Over 400 Years of Shakespeare - Q&A | 5 September 2016

good evening and welcome to puree live from the Sydney Opera House and the festival of Dangerous Ideas I'm Tony Jones tonight a Q&A devoted to Shakespeare's dangerous idea that all the world's a stage and all of us are merely players while joining us to play the panel award-winning writer and actor Kate Mulvaney indigenous performer and translator Kylie farmer the founding artistic director of build Shakespeare John Bell celebrated Shakespeare scholar Germaine Greer and philosopher a see Anthony grayling please welcome our panel thank you now Q&A is live in the eastern states on ABC TV can also watch and listen live across Australia on I view Facebook and news radio and it's 400 years since Shakespeare died these plays continue to be celebrated perform discussed and debated around the world as we will do tonight before however we go to our first question today Australia actually lost one of its great cultural figures in Richard Neville and Germaine Greer a friend of his and old colleague wants to say something to mark is passing before we go ahead and I'd like to had the microphone over to you Germaine before we start thank you well I'm sad today because Richards is gone but in fact we lost him some time ago when he became ill and I'm in another part of me is glad that it's over that the struggle is over and he's at peace but I think it's important that we understand that what kind of a person he was I mean he was unafraid he was supple minded he was open to new ideas he was adventurous he shook things up he was also charming and we haven't got that many charming men that we can afford we've got a few roundtable I'm sure Richard would like us to have a bit of a laugh because he was quite a character but just what sort of legacy do you think he left behind well I think it's gonna take us a while to work this out because he did something that many of us didn't do which was to come back to Australia and the thing that was important about the way he thought was he always welcomed the future he looked forward to the new and I'm afraid I'm not really like that I kind of a bit suspicious of the new I used to tease him and say that he was the ad man for the revolution because he didn't actually have any ideology his ideology was endlessly supple but in some ways that's that's important that you are open to new ideas in that way and not doctrinaire like like me okay let's have a look at shakespeare and add some new ideas to some very old ones and our very first question comes from Courtney Hammond Houser my question is major theatre companies have a responsibility to educate audiences about the world we live in Shakespeare's plays were written over 400 years ago by a white man living on the other side of the world with characters that often perpetuate ancient stereotypes what a major theatre company's teaching audiences about contemporary Australia by producing these works John bill challenging question to start with thank you I think it's a question of balance any theatre culture needs a balance of classics and new work it's just a matter of working out the proportions audiences needed to see the classics we the artists need the classics actors directors designers need to work on the classics to become good at them it's all a matter of proportion looking around the country I would say that all the major companies might do seven or eight plays a year they might do one Shakespeare in that season some of them don't do a Shakespeare at all that season so looking around the the country as a whole I'd say Shakespeare certainly isn't pushing anybody out of the way or taking over what I would like to see is the company's both commissioning new Australian work and then developing it too often the play gets thrown on before it's ready and it's it's dead in the water plays need a lot of nurturing and I think that's what the companies should be doing but I don't think we're being swamped by Shakespeare and I I do question your ideas about Shakespeare producing stereotypes I think it created extraordinarily original characters he broke stereotypes he challenged notions of stereotypes and I think and teach us a hell of a lot about the world we live in now John the Sydney playwright Lachlan Philpott asks whether a play about a Danish or a British King is relevant to contemporary Australian audiences and he says we need a five year moratorium no Shakespeare on our play on our stages for five years what do you say to him well if there's a playwright talking about the playwrights might say the same thing but as I said Shakespeare is not pushing anybody out of the way to have one Shakespeare a year in the season by a major company that's not too much and it doesn't ever Hamlet's danish or english what he's not his universal you could do Hamlet in any country any any nationality and they all do play him that every country has its own Hamlet's and it's not you know we must stop thinking in those old-fashioned stereotypes we in the business are all about breaking those bounds and creating Shakespeare afresh for each new generation through that generations eyes Jemaine what do you think reflecting on the question that came from up there and also the the notion that perhaps there should be a moratorium well if there were to be a moratorium the only reason why people put on Shakespeare plays is that they get audiences we do actually have a question here keeping the theater alive people will come to Shakespeare plays you may not like that and you may think it's because they're taught in school and all that kind of business but then if you actually say that Hamlet is a Dane therefore we can't understand him well a perfect that I happen to be descended from Danes who settled in Australia it's not speaking in Danish and 400 years is not very long it's a blink in the history of the world and what actually happens in the Shakespeare play is your prevented from arriving at easy certainties everything you think you understand is challenged so you have to recast your own ideas people start off thinking for example about Hamlet that Hamlet's duty is to carry out revenge on the death of his father that's a nonsensical idea we have justice in order to keep us free from revenge which will lend us up in a kind of mafioso situation with blood in every alleyway it's altogether more taxing and intelligent and questing Shakespeare isn't a representative of the ruling class he exists to call into question all our certainties and this is what makes them the plays work because if he keeps shifting people it's not a question of dramatizing and narrative that when you've got a hold of the narrative you've understood the story he's not writing scripts for EastEnders or neighbours he's actually making you think the only thing he wants you to do is to think he doesn't tell you what to think he tells you that you must think let's go to Albany thank you and I agree with everything but I do also say that Australian playwrights can do that as well I don't I I perform in Shakespearean plays many of them for Belle Shakespeare and it's a job I absolutely adore but I it is a 400 year old playwright but we have 60,000 years worth of culture and storytelling that still needs to be looked at in this country and I think that's something that a lot of the playwrights argue that our Australian stories that have bet have a much longer legacy than Shakespeare have sort of been shoved aside we can still be epic we can still find the domestic in the epic and the epic and the domestic as Shakespeare did there are playwrights out there in this country from all ranges of backgrounds and all ages men and women that deserve their own First Folio and second and third and fourth folio and your own mum advise you to avoid Shakespeare when you Ricky oh god mom sorry and she was a teacher of an English teacher yes my mom my mom told me I grew up in country western australia and my mom said to me you're not going to enjoy Shakespeare though we could either do literature Shakespeare or we could do Australian literature and she said to me do the Australian literature so I actually studied John ROM oral Deborah Oswald Dorothy Hewett Germaine Greer I studied amazing amazing Australian writers and thinkers and that was what encouraged me to become a playwright it wasn't till I was at University and got cast in Hamlet as Claudius of all things that I kind of had to put my hat on and say I've never studied it before and I learned on my fate and I'm still learning on my fate I do a lot of Shakespeare now and I adore it but I'm still still catching up so I I'm I'm have a foot in both in both kind of fields I guess I love my Shakespeare but first and foremost I'm an Australian writer Oh Kylie let's bring you in and how did you get hooked on the work of a of a white man from Britain who's been dead for more than 400 years another man by the name of Karl J Morrison who is the current artistic director of Yuri Aachen has had a long-held goal I supposed to translate they'll have a full work translated into our language he had the opportunity recently in 2012 through shakespeare's globe to do that but unfortunately didn't have enough time offered to him so we ended up putting together six selected Shakespearean sonnets which I translated into our language I know earlier they said I'm a Shakespearean translator which is a little bit German but I have translated the sixth sheiks variously having a cracker Macbeth as well I am soon actually I haven't contract but when that comes through then I'll start yes so it's it's no easy feat let me tell you we'll come back to you a bit later and and hear at least one of those sonnets so let's go across to Anthony grayling what do you think do they have the same kind of argument in Britain not really because of course he he's the national bard so you know no problem about performances look the point has been well made that you wouldn't want performances of Shakespeare to exclude everything else obviously not but human nature is a perennial that you went all the way back to Homer for example if you read in the Iliad Homer's account of the grief of Achilles for petropolis if ever you've yourself experienced any kind of grief you see with the immediacy that that is a very very true and deep account of it so just four hundred years ago and Shakespeare's wonderful insights into the variety of human nature into the diversity of experience and the really important point about it is that when you have language of that power and beauty it encapsulates ideas and it presents insights which really make you see something significant in in what's being said it really helps you to capture it that's one of the great powers of Shakespeare and why we have to keep going back and drinking from it as from a fountain okay we've got one more question from a skeptic and it comes from up there it's from Elana Valentine I'm a working playwright and my question to the panel is could the box-office royalties that Shakespeare would be entitled to as the author of his produce plays be paid into a fund to Commission and produce new Australian work yes of course John you can yeah in fact when I was running the Nimrod theater before I found a Belle Shakespeare we used to do a Shakespeare every year in order to Commission newest dragon work in those days when we started a Nimrod people like David Williamson Jack Hibbard John Romero you couldn't get an audience people didn't know who they were so he put on a Shakespeare to fill the house and then with the the Commission we would have paid to take his agent we paid into commissioning a new Australian work and we kept it up for as long as I was at the new Mirada theatre would you like to see Shakespeare subsidizing an Australian writers is that even theoretically possible I mean it is obviously well it is obviously possible on yes I would but I'm what worries me slightly is the assumption that that Shakespeare's kind of all the worldly and and not of today and so forth the reason that we speak Shakespearean language is because it is still current for us people say that Shakespeare is full of cliches what they don't realize is that we've been copying his way of saying things for a very long time and what and it drives me nuts that people want to prove that he's the Earl of Oxford because the one thing it's obvious to me is that he isn't the Earl of Oxford he's someone who speaks the language of ordinary people and who has no university degrees and none of that it's all to do with expressiveness and putting into words things that people had never managed to say well we have to understand what it is like when the only thing you've got in the way of literary culture is the sermon in your church on a Sunday and the play that you may hear only once a year or even once in a lifetime and then that play you the play doesn't work unless you bring your imagination and the extraordinary thing about that is that you had this big hungry imagination that pounced on these plays and turned them into what they are they're our collective inheritance they are not simply a literary exercise by some strange toff who existed 400 years ago they're ours we made them it's our language our language is our most important artifact it's a huge language and the person who put it together for us in the best way is Shakespeare yes let's go to another question that's sort of really asking similar questions of the rest of the panel it's from Davina bunts Moe in the play Hamlet Ophelia says we know what we are but know not what we may be while the world has evolved in so many ways what do you think it says of human nature that the characters and themes of Shakespeare's plays remain so relatable to us today yeah I'm gonna go to Anthony grayling first I mean it's in a way it's picking up what you were saying earlier can I just comment by the way I've been struck by the idea that if the royalties do to Plato Aristotle and song could be paid into a fund I could arrange that would be I think in the case of this question it's very very opposite because he Shakespeare's a wonderful resource not alone but I think magnificently ahead of the game in getting us to see things about despair ambition desire passion for vengeance love all these things one of the greatest writers about Shakespeare is William Hazlitt the essayist talking about the characters not the plays so much their structure and the like but his investigation of the characters he was so fascinated by the fact that somehow Shakespeare with his marvelous ability he had to be anybody and everybody to see everything from all points of view to inhabit these different sensibilities brought out things about what it is to be human which when you see the play or when you read a play today you're very struck by so I mean I think he remains the great relevance for that point yeah okay what does he mean to you what does he taught you about human nature well he teaches me a lot of things of course he teaches me as a human because of the way he crystallizes and cap and encapsulates a moment in a word or in a phrase what he teaches me as a playwright is extraordinary though too as I mentioned before he I love that he can he can take the epoch of a battlefield and we can hone in on to an unknown Brutus and cassia speaking about what it is to be loyal to one another and what it is to be a friend and and and I there's something so human about seeing about seeing the man behind the soldier and for me that's a really important thing as a human my my dad is a Vietnam veteran and and who didn't speak and I found a lot of the answers of what I was looking for from my dad through Shakespeare the way the soldiers spoke to each other the way they talked about the war when they got home and it's it's through those sorts of passengers and freight and narratives that and characters that shakespeare gives us that we can we can find ourselves we can find our family we can find our loved one so we can find other ways into our own human existence john bill before we began you're asked during the warmup what your favorite Shakespeare play was you said King Lear because it's the most profound what do you learn from that kind of profundity well I guess what do we care is I think the courage looks so deep into the human psyche and say man is capable of such cruelty and and degeneracy no other playwrights gone that deep I think Beckett farthing Shakespeare's footsteps went to some of the way but so uncompromising and thinking he wrote this play as a commercial piece of theater humming and read it for the King's Christmas party I mean Christ what a what a Christmas party it's extraordinary parish the scale of the thing the the ruthless examination of people's motives and pretensions I suppose what Shakespeare teaches me more than anything is curiosity unbounded curiosity and and openness to anything everything there's no barrier he just takes it whatever the you know it's gonna throw at him and he'll turn it into something how about the way that he expresses profound emotions through what Lear himself is saying and at times it just becomes sort of primal yeah how how how I mean that's what that's what the line is but sometimes it's by saying nothing is silences that tell you a lot actually being an actor himself knew not to overwrite he would leave silence for the actors to fill in there's a wonderful moment in Antony and Cleopatra when one of her handmaidens is is about to die and a soldier comes in and says what's going on here and she says our soldier and that dies and that's it like if I could only tell you what I've just seen what what's been happening here and so that gives them actress a fantastic opportunity to use this there's two words what you can do with that okay good another question that's related to that one it's from sire Malick Shakespeare is often credited with speaking universal truths or crystallizing the human condition do you believe Hebrew been as influential exclusive of the vast reach of the English language or to put it another way does he you were part of his success to the British Empire start with you there because well I'm wondering if it's actually a negative for indigenous people that he does represent the colonial power that invaded the country chickened out a bit of with politics the way I like to put it is that he's probably the most famous author and everyone likes to be with the cool crowd and hang out with the famous mob so I think I think you know the optimistic side is that we all know how dominant English languages and of course Shakespeare is from that culture but if you look at it in a way where you can align it with another ancient language that is maybe a little bit older and translate something like that it can be a really beautiful collaboration so that's how I would say that do you think the same for the same token do you think the themes we've been talking about this kind of profanities do they sort of echo equally whatever community you come from I think the the traits that people are mentioning about these characters in the way he writes of course I speak to humanitarianism and they there are things that relate like I was speaking to my fiancee earlier today about and I don't know whether this is relevant but um you know people who break the law in our culture and how that love when that love is really strong they do go off and and they do things they're not supposed to it and I think a lot of plot lines or occurrences that happen in our culture do mirror a lot of the the characterizations that Shakespeare speaks about in his work because they are relatable on a human level in any language as any growling it's likely to reflect on the the question and the way it was asked the notion that English was somehow pushed forward by all that's the plays were pushed forward by being English and being part of the colonial empire well to some extent of course obviously enough it helped but if you think of just the following glisteny of names Homer Virgil Gert Pushkin Dostoevsky and none of them as far as I know part of the British Empire and yet because of the greatness of their work it breaks through boundaries that breaks through even linguistic boundaries of course in the case of Shakespeare the language is very special to the experience also but I just a couple weeks ago at the Edinburgh Festival I saw a performance of measure for measure in Russian and it worked wonderfully well and their interpretation of the play was very striking and very fresh so it's not 100% that the factor of the language but you're right I mean for historical reasons of course with the globalizing influence of the language following trade and colonization and Empire and lots of people were given opportunities to get to know Shakespeare as a result let's quickly go to some specifics and the themes within the plays this question from Isabella Corrado my question is in a country wrestling with its conscience about asylum seekers and the stigmatization of the Muslim community as terrorists what do you think a plane like Othello or the Merchant of Venice has to say to us Jemaine start with you oh well it's interesting in lots of ways I mean a fellow is a blackhat general in the White Army he is himself a victim who has created for himself a personality which they can accept which is probably mostly fictitious the most helpful thing I found in teaching a fellow to students was a very interesting essay by a black revolutionary in America called Eldridge Cleaver it's an essay called the allegory of the black eunuchs now if you try you look at a fellow you see that he's an older man he he marries a white woman who falls for his panhandling believes his myth-making but he's he would appear to be incapable of actually consummating that marriage then it's disrupted by the Cold War and so on and so forth and he ends up by killing her now Eldridge Cleaver when he wrote that essay was in prison for raping a white woman and what he was explaining was the psychopathology of being a black man in white America under white Dominion and it's an extraordinary interaction of these two things a fellow is a victim of if you like of imperialism he's been sucked into somebody else's scenario and he has enacted this fake role to survive I mean Shakespeare also writes about imperialism in The Tempest Caliban is you know the the the native the savage native who is being manipulated by Prospero and but who is remains fascinated by the gift of language who seems to find the English language in his mouth like a gift it's the most extraordinary thing then he falls for the two ridiculous servants and they they want the glittering apparel they've fallen for the mockery of power and he wants real power and so you have the the the struggle of Caliban versus the instruments of of the imperial power if you like it's it's all there if if you want to look for it let me bring John in and what do you think I'm stick with Othello for a minute I mean it's shot through with the racial abuse of a fellow and terrible racial epithets constantly the old black RAM is tupping you're white you being one sort of memorable line from Iago well that's what Shakespeare thought no no character says something in a Shakespeare play Shakespeare City no Jews carry of course of course it's the characters ardor and yes it's necessary that we see a society that is discriminating against the minorities I think it's even more apparent with Merchant of Venice which is a very disturbing play it's about it's about discrimination the only people who belong here are these sort of the upper crust white Venetian people nobody else is welcome Portia doesn't want the French or the English or the Spanish or the and and least of all the Jews it's you going to belong to this exclusive white Club and is spat upon and reviled and abused and finally cheated of his money and his daughter it's no wonder he cracks at the at the end I'd be interested to see a production of The Merchant of Venice were you substituted the word Muslim for Jew and see how that would resonate today because it's about if someone drives you far enough and spits on you and abused you for long enough you're going to be like a suicide bomber if you said to me ten years ago could you as an actor could imagine yourself walking into a school with automatic rifle and shooting twenty children well could you imagine yourself putting on a vest and walking into a cinema or a supermarket and blowing up everybody taking as many as you could I'd say no that's impossible no human being could do that now we know better it's a daily occurrence and so with I can understand completely why it does what it does and I say good on it Anthony Greg let me bring you in and just I mean a historical night I mean Venice oddly enough was the place where Jews could live they had an enclave in Venice yeah that's why is there in the first place in Britain you weren't allowed to practice your religion at all and that's where Shakespeare came from indeed in the first ghetto in Venice they lived under the Venetian law they were able to trade and and lend money so in fact they had quite a lot of freedoms that they didn't enjoy elsewhere you were dead right about that and in fact the Jews had been expelled from England way back in the 13th century didn't really start to come back and figure in English society until well after Shakespeare's time so he was writing about a situation which was in fact very unfamiliar to his or although anti-semitism hatred of the Jews as christ-killers was of course embedded in the Christian consciousness listen and people would have understood at that point what's interesting in Jake's memory the part about the Caliban and The Tempest is very very well made because in Caliban you get a rather eloquent account of what it is to be colonized much as you do in Merchant of Venice where Sherlock himself talks about the fact of his own humanity and the failure of the others to recognize it but there are all sorts of of non-english characters in Shakespeare view like he even has a bit of a goat the Welsh you remember the character of Fluellen who in the English army but you know he has Sicilians and Bohemians and respite probably partly to be able to make use of the little bit of distancing that that gave things could be a bit different over there and would make sense of the plot that he was running so the idea of a cosmopolitan society of differences of different perspectives that other people might have was something he exploited and something that he could make use of thinking that his audience were perfectly well understand what he was doing iCarly what's your reflection on the question that was asked and the discussion we're just having now about racism about prejudice within these plays how it's used that's tricky one I don't really know how to answer that to be honest all I can say is when I was listening to you guys speak I was thinking about the upcoming work that I'm going to be doing in the Scottish play and I started to think about how Yuri Atkins artistic director Carl J Morris and wants to stage that with our culture knew our way and how that's going to relate and I kind of started like vision having visions about that during that conversation I don't really know how to answer that question to be honest I feel like we're thinking you might be able to weave contemporary themes into the play yes I think so but I think also Carl might be wanting to tap into a lot of traditional elements that come into that so culture is definitely going to pay a strong part in that definitely but I do think as an actor I just take it off that a bit to see that more there is more diversity in the presentation of the works and so that doesn't have to strictly be Shakespeare itself how he's written it but that more people can come in from different backgrounds to work with Shakespeare's plays to present it in different ways especially collaboratively like what URI are can are going to present with the Scottish play and bringing in those cultural elements to to present that I suppose it does absolutely which is what I'm mostly drawn to now let's move along you're watching Q & A Shakespeare live from the festival of Dangerous Ideas the next question comes from Katriona robertson shakespeare's women seldom stupid or flighting well there is a whole host of men that are contemptible and loads of those shakespeare's representation of a women display a certain amount of feminists leaning or is it a constraint of the time okay I'm gonna start with you thank you I love Shakespeare's women I know it's very contentious to say that but I think he had a really really good eye for women I think he may not have been really lucky as well with the with the Shakespearean women I've played and I've also been really lucky in that I've actually played a lot of male Shakespearean characters I've played Casius and I've played Claudius from Hamlet and I have much as well so it's it's an interesting comparison to as an actress to to compare the words that come out of my mouth as a male Shakespearean character in the words that I get to say as a female Shakespearean character and I have to say I just love playing the female carry the reason I started with you is because you've got a speech to do for us Joe I think you regard as one of the first real feminist speeches in drama from Amelia in a fellow yes just set it up for us and then go into it if you can okay well this is this is Amelia speaking to Desdemona Desdemona is in a kind of terrible terrible state she's upset by the way that she's being treated by a fellow and Amelia herself has a very young tough manipulative conniving husband in Iago and so what we're really seeing here is is an older woman sitting down but a friend as well sitting down with with Desdemona to tell her what she what she should know about men so I go into it but I do think it is their husbands faults if wives do fall say that they slack their duties and pour our treasures into foreign laps or else break out in peevish jealousies throwing restraint upon us or say they strike us scant our former having in despite why we have galls and though we have some grace yet have we some revenge let husbands know their wives have sense like them they see and smell and have their palates both for sweet and sour as husbands have what is it that they do when they change us for others is it sport I think it is and Duff affection breed it I think it does is it frailty that bus earth it is so to and have not we affections desires for sport and frailty as men have then that then use us well else let them know the ills we do their ills instruct us so I've got to say that radio nationals she's so much fun brilliantly darden I've got to say that radio national listeners voted that their favorite speech in Shakespeare and on I guess I tell you something about our listeners Kylie listening of that did you feel it it's a very modern speech isn't it yeah it is but Kate's amazing and what she does is I always love Kate performing very powerful I think we all agree with that now we're good another question on this topic it's from Elaine Jean tech and we'll go straight to that highlight hi they remind me a bit another Jew we're talking about the Jews and women being different there and last night at the festival of Dangerous Ideas Germaine Greer suggested it was the women who are the movers and the shakers they're the ones that get things done that's in the comedies been in the tragedies women unfortunately a morally blank and powerless sometimes loveless did Shakespeare intentionally see women playing a more important role when it was about the lighter side of life than that in our tragedies Jemaine oh it's an interesting question I don't think the comedies are about the lighter side of life they're about the view of life as leading towards salvation of some sort and the idea is that without a woman's cooperation in living together bringing up a family and so on the results are going to be pretty unsatisfactory one of the most important aspects of the Puritan revolution Puritan stroke Protestant revolution in the 1590s in particular was the foregrounding of marriage as the as the most appropriate way of life for a modern religionist as distinct from the Catholic Church which prized virginity and monasticism and so on so and that this is deliberately done I think by Shakespeare I think he understands that he's actually promoting a way of life which has never been promoted before people think that we had always a literature of courtship and marriage we didn't as far as I can see having scoured libraries all over Europe Shakespeare actually invented the comedy of wedding of courtship and marriage what the tragedies show you is what happens when the woman is a cipher when she doesn't understand what's going on when she cannot assist in the salvation of the community or the body politic or whatever if you think of something like Hamlet's mother who is moral cipher she doesn't she doesn't know or care but she's almost autistic you know he asks her to keep a secret wouldn't say that Germaine about Lady Macbeth would you Alice I would may be morally bankrupt but not powerless oh she is powerless she absolutely is power of influence on her husband listen the person who causes Duncan to be killed is Macbeth I mean what his problem is that he is there here's what keeps the crown in power and he the thought comes into his head that maybe he should actually have the power once he's had that thought and this is a thing that Shakespeare deals with all the time if I have thought of committing a crime is it as if I'd already committed it am I already guilty and this is Macbeth mistake now I think doesn't it doesn't she put the steel into his spine know when he's wavering no she just goes and picks up the daggers then she hasn't then she has a nervous breakdown she does the cleaning up and then she has a nervous breakdown I mean if I was doing a Macbeth now I would I would I would have Jacki Weaver play lady with me I think many people would like to do that John what do you think about that just your reflection on that notion well I disagree with Jemaine on that Lady Macbeth element I think Macbeth hasn't got the guts at the beginning to go through with this thing and she's the one who really Prime's him up she has many resourceful ways getting him in there and making him do it then she cleans up I think what she collects his imagination she can't see the consequences but Beth sees them very clearly he knows he's going straight to hell but too bad he wants what he wants now she can't imagine what the future might be let's just have it and everything will be okay and that it's a lack of imagination that's her problem I think all right but that isn't going to have you sleepwalking and trying to wash off the spots of blood on your hand and and generally completely collapsing dying even that's because it's easier to imagine killing someone than actually doing it then conscience kicks in accept that Macbeth has done lots of it Macbeth is a powerful soldier you know and he's actually operated on a huge scale no hero in Shakespeare is built up in that way before you even see him on the stage you've been told what the massive sizes of this man you know his he's given a kind of planetary environment to exist in he is an enormous hero he also has the finest moral sensibility of anyone in Scotland and this is what brings him down nobody is more aware of the of the awfulness of his crime than Macbeth he can't forgive himself I mean it is the most extraordinary wonderful contradiction that this great man should commit this terrible crime and destroy himself that's why I think it's probably a more powerful tragedy than Lear I mean Lear in many ways is about entropy it's about it's about the end of the system it's about aging it's about the loss of personality and so forth but Macbeth is a bigger thing Macbeth says I am the hero I should be the power in the realm but I've made a nonsense of my life I've killed my king and now I don't make any sense at all okay let's move on as fascinating it would be to keep going the next question is a videos from Terence Hughton in Henley Beach South South Australia good evening Jemaine my wife's 1963 school copy of Macbeth as a portion of the quarter seen excised because its reference to the effects of alcohol on sexual desire and performance was considered unsuitable for school students at that time hasn't the time come for us to discard once and for all moralistic exam oriented approaches to shanks be in our schools in favor of a more hedonistic liberated enjoyment of his plays I know he did but demand respect for a while I'm gonna come back to Jamaica well I think if I if my mum had my guess why my mom didn't allow me to study was always afraid I was gonna go that way unless her copy was sensing yes possibly I one of the most fun parts of Shakespeare for me is learning all those dirty dirty bits you know and and and realizing that he was a sexy writer he was really sexy talking about Macbeth before and and and having played lady Mac I love how sexy that couple is I love for me the tragedy is how this very very sexy couple that are in grief I think because they've lost a child we we hear about her giving suck to her to a male baby I feel like that they are like yes they're they're kind of locked together and the tragedy for for me is not who killed who who's responsible for the murder it's the fact that this locked couple leave and and and drift away from each other and aren't there for each other when they are both dealing with their own mortality the sexiness of them damn straight I would have loved to have studied that at school absolutely I mean I I still giggle whenever I pick up Shakespeare and and gasp at the at the amazing bald boldness of it and how bawdy it is and and I I really would like to to encourage children - I asked their parents exactly what those particular phrases means if they know I'm gonna test my mum when I get there I'm gonna the question was addressed to you originally Jemaine so we'll go to you and do you recall a time when Shakespeare's plays were censored in Australia no I don't but the interesting thing is that there was no censorship for sexual references in Shakespeare's time the only censorship was political and it was very it was very anxious censorship so that the deposition scene from richard ii could not be played because it seemed to be so subversive so that when essex was thinking of fomenting revolution in 16 101 he paid the Lord Chamberlain's players 40 shillings in as a special bribe to play that scene thinking that the people of London would rise against the Queen which didn't happen now that's what they were worried about they but in Romeo and Juliet is probably the most obscene of all Shakespeare's plays you know the bawdy hand of the dial is even now on the prick of noon you think that's really a bit far-fetched isn't communis say it's 12 o'clock well you could he did now listen in in his time Shakespeare you say became most famous not for a play but for an erotic poem Venus and Adonis tell us tell us how that happened well we've got those theatres are closed because of plague as far as we know and Shakespeare sits thinks I've got to be doing something with myself so he sits down and writes this poem in six scenes about Venus of falling in love with Adonis who is in the woods they're both in in the woods and there's there's other things going on in the woods this as some horses are thinking about coupling and so forth and she decides that she's going to seduce Adonis but Adonis is actually heaven forbid underage and shy and probably also rather repelled and it's a very funny poem and it's very various so it changes all the time you there he is naked on his horse then it turns out he's wearing a hat so that you naked with the hat on that's a bit hard and it goes on like this sensible if it's sunny indeed he's probably also wearing sunblock if we were to rewrite the whole thing about the poem is it's light hearted it's sexy is playful and it's written in English whereas most of the pornography that was available was for gentlemen was written in Latin or if they were very very posh in Greek but this is written for housewives and that caused tremendous fuss because it turned out that housewives really loved it and they actually were likely to sleep with it under their pillows and the thing is it went through 13 editions within Shakespeare's life at least 13 editions that makes it a huge bestseller and none of the plays is a best-seller the plays are often not printed at all or printed in in rather faulty versions it's a bit like when Shakespeare's a playwright it's a bit like writing scripts for EastEnders you know it nobody knows his name then and if it's how the theatre worked that you had groups of players who groups of writers who worked together Shakespeare is interesting in lots of ways and one of them is that he wrote by himself and I find I really need to know how he did that I mean I think he went back to Stratford and wrote them on the kitchen table during Lent because the theatres were closed because so much of his imagery is about early spring in Warwickshire and that would be the easiest thing for him to write about and I think he probably did try them out on Annie's and he found blushed I said I think that's a bit over the top bill you keep it it was a bit like writing fifty shades of gray because the players were unable to be written or performed because of the plague and had to make some money some except it's a damn sight better than 48 I think you're right about that it's time to move along our next question comes from Ned Hearst one of Shakespeare's quirks is his ambiguity it's very hard to find his personal beliefs in his plays but Shakespeare said sorry Wordsworth said of the sonnets this is the key with which Shakespeare unlocked his heart does the panel think there's something to that or is it just wishful thinking what do you think John I think the sonnets are often taken as being autobiographical and depicting a real-life situation between the Shakespeare and a young aristocrat and a dark lady that the he's in love with this young man then he's in love with a lady she comes picks the young man away from him and there's this love triangle now it's to me totally in possible that a middle-aged actor like Shakespeare could have any kind of relationship of that sort with one of the leading young aristocrats of the day that wouldn't happen wouldn't possibly happen even if it did he wouldn't write sonnets about it and even if he did he wouldn't hand her out and then publish them I mean the scandal would have been absolutely you know it would've been an earthquake and something that sometimes were published and there was no one blinked an eye people recognized into what they were a fiction about a poet and a young man and a lady which enabled Shakespeare to run extraordinary commentary on love and a sex in every aspect from every possible angle and I think that's what the sonnets are about if one wants to argue they are autobiographical and they are so persuasive when you read them that they read like a real to life confession but even there if you want to argue that then he does make it very clear the poet to the young man whatever affection I feel for you this is purely platonic buddy there's nothing else in it because you're very beautiful and if you're a woman I can take you as a lever that as you were a man sorry it's not on so either way I think you know it doesn't tell us anything more about his his sexuality except that he had the extraordinaire Majan nation as said earlier he couldn't as Anthony said he could put himself into anybody's soul he could be rosalind and Cleopatra and King Lear and the porter he was all these people and he had no trouble imagining what it would like to be in any different kind of relationship now we mentioned earlier that Kylie's been translating you've actually got one of them here for us and the two of you are gonna help us out here so I think we're gonna we're going to have a look at one of these sonnets you're going to sonnet 127 yes turn your page to sonnet and we're gonna get a translation back into English from Kate shall I start yes all right this is a new our language and I just let everyone know that newer languages from the southwest of Western Australia son at 127 Morin Cora Coburn abort gentleman mourn quarrel court below in yon way an ally one knee mourn coal burning near young juror budva popcorn dine in the old age black was not countered fair or if it were it bore not beauty's name but now is black beauty's successive air and beauty slandered with a bastard shame Wilkie Buju bearing mark Wilkie co-op Baumann cool image me rich co-op world worked water cold bar booyaka Baldwin atch belong card Carney weirding for since each hand has put on nature's power faring the fowl with arts false borrowed face sweet Beauty has no name no holy Bower but is profaned if not lives in disgrace jinyeong york me I'll mourn were dubbing ball caught me out polyp way on Merlin Nietzsche ball quatro our gentleman Jin hyung will kick or pitch pop work me rich therefore my mistress eyes a raven black her eyes so suited and they mourn as seem at such who not born fare no beauty lack slandering creation with a false esteem when yarn mere niche Mort Wilke mere lingua darling walk mourn mere niche Mirage kya yet so they mourn becoming of their whoa that every tongue says beauty should look so I think we well done guys I'm much better at talking to our language than I am Shakespeare but tell us what you think is going on in that sonnet because Shakespeare appears to be saying effectively black is beautiful that's that's obviously the the text of the first three or four lines do you think he's actually saying black is beautiful in the sense of we might understand that I think so I'd like to think he's lobbying for the beauty in the blackness to put it plainly what do you think Kate I don't want to sound biased about like I totally agree I also think that he's saying to all women don't feel like you have to put on the layered face that's now don't don't feel like you have to be fully made up you are beauty God has given you Beauty Nature has given you beauty but I do think he's preferences for his dark lady which I just think is he writes of it so beautiful so Kate contradicting the the received image of beauty is you have to look like Queen Elizabeth yes yes ginger here a very wise very wise yes that's the look yes so he's saying that by that you know if you have dark hair or black eyes that's that's you that's your beauty yeah yeah Anthony you mentioned before you heard Shakespeare in Russia never in younger it is pretty amazing don't you think that this these ideas can be translated into any language that's the profundity of the ideas that carries through yes it is that I think content in the end although as I say how its express makes an enormous difference to how we appreciate it I'm very struck by the fact that poetic representations of kinds of beauty that are not accepted as being the normal the norm and the ideal I'm in Byron for example as a lovely poem she walks in beauty like the night of cloudless climes and starry skies and all that's best of dark and bright meet in her aspect there are eyes so this is somebody with dark hair and beautiful dark eyes but pushing pushing the that the contrast against the norm in fact needs the potentiation of a of an expression a way of describing or putting the point that really brings it home so you can see it you can feel it and taste it almost but you can really see it because of the way he says it Jermaine my mistress eyes are nothing like the Sun how does it go though snow be white why they are done and so it goes on the anti Petrarchan sonnet if we know anything about the dark lady it seems quite likely that she was Jewish that she was a mini Abbas Anna from the Veneto Sammy of musicians who were to be found all over Europe who spread everywhere I I think the the notion that that beauty has to be flexin head and blue-eyed and so on is never important for Shakespeare if you were even in Love's Labour's Lost the mistresses eyes are black but then black eyes are in fact in in terms of the archaeology of the time they're actually gray eyes it's all fine you know Shakespeare is not telling you what you should love and what is lovable but he may be mocking certain postures and posturing there are no limits to Shakespeare but the interesting thing is that we were the original question was about how do we know what shakes me is thinking or what Shakespeare liked and did he like brunettes or whatever it's improper like I don't think that was the question actually I think to be honest I think you're paraphrasing rather rudely yes except that it is not the issue and this is well the questioner was about is this what Shakespeare really thinks because in the place you get versions what his characters think and so the question is in the sonnets isn't this what he thinks no well the end of well we've already had the answer from John and I think it was it was perfect perfect don't you want to know what he thinks you're never gonna know what he thinks if you think that you that he's giving you Clues you're mistaken he is extraordinary if you think of Ben Jonson for example now Ian Donaldson is gonna be annoyed if I say this Johnson puts himself forward all the time I am the tryam the head of the tribe of Ben this is what I'm like this is what my friends are like this is the way we live he is tired a tiresome I was gonna say tireless self-promoter Shakespeare is exactly the opposite if we shadows if we shadows have offended think but this and all is mended that you have but slumber'd here he's forever abstracting himself he's leaving you face to face with the dilemmas in the place and he is not directing where you should go or whether you've made a mistake or whether you're wrong and in fact everybody who leaves the theater can have a different idea of what the play actually means okay Anthony I agree with with Jemaine I don't think you can tell what Shakespeare thinks because he thinks everything he can see the point for him from all sides but I sometimes wonder and you know the cynics in some of his face Jake wheeze for example when they when they talk about life and and the pointlessness of it and the pursuit of Fame and wealth and so on is there a little tincture of something there maybe just occasionally a little echo we're gonna leave that point there because we've got we've got time for one last question I'm afraid we're nearly out of time comes from John Larry like in the lot in the 20th century I was fortunate enough to attend the Globe Theatre in London and standing in the mosh pit in the in the in the Sun and I I was struck by the cultural difference it was so different from attending a play in in Australia in a theater crouch the the panel just to outline for us what was like to be part of that situation staging Direction acting rehearsals I'll start with John yeah okay I have had the the lack of the privilege to walk on the stage at the globe we were the belt safety company was touring in London and the director Mark ravans invited me the company to go and work on the stage just for an experiment and it was an extraordinary experience when you are backstage and you walk through that curtain onto the stage and you look at it's a little bit like this any more intense you see faces all around you on every level the galleries and down there in the pit and almost behind you with a packed and the head like two thousand sometimes three thousand people in these theaters those present globe is much smaller than the original and so you're aware that it's a totally public thing you have to walk array of can't stand still and talk you've got to walk around and deliver the lines to the audience the whole time you occasionally look at your fellow actor and deliver a cue but it's all for the audience not just the soliloquies everything is shared everything is public everything's a conversation with the audience and the energy that brings to the play is amazing and as Mark Rylance said to me it's very much depends on the audience standing up and bringing that bad energy into the theatre and I said what happens if they sit down he said well I hose the ground so they can look back then of course as well as all of that you probably have to perform pretty authentic looking sword fights oh yeah there were specialists in all of that stuff I couldn't get away with anything shoddy very well trained actors very very articulate highly charismatic and energetic a different kind of energy than we generally employ we incline to television naturalism in our acting we think bets or cinematic acting that's what acting is but when you walk on that stage at the globe you realise it's got to be rhetoric it's got to be high power still truthful still real but full-on I think the most important thing is to understand that the soliloquy in the globe is not a soliloquy you're not actually speaking within yourself you have got to talk to the audience and it's very funny than in the very early days when Mark Rylance was first a director of the globe I was the one of the people who were supposed to give prizes to schoolteachers who actually brought Shakespeare alive for school kids and Mark's first action was to set us all paths in and then I got I criticized the performance of his saying then he was playing Henry the fifth or somewhere trying to do it internally as if he was on a moon in a movie and there was the audience panting to make contact with him and the really extraordinary thing is that when when the audience in the globe just draws in its breath was shocked because something has happened it's it's like a little gale yeah it's so real they have so much power over the action and it's worth and it's anybody who cares should see if they can't just go and feel it because it sound like you've been on that stage of news I have and performed yes Sunday uh it was I don't have enough time for my answer um I found it quite intimidating when they said it's like this audience but but more intimidating it really is John um the tears they span all the way around quite like here in the studio standing on the ground so you've got faces almost like popping out at you quite a bit but it's amazing as I mentioned before about this famous white fellow he's dead now 400 years and we're still celebrating his work to be on that stage and celebrating it with people that are in awe of him just as much as asked as performance whether you know lots about him or not so much about him and it was an honor I suppose which may sound silly and my country might be saying what is an honor to be on his stage for it was very much more of a privilege to performing these versions of the sonnets and you my language on our home country but then to go over there and perform them over there I have to say was thrilling in a way in a respectful way but it's an incredible place to go to if you're ever over there to see a show I saw two shows before I performed on the stage and it was amazing great place not many was performing on this stage yes and I'd like to say I haven't I've been to the globe I haven't on the stage but I encourage everyone out here I'm sure there's lots the theater goers here but everyone who's watching at home to really go to the theater and and not just that those theaters that are that are putting on the big Shakespeare's but the ones that are putting on the those that are inspired by Shakespeare the smaller to medium sector theaters across Australia that need your support at the moment because of funding cuts but you still get that gasp you still get that electricity from a normal theater we have them across Australia so I really encourage you to support them and there might be you might be seeing the next the Australian Shakespeare I'm gonna give the last word give the last word to Anthony grilling and ask you to if you can take us back to those days because it's pretty extraordinary when you think about it to get to where those theatres we mostly have to cross the river one way or another it's pretty hairy place to be there's a dangerous place in Shakespeare's day yeah very much so Southwark was outside the city limits so the usual rules and regulations didn't apply right next door to the Globe Theatre was the the famous Borough Market where all the farmers used to bring their goods it wouldn't take them across the bridge into the city because they'd have to pay a tax to do so so they they had their market there there was the globe there was the rose there were bear gardens that were brothels they were you know it was a place you went to party and there it was sometimes some pretty dangerous to be out there at night or on your own two gangs of young men with their way you could easily get beaten up so it was a pretty exciting place now I used to live just around the corner from there actually and I can tell you them now that now it's it's it's very tame I'm afraid that's all we have time for I'm very sad to say please thank our panel Kate Maldini Carly farmer John Bell Germaine Greer and Anthony grayling gone that your peers that is your fear we're gonna stand over there and very special thanks to the festival of Dangerous Ideas the Sydney Opera House and great audience you can't actually give yourselves a quick round of applause while John gets ready next Monday Q & A we'll be back with politics with the National Senator Bridget McKenzie labor senator Doug Cameron editor of The Spectator Australia Rowan Dean and former Liberal candidate Dai Li who's recently been suspended by her party well in tonight's Q&A with John bill performing a speech written by Shakespeare for Sir Thomas More until next week good night thank you we had a question earlier about refugees and sort of people who are discriminated against this is a speech from a play called Sir Thomas More which Shakespeare wrote in collaboration with a younger writer john fletcher and in this speech Sir Thomas More is confronting the protesters and the mobs who want all the refugees removed from London grant them removed and grant practice your noise hath chit down all the majesty of England imagine that you see the wretched strangers their babies at their backs of their poor luggage plotting to the ports and coasts for transportation and that news sit as kings in your desires Authority quite silent by your brawl and hewn rough of your opinions clothed what have you got I'll tell you you had taught how insolence and strong hand should prevail how order should be quelled and by this pattern not one of you should live an age and man for other ruffians as their fancies wrought with self same hand self reasons and self right would shark on you and men like ravenous fishes would feed on one another what country by the nature of your error should give you Harbor why you must need to be strangers would you be pleased to find a nation of such barbarous temper that breaking out in hideous violence would not afford you an abode on earth Whitney detested knives against your throats spurn you like dogs what would you think to be thus used this is the strangest case and this your mountainous inhumanity

Channel: abcqanda

Views: 18,240

Rating: 4.5932202 out of 5

Keywords: Q&A, QandA, auspol, australian politics, Tony Jones, politics, abc, abc news, John Bell, Kylie Farmer, Germaine Greer, Kate Mulvany, A.C. Grayling

Id: 7Uq7ZnIcMs4

Length: 68min 34sec (4114 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 05 2016