I'm here with Gregory Thompson,
a theatre director, and you've taken Shakespeare all over the world, haven't you, Greg?
I have, yes. So, recently,
we did Hamlet in Nepal.
So in Nepali working with actors from Nepal.
I did the Winter's Tale in Karachi in Pakistan in Urdu,
and I've worked with Shakespeare in English,
places like the Royal Shakespeare Company and beyond.
Fantastic. And what got you interested in the Shakespeare authorship question?
I was directing Henry the Eighth as part of
the Complete Works season at Stratford in 2006,
and we had a point during the tech where something had to be sorted out.
And I wandered into a bookshop in Stratford and went to the Shakespeare section -
partly as a kind of relief from the stress -
and just start pulling books off the shelf and looking in
the index for references to Henry the Eighth.
And there was a reference in one book to the Tower notebook.
And in that, it said there was the same stage direction,
or the recording of Ann Boleyn's coronation was the same as the stage direction,
in Shakespeare's Henry the Eighth.
And that seemed to me remarkable.
Yeah.
So it went from there.
And so the chasm of doubt began to open up from that small crack?
Yeah, absolutely. Because, really,
I believed in the myth of the grammar school boy, that somehow
there was this natural-born genius who created this work of art.
And how dare anyone suggest that a working class-boy couldn't be a genius?
So in that part of the Shakespeare story I'd bought into.
And then of course, as you look at the reality what the plays are,
there's a massive disparity between the life of this man from
Stratford and then what it needs to create works like these plays.
And I found that fascinating.
From the point of view of how were these works made?
How does a writer create such plays?
Because there's the imagination myth as well,
you know, that he made it all up.
Well, what's clear is no,
he didn't make all the stuff up.
He used things.
He read books, and he adapted books,
he adapted plays,
he adapted stories that these plays are rooted in something.
They're not just figments.
Yeah. So how did that affect you?
So you were sort of a strong believer in
the Stratfordian man and then this began to change everything.
How did that affect you as a director?
Did that change the way you look at these plays?
That's an interesting question
because I'd always been driven to how did these place come to be?
So what did a person need to know in order to write those things?
I think that it just got deeper.
And I became more interested really in, so what books?
I started to see,
"Oh, he's quoting things," and got very interested in the footnotes.
What was Shakespeare's library?
That was the real thing for me,
Shakespeare's books. So hang on,
he must have read this and read that,
and if this book was only available in Italian,
then did he speak Italian?
He had a little Latin.
Seems like he had quite a lot of Latin.
Lot of Latin.
One of his heroines points to a particular word on
a particular page of a particular edition of a book of a particular writer.
And that's a plot-point in the show.
So he's somebody who's familiar with books,
and they're using reading and books as a dramatic device.
So yes, I became more interested, I suppose,
in what were the contents of the library of the person who would produce this work.
Yes. And of course Shakspere of Stratford,
there's no no library that we can discern.
As far as we know,
no books mentioned in the will.
They may have been in a separate inventory but ...
Yeah. Well, this is another myth,
I think, of the life.
The writer's life and his work are separate.
Shakespeare is almost the only writer where what we know
about his life is so different to what is in the plays.
You know, here's this litigious man who doesn't educate his daughters,
as far as we can tell, his daughters can't read and write.
And yet, the plays are full of fathers who were
desperate to educate their daughters and raise them up.
Yeah. He's a litigious man,
the man from Stratford.
Yes.
He's fined for hoarding grain and yet the plays are full of humanity and generosity.
So it just doesn't fit,
this gap between the life and the plays.
And the idea that somehow all writers are like
that is a terrible kind of pernicious thing.
Harold Pinter's plays are full of his politics.
They're all about power and how does the small man survive?
And his politics is the same.
Well, suddenly, with this one writer,
the genius writer, somehow that's different.
Yeah. People do put themselves in their plays even if they don't mean to, I think,
the themes that you're interested in,
the politics, your general stance will be in your work unconsciously,
even if not consciously.
It has been called by Stephen Greenblatt double consciousness.
He talks about Shakespeare's double consciousness.
The thing that all artists know is that what ends up on stage is them.
Yes it's disguised, and it's transferred, and it's adapted.
But we all recognize ourselves in our art.
And why wouldn't this be the case for this particular writer?
Yeah. Absolutely. What do you think is the strongest argument,
the most compelling argument that
Shakspere of Stratford didn't write the works of Shakespeare?
Is there a single thing that you think is the strongest thing?
I would go back to the books.
The key thing is that these plays are,
they're different to the plays of other writers in that they are highly literate.
He's quoting books all the time.
This is somebody who's highly educated.
This is somebody who has had teachers who have
discussed with him the ideas of early modern Europe,
the philosophy, the politics.
I mean, these plays are so highly political in a way that we have forgotten now.
I mean, so many plays are set in republics.
He's obsessed with republics.
Shakespeare, you would say if you didn't know anything, he's a Republican.
That's what Andrew Hatfill says,
actually, my Ph.D. supervisor.
He's written a book about that. Shakespeare is Republican.
Now he is actually a Stratfordian but he's seen
this pattern and I think you can see certain patterns in the plays.
But people don't think of Shakespeare that way.
No, the myth of the apolitical writer,
that somehow he was celebrating Elizabeth when
all of those history plays are about succession.
So much of these plays are about tyranny,
and that in some way you need to check the divine right of kings.
And can we have the government of the wise?
Wise counsellors needed to be listened to.
They're highly political and we think they're celebratory.
And they're not, they're highly critical.
Did you perceive this before you became a doubter?
Or is it stronger now?
Do you feel that you have more of a handle on
the political nature of the plays now or were you aware of that before?
I think I've become more aware of that by looking at the concept of who the writer is.
But through this question of how did these plays come into being?
What was the creative process that led to these plays?
Ros BarberDr
