to reading in the theatre is to enjoy that English procession as a sweeping saga. Follow it through. Start with Richard ii, which is an incredibly lyrical play. It's musical. Shakespeare had a period in which he was penning really musical plays, essentially back to back. You've got Love Slavers Lost in there, which is just an absolute symphony. And very sadly, it was around that time, after he'd penned a string of lyrical plays, that his son Hamlet died. And would we have Hamlet, at least in the way that we have it today, if it were not for the death of his son which stayed with him? But we then see that the lyricism, the lightness stops and the death of his son would usher in a dark age and some of the most sublime works that the literary world has ever seen. Trauma and turmoil is fertile soil for aesthetic greatness. So, yeah, read Richard II. Read the two Henry IVs, read Henry V, read Henry VI and read Richard the third. Third, what other plays would have really great passages? I think Romeo and Juliet would have a lot of really great passages too. I absolutely adore that play. What I love about that play is it feels very. I'm not saying this in a bad way, but it feels kind of immature. It's got an innocent quality to it, it's still got a little bit of shoddiness to it, but it's also got some incredible beauty. And that's a watershed work because it's really from Romeo and Juliet that we see Shakespeare really starts to be Shakespeare. There's some absolutely phenomenal poetry in Romeo and Juliet, but indeed there are just too many plays and the idea of isolating just a handful is a real shame. Luckily, we don't need to do that. I do believe the best way to read Shakespeare, or indeed the best way to read full stop, is to read Shakespeare all the way through all the days of your life. Read all of the plays, read all of the poems, discuss them with fellow lovers of literature and reap the rewards. Shakespeare has helped me through the darkest times and has been there through the greatest times too. He's always been a good friend that I can rely on going to. His work is medicinal and it's healing and without a doubt, it's one of my absolute favorite things to do. Therefore, I couldn't let a birthday go by without appreciating a little bit of Shakespeare. And thank you very much for appreciating Shakespeare with me. I'd really love to know what your favourite passages in Shakespeare are and what are your favourite plays. And if you would like to read any of Shakespeare's plays in depth with me with my commentary, my lectures and my writing, recommended resources and the discussion that happens amongst the members of the hardcore literature book club, then do join us@patreon.com hardcore literature. You'll be very warmly welcomed and you'll read some absolutely phenomenal works with us at time of recording. We now have a very extensive back catalogue of lectures, read throughs and bookish discussions that you can access on demand at your own pace. We haven't just read Shakespeare, we've read Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, George Eliot, the Bronte sisters, James Joyce, Cervantes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. We have read David Foster Wallace and Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, Cormac McCarthy, Herman Melville, Lady Murasaki with the Tale of Genji. We've read Alexandre Dumas this year we're going to be reading Homer. We're going to read Faulkner and Chaucer and so many more great works together. So again, thank you so much for listening today and helping to keep great literature alive. I appreciate you and I hope you have a wonderful day. Happy reading and bye bye for now.