Liberating Shakespeare

Mary Wakefield

Wednesday, 2nd April 2008

Mary Wakefield talks to the RSC’s Michael Boyd and learns how he scared the Establishment

Breaking of a banquet? ‘Well,’ says Boyd, ‘modern playwrights, David Hare, for instance, are often geniuses at talking about crisis. Modern discursive playwrights can talk about crisis ’til the cows come home! But Shakespeare goes a step further — he doesn’t just bang on about crisis, he dramatises it by creating a moment on stage — like a banquet or a funeral — which is broken, interrupted in front of you.’

Now Michael Boyd has stopped looking weary, he’s waving his hands, scratching his head, leaning forward. This is when he mentions his desire to knock Shakespeare from his pedestal, and in the context it’s quite clear that he doesn’t want to damage the great man’s reputation in any way. The pedestal-pushing is about liberating Shakespeare, breaking him free from the stultifying grip of the Establishment; from a ‘Little England’ theme park.

‘Shakespeare speaks to everyone,’ said Orson Welles, ‘and we all claim him, but it’s wise to remember, if we would really appreciate him, that he doesn’t properly belong to us but to another world that smelled assertively of columbine and gunpowder and printer’s ink.’ Boyd agrees: ‘Shakespeare wasn’t writing about a twee little country, about merrie olde England, but about very repressive, autocratic regimes. He belongs to the world. Monarchy, for instance, meant something completely different to Shakespeare than it does to us. Monarchy in the history plays is more like the presidency of unstable African republics.’

Michael Boyd has always had an emotional reaction to Shakespeare. As a teenager he was moved by the eroticism of Othello: ‘I took my first girlfriend to see it, and it was all quite arousing.’ And as a grown-up he talks excitedly about Shakespeare’s changing opinions and philosophy of life, as tracked through his works. ‘Of course, he started out as a Catholic!’ says Boyd (though Shakespeare’s religion is a hotly disputed subject). ‘Everybody of Shakespeare’s father’s generation was Catholic. I mean, think about Hamlet, think about the extraordinary and controversial scene where Hamlet irrefutably on stage sees someone from Purgatory — an outlawed place! But he was clever about it,’ Boyd’s eyes narrow. ‘Remember that Shakespeare has Hamlet come back from Wittenberg with Horatio. If he’d come back from Rheims, I don’t think the play would have been put on! But he’s also conflicted in Hamlet — I think he was genuinely torn. This is Shakespeare’s first favourable portrait of a Puritan, a Protestant leader.’