[hdw]

If you're a native speaker of English, it's difficult to read, or watch a production of, a Shakespeare play with an open mind, because you've had it dinned into you life-long that he is the greatest writer who ever put quill to paper, no question, no argument. Never mind that none of us - even Eric - are sufficiently fluent in enough of the world's literary languages to make meaningful comparisons with other writers. If you don't enjoy his plays, obviously that has to be your fault.

I suspect my experience of Shakespeare is fairly typical. As a bookish teenager I was in a small minority in my class at school who enjoyed my introduction to Shakespeare, and occasional school trips to the theatre were a real treat. We've all probably seen some great Shakespeare productions on telly too in the days when they still did such things. At school, university and teacher-training-college I even acted in some Shakespeare plays myself, and that was fun, until I realised what a crap actor I was and stopped.

Nowadays, it would take the proverbial team of wild horses to get me into a theatre to watch a Shakespeare play. I'm an unashamed doublet and hose man, and I don't want to watch Chicago gangsters or Italian Fascists spouting Jacobean verse. Stuff trendy directors and their "concepts". Nor do I want to watch TV stars parachuted into the starring roles, tho' I understand that Richard Wilson of One Foot in the Grave is currently acting his socks off as Malvolio on the London stage, despite being several decades too old and having some of the best-known and most irritating mannerisms of any British actor.

"Enough! No more! 'Tis not so sweet now as it was before" (that's from memory!) - not for this jaded old amateur thesp anyway (and, yes, I was once in Twelfth Night).

Harry