The friendly truce that has come to
exist between two Shakespearian constituencies - the scholars and the
practitioners - has brought a new intellectual credibility to the latter
together with, for the former, an absorption in the minutiae of live
performance. Despite the occasional unease felt by an actor on a lecture
platform or by the academic feeling like a breathless fan, we know at last that
we are engaged in the same enquiry, though probably as far as ever from any
conclusions. Meanwhile, our two audiences, readers and spectators, supply a
market for Shakespeare that seems equally indifferent to educational policy and
to changing intellectual fashion.
Forty years of practice, in which
the systematic study of the texts has supported the daily practice of rendering
them entertaining, suggest to me that in Shakespeare the devil is as much in
the small detail as in the visceral rush. When we quote from Shakespeare, as we
do almost daily without attribution, we do it as often from the language of
trade as from high tragedy. The actor remains, uniquely, the tool for this
enormous range, though he rarely talks about it. I hope, in the British
Academy’s 2004 Shakespeare Lecture, to illustrate something of how he or she
must weave a path between theories of verse speaking, critical assumptions and
changing theatre fashions, to make Shakespeare’s language continue to walk in
our lives, as much in the everyday detail of his working men as in the rhetoric
of his kings.