SoS #17 | Tiffany Stern: Shakespeare Institute

Thomas Dabbs speaks with Tiffany Stern of the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham. The Shakespeare Institute is located in Stratford-upon-Avon and has become a beacon of scholarship in studies of Shakespearean performance and texts. In this talk, Professor Stern's work on Shakespearean performance and documents are discussed along with how Shakespearean drama related to the common person in Elizabethan London and in England during Shakespeare's time. Stern also talks about her forthcoming work on fairgrounds during the Shakespearean period and on broadside ballads and how popular songs appear throughout Shakespeare's plays. Stern also describes her work as a general editor of plays in the Arden Shakespeare series.

SEGMENTS:
0:00:00 - Intro and greetings
0:02:54 - Summary of Tiffany Stern's research
0:14:23 - The Shakespeare Institute
0:19:06 - Fairgrounds and Shakespeare
0:30:50 - Broadside Ballads
0:36:54 - The art of insult, the 4th wall audience response
0:45:25 - Shakespeare beyond Performance
0:54:58 - Textual Editing, Arden, Hard Copy vs Digital
1:04:29 - Shakespearean adaption: Novels, Manga, Anime
1:07:12 - Beyond performance. beyond text, clowns
1:13:50 - Closing remarks, recent scholarship, chronology

TOPICS:
#shakespeare
#shakespeareantheatre
#shakespeareanperformance
#shakespearescontemporaries
#editingshakespeare
#renaissancedrama
#earlymoderndrama
#digitalhumanities
#teachingshakespeare​

Transcript

This is Speaking of Shakespeare, conversations about things Shakespearean. The following talk 
is with Professor Tiffany Stern of the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, located in Stratford-upon-Avon. The Shakespeare Institute has established itself as a beacon for international Shakespeare scholarship. Tiffany is deputy director of institute and research and also fellow of the British Academy. 

This talk is funded with institutional support from Aoyama Gakuin University. This series is 
also supported by a generous grant from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. Tiffany Stern. There you are. I got you to come on our program and I am absolutely delighted 
and I cannot tell you the truth now, because you would be certain that I was being disingenuous or 
being what would be a Shakespearean phrase, base flatterer or　some kind of person like that someone who in the end and trying to give you all of the 

accolades I would want to give you would end up, it would end up backfiring and making 
me look a little bit like a fool. But thank you so much for being here today. 
I'm absolutely delighted to be here. Thank you very much for inviting me. 
Now, I saw you and saw you in person in 2019 at the Digitizing the Stage Conference in Oxford. And I was going to be that guy who came in and broke into a conversation that perfectly good conversation happy that you were having with somebody you wanted to talk with about something. I was going 
to be that guy during coffee break you broke in to tell you how much I've appreciated you 
working, oh yeah yeah who are you, this guy from where Japan, my goodness you don't look Japanese. 
And I didn't get a chance because you had a major event going on parallel to that conference. 
And you had to kind of cut your time there, right? Yes, I was dashing back to get 
married. You got married. And congratulations, it's a little late. 
And I'll tell you what, that marriage, the early days of marriage when you go 
from the wedding into a pandemic, that will test the medal of any marriage and 
mine included. And it's worked out very well. And my congratulations to you. You 
seemed and you still seem so happy at that time. So, congratulations. What I want to do is kind 
of get a little serious here and going to your past. I have been one of your super fans for 

about 20 years. I would say 20 years or so since making Shakespeare. And it 
approached me, I was trying to give a summary, I'm going to allow you to do this because you can 
do this better than your practice that it. But at the very onset, I think you focused on the right 
in the word playwright, w-r-i-g-h-t. That's a word that's been misspelled many times. 
And it's natural to think of Shakespeare and his contemporaries playwrights as writers. But 
rather than rights or makers of plays, these people made plays. Very important in your work 
and in any consideration of Shakespeare, it gets to the essential, the element, the truth of what really happened. So your work, because it breaks up plays and performance to their component parts 
and examines the workings those various parts, I love this. It helps so much to remove 

Shakespeare and other playwrights from that lingering Victorian Romantic conception of 

the iconic author. And when we have that image of Shakespeare in our minds, it excludes so much 
of what it actually did happen, which was, let's call it genius wonderful outrageously 
innovative, all those great things, but something else other than an icon. 
Jonson or Shakespeare or any of these other guys sitting in a study and behaving like 

Wordsworth or Tennyson or something like that, who are all very fine poets. 

But it's a different animal, isn't it? So let us know a little bit bring us up from 
the past for our younger audience who may not be quite as exposed to your work, 
and bring us up to now and then we're going to move into the future. 

Thank you so much. Firstly just to say you have aged me ever, it is correct that I've 
been writing for over 20 years, but let us lie and say that I've been running for 10 years. 
Let's call it 10. Round it down to 10. 

So, I think I've always been incredibly interested 
in the process of putting on a play. So I loved the literature, 
but I was very very interested in the practical side. So I suppose all of my research has been... 
I like being a sort of detective and finding out how things happened in the past, that will explain 
the place to me. And in particular I got very very interested first in how did actors rehearse, 
because we kept on and on speaking about how actors performed, but we never really thought about 
how plays were rehearsed. But Shakespeare was an actor before he was a playwright. 
And he was writing for his fellow actors, and he was writing for the way they would learn 
as well as what they would put on. So I started researching rehearsal. And what I learned was that 
actors were given simply their own lines that they were going to speak. And then a queue of the last 
one or two or three words before each of their speeches. And so they were given a long roll 
or scroll, which had all their lines and all their cues but none of the rest of the play. And I think 
that sort of opened up all the rest of my work, because firstly I started dividing big hole 
plays back into actors parts and seeing what the actor would see. And you'd realize that there's 
all kinds of information there that you don't see when you're reading the beautiful 
literary arc of a wonderful play. But you're not seeing that this act that he repeats the same 
words that he always asks questions or that he goes from humorous to tragic or, so I became 
interested in the play as two different things: a whole play and then a series of actors parts. 
So when I was writing Making Shakespeare, I think I was very interested in the actor's parts. 
And I was also then interested in other bits of things that entered the playhouse: music, song. 
And I realized that these happened on different bits of paper from the actors parts. So you've got 
the actors are getting their texts, there are musician, texts there are prop texts, there are 
letters you're going to read on stage, and there are other texts. And I started to realize that this 
whole play was given out as fragments and that Shakespeare, who was an actor as well as a writer, 
will have been thinking in terms of those fragments as well as in terms of the whole. 
So I think a lot of my work has been on the whole and the fragments. And what that means for 
performance and also what that means for printing, sometimes when you get a published text, there are 
actually weird things about it, like it hasn't got its songs. And that's because the separate bits of 
paper that had the songs on them weren't in the rest of the play and they haven't been taken over 
to the printing house. So that's one whole bulk of work. And then I guess there are other attendant 
things, but have I talked too much maybe. 
You have not, you have the floor. I'm thinking 
of while you're talking and you also do something that I love and you connect 
things into place with physical elements of the city of London and London society. And 

I'm of course teaching Shakespeare in second language, and so we have to go very slowly. 

The wattage is there the brain power and understanding, but when I 

read in Latin, I wasn't the best student. But we didn't exactly read like Romans, so we went line 
by line and that's what we do, so I think that's even more trained me over the years to examine 
these things. And then I have to explain things to students who are not living in the 16th century or 
in an English-speaking culture. So it drives me to go to the notes 
constantly and try and we'll talk maybe later about this about things that aren't in the notes. 
Leaving me stranded, so that's the type of thing that I have to do in order to get meaning 
out of these lines for people. And there is this sort of feeling that you read a Shakespeare play 
and you feel you have it down, right? Or you read anything and you feel it and you try to teach it 
or write about it or whatever. And then you go, oh my goodness, there's so much 

I don't know here. I thought I knew it. I know Hamlet dies at the end, and 

he was too slow, Romeo was too fast, Hamlet too slow. But this type of work 
that you do brings sheds light on it. And there's so many examples coming to my head from your work, 
because there's so many examples that you give, and you seem to move fluidly between... I don't 
know city records in Stratford to out to the play over here, and how do you remember that? 
And there was something I remembered and wrote down and wanted you 
because I wanted to use it and quote you, and I can't find it and I can't remember it. 

It had to do with Ludgate and Coriolanus, and how the ancient king is reflected 
in the play. Do you remember it? What was...  I think it's in Making Shakespeare. It 
was a long time since I wrote about the gates of London. 
That was in Making Shakespeare. Yes, but it 
was to do with how would people in London have known little bits of historical background before 
they went to see the plays. And actually, there were various ancient mythical kings of London 

represented in statue form in the gates of London. I think I was talking about that. 
I suspect, yeah. So, it's like making a reference to the Hollywood walk of 
fame to people who don't remember the hall of fame, and you don't get the joke if you don't know the... 
I'm sorry, the walk of fame, you don't get the joke if you don't know something about the walk 
and how it's done and so forth. Well, you see I have this that I've had for a while this is 
Making Shakespeare. And also I have, this is the very humbly humbly titled Documents of 
Performance, that does not begin in any kind of humble way, it's beautifully done, where 
you begin with the notion of patchwork. It is a kind of motley design, it's patched together. 
And that's the sort of prologue to you or introduction to your book 
about these documents. And it's just it's gripping that you use to see the 
play being put together like this. And also you quoted my advisor, Trevor Howard-Hill. 

Oh yes, a great admirer.  He's no longer with us, but 

he was doing this stuff when it wasn't cool. There were other things that people were 

doing, they were doing critical theory and that sort of, and he was digging in the same way 
so kudos to his work. And so that just drew me in. And I've been following his work but also Peter 
Blayney, and the bookshops and so forth, that type of work, and other not scholars I could name 
including you, who have again shed so much light on meanings in these lines 
and help me out of some jams and in teaching, because I don't have the access 
to some of these records that you've been pretty well situated in terms of libraries. 
Both at Oxford and Cambridge, I think they have some little libraries over 

there, right? And they'll let you go in and look at some things. I get over there. 
I used to get over once a year. And it's just bonanza for me and then it all 
ends too quickly, but to be able to say, ah, I can't remember, and just walk across the street 
or down the road a bit, and how nice is that. But you're in Stratford now, is that right? 

Okay, and so I don't know exactly how professors at the Shakespeare Institute do it, but this is 
with the University of Birmingham, which is about less than an hour away I think. 
Yeah, and very close, very very commutable. So maybe some people live in Birmingham and... 

or maybe some people live in London, I don't know, but you're in Stratford, so... I'm in Stratford. 
The Shakespeare Institute is indeed a satellite of the University of Birmingham. And it's for 
graduates only, so masters and doctoral students. So it's a sort of graduate center that specializes 
in Shakespeare. And for me, as a Shakespearean, I thought I loved being at Oxford and 

I had intended to stay there forever, but I got very tempted by the idea of living in Shakespeare's 
hometown, teaching in a beautiful house in the center of town, which is what the Shakespeare 
Institute is, and teaching my primary love to doctoral and masters students. And if I 

might just say, if you love Shakespeare, why not think about coming over and doing some more at 
the Shakespeare Institute? I think I have a student who may be joining you next fall. 
Fantastic. And I have a couple of colleagues who are younger, who are graduates, and who 
have nothing but great things to say about their experience there. It can be 
intimidating to go to the heart of Shakespeare from if you're an international 
student, if you're from Japan or China or somewhere else. But they ultimately just had a fabulous 
experience there working. And we sort of moved into this a little earlier than I wanted to, but 

I wanted to be selfish. I studied at the Shakespeare Institute before it was the Shakespeare Institute. 
You talk about dating yourself. I can win, I could win this one. I was there when 
Patrick Stewart was playing Enobarbus and also Shylock. Shylock in the Merchant of Venice and 

Enobarbus in Peter Brook's Antony and Cleopatra. And I remember that Glenda Jackson was 
Cleopatra. So that's going back a ways but what an actor, but Patrick Stewart just had 
this stage presence, you remembered him, he had that. And other Jonathan Pryce played Petruchio. 
I remember this like it was yesterday, because it was just so much and I was in college, 
and it was transformative. It changed things for me. I tell other guests that I was supposed to 
go back to a small town and make a good bit of money selling insurance and which is a great 
great thing to do, it's a great thing to do. And there have been times when I wondered if I 
made a mistake not doing that when I didn't know about my next 

job. But that was the transformative thing that the studying there, and the institute was 
not with Birmingham yet, but it was still that house there. And we would go there every day. 
And actors would come over and talk to us. And we would meet actors at the Black Swan 
across the street or the Dirty Duck, and it's still there. And then it was just the big theater and 
the Other Place, which was a warehouse looking, a little tin building. It was nothing but 
you had these seats and you could touch, you could reach out and touch the actors if you wanted to. 
They were that close and there's nothing like that to see them in their dimension 
and fall into character and you go there's something between me and this person. It was 
just absolutely stunning. Now, let's see, what else, Stanley Wells came and talked with us a younger 
Stanley Wells. And so we had all of these people and it was just so great. And so, I 

highly recommend it and I just think it's a wonderful experience. 
Now, you were at University College in Oxford and then you moved to 
Stratford. And that's a kind of big move. It's not far away but it's a big move. 

And I'm glad to see you where you are. I think you are exactly where you 
should be. That's what I think. So, I want to move into some of the stuff that you're 
doing now and hear what we have coming. And you have speaking of Oxford, there's the St Giles' 
Fair every September. And I think there's a love hate relationship, sometimes more 
hate than love among certain people. I don't think C.S. Lewis spoke very highly of the St 

Giles' Fair, but for our listeners for they haven't, we take a group for a summer program to 
Oxford and I get to visit oxford a good bit in our summer break, so I'm kind of familiar with the 
town, and are very familiar with the town and the pubs a little too much, sort of a joke. But 

the St Giles' Fair comes in every September. And it is for the people, and 

people come in from outside. So it is not the Oxford of people's imagination where you have all 
of these scholars walking around and so forth. And C.S. Lewis of course didn't like it so much. He 
thought it was a little too dirty for him, a little empha dig. And it is, it has everything, and 
you are working on fairgrounds in Shakespeare. And I wondered if maybe St Giles wasn't somewhere in 
the back of your mind or similar type things that we still have. 
Yes, yes in a way because St Giles 
is one of the noble old fairs. Stratford-on-Avon has one mop fair, Cambridge has one Stourbridge fair, 
and they're all actually the same fairground essentially that rotates around the country, 
London and around the country. And this happened precisely in Shakespeare's time. A fair is 
annual and doesn't last very long, a week maximum. But it's recurring an annual, but the fairground 
people are all rotating together. So there's a kind of city without a location or a town of fairground 
that reappears in different configurations in different places. And yet in Shakespeare's 
time, it was extremely organized, it had its own legal structure. So I was very interested in 

a place that wasn't geographic which actually meant that more people could experience it. 
And in fact in that way, it's rather like theater because the theater people would leave London 
and go and tour a progress through the country, and they would actually follow roughly 

the same route as the fairgrounds. So actually at different times people are experiencing 

the theater and experiencing the fair. And I came to be interested in the rather close connections between 
theater and fair, because actually what they're selling is entertainment rather than a thing 
very often. They're selling a bit of a thing, they are selling some drink and some food, 
but mostly what you take away and what you pay for is an experience. 
And I became interested in the connections between those two things the experience of going to 

the theater and the experience of going to the fair. And when I started researching it, it turned out 

that in London, when they had the big annual fairs in London, they would close the theaters. 
And the theaters would become like youth hostels bedding down places, people could stay 
in the theaters, could sleep over in order to go to the fair. And you start realizing they won't 
compete for the same people, instead they'll help one another. So you were talking about 
how sort of low culture St Giles' Fair is and and sort of not the grand beautiful Oxford. 
And I suppose I was interested in, oh, we keep thinking of theater because of Shakespeare as 
a very noble high culture, fairground is sort of low culture. But if they're competing for 
the same audience and they're going  to the same places are they more similar 
than we had thought. And this ties in a little bit with something I'll talk about more in the future 
with which is that I'm an editor of plays and the general editor of plays. And that means I think 

a lot about how you write footnotes for plays. And I suddenly realized that the people who write 
footnotes are literary people, and we all write footnotes looking to the highest literature to 
explain something in a play. So we go, oh you know, I think this is a reference to Ovid or to Virgil, high 
other literature, and we're never looking enough at events and popular culture and the very 
kinds of things that are happening in the fairs, because sometimes our references are actually to 
puppets, performing animals, and sometimes we're not very astute at recognizing those ballads, we're not very stupid recognizing popular references, because we're so trained to look for literary references. 
So a little bit my interest in fairgrounds also arose out of my editing, because I thought that the 
more we weigh a play down with literary footnotes, the more we make it difficult and arcane and sort 
of splendid in ways that aren't always helpful. And actually, those were both high literature but also 
raucous, outrageous, funny, and people were feeling a huge burden of emotion, love, and desire, and anger. 
And these days we sit in the dark and watch them with kind of folded hands going mm-hmm. 
And that's not they weren't written for that. So fairground ends up tying in with editing 
and my interest always, as I said before, I'm so interested in the practicalities of things, and 

it's the practicalities of the fairground and the theaters and the way they sort of hold hands with 
one another and are looking to the same audience. So that's the connection there, and I think 
are you saying that once you get this framework and you start looking back into these 

text, suddenly you can kind of see it. It comes out more, right?
Yes, it comes out more, and I think one 
of the issues is that the way we do research now. We've suddenly got marvelous tools on the Internet. 
And I don't know if you have access to them in Japan, but there are things like Early English 
Books Online. And it gives you all early modern texts more or less, many of them are transcribed, 
so you can hunt them for a quotation. 
I'm part of a group who championed. We like to think so. 
Actually, the national government just saw it in the national consortium of libraries, but we 
were out there pushing and pushing and pushing. Oh, it's brilliant. And I also wanted, I talked 
with Heidi Craig, who is the general editor, and I think you probably have crossed past with her. 

They were working on paratext, which makes it easier, she was saying to search than EEBO even. So there's 

a kind of new generation coming along who are doing things that will even improve on 
or can be used alongside EEBO. But please go ahead, I wanted to put in that plug for Heidi. 
EEBO is spectacular and has revolutionized our lives and made research very different. 
But EEBO is so comprehensive that it can fool you into thinking that if you've checked something on 
EEBO. You've had kind of coverage. And I suppose what fairgrounds alerted me to is that there 
are things that happen in quotations and you can find them on EEBO, or a word and you wonder 
if Shakespeare coined the word or someone else coined the word and you can look at that word. 

So there are brilliant things you can do on EEBO. But the sort of things that happened in fairgrounds 
are for instance speaking not in a direct quotation but in a patter, a manner of speaking. 
And I realized that because we were quite EEBO bound, we were not at all 
conscious of, oh, this man is imitating the patter of the person who speaks to his performing monkey. 
And it doesn't happen in direct quotations. It have there's a way of speaking to your 
performing monkey. And actually, I might just tell you that way. So if you had a performing monkey, 
you would say to your monkey a version of what will you do for, and then you'd name 
something that everyone hated. The Pope, the King of Spain, the Turk, you know, and you'd 
go to some horrible race this place, what will you do for, and then the monkey would play dead. 
And then you'd do a kind of, oh no, oh I mentioned the King of Spain, oh no, that's killed my monkey. 
Oh I'm so sad, my monkey's dead, oh if only Queen Elizabeth were here. And now you've 
mentioned something so wonderful that the monkey springs to life. Okay, so that's the patter with 

the performing monkey. But it doesn't happen in direct words. It happens in a type of way of speaking. 
But once you realize that, you see for instance the performing monkey patter in Romeo and Juliet that 
Romeo disappears and his friends are kind of, the ape is dead, oh no, oh if only Rosaline 
were here, because they think he loves Rosaline. But, and you start to realize, 
okay, there are high literary references, but there are also popular culture references that we don't 
always follow through because they're located differently, so that goes back to the playgrounds. 
Well, the ape is dead. That was one that I have never really been able to explain, 
and that those that series of speeches by Mercutio is so referential out there from 
Saviolo over the book on fencing. There's another book on honor and the arms and 
heraldry and that sort of stuff. And he goes from all of that kind of a little bit more 
courtier level into Romeo without his row. And then he goes and references the Petrarch 
and all the sonneteers throughout. But I even think though and it's been one of 

my little things that even these high cultural references that have been made so much of, 
you can locate almost all of them to English text that were readable and also transferable. 
I'm very big on the Paul's cross church yard, where you know I felt like there was and 

the name of the cathedral where there was a lot of exchange. So even what David Cressey talks about 
the semi-literate, I mean you can read the story and tell your mate who may not have quite 

the skills that you have, but these are readable texts. And even if you can't afford them, you can 
browse the bookshop. Absolutely. And more than that, I'm working on ballads, which are 

songs, and you could print them on a broadsheet on one which is to say on a piece of paper printed on 
one side. So one big piece of paper could hold a whole ballad. People would take a ballad to 
a pub, and the person who could read would sing the ballad, everyone else would hear the ballad. 
And they could learn the chorus and join in to the chorus. And then often that ballad would end 
up stuck on the wall of a pub, because it also had a wood cut a picture or so. So it's quite pretty. 
It's good wall decoration and also people can sing from it. 
And ballads, when you look at ballads and there's another great site, which I think everyone can 

have because it's free, and it's called EBBA, English Broadside Ballad Archive, EBBA. And 
when you look there, you realize that a lot of classical stories are in ballads and a lot of 
bible stories are in ballads. And you realize but people don't have to have read Virgil, they just 
need to have heard the ballad of Weeping Dido or the ballad of Constant Susanna. And that's 
how they know a lot of these stories. And ballads is completely different from fairgrounds, but 
you can see it's the same sort of interest that's dragging me over to ballads and particularly these 
ballads. I'm also interested in documents having looked at all the documents that made up a play, 
and then interested in after a play was put on what documents does it break down into. 
And one is ballads, there were actually a lot of ballads that told the stories of plays. And there 
were ballads that were in plays. And when you realized that people at the door of the theater 
sold ballads, you start to realize that actually again a bit as with the fairgrounds, there's 

a cross-trading going on between the ballad sellers and the sellers of performance. And they're 

all co-advertising one another and creating marketable popular entertainment. That's 
really something that, were there musical scores or some kind of...? No, I'll tell you how it works with 
ballads. You didn't print music because many more people could read than could read music. And 
musical type was very expensive and only one printer was allowed to print it. 
So instead with a ballad, you would write ballads that were almost always to known tunes, known 
from other ballads. So when you look at a ballad, it'll say the ballad of Constant Susanna 
to the tune of Fortune My Foe. So you already know the tune Fortune My Foe and now you sing Constant 
Susanna to it. And very occasionally, you get a new tune and quite often, that's because the theater 
has taught you the new tune in the jig at the end or something. And again, it ties in with the ballad 
sellers. Or, the ballad seller is also a ballad singer, and you have to hang around 
the ballad seller singer until you've learned the tune. And then you buy the ballads. 

But a lot of ballads were to known tunes. And actually, if you think of Winter's Tale, 
Autolycus, who's being a ballad singer seller. They're desperate to have ballads. And he says, 
oh, I've got one and it's to the tune of two men, two maids wooing a man. And they go, oh yes, 
we know the tune, yeah we'll join in because we already know the tune. Then they sing 

the new ballad together. 
That's just wonderful stuff. I wanted to also ask you a bit about, I think 
there's a misconception about what aristocratic audiences at court may have or have not liked 
that for some reason all of them were perfectly good students in their grammar 
studies and so forth. I think, what is it, William Baldwin, he talks about the lack Latin aristocracy. 
There were some bad students there, and I think Elizabeth was famously very good 
with languages. And I'm sure other people too, but it didn't like they're sitting in like 
what you might imagine proscenium stage with the Victorian audience trying to be polite. And 
I'm not even sure those audiences, I think there was some raucousness in those playhouses too. And 
a winter night, when one of the holidays, Christmas holidays, 

you're drinking, you're having a feast, and you're having an entertainment, and I think they 

were magnificently charmed by all of this folklore and culture and the things around them. There's 
a closeness that an aristocratic audience would have felt. And they too could go to the English 
version of Ovid if they couldn't quite remember who psyche was or... Absolutely. And they also 
loved ballads. I mean one of the ways ballet tunes are preserved is that quite often they're set 
by people like Dowland, kind of important court luteinists or court composers. Everyone 
likes those tunes. I think one of the problems with us is that we have an idea of high culture and 
low culture, that maybe speaks to something rather Victorian where there were things you looked up to 
and things you look down on. And I don't think in the early modern periods those distinctions were 
the same. A bit like now really, everyone wants to have a good time and be entertained and  
there's a pool of shared stuff that everyone likes, and then there's some 

that's a bit to the side. But in the middle, there's just a bunch of stuff that everyone 
really really enjoys, and people are willing to pay to be entertained just as we are now. 
Well, it's a standing joke with my students, I'll say listen, when you talk to your next 
time you talk to your mother or father, tell them that you studied Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, 
and that you didn't learn about Romeo without his row and the reference to fish, 
and the reference to sperm, that I have to because they are thirsty for this. They love this, 
and then the meow and the cat and being effeminate and the sexism that's just intriguing 
with this locker room conversation. I have to define that and explain that. And in one section 
of your book in the documents that you talk about or I'm not sure which one, it's about insult. 
And I'm very interested right now so this is selfish. I'm very interested in insult and also 
the kind of initiation, the kind of gathering the fellowship of insult 
in a case like famously with Hamlet, where he looks at the groundlings and calls them 
a bunch of idiots who wouldn't understand anything more than a dumb show, right? And I'm thinking they 
loved it. I grew up in the American south in this male culture, 
and you have the older guy at school who's the tough guy and everybody's scared of him and 
everybody respects him and you try not to make eye contact. And one day he looks at you and 

he insults you and walks by and you go, I'm in. He took time to insult me. And 
it's a little bit of breaking that like his fourth wall a bit where the actor playing Hamlet 
of course isn't a prince, right? And there's a sort of inside joke there where he's 

only... I can't think of a polite taking the piss out of but you know kind of we would say giving 
him in English, in American English, but that is a kind of repartee among these. It's sort 
of a male young man thing. And you have to be very careful, right? So if a comedian comes 
to South Carolina and does a show, he can go out there and say well, I hear that all of you guys 
are a bunch of dumb ignorant races and so forth, he might be able to get away with it, but 
it's the delivery. It's got to be expert, it's all or none either you gather in everyone or you 
run out of the town. So I saw that you were talking about that in insult and that 

lower, vulgar, vulgar's speech is so present in Shakespeare. And it's so interesting, and it's 

so ignored. Yes, and you are right that one of the things about insult correctly delivered 
is that it unites people. It's a unifying force. Yes, and it's sort of the joy. It unites people 
and it gives them the opportunity to shout back at the stage or even throw things. It's incredibly 
interesting that Hamlet that he does so many clown things. He tells clownish jokes, he insults 
the audience in that way, he ends up digging up the skull of a dead clown. 

There's a lot of tragic clown about hamlet going on and I think 
and I think that's one such example. But yes, one way you excite an audience is to 
notice them and to see them. And these days, we talk about in English, we talk about breaking the fourth 
wall. The idea being that there's a proscenium stage with three walls and you 
break through the other one. But of course when you had a stage that was thrust into the middle 
of an audience, there wasn't exactly a fourth wall. But it's very interesting the characters who see 
the audience, and the characters who within the fiction do not see the audience. And usually 
the clown sees the audience, and the prologue sees the audience, and the epilogue sees the audience, 
and addresses the audience. And so you get a framework that takes you from reality 
into the fiction. And then there's usually, as I say it's usually clown characters 

who continue to see the audience and know that they're not inside a fictional world. But it's 
really intriguing that hamlet is one of those. 
Yeah, that is something I've never thought of that. 
And you make the point, I think it's about Henry V, where the audience has to be sort of the army. 
They have to be the multitudes. You have to rally them. 
King John also, and I think again that's interesting, you don't want the audience 
to be having the same unified experience the one that we have now where we sit in the dark. 
You want sometimes to be insulted, sometimes to be roused, sometimes to 
be... you know sometimes to be in the fictional world, sometimes to be consciously in the theater, 
sometimes to be making eye contact with the actors. And you want to have and sometimes to 
be being erotically charged and very you want to have a range of extraordinary experiences, so that 
going to the theater is like going on holiday or you've been to another land. You've had 
so many events you felt so emotional, you're kind of drained afterwards. 
And this, we still sometimes get, I say we, I don't, but we still sometimes get with sporting events, 
but not with theatrical events because we tend to be so formal about them. 

Well, I'm going way back to Jonathan Pryce again, his performance of Petruchio. It's a 
complicated play to play now in there's much more awareness that you know this is a 
horribly sexist play. And and it doesn't do anything to help you get out. 
I saw a production of Merchant of Venice and they played it as straight as you might want 
whatever straight is, they stuck to it. And I realize at the end you do feel sorry 
for Shylock, you do feel if Shylock is played correctly. You don't need to bolster this 
anti-semitism thing in any way, it's there. And you can feel that like in any  

Shakespeare comedy the bad guy, you tend to feel sorry for they're over punished 
almost several examples. But anyway, going back to Petruchio, Jonathan Pryce played, 
I went into that production and this guy stood up and he was drunk and he was on drugs. And he looked 
like someone that you see sometimes on the street, who is not just a drunkard, that somebody who is 
seriously has been taking too many very bad drugs. And a little lady who was an older lady jumps 
out of her seat and runs out of the theater and there are people who are jumping up and he leaves 
and gets on the stage and starts tearing down what was this beautiful Victorian style set. And you 
realize it was Jonathan Pryce playing Sly, the tinker, and talk about getting the audience 
involved. I was standing up, maybe I'm going to be called in to try to get 
this guy out of here. He's out of his mind. He did that so well. And it was so real, I'm going you know 

and throughout the rest of the play, there was this thing where he threw chicken on the table 

and it flew out into the audience, so the whole big mess. But, nowadays probably 
that production wouldn't carry so well nowadays. But it's just what you were 
talking about unifying the room. And it was in the big theater, nothing like 
this you know The Swan has that nice curvature, and of course  The Other Place and... 
Have they finished the big one they're working on? Yes. For years, it's all finished, okay. So when are 
they gonna finish? I don't like it very much, but yes. Okay, so you had all of those experiences, 
but I always enjoyed on the other ones more. Now I have so many questions for you that 
and I promise you, I wanted just a barrage of things, I'm thinking of all of these footnotes 
I've been trying to explain for years that I think that you have ready access to. But I wanted to 
move on a little bit and let me take a look here at my notes. How are you doing all of this work? 
My goodness, you're doing also Shakespeare beyond performance. Now, a lot of your work is involved how 
did we get to the stage, and then the page, but then there's there are more pages and there are more 
stages. Yes, Shakespeare beyond performance is ballads and puppet shows 

and the other things that were created in the light of a Shakespeare performance having taken 
place. So I'm not going into the whole history of adaptation which has been told before. I'm actually 
interested in sort of repurposing the story of the play or bits of the play and disseminating it as 
other literature or other things. So particularly but puppets and ballad shows and 

ballads. And chap books, little books for kids that take that tell versions of the story. And 
those haven't been looked at collectively so much. Actual adaptation of Shakespeare, say 
when Nahum Tate kind of rewrites King Lear, that story has been told but the immediate 
the fact that those plays immediately became other literature and other popular events 
that hasn't been told. So that's what that book is doing. 
There's a quite a lot there. 
Yes, there is. Potentially a very big book, but it would be also an extraordinarily 

interesting book. Nahum Tate's one of my heroes, because I've always felt like, oh come, on come on, 
you can't kill every... just come on. 
That play with all the beautiful language 
in there and all of the wonderful stagecraft, including some horrible stuff. It's just 

Tom, do you want to spend the afternoon watching Lear? No, not after a pandemic. 
Give me a comedy. So, now I did want to get into a little bit you do, 
you're very oriented with the sort of what we might call original. I don't want to talk 
about origins but the paper, that's printed and you work with print. But you also work with other 
things like King Lud, the archaeological, the spaces. The spaces and the performance spaces but also 
spaces and society in London that and I've gotten in trouble for this. One might assume from what 
you can see on a map or what you understand about a structure. And I've been admonished in some 
of my writing in the past about saying not having evidence. One of the great examples 
for me is the priory of St John's Clerkenwell where the master of rebels offices. 
Anita Sherman, a friend of mine talked about how it's been disappeared. It's not a site of 
memory. And even Stow, he kind of avoided playhouses and all that other stuff. 
But you know it was there. You have pictures of it, and you have an archaeological dig there. So 
there are things you can say about. How do you feel about that kind of speculation? 
I love looking in other places. I love that, I'm very interested in archaeology. I'm very 
interested in bits of text that get preserved in places that aren't books like in embroidery 
in trenches, which are kind of wooden plates that would have poems and things on them. So 
yes, I'm very interested in information that is not bookish, what the Blackfriars 

which was an old disbanded monastery a bit of which had Shakespeare's theater in a bit of which 
had a church where people went to sermons and took them down in shorthand. I'm very interested 
in kind of people stealing by shorthand sermons, and doing that so near to the Blackfriars where 
Shakespeare plays sometimes seems to have been stolen in such a way. And yes so 

I'm going off on a tangent, I'm very interested in other kinds of information. I am myself I think 
because as I say I like being a sort of historical detective on the past, if I could dream of 
a different career for myself, I'd like to be a detective because I like reading detective books. 
But I wouldn't like to have to deal with horrible dead bodies that have been grotesquely mutilated, 
but if instead you can deal with the architectural remains and a plate, that suits me very well. 
So I am very much myself an evidence person. I like to gather evidence but I like to look 
differently and have a different pool of evidence. And then go now I've looked at this 
pool of evidence, I don't think what you've always been saying is in fact right. 
So I think very often I question one of the givens that people have had with a different pool 
of evidence. Or I've asked a slightly different question like asking about rehearsal rather 
than asking about performance. And people who like my work like that kind of thing, and 
have an eye for the quirky things that I like. And people who don't like my work are kind of we have 
never said that, we've never said that and you're kind of yeah, that's because you've never looked. 
I can't imagine anyone not liking your work, but okay, there are people out there. 
There are haters out there, there are haters. There always are and they're always people 
who want to find something wrong and even more so not we're in such  
a socially networked world where people can comment anonymously you know 

and that sort of thing. But that is that's brought up several ideas, and I'm 
forgetting him as I go through the whole idea. I don't think you were on a tangent though 
at all about this idea of auditing. I do think that and whether it's evidentiary or not, 
I do think that people who they had to audit the court in Westminster, there were auditors, 
they had to remember like a lot better than I'm remembering things right now. 
You remember and they also, and they took copious notes. And they led to write longhand very quickly, 

and there were all kinds of competing shorthands around. So I've written about 

there are some Shakespeare publications and by other people that are very low quality versions of 
the plays, very very bad. And we used to call them bad quartos, but these are just right. 

And we've always said that bad quartos or for a long time we've said that bad quartos came about 
because an actor or a couple of actors remembered other people's parts and then wrote them all down, 
and created a bad quarto. And we often called these memorial texts that they 
were remembered. But I don't think that's the case. It would be a very silly 
thing for an actor to do, who gets money from doing performances to steal a play, you wouldn't get very 
much money for a stolen play and you would lose your job. For another thing, because you only have 
your actors part, you don't have the other texts. So that makes it very difficult to steal a play. 
And thirdly, if an actor had stolen a play, he should have his part perfect and his cues perfect. 
And this is not the case with the actors who are supposed to. So, when I was looking into if 
those texts are not stolen by actors, then how do those very bad versions of the plays come around? 
And when it became clear to me that many people were going to sermons, and sometimes going in 
little cabals, little groups of say four or five people and they'd all note down what they could 
from the sermon. And then they'd put it all together, and then they'd publish the sermon. 
And then the person who gave the sermon, and this is how we know about it, 

it's outrageous that's not at all what I said, now I've got to publish my actual sermon, 
because you have just published some rubbish. So we've actually got quite a lot of bad sermons and 
then corrective good sermons. And I realized that's what we had with bad quartos and then corrective 
good quartos, that I think we've had audience stolen texts from probably the very same notice 
who'd learnt either in the court or going to sermons how to note down those texts as best they 
could, using long and shorthand. 
I was last year working with John Jewel's apology, 

Apologia, and there's several versions on EEBO out there, and it was just overwhelmed. They're 
just not the same, you know. And I just wanted to make one point and I got stuck on this whole thing 
of... I just wanted to make one point that as erudite as that sermon seems, there was a lot of 
pre-training that went into it from what you could get get from the bookstore that was already 
available from what you'd already heard and so forth. And it was just impossible, because 
I couldn't locate one text that I felt was the one I should use, the trustworthy worthy one. 
And as a textual editor and I want to go into the textual editing, that's something you have, 
those are decisions you have to make all the time. And you're with the Arden Shakespeare 
series as well as the Mermaid. And the Mermaid being what off Shakespeare, right? And so, what 
are you working, are you working on one particular play now or are you overseeing 
other people who are working? So in both of those. I'm an overseer. But you also need to be editing 

a play so that, well, New Mermaids, I've already edited some. So I'm fine just overseeing at this stage. 
Arden Shakespeare 4, which is the next iteration of Arden Shakespeare, so Arden Shakespeare 3 has 
just completely come out now that the last Arden 3 has been published. And I'm one of the general 
editors of Arden 4, so we're going to get all the plays edited again. And the one I myself 
am doing is the Tempest. So I am currently editing the Tempest, but I'm one of three people, 
so me, Peter Holland and Zachary Lesser overseeing, so commissioning and choosing and getting edited 
all the Shakespeare plays again for now with our way of thinking. That's what a team, 

what a team. I'm looking here at my old Harold Jenkins's Hamlet and then Ann Thompson and 
Neil Taylor, and they that extraordinary monument that they put out using, 

giving you quarto second, giving you all three versions. Turned out to be not very teachable. 
Yeah, it is. 
I mean I mentioned this just because Bloomsbury, who publish Arden, are 

a commercial publisher. And it's been interesting to me, that there are decisions you make for academic 
reasons, and there are decisions you're encouraged to make for commercial reasons. So I think 
something that commercially had shown itself not really to work, like separately publishing 

quarto and folio texts. We would have to be very careful about proposing to do such a thing 
again, because Bloomsbury wouldn't really be on for it. 
Well, right now what I've been using 
through the pandemic is the Internet Shakespeare. Yes, they are good. 
And David Bevington's very finely annotated version there, and it's good enough. 
It's very good for teaching, because it goes right to those areas. I'm not going to get 
into textual variants on every line. Graduate students, yeah, there are I have students who might 
be in, but third and fourth year undergraduate, uh, they they want to just do Hamlet. And 

that's good enough. Thompson and Taylor gets way into all the weeds there, and 
it's just the way it is in a printed book. Do you see any digital solutions for this problem? 
Yes, well, I'll tell you where our thoughts are digitally. Originally, we were thinking maybe 
we would only produce digital texts and not hard copy text, because we were so excited 
by the way that if you start off digitally, your footnote needn't be words. Your footnotes could be 
a picture or a sound and very often instead of explaining something like an early modern 

weapon or kind of a whole bird is this long and it's got 

a head that's like you could just go, here's a museum, whole bird, this is what 
it or... What it looks like. This is what it's like. And that explains it better. 
yeah but there are two problems one and i wonder if this is true or not in japan but one thing we found here is that students who read quite a lot of things online still quite like having shakespeare books as books and marking it up in annotation and putting it on their shelf and so we realized that maybe it's not right to go only digital maybe the world either hasn't got there yet or will never get there because at the point when we started commissioning we thought we don't want this to be you know i love books you love books but we thought maybe the future will end up all digital but now we don't think that anymore we think some things will be digital and some things will stay books now if we have to think of also producing hard copy we can't have nearly so many digital bells and whistles unless we want two quite different texts and sort of we want two similar texts so for one thing we've reduced we'll still have some sounds and some pictures but it won't be all sounds and pictures the way we'd thought it might be and the other thing is sourcing online a picture or a sound that is a free and be stable so it'll still be there in 20 years that is very difficult so if um if you can only get people to locate their sounds and pictures in extremely reliable sites of large museums and things that are in creative commons and and that have been put out for educational use that very much limits um what you can use because you'd found something quirky and amazing that a person had tweeted well you can't use that so actually um we started off quite ambitious digitally and we've got nearer and nearer something that's a bit more like a page with a few more accessories and i'm sad and happy to say that but but that's where it's gone another problem we were starting to have digitally just to see through that thought is that when we had originally thought we can have all pictures and all sounds and film footage and and you know and everyone can mount a picture of their school production or university production and we can have and we started to think of something that was like a museum of that book rather than a readable book so it would have been a usable site but no one would have read it an arden is meant to be a scholarly text that you read so maybe someone else needs to come up with the everything museum of taming of the shrew but maybe we need to come up with the enhanced book of taming of the shoe which is a different thing because arden has a brand and its brand is a reliably scholarly text with helpful and earnest and academic footnotes um so i i hope that's not a disappointing answer but it it takes you through the process where we started from and actually where we've got to is rather more booky than we thought you know i'm in i'm in digital humanities and i this is this is my it's uh it's just i don't even know if it's readable anymore i've made so many notes in it and stuck so many stick notes because i i don't feel i can uh remember uh what i have trouble remembering everything because there's so much out there you know this feeling you get scattered all over the place and your thoughts so you have to make these little notes and then i i mark a place and i forget to make a note to myself about why i marked it that that kind of thing but i'm still very much in the book but it's not about me my students japanese students you understand you know they they belong to a visual culture the language is visual you know the kanji and the uh the chinese characters and so forth and my my students even the young students still like that book and they still study in schools with the book and manga or still uh people buy books there's still a book industry now it's it's suffered somewhat i mean there there has been uh a movement to i think more of a distraction more than you can find you can entertain yourself online uh easier or just as easy as you can go down and get a a book at the store and entertain yourself and whether anybody's going in and reading jane eyre i'm not sure but the we're we're doing i'm doing some work now on uh novels light novels that have been adapted from shakespeare you know imagine this you had i i would say primarily a male audience and uh very filled with like all kinds of people and uh and then sudden and you play like 12th night which of course can play for a polite aristocratic audience who but but anyhow it was okay on the regular stage too but you take a work like 12th night and you transform it into a novel for high school or maybe early college but maybe high school even middle school women girls actually they're still girls so uh and they read these things and they when they get popular they get hot and they read them and read them and they have pictures the manga is all anime but these novels have a lot of pictures and graphics and so forth and as far as i can tell they're doing well you just have to get that audience and there's another one for it so it's so gender segregated you know but uh but within the novels there are a lot of uh there's uh queering the queer right where you you have the uh you had the transgender theme that is already in shakespeare all over the place and also the gay or lesbian whatever already there but then you take it uh and in one series they're they're turning uh henry uh the sixth and richard iii into lovers not lovers but in love i'm sorry i don't think they do anything they are uh richard iii is obsessed and richard iii instead of being uh in you know some sort of uh differently abled state is androgyne he's uh sexually ambiguous so they're playing with this stuff and then we're looking into that now that's fan fiction i guess it's one of the terms that that one might use for right yeah yeah but i'm i'm thinking they come across this before they come across uh henry the six one two three uh but you know i think it's a bit like the ballads and the puppet shows it's a modern version of that that you might in the early modern period have have met your grand play in in a in a slightly debased and very accessible form first yeah well does that fit in with your shakespeare beyond performance type it absolutely does except i don't want to go right up to now because that gives me too much but it's it's the same interest it's the kind of thing you know exactly the same kind of thing yeah and and it does it when you like something a lot you want to own it for yourself i think that's partly what this is you you like richard the third so much you want to see him have a different story and you want to write the story you know and you want to make him a bit more like the things that you care about yeah but it's a form of homage because you like the original so much that you want to re-own it and yeah which is what shakespeare did and shakespeare did exactly the same just about every shakespeare play was an adaptation of an already known story we'll throw a nurse into that story for humor so forth uh i did want to ask you before i let you off what's the deal with the clowns in romeo and juliet and i think this is uh pertinent to all what we've been talking about it's just always i've had trouble with it because it's a sad sad play and it's lofty in its uh you know themes and so forth and there are these scenes where these clowns come in at the oddest time uh like after the death of tibble and they i do get the humor they have to change the song you're talking about ballad they have to change their because they're going from a funeral suddenly to a wedding and then back to a funeral i figured out right so it's tibble's funeral it's julia's wedding and then australia's funeral and there's some joke that i'm not getting in there but i think that was the purpose have you seen yes um okay so i don't know that i have an answer answer but um i think if you think of walt disney learned the device of have the death of bambi you know have something very sad and then have something very happy immediately afterwards and vice versa that that the switch of emotions intensifies both emotion that actually you know it's fabulous to have them cry and then force them to laugh and then force them to cry and you know and that gives the kind of emotional rollercoaster sort of embodied event that that theater was meant to be so i think shakespeare in general liked that device of kind of you think you're going to wallow in this and i'm going to give you something so inappropriate and so tricky for you to deal with and you're going to have to get into another emotion so i think it's doing some of that yeah but yes i think it also might be taunting the audience with with music it thinks it's going to get and doesn't get or you know like are we going to have a lovely roller king song and we can join in the chorus a nice ballad we know or you know yeah yeah i can see that because i can't find a way where they need to someone needs to go back to the towering house or they need time they need to buy maybe there's a little bit of that buying time for something else but yeah and the the famous uh what the zafarelli version all of that's just cut out it's gone yes i'm sure other directors have cut it out too because it doesn't uh i mean yes the other thing about clowning is that i think that whereas other bits of text that's what the actor actually said but clown text i think it's kind of here's a broad framework you know improvise do stuff basically clown around for three minutes make the audience laugh and then and when you read it on the page you're sort of oh this seems quite not funny at all what's going on here but but i think it's just you know i i don't think the clown needed to be correct to the to the the inscribed clown words because they're they're famous for improvisation yeah and hamlet makes that point too much too much so sometimes right so yeah yes and of course with actors parts you can improvise as much as you like and the other actors on stage won't even know your whether you're on script or not because they've only ever had their own script so you can improvise away and then just home in on the last three words which are the cue to the next actor and provided you have the last three words you can say what you like before oh yeah yeah i i see so that's sort of what you're doing and then shakespeare beyond performance you're gonna go take it but you're gonna take it beyond the age of shakespeare into uh yes just just into the restoration yes restoration well that's that's enough that's enough there's a lot of restoration out there and uh particularly what do they call it the uh the is it the big referee no it's not the big reformation the large i don't know they're they they kind of uh absorb uh uh three parts of three centuries yes the long eighteen so long belong actually i was thinking margin it's not long as large but it's also wrong uh and there's so much there i i'm kind of glad i didn't now because there's so little interest uh and just institutionally i think there'd be a lot of student but i loved the 18th century when i was studying it i loved that stuff and uh just brilliant brilliant and what a theater scene what a theater oh amazing absolutely amazing yeah i love the 18th century also yeah and the 18th century was also when they came up with the first dictionaries and also the first theater historians the first really serious editors i mean actually the work i as an academic do i feel like it's a continuation of 18th century work and sometimes of 18th century thought yeah you know yeah and surprisingly good at it too yes and reliable uh this has just been wonderful what i want you to do is think of anything that you would like to promote you know how entertainers you know say i'm going to be appearing in las vegas and at the uh at the mirage and then i'm going to my you know is there anything uh i don't know if we we've kind of been not in conferences but is there anything forthcoming that uh we can uh more immediately let's say um the last little essay collection and i'm in it talking about ballads i published is this one this is from 2020. that's 2020. yeah i saw that i don't have it yet well maybe i can get you one anyway it's it's an art and shakespeare rethinking theatrical documents so it's got really good people in it um hulk is simon has a really interesting essay richard price has a really interesting it's got great people in there and i'm in there talking about ballads so i certainly recommend this book what i'm currently writing now this very instant and i'm trying to decide whether it becomes a long article or a short book is on chronology the order in which shakespeare's plays were published and i'm looking at the 18th century man edmund malone who came up with the first chronology and invented how we do chronologies and i was going to praise him because he wrote his he rewrote his chronology three times three different orders as he gathered more and more information and his final order is more or less the order in which we say shakespeare's plays were written in yeah um and it's important to us the the order shakespeare's plays were written in because we have so little biography of shakespeare that we end up looking at the order in which he wrote plays and the moods of the plays and we kind of make our our biography of shakespeare kind of strung along the order in which he wrote the plays and anyone who does a stylometric analysis or something they need to know that this is how shakespeare was writing in the 1610s and this is how he was writing in 1600 so order is incredibly important but what i realized looking at edmund malone is that he came up with the methodology we use and that it's fundamentally flawed so the thing i'm now writing is all chronology is wrong but i've got to think of a more tactful way of saying that but i know that no one will be pleased because no one wants the chronology to be wrong because then now what have we got but but that that is what i'm currently working on yeah that's that sounds uh chaotic i like that

i came across malone working on marlowe years because he was really a great scholar he went into the bot lane and he f he found marlowe yes uh so i don't know how much that i think it had some yeah it's you know in a sort of domino effect that uh it was very influential just putting together an addition of marlow is what he did nothing in terms of uh distributing or anything but the chronology uh has always been curious to me because you had the chronology of the writing and the chronology of possible performance yeah and i've always there's so many times i've been disappointed where there's just no record of a play and darn do i want it to happen in 1605 or 58 or i want to just ah you know but you know people say well we can assume this from france's mayor's or you know you know what it is yes he's really problematic yeah when you start looking into what we've based our assumptions on a lot of them don't really hold water even if they do you know to know that there was a play of that name performed then doesn't mean that the play that we've got is is the same and and sometimes when you date a line you only date that line you don't date the entire play because a play isn't like a a sun then you might write in a day a play you might write over time and very often a play has early signs which everyone looks for and late signs which no one looks for because they want to know when it was written but you're kind of this play was both written in this period and in this period so it's both an early and a late play well i i think the great example of what you're talking about for our audience the great example is hamlet running uh had a run of 20 years more but i mean with perhaps burbidge so you have an actor aging 20 years and it's at the end am i right on this at the end it's kind of hard to make him even if he's a graduate student he's getting a little bit old to be the son you know oh just to say though um uh you may or may not have heard that ian mckellen is going to perform hamlet oh no i haven't that's not well yes so yes

it was in the news i think a week or so ago so so we're going to have a hamlet who's in his 80s oh i can't wait i can't wait he never does anything badly he never does anything but just extraordinarily well i he does it really well it's going to do funny things with our mind to see an ancient hamlet that it's on video but that production of edward ii i think back in the 70s he absolutely kills it it is how he just has uh he just oh that's going to be crazy good well listen if olivier can ca if for that production if he can cast his mother as a woman 12 years younger than he is you can have an 80 year old all right so but after all it's acting exactly yes it's acting it's acting and you know

i'll do anything ian mckellen plays i i will watch anything he does uh tiffany i want to remind my audience that you have for forfeited uh a good couple of hours of your monday morning this i mean that's a that's when you're supposed to have a you know get it getting on with your week to talk with us a large part of my audience of course is japanese but we're getting kind of we're getting a little more spread out now and uh i'm sure everybody in this uh who who gets a gander of this and uh can watch parts and holes we'll we'll we'll make it into segments so if you don't like one part so much you can move ahead and uh and we'll try to make a couple of little clips too okay so uh but you're uh i am so grateful because your appearance here has done so much uh i think we already have a fine body of scholars and so forth and to have you here uh just rounds everything off for this part of the series and uh we're gonna continue in the fall and also you don't have to do just one i might be able to talk you into coming back after you know something comes out or i might be able to or depending on the future of the series but i will tell you this my japanese audience is in a deep bow and they uh they they love you and they will love you even more if that's possible and boy do we hope we can see you the in the tiffany stern in tokyo and throughout japan and sometime in the not so distant future and there are people out there who would love to have you back in to to talk and thank you again so much

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