Page 2 - Just Macbeth News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

The play today, you hear things in a way that you probably wouldn't have heard them three weeks ago. as i perchance hereafter shall think meet to put an antic disposition on. that you, at such times seeing me, never shall, with arms encumbered thus, or this headshake, or by pronouncing of some doubtful phrase as, "well, "well, we know," or "we could and if we would," or such ambiguous giving out, to note that you know aught of me! the late, great david warner, i had the pleasure of talking to him about hamlet — which, of course, he did very famously whilst the vietnam war was on. and there's...

Shakespeare is the cornerstone of our cultural life in the way that he is. he simply wouldn't exist as part of the kind of national conversation in the way that he does without the first folio. those — we would have lost so many of those plays. you know, i'm sitting here at the end of my first day of rehearsals for macbeth, a play that's been in performance now for over 400 years, but it wouldn't exist. we wouldn't have a copy of it. and even those that we did have, that we do have other sources for, the folio was the kind of...the prestige edition. and the reason that those plays are still ...

Let's take just macbeth. what would it have meant if macbeth, we'd never come across macbeth? stammers it's hard to compute, isn't it? because... ..because we didn't. so, it's there. and there are shakespeare plays that we have lost. there's at least two. there's cardenio and love's labour's won, which some people would say was actually a different title for much ado about nothing. who knows? we know these plays were performed and existed and they didn't make it into the first folio for whatever reason. so, we have lost some. who knows how many more we might have lost? so, it's difficult to qu...

About it in the way that they talked about it. and i don't know that i necessarily understood that when i — i mean, macbeth was the first play that i studied for 0—levels. i got bits of why it was important, but it's... these plays exist to be experienced as a member of an audience, to be heard, to be taken on a journey by performers. and it's a hard ask, to be inspired. listen, my teacher was great, and i — i got a lot out of it but it's almost a shame that the first experience of shakespeare is — is sitting in a classroom, kind of standing up, trying to mouth these words that don't s...

You know, they're not — they're 400 years old and there's vocabulary that we don't use any more and it's in verse. it doesn't immediately — you know, it takes a bit of taming. you have to wrestle with these words a little bit to get on the right side of them, so that you are in charge of them rather than them being in charge of you. it is the bloody business that informs thus to mine eyes. thou sure and firm—set earth, hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fear thy very stones prate of my whereabout. i go and it is done. as i start rehearsals, i would hope i know what everything me...