Welcome to the 1740 podcast with me, Alexander Waugh and Maudie Lowe.
Hello. Hello, Maudie.
We're very, very excited, aren't we, Maudie, today?
Yes, we are. Because we've got an incredibly special guest.
I can't believe how we've managed to get this guest on today
because he is fact, the greatest living Shakespearean actor.
It's not a matter of opinion. It's not a matter of opinion.
It's a fact. And it's not just me saying it.
And millions of people have said it.
And you can find people much more knowledgeable than I am
about Shakespeare in the theatre who are absolutely convinced
that our guest today is the greatest living Shakespearean actor.
And we're going to talk to him about Shakespeare
and about his time with Shakespeare and all that Shakespeare means to him
and some of the things he's done acting Shakespeare.
And possibly we'll even talk a little bit about the identity of William Shakespeare as well.
He is, of course, Sir Derek Jacobi. Welcome, Derek.
Thank you very much. We're very honoured to have you on today.
My great pleasure. I hope I can live up to that extraordinary introduction.
Well, it's just a fact and I'm sticking with it.
You are the greatest living Shakespearean actor
and you have an extraordinary ability to turn Shakespearean words
and speeches into more than music.
It's just an unbelievable communication.
And a lot of people, as you know, find Shakespeare quite difficult to understand.
Some of the lines are obscure.
I've never heard you read or act a single line of Shakespeare
that wasn't clear to me what it meant.
And that's a real gift. There are not many who can do that.
In fact, a lot of actors, I think, make it even more obscure than it needs to be.
But can we can we start by one thing I'm going to tax you on, Derek?
I know you've you've you've gone over the the four score years now.
So forgive me if this is difficult.
I'm going to tax you a little bit on memory.
And I was going to ask you, do you actually remember your first encounter in boyhood?
Was it at school? Was it your parents reading to you or whatever?
Your first encounter with Shakespeare that was meaningful to you?
Yes, my I think my first encounter at school
and talk about starting at the top.
I played Hamlet at school in the annual school play.
And from then on, I was learning a great deal.
Somebody I think it was my English master who said treat all the poetry as prose
and all the prose as poetry.
And that sort of stayed with me.
And that's what I tried to do.
And and curiously, it it worked.
It made some of the most obscure Shakespearean passages clear
when when you and when you stop being afraid of it and and just tackled it head on
and loved it and enjoyed it and
desperately wanted to communicate it and make the audience understand what you were saying.
And often it's difficult. It's it's it's hard.
But you're doing it for an audience.
And if they don't understand what you're saying and what you're thinking and what you're feeling, why do it?
Could you remember? I mean, how old were you when you acted Hamlet?
I was a teenager. I was
I was
17, 18.
But can you remember how you got the role?
I mean, they must have thought we've got a very exceptional young actor in this school
in order to put Hamlet on at all in the first place.
Or did you have to audition against the other boys?
And no, I'd I'd been in school plays.
It was my I think it was my last year at school before I went to university.
So I was I was I was 18, I think.
And I I'd been in several school plays and we had an English teacher who was very keen on theatre
and had taken numbers of boys to theatres, particularly the old Vic.
So I'd seen quite a lot of Shakespeare, professional Shakespeare.
And he cast me as Hamlet.
And he also got us on to the Edinburgh Festival, the fringe of the Edinburgh Festival that year.
And so I played Hamlet on the fringe of the festival and it was reviewed by professional
critics.
And they said, look at this.
Look at this and the main thing on view with the festival that year was a play called The
Hidden King.
And it got very badly viewed.
The critics didn't like it.
And I remember a couple of them saying, look at these kids on the fringe doing this marvelous
Hamlet and the professionals mucking it up.
So we got a lot of backhanded compliments.
And so I was about to go up to Cambridge and we had a lot of publicity in the papers, in
the Times and the papers.
And so when I went up, I got an interview.
I was in what was called the pool.
I'd been ill, very badly ill before the examinations for university.
And I got in the pool.
They weren't quite sure whether I was university material.
So I got an interview at King's College and an interview at St. John's College.
And they had all read these reviews and it did me a lot of good.
I eventually was accepted by St. John's and the next three years, I did some academic
work, but acted most of the time.
There were many acting associations in Cambridge and there was, of course, the very famous
Marlowe's Society that did play per year.
And you were invited to join the cast of the Marlowe's Society.
And I did and I ended up playing Hamlet again at Cambridge.
That went to the open air theatre at Stratford upon Avon.
Where I didn't realize, but in the audience of one of the performances, were all the big
rigs from the Birmingham rep.
And at the end of my three years at Cambridge, I decided that I wanted to be a professional
actor.
I wrote begging letters to various reps all around the country.
But when my letter landed on the desk at Birmingham, I said, this is that boy we saw playing Hamlet
at Stratford.
And I got a job and I stayed there for three years.
Talk about luck.
Wow, that's amazing.
Going back to your first performance as a Hamlet, were there any specific emotions or
challenges that you faced during the first performance?
I suppose one of the challenges was that we were all boys.
Gertrude was in drag.
And so was Ophelia.
And the main challenge, I think, was able to learn it.
And of course, you were playing to an audience of doting parents.
So the audience were kind of on your side.
But I loved it.
I loved it.
And it convinced me that that was the world I wanted to be in.
That was the world that I had most talent for.
I couldn't think of what I was going to do after grammar school.
And suddenly I knew I was going to be an actor.
And how did that experience shape your perception of Shakespeare's works?
Before, I think, they were in a way still mountains to climb.
But Shakespeare's works were no longer so unassailable.
They became, as I read them, from the point of view of performing,
they became more accessible and ceased to be Shakespeare.
And I wasn't frightened of them anymore.
And I could see the beauty of them, but also the ordinaryness of them.
They were real people.
They were speaking what used to sound to me highfalutin.
But now they were perfectly accessible human beings who were speaking in a highly charged,
often flowery way.
But what they were saying and what they were thinking and what they were feeling was just like anybody else.
Yeah.
You were an only child, weren't you, Derek?
Yeah.
Did your parents encourage you in Shakespeare?
Or was this something you sort of took off your own bat from a schoolmaster or something?
Yes, no, they did.
I wasn't an only child.
I was also a war baby.
I was born the year before war broke out.
And I was evacuated and all that carry on.
So I didn't really see my father until after the end of the war.
And they were doting parents, I have to say.
They gave me everything, their love and whatever I wanted somehow.
I was spoiled, but hopefully I survived being spoiled.
And of course, we didn't love each other.
We lived in London.
Had they been to university?
Had they been to Cambridge?
No, they were both tradesmen.
My mother worked in the local high street, as did my father when he came out of the army.
He had a sweet shop for several years in Chingford.
No, no, no, no.
My mother was more educated than my father.
Dad wasn't particularly educated at all.
But they must have been astounded when they came to see you playing Hamlet at age 17.
What had they given birth to?
I think they were.
But the great thing was that I think because I was the only one,
I got sort of whatever I wanted.
It didn't make me one of those awful children, you know.
But they did indulge me, shall we say.
The first theatre I ever went to, they took me to the Phantomime at the London Palladium.
And during the course of the Pantomime, the leading lady, Prince Charming and Dandini,
both famous actresses and performers, came down into the auditorium and picked a few kids to grow
up on the stage.
And I was one of the kids they picked.
So the first stage I ever on was the London Palladium.
How extraordinary.
Do you remember your first Shakespeare play that you ever went to and whether that had an effect
on it or whether the actors in it inspired you to start thinking of becoming an actor?
Yes, I remember.
I can't remember exactly.
I think it was Hamlet.
Well, we had kind of regular visits to the Old Vic in London.
And I saw Richard Burton playing Hamlet.
John Neville.
That's right.
John Neville and Richard Burton alternated Hamlet.
One played Hamlet and one played Horatio, I think, and they alternated them.
So the Old Vic was the first theatre in London that had a huge effect on me.
And I loved going to the Old Vic, mainly in school parties, mainly sitting up in the grounds.
And then eventually, of course, I played the Old Vic and it was a wonderful circle.
Is there a specific scene or character from the works of Shakespeare that resonates with you most?
Oh, that's a difficult one.
They kind of they all do, I think.
Hamlet is the play that I've done over 400 performances of.
So it's the one that first springs to mind.
But I've been in many of them.
The one that I didn't think I could do, and eventually the
director said, unless you do it now, you won't you'll be too old to do it.
And that was Leah when I was in my seventies.
And that has stayed with me very much so.
But Hamlet for me is the one, because I also got to play Hamlet at Elsinore
in the castle, the castle of Elsinore.
Wow.
That was that was great.
That was wonderful.
To a largely Danish audience, I imagine.
But they understood.
The height of the tourist season.
So there were there were English people there as well.
But as you say, yes, the Danes, however, Majesty, the Danish Queen, Margaret of England,
and she came and the lady waiting came twice.
Really?
Yes.
And then and then the Queen gave me a Danish knighthood.
Hooray.
And jolly well deserved.
But so, Derek, who who fundamentally taught you, who guided you?
About how to be so brilliant and so true in the way you speak these Shakespeare lines.
How did it come about that you, of all people, managed to communicate them in this extraordinary
way that is lacking from so many other well-intentioned actors?
I I find that very difficult to answer.
I I think that's the most important thing.
Very difficult to answer.
I as very young, I mean, when I was about six or seven, I was in the local library.
Panto Panto Christmas play, not Panto Christmas play.
And that was my first time dressing up and trying to be somebody else with the Shakespearean
texts. I just thought I've got to make people understand what I'm saying.
And I had seen by which time I had seen performances and I hadn't actually understood it all.
It wasn't immediate to me.
And I thought there must be a way of saying these lines in a colloquial way. Don't worry
about the flush and the bloom of poetry on them.
That'll speak for itself.
You can't get rid of it, but be be be colloquial.
Say it as if it's your everyday language.
That's the way you talk.
And so with that at the back of my head, it meant that the text suddenly, the meaning
of the texts shone out rather than the way they were being presented to the audience.
And if I could understand what I was talking about and using tonalities that the audience
would recognise, that there was no poetic overlay, there was no reciting, the voice
didn't seem, it was my voice saying those words as I would say them to you.
Yes. But so what's extraordinary, what I find extraordinary when I hear you doing Shakespeare
is that on the one hand, it's absolutely clear to me that you have a very deep understanding,
you know exactly what you're saying, you absolutely understand the lines perfectly.
On the other hand, you appear to be almost improvising, that it's a natural thought that's
coming to you just as you're about to say it in that second, that's very, very realistic.
And that sort of balance between what's total improvisation and what has to have been quite
a serious study of it, seems to be the whole art and difficulty of acting.
And so I wondered when you, for instance, did to be or not to be speech 400 times, did
you always, had you studied it to the degree where you put the lilt or whatever it was
or the emphasis on particularly words of time, or did you find yourself sounding different
every time you did it on those 400 occasions?
Again, it's difficult to answer. I think basically I ignored punctuation. I punctuated it for
myself. If I wanted that line to mean something slightly other than what the line actually
meant, then I would punctuate it in my own way. And I would inflict it in my own way.
So that it sounded like spoken thought, that I was kind of not exactly making out as I
went along, but that it had an immediacy to it, but it didn't come over as a learned text.
It came over, hopefully, I hoped, but it came over as spoken thought. And there wasn't necessarily
a rhythm to it, particularly within the more poetic lines. I sort of thought, forget the
rhythm, go for what it means. And if you have to stop in the middle of the line to emphasize
something, do that. If you want to metaphorically put that word in inverted commas, do that.
Don't worry about tradition, for a start. And make it as real and as colloquial and
as conversational as you can. And if they throw brick bats at you for that, well, they
do. But I thought that was my way of making it interesting and not just receive text that
many in the audience would have heard before. Maybe this was a way of, it would hit their
ears in a new way. And they would think, oh, yes, that's interesting.
Did you find it difficult to learn the text?
No. And that's my great sorrow now, because I find it more difficult now. No, I was gifted,
gifted with a wonderful, an instant memory. I mean, I could learn these and there was
no problem. There is now, there is now, big problem. Well, a much bigger problem than
it was. But no, I had no problem.
Can you share any particular memorable or challenging moments from your live theatre
performances?
I remember, Derek, not trying to answer for you, but I remember once you got very challenged
talking about learning lines. Didn't you have an extraordinary experience on the very last
of your 400th Hamlets, where you suddenly had a sort of freak out? Am I right or have
I misremembered that?
You were performing Hamlet and I think you were doing the to be or not to be speech and
you suddenly had a panic.
Oh, I did. I did.
You wouldn't be able to remember it or something.
Yes, I did. Yes, I, I for two years suffered actors. What was it called? I didn't go on
stage for two years. I got actors block. And it was while I was playing Hamlet. It was
the last I was on tour. And I think somewhere in the South of England. And our interval
came before to be or not to be. So the first thing I did after the interval was the nunnery scene
and I was in the wings and I put a worm of doubt in my head so stupidly.
I thought, gosh, I've done this place so often. And it's so beautiful. What if I went on the
stage and forgot to be or not to be?
My cue came. I walked on the stage to be or not to be. That is the question. Whether it
is noble in the mind to suffer the sling and arrows of outrageous fortune or. And I went
complete black out. My costume, I sweated my costume turned black with sweat. I it lasted. It must
have lasted about 30 seconds, but it felt like an hour. And I picked it up. I went on
finished the play. It was a matinee. I had to do it again that evening. And I didn't
go on stage for two years. I scared myself rotten. I got stage fright and I gave stage
fright to myself by stupidly questioning what can I remember? And I done it umpteen times.
It's a really horrific story that actually. It's a real, real nightmare. I've never been
able to act. I've never acted. I've absolutely terrified about ever even thinking of acting
in my whole life. And yet I have these dreams sometimes where I'm an actor on the stage
and I can't remember my lines and it completely freaks me.
Join the club.
I mean, because you can't, especially in Shakespeare and especially in to be or not to be, you
can't just improvise.
But it was a horrible moment. And as I say, I didn't go on stage for two years. And what
got me back on stage was an offer I couldn't refuse from the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Yes. And well, talking of which talking of it to be on not to be speech. I bet you've
never acted it, but I suspect you are aware that the to be or not to be had an earlier
form that that speech in which it doesn't really sound the same at all. He says to be
or not to be.
I've got it here. He says to be or not to be. I there's the point to die to sleep. Is
that all? No, no, to sleep, to dream. I marry. There it goes. It's very different. It's a
very different speech, which which which comes in the first quarter of that play and clearly
didn't satisfy the author or something happened to make him revise it.
The speech is much better.
Yeah, well, I read it very badly. I expected you had read the first quarter version. You'd
make it into music. But it's it's very interesting that now when it of course it brings us on
to a very interesting fact that you and Maudie and I all have strong reasons to believe that
William Shakespeare was actually a pseudonym. And when you look at things like the revision
of the to be or not to be speech, one cannot help but think back to the author and
the relevance of the author in this in this extraordinary three way dynamic, the author
who channels to the actor who channels to the audience.
So you've been very brave because you had a big reputation. I think things have
got we still have a massive reputation, but things have got better. But I think when you
first when you first announced to the world that you thought that William Shakespeare
was a pseudonym, you've got a lot of heavy hammers coming crashing down on your head
and people being very rude about you. Can you remember can you remember whether you
thought carefully before you gave the public that information or how it slipped out or
what happened there?
No, it was the book I read that what was it called? Probably was it Ogburn? Was it the
the mysterious William Shakespeare probably?
Charlton Ogburn. Yes. I and somebody gave that to me and said, this is fascinating. It's
never occurred to me before that. Look, anybody but William of Stratford, and that really
thought this this is I believe this I believe this and that I made my own inquiries. I became
quite convinced that the man from Stratford, his only connection with the place was being
member of a troupe of actors on the South Bank in London, that he had no input in the
actual writing of them. And there was no evidence to say that he had written them. And where
it all started and the birthplace and suddenly it had become Shakespeare was not just an
Elizabethan dramatist. He was he was God and Stratford on Avon was a hallowed place. The
birthplace and suddenly it became a kind of toy town. And it became anathema and
particularly for an actor to say that no, I don't believe Shakespeare in Stratford wrote
them. I believe somebody else wrote them. And grudges as I read. The Earl of Oxford became
for me the nearest thing to how I imagined the author to be.
But do you remember thinking twice about telling people that you thought this or did you are
you the sort of person who just says what you believe and out it came and then all hell
broke loose?
I knew it would cause ruptures. I knew it would cause some particularly, well, the people
from Stratford, the great believers in I won't mention names in Stratford called me insane,
called me mad. Okay, well, I'm insane. I'm mad. But that's, that's what I now believe.
I think the nearest as I say, was Oxford. But I'm not saying it's it was definitely
him. Nobody else. I don't I still don't know. But I, I am firmly convinced that it wasn't
the man that they say, it wasn't about the Stratford.
How did your fellow actors react to your doubts? Did you have any or did you face any
challenging discussions with them?
Not really, they kind of refused to discuss it. And I was I was surprised that fellow
Shakespearean actors well known Shakespearean actors, you know, I thought I thought I was
mad and thought Mark was mad and kind of didn't want to discuss it didn't want to talk about
it. I'm very fond of Derek, but look, don't let's go there. Don't let's go there. And
that was the sort of reaction. Not not to be discussed. It was beyond the pale, beyond
the pale. It was like you know,
now you read history at Cambridge University, didn't you? And then when I acted all the
time, well, you Yeah, but you you were there to read history, whether you read it all the
time or not. But and and then of course, being an actor. So I just imagine your your latest
reading of Ogden's extraordinarily long book, it's sort of 800 pages, it's a very good and
worth reading book. But how passages of that would be resonating with you as you read it
as both an actor who knows Shakespeare pretty intimately, but also a historian who has this
sense of, of history and a mind that is trained to some degree to challenge history. That
perhaps put you in a different position from some of the other people you find yourself
having to argue against who either instinctively or spiritually just wish to believe that Shakespeare
was William of Stratford.
Yes, I think my historical instincts also weighed heavily on the side of it wasn't the
Stratford man. The historical trails to the plays to the characters just were wrong.
The place you believed in Stratford. And I think those historical senses of finding trails
finding ways in, finding reasons for, were part of the historical mind and which I suppose
I had. And it's, it ended up just not making sense.
Did playing Hamlet or directing Hamlet deepen your connection to Edward de Vere?
I can't say it did. Shall we say Edward de Vere doesn't come into the theatre with me.
He doesn't help me in the theatre as such. Certainly not as an actor or a director. And
certainly not in Hamlet because there's too much other to think about.
But Derek, am I right in thinking that you read the Ogburn book and got convinced by
the Oxfordian argument after you had acted all the Hamlets. You've done the Hamlets first.
Then you read this book. And I assume were very, very interested in the passages that
book that are about Hamlet which show how many aspects of the Hamlet seem to be autobiographical.
And what's always amazed me is that the Stratfordianist, the person who believes that William of Stratford
wrote the plays, they've gone on for many, many years saying they don't have much about
the biography of William of Stratford or practically anything of any interest. But they've been
saying that Hamlet has to be the most autobiographical of William Shakespeare's plays. Yet they
can't match any incident in Hamlet to anything from the life of William of Stratford. And
yet along comes the Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere, and there's incident after incident
after incident, that seem to mirror very precisely what went on in his own life. Including the
early death of his father, the precipitous marriage of his mother to somebody else, being
shipwrecked and stripped naked by pirates. I mean, it sort of goes on and on and on.
In fact, Edward de Vere even dreamt that he saw the ghost of his stepfather rather like
Hamlet sees the ghost of his actual father. Your deep, deep knowledge of Hamlet, when
you read that book, so I'm not talking about how if you were to play Hamlet today, how
knowing about Edward de Vere would alter your performance, but just reading that book and
having all that background on Hamlet, it must have resonated very strongly with you.
Oh, it did. It did. I mean, the connections between what we gleaned certainly from the
plays of the character of the man who wrote them, whoever wrote them, suddenly coalesced
with what we were finding out about de Vere. And the connections were mind bogglingly close,
which was, which wasn't the fact with the man from Stratford, where there was nothing
contingent between his life, his experience, what we know of all that. And the only connection
was the company that he joined in London. That was the only connection he had with play
acting, certainly not play writing.
Certainly not play writing and in even play acting, we don't know 100% what he was doing
and what he acted, if he acted anything at all, but he was certainly involved with the
business side of the Chamberlain's men. I want to remind you of something you may have
even totally forgotten, but I was listening to it just the other day. You made a recording,
an audio recording of the letters of Edward de Vere, and I was just astounded listening
to those, how even a sort of transactional business letter, when read by you, sounds
pure Shakespeare. Do you remember making that recording?
Yes, I do. I do remember. They were beautifully written, although their subjects might have
been, certainly to me, rather mundane, rather ordinary, but they kind of lifted off the
page with the way they were expressed. I suppose reading them automatically, not put on a voice,
but read them, if I was reading them truthfully, their intrinsic value, literary, poetic, whatever
value, came to the surface.
Yes. Would you mind if when we edit this conversation, if we just intersperse a little bit, there's
an absolutely beautiful letter that Edward de Vere writes to Robert Cecil about the
death of Queen Elizabeth, and he says how he's left rather like a ship without an anchor,
without a sail. So if we might just intersperse a little bit of that with your reading it
on that recording, that would be great.
I can't remember it.
It's a beautiful bit of Shakespearean prose, absolutely wonderful.
I cannot but find a great grief in myself to remember the mistress which we have lost,
under whom both you and myself from our greenest years have been in a manner brought up. And
although it hath pleased God, after an earthly kingdom, to take her up into a more permanent
and heavenly state, wherein I do not doubt but she is crowned with glory, and to give
us a prince wise, learned, and enriched with all the virtues, yet after the long time which
we spent in her service, we cannot look for so much left of our days as to bestow upon
another. The long acquaintance and kind familiarities wherewith she did use us, we are not ever
to expect from another prince, as denied by the infirmity of age and common course of
reason.
In this common shipwreck, mine is above all the rest, who least regarded, though often
comforted, of all her followers she hath left to try my fortune among the alterations of
time and chance, either without sail, whereby to take the advantage of any prosperous gale,
or with anchor, to ride till the storm be overpassed.
Derek, what's your favourite sonnet and why?
I suppose, shall I compare thee?
Which is number eighteen, isn't it?
It is.
Number eighteen, yes.
Yes, I think it is. And actually, this has, in my mind, a very, very interesting connection
again to Vere, because Shakespeare's first seventeen sonnets are known as the procreation
sonnets, and in them he's urging a fair youth to have a baby. And everyone argues about
who Shakespeare is and who that baby is and why he's urging someone else to have a baby
for him. But never mind all that, one of the great big arguments in those first seventeen
sonnets is if you don't have a baby, if you don't father a baby for love of me, which
is a very odd thing, your beauty will die. Your beauty will live through lines, eternal
lines. And one of the arguments he gives, he says, ragged winter will catch up with
you, basically ragged winter will catch up with you and your beauty will die. And then
in sonnet eighteen, he compares him to a summer's day and talks of his eternal summers shall
not die. So it gives the impression that this baby has been born. And this has led to a
lot of theories that the Earl of Oxford was unable to have an heir. He, of course, was
the seventeenth Earl of Oxford, i.e. the seventeenth procreation sonnet, and he actually got Southampton
to surrogate an heir to the Earl of Oxford, who was the eighteenth Earl of Oxford.
Therefore, the eighteenth sonnet talks about the eternal summer that shall not die. And
it's a very interesting fact that a contemporary called Anthony Mundy writes to the eighteenth
Earl of Oxford, long after the seventeenth Earl of Oxford is dead, and he alludes to
the eighteenth sonnet of Shakespeare. So it does rather look like that's what's going
on.
And my knowledge of sonnets is not profound.
Well maybe, but I've heard you reading them very profoundly indeed. And I think one day,
if you ever had the stamina, energy, goodwill, whatever, to make a recording of those sonnets
would be an absolutely fantastic thing to do, because you would do it so beautifully.
Right. I'll get my agent on to it.
Good idea. Send us the bill. I'm sure we can, I'm absolutely sure we can, we can, we can
raise the money to whatever your agent wants to get that recording out, because it would
be absolutely wonderful. The other thing would be lovely is to record some of the poems that
people wrote about Shakespeare at the time. Now, in a recent conference for the Devere
Society, you read a section of Ben Johnson's poem about William Shakespeare, the Encomium,
which I think is a really beautiful and very, very extraordinary poem.
So another thing to get on to your agent about is maybe reading some of these
poems by Ben Johnson and other contemporaries writing about Shakespeare.
Shakespeare, yes. Because we never hear them read out loud and some, well, I would say
Ben Johnson is rare because he really is a great poet. Some of them aren't so great,
but it's still wonderful to hear them read aloud rather than just see them on the page.
Right. I will look into that. Yes. Thank you very much. So sitting down, can't you?
Now one of the things I want to just ask you briefly about is, well, let's put it this
way. One of the things I find about Shakespeare is the sheer beauty of the lines and the ability
to compress such a big thought into such a small space just in two lines or three lines.
He can say something that is so pregnant with meaning and beautifully stated. And no wonder
he's the most quoted person probably outside of the Bible, but I mean, he's the most quoted
source from anywhere. And he's one of those authors who you're just, I'm put into an ecstasy
just reading the lines. I almost don't care about the stories. I mean, of course, some
of the stories, Lear and Hamlet are amazing, but things like Comedy of Errors are rather
fatuous in my view, but doesn't mean there aren't beautiful lines. Sorry, I've just given
you a monologue about my thoughts of Shakespeare. So that I totally the opposite of what I wanted
to do. Well, I would just like to hear, let's hear your response anyway to that sort of
line of thinking.
Well, as an actor, they are a gift for an actor. Nobody that I have ever met can express
or has expressed the deep truths of life in such a simple way as whoever wrote Shakespeare
wrote. The profundity that is evident in the simplest, the simplest serving up of something
that is so deep. It requires, it's so surprising that sometimes when I, when I read Shakespeare
for the first time, it was a very, very slow process because what it was saying was so
deep and yet what I was reading was so simple and beautiful and true that it was remarkable,
absolutely remarkable that he could think a thought and then be able to express it so
poignantly, so truly, so beautifully, seemingly so easily. It dripped off his pen. It was
an amazing facility that Shakespeare taught for me is beauty. It's beauty in the mouth,
it's beauty on the ear, it's beauty in the mind.
So it must be a massive thrill to be the person who can channel this mind from 400 years ago
straight to a modern audience of people in front of you and not only feel as a really
good actor feel totally moved by what you're saying or move to hilarity if it's a comic
aspect or to tears if it's a tragic aspect and to see the effect of that coming around
to a modern audience. It's an extraordinary triangle that begs the question what is, what
is Hamlet? Is it in the mind?
The trick of it all, of any acting ability is to experience it yourself but at the same
time as you're experiencing it, sharing it with the audience. It's no good you experiencing
up there on the stage and they are looking at their programmes, they are not involved.
The whole essence of the performance, on any performance is to, you do it for them, not
for you. You had a journey, you had a journey of learning, of understanding or of feeling
and you have to package all that up and give it to them so they can make the same journey.
It's harder for them because it's immediate and it's up to the actor to present it in
such a way that the immediacy of what we're offering is completely and wholly absorbable
like that by the audience. That's the trick of it. Trick is not a, perhaps a nice word
to use but it is a trick. It is in a sense trickery.
Well you're referring to the craft, the skill of acting is a trickery.
It's often called technique.
But do you not think that there is, sorry Derek, do you not think there is also something
ethereal about it, that there is a mystic element even that God if you like it or don't
like is playing some role in this threesome of writer, actor, audience?
Yes, I agree but it's not something that you are aware of. Something that you accept that
that is there, that is always part of the communication. Something that you want not
on but it's the magic of the theatre. The magic of the theatre. Sure, there is a magic
between us and them that we're not in charge of. It descends, it's there. It will come
under the right circumstances. You have to create the circumstances and that adding,
that thing will come. You may not actually be aware of its presence but the audience
will be aware of it. You're in the fact the tradesman. The product is what they are buying.
Sometimes there is something about the product that has nothing to do with you. You are producing
but something else, something magical, something ethereal is happening to you.
So years ago I made a television programme about piano playing and they put my head into
a, what do they call it, Maudie, in a hospital when they read your brain?
MRI.
An MRI scanner and they made me play the piano while I was in the MRI scanner and they realised
that I was playing the piano with only that part of the brain that did not deal with emotion
at all. This goes back to your idea, Derek, that there is a kind of trick involved, that
a very skilful actor is in a sense playing tricks. But at the same time I think I've
heard you saying in other interviews and things that you do genuinely feel the emotion, the
tears of Lear when Cordelia dies. You're actually feeling it. It's not really all trick, is
it? Somehow there's a merge between the trick and the skill and the craft of acting and
what's really happening becomes so real that…
Combination of all of them. But trickery is there. I mean, when I say that, an awareness
of… so that when you are overcome by emotion and the tears are flowing, at the same time
there is an awareness that the tears are flowing, that this is part of a performance. There
always has to be an awareness. You don't cut off entirely. You appear to cut off. But
the art is the appearance of having totally let go. No actors don't totally let go. They're
still in control when they appear to be absolutely broken. They're still in control. They have
to be because they're going to do it eight times a week.
Yes. And the extraordinary thing I notice with actors, really good actors such as yourself,
all really good classical musical performers, is they draw the audience into them as well
as projecting out to the audience. There's a sort of double movement of energy. An actor
doesn't just stand and project. There's something that draws the audience towards
a great actor so they can't get their eyes off the actor's eyes. They're completely
gripped by it. There's an energy going both ways. Do you feel that or am I just inventing
it?
You're inventing it because you were doing it for them. You are not just parading yourself,
saying aren't I clever? That I could draw these lines and spout them out. No, no, no.
Your job is to make them feel, make them be moved, make them feel involved. That's what
they paid their money for, to have that experience. You have hopefully got a talent to give them
that experience without actually ruining yourself, without actually to get so emotional that
you get ill with it. No, you've got to do it again and again and again. But you do it
for them. They've got to feel it. They feel, if you can make them feel ill or sick or happy
or whatever, they've got to, that's what they paid for, to feel, not just to watch and listen,
but to feel, to think, to go somewhere that you can only go to in a theatre in front of
actors.
What's your favourite theatre to perform in, Derek?
Oh, I think it was the Old Vic. I was there for a while and I love the Old Vic. It kind
of, it welcomes you. It loves actors. You know, and you go out on that stage. I used
to go to the Black Theatre as a schoolboy. I watched the actors and then I was allowed
on that stage and I performed on that stage. One of my great experiences was playing Hamlet
on the stage of the Old Vic. Richard Burton was in the audience and I didn't know.
Had Richard Burton played Hamlet on that same stage?
I saw it.
Oh, you saw it, yeah.
As a schoolboy.
And then he came to see you.
He came, and he came round afterwards and said how much he'd enjoyed it. We went out
to dinner and it was a magical night because I remember sitting up in the glance, watching
him play Hamlet down there and it was a magical moment. The dressing room door opened and
the rest of Richard Burton. It was just amazing.
I somehow imagine that your respective Hamlet performances were very different from one
another. I don't know why I say that.
He was very romantic because he's very handsome. He's a film star. He had great charisma.
I can't remember.
Did he do it in a Welsh accent?
He always had a lute. He always had a lute in his voice. Lovely voice.
Beautiful voice, yes. I've got his recording of Dylan Thomas under Milk Woodwich. It's
pure music, isn't it?
So Derek, I cannot say to you what an honour it's been to talk to you. I'd love to go
on and on and on, but we've already hit the hour and I just feel it's a tragedy, but we're
going to have to draw it to a close. But thank you very, very much. You do us great honour
on our little podcast by talking to us.
Thank you so much, Derek. It's been a pleasure.
Very, very interesting as well. Absolutely fascinating. So many, many thanks. If you're
a listener to this and you've enjoyed this, please subscribe and we're going to do many
more 1740 podcasts which are linked to the De Vere society and we'll let you know who
the guests are going to be in future. But I very much doubt we're going to have anyone
of quite the incredible calibre and genius and brilliance of Sir Derek Jacobi. Thank
you.
Please subscribe and we'll let you know who the guests are going to be in future.