King Lear

Bill Alexander - director
The director Bill Alexander talks about the play.

King Lear - fact or fiction?
Nobody really knows whether the story of King Lear is real history or not. Shakespeare took his ideas from Historia Regum Britanniae (c. 1136), a work by the C.12th chronicler, Geoffrey of Monmouth. Monmouth gives a (possibly fictitious) account of kings who ruled in Britain in pre-Christian times, spanning a 1,900 year period. He claimed to have based all that history on books in the ancient Britons’ language, which is what we now call modern-day Welsh. For years academics have disputed whether Monmouth, a monk, was making the whole thing up, some suggesting his histories had more to do with poetic imagination than fact.

A different kind of history play
Approaching King Lear, then, is unlike approaching any of the other history plays in the Shakespeare canon. You can look very closely at the known history of Henry IV, for example, and compare the version Shakespeare received through Holinshed, or a later historian with our own knowledge of the late medieval period and say ‘Right, that’s very interesting: Shakespeare changed that, there, because he wanted to achieve such-and-such a dramatic effect’. Or we can see that, on the whole, he stuck precisely within the known facts of history. In King Lear, generally acknowledged by many people to be the pinnacle of his achievement, he wrote a play about a king alleged to have lived around 800 BC. In truth, though, Shakespeare mainly wrote about the things that preoccupied him in his own time: he wrote about ideas of kingship, of loyalty and of generational change from an old way of looking at the world to a new way of looking at the world. King Lear was written at a time when England was very unstable, when King James VI of Scotland had only been on the English throne for a few years. There were rumours about James and after all those wonderful years of Elizabeth’s reign, people wondered whether he was up to the job.

The starting point for me, having read the play a few times, was to research the time at which, in his writing career, Shakespeare was inspired to write on a particular theme. One of the things I noticed was that, in the five or six years leading up to 1606, when he wrote King Lear, there was a lot of agricultural unrest and there were a number of food riots. One of the first things you notice in King Lear too is that the play is greatly concerned with matters inequality and justice. At the time, people in the cities were beginning to talk about the responsibility of government towards the poor. At the time, common land that had been the property of anyone in that area, available to the poor as land on which their sheep or cattle, was taken away, fenced off and called private property [for more on this subject, go to ENCLOSURES in the section FOR TEACHERS].

Religious Background
There was, at the time, an apocalyptic mood around, a feeling that the end of the world was nigh. Manic preachers were out on the streets inviting everyone to repent their sins before judgement day. There were Jesuit priests in the country trying to attract followers to the Catholic cause by practicing exorcism and demonstrating their power over evil spirits in what I suppose you might call a form of popular theatre. Priests would hire groups of out-of-work actors to pretend to be possessed by devils and, as the crowds gathered round, they would be seen, effectively, to ‘cure’ them. Shakespeare had obviously read a book by Samuel Harsnett called A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures (1603) a lot of what Poor Tom says is taken word-for-word from the book.

Quarto and Folio editions
I started work on this production 8 months before rehearsals began, talking to the set and costume designers and researching as much as I could the play’s political, social and religious backgrounds. The original C17th texts of King Lear and Hamlet vary considerably between Quarto and Folio [for more information about this, go to Which Edition? in the LEARNING section and Quartos and Folios in MORE ABOUT SHAKESPEARE]. The Arden edition marks clearly sections that are only in the Quarto or only in the Folio but I was very lucky to find, when I was directing Henry IV recently in Washington DC, a photographic facsimile of the Quarto and Folio texts, The Complete King Lear, 1608 - 1623, prepared by an academic called Michael Warren [University of California Press]. It has the Quarto text and the Folio text printed side by side, so you can see in an instant what the differences are. Having all available texts with us in rehearsal was the closest we could get to having the author in rehearsal with us.

The playwright Ben Jonson said of his friend, Shakespeare, that he was ‘not of an age but for all time’. Shakespeare’s works transcend his period to achieve a kind of universality, which is why, in the late C.20th/early C.21st, people have always thought of King Lear as a particularly modern play - it has a sensibility and vision we feel we can understand particularly well. That is perhaps why, since the 1960s, productions of King Lear have often been done in some version of modern dress. Three distinct overlapping periods, or ideas about history, come together in King Lear, which the set designer [Tom Piper], the costume designer [Kandis Cook] and I have tried to combine in our production, namely:

1. the very ancient world of possibly imagined, mythical Britain c. 800 BC

2. the Renaissance world of Elizabethan England which Shakespeare inhabited/ a world of Jacobean sensibilities

3. the modern world, which seems to recognise in the play certain things about itself.

According to what you have experienced in life and the state you’re in at a given time, you will draw conclusions about what a play like King Lear means to you. It is not the director’s job to put before an audience the idea “This is what you should be thinking this play’s about” because Shakespeare’s plays are too multi-layered and contain too many potential meanings for that to be anything other than confining and ultimately distorting.

Creating a recognisable yet slightly alien world for the play
When staging King Lear there needs to be a sense that people actually do live in castles (the interior locations are Lear’s castle, Gloucester’s castle and Albany’s castle) but audiences also need to be able to access, in a sharp, modern context, what Shakespeare is saying, for example, about the big issues of religion and politics. The designers and I have aimed to create, therefore, a feeling of huge inner spaces inhabited by an elite (the king, dukes, earls, etc.) who own large chunks of land, while the rest of the population is virtually invisible. There are references in the play to whipping, riding, gods and swords and to distance that physically demands written communication - they don’t just pick up the phone in the play or send a fax. It’s important to convey a sense of physical endurance experienced because of moving from one place to the other, the likelihood of messages going astray, the idea of armies deployed in ways that people can only rumour about where they are. I didn’t want to change every reference to the fact that people have got to ride from A to B in order to deliver a message. The society in which a production is set has to be a bit alien: the familiarities take care of themselves through the people of the story. It would be incredibly inconsistent to create a world in which the audience was always saying ‘Oh, why don’t they just pick up the telephone?’ And so we have tried to bring together an imaginary or parallel world, a created world in which you’d say that the clothes are recognisable from some time in the late C.19th or early C.20th so that the audience feel simultaneously comfortable and yet slightly distanced. I wanted the world we created to be plausible within the implications of the text, to be simultaneously partly crude and yet sophisticated, brutal and atmospheric and a little bit modern.

On the first day of rehearsal I talked for an hour or two about the play - and about concepts, but you can’t play a concept as an actor. It’s no good to Gonerill, for example, to know it’s a play about the nature of kingship. Shakespeare’s great tragedies are actually about something very simple and human and that is playable. Othello, for example, is about jealousy. That’s not a concept - it’s a real human feeling that everyone can understand. Similarly, it’s no good to say that Macbeth is about remorse and the workings of remorse - that doesn’t mean anything. To say it is a play about regicide gets to the heart of it. King Lear is about getting old and everything that follows from that:

losing power

realising that you have not used your life properly

the reality of love and understanding what love means when you begin to accept your own human weaknesses

the way in which love can be distorted and become hypocritical

the attitude of younger people to age and the fear that many young people have of it, the contempt in which they hold it

the sense in which people, as they become old, are terrified of becoming disempowered in their personal relationships. So you begin to understand that all the characters are linked by simple, human, obvious, ordinary things, which you can play.

In order to help the audience understand what the story is in the opening scene of the play, I wanted to create three strongly contrasting atmospheres, composed of three very different sets of human tensions. What Lear has in mind in Act 1 scene 1 is clearly two separate familial political situations:

he’s going to announce to his immediate family and closest political colleagues his plans for abdication

he’s going to make, publicly, a decision about which of the two Frenchmen he’s going to allow to marry his daughter.

My idea was that in his mind there was always going to be a restructuring of the room. What Lear doesn’t expect is for Cordelia and Kent to say what they say and so the reshaping of the room (which takes place during the row between Lear and Kent) is extremely chaotic.

Division of the kingdom
King James VI/I was keen to unite the kingdoms of Scotland, England and Wales, so it is interesting that one of Lear’s first lines is ‘Know that we have divided in three our kingdom.’ That might lead you to think that this is a pro-James play and yet, for all kinds of historical, cultural and political reasons, an awful lot of people were against the unification of England and Scotland. Lear hopes to avoid future strife by dividing his kingdom now. What we don’t know is whether the characters knew the kingdom was going to be divided in the way it was. Kent says ‘I thought the King had more affected the Duke of Albany than Cornwall’ but from the way it’s divided, it’s impossible to tell which of his sons-in-law is Lear’s favourite. We’ve decided that Albany and Gonerill are given Scotland and Regan and Cornwall are given Wales and Cornwall. England, the jewel in the crown, will go to Cordelia, which would concede immense political influence to France and create a potentially dangerous political entity.

A king and his daughters
Lear is a man who doesn’t make distinction between being king over his family and a father to his country. He’s not able to dissociate those things, which is why he can’t tell the difference between a real expression of love and a false one. In rehearsal we talked a lot about the background between Lear and his three daughters and their individual relationships to him. In Shakespeare’s source material (Monmouth and Holinshed), Lear goes to his daughters individually and asks which of them loves him most. We decided that Lear has probably dropped hints about what he’s going to do, so that the abdication and division do not come as a total surprise and that’s why Lear can’t understand why Cordelia won’t play the game, why she won’t simply do what she knows he wants her to do. She must know how much he loves her because he’s always telling her, even at the risk of permanently upsetting the other two. It’s more than he can bear that she won’t play the game, that she embarrasses him in front of everyone: ‘Thy truth then be thy dower’ he says - that’s all you’re going to get - Nothing. ‘Nothing’ - the word reverberates through the play.

An abusive father
Lear is a jealous man and a bully who believes he owns his daughters. He has probably bullied Cordelia considerably less than her sisters, part of whose stories is discovering that they can escape from him and, in a way, take their revenge on him for the abuse they’ve suffered. I’m not talking about sexual abuse but sometimes there’s a fine line. He’s certainly made sure that he’s married off his two elder daughters to men who they’re not going to love because he wants to retain all their love. He’ll probably choose Burgundy over France for Cordelia because Burgundy seems to him someone that Cordelia won’t love. The idea that France actually loves her, and that she loves France, is more than he can bear. Cordelia says ‘I will never marry like my sisters, to love my father all.’

Lear and his Fool
The Fool is an old man, the same age as Lear. They’ve known each other all their lives. There’s a very deliberate scheme in the Fool dropping out when he does (at Act 3 scene 6 line 80): in Lear’s mind, as he goes mad, he goes beyond the kind of wisdom that the Fool can impart - he needs the stronger meat of Poor Tom, who, ironically is only pretending to be mad. So Archie (we call the Fool ‘Archie’ after Archie Armstrong, jester to King James VI/I and his son Charles I) gives way to Poor Tom, whom Lear thinks has come in answer to his prayers. When Poor Tom’s around, Lear ignores Archie, who drops out. Lear disappears from the play for a long time and by the time we see him again he has, in his madness, become his own Fool. In those wonderful scenes on Dover Cliffs, where he suddenly he sees the truth about life and people, he has acquired wisdom. It’s very important that Shakespeare drops the Fool at a certain point. Try to imagine the character of Hamlet, or Macbeth, or Othello without soliloquy or interior monologue. They’re all deeply self-reflective people who, when they are alone, think about the consequences of their actions, their hopes and fears and their state of mind. Lear doesn’t have any soliloquies. Now try to imagine Othello, Macbeth or Hamlet with a Fool. They don’t need it. Lear has a Fool because the Fool is his soliloquy. The Fool is his inner voice, worn on the outside.

Stage Violence
I going to try to stage the play’s violence fairly realistically. There will be blood in the gauging of Gloucester’s eyes. We’ve spent time in rehearsal with the fight director Malcolm Ransom working on the technical problems of plucking out eyes on stage. I think the audience have got to be shocked, but not alienated and the violence certainly must not be risible. Initially we wondered whether the line ‘put the eye beneath my foot’ might mean that Cornwall was going to put out Gloucester’s eyes with his heels, but that would have been extremely difficult. The thumb is the obvious thing: he’s gauging out the eye with his thumb and then stamping on it. Anatol [who plays Cornwall], standing out of sight of the audience, will pretend there is an eyeball - there will be no actual solid objects left on stage for stage management to clear up!

Using the language to think
To improvise the thoughts in your own words is destructive and dangerous, because if you are encouraged to speak words that roughly convey the thoughts, you’re liable to start thinking like that. Take for example the phrase ‘Light thickens, and the crow makes wing toward the rooky woods’: it means precisely that. It doesn’t mean that it gets darker and a large black bird of the raven family is flying through the air towards the wooded area. If you’re to understand how to play Shakespeare you have to understand that the fabric of the language is the total and elaborate thought of the individuals. To try to think about it in a more modern way only alienates you from it further. In order to dress yourself in the fabric of the language you have to become completely at ease with it. Obviously you have to sit down from time to time and work out what your character means but it’s no good having pretty much roughly the right thoughts and then saying the language: you should only be thinking exactly what you’re saying.


			The director Bill Alexander talks about the play. Nobody really knows whether the story of King Lear is real history or not. Shakespeare took his ideas from Historia Regum Britanniae (c. 1136), a work by the C.12th chronicler, Geoffrey of Monmouth. Monmouth gives a (possibly fictitious) account of kings who ruled in Britain in pre-Christian times, spanning a 1,900 year period. He claimed to have based all that history on books in the ancient Britons’ language, which is what we now call modern-day Welsh. For years academics have disputed whether Monmouth, a monk, was making the whole thing up, some suggesting his histories had more to do with poetic imagination than fact. Approaching King Lear, then, is unlike approaching any of the other history plays in the Shakespeare canon. You can look very closely at the known history of Henry IV, for example, and compare the version Shakespeare received through Holinshed, or a later historian with our own knowledge of the late medieval period and say ‘Right, that’s very interesting: Shakespeare changed that, there, because he wanted to achieve such-and-such a dramatic effect’. Or we can see that, on the whole, he stuck precisely within the known facts of history. In King Lear, generally acknowledged by many people to be the pinnacle of his achievement, he wrote a play about a king alleged to have lived around 800 BC. In truth, though, Shakespeare mainly wrote about the things that preoccupied him in his own time: he wrote about ideas of kingship, of loyalty and of generational change from an old way of looking at the world to a new way of looking at the world. King Lear was written at a time when England was very unstable, when King James VI of Scotland had only been on the English throne for a few years. There were rumours about James and after all those wonderful years of Elizabeth’s reign, people wondered whether he was up to the job. The starting point for me, having read the play a few times, was to research the time at which, in his writing career, Shakespeare was inspired to write on a particular theme. One of the things I noticed was that, in the five or six years leading up to 1606, when he wrote King Lear, there was a lot of agricultural unrest and there were a number of food riots. One of the first things you notice in King Lear too is that the play is greatly concerned with matters inequality and justice. At the time, people in the cities were beginning to talk about the responsibility of government towards the poor. At the time, common land that had been the property of anyone in that area, available to the poor as land on which their sheep or cattle, was taken away, fenced off and called private property [for more on this subject, go to ENCLOSURES in the section FOR TEACHERS]. There was, at the time, an apocalyptic mood around, a feeling that the end of the world was nigh. Manic preachers were out on the streets inviting everyone to repent their sins before judgement day. There were Jesuit priests in the country trying to attract followers to the Catholic cause by practicing exorcism and demonstrating their power over evil spirits in what I suppose you might call a form of popular theatre. Priests would hire groups of out-of-work actors to pretend to be possessed by devils and, as the crowds gathered round, they would be seen, effectively, to ‘cure’ them. Shakespeare had obviously read a book by Samuel Harsnett called A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures (1603) a lot of what Poor Tom says is taken word-for-word from the book. I started work on this production 8 months before rehearsals began, talking to the set and costume designers and researching as much as I could the play’s political, social and religious backgrounds. The original C17th texts of King Lear and Hamlet vary considerably between Quarto and Folio [for more information about this, go to Which Edition? in the LEARNING section and Quartos and Folios in MORE ABOUT SHAKESPEARE]. The Arden edition marks clearly sections that are only in the Quarto or only in the Folio but I was very lucky to find, when I was directing Henry IV recently in Washington DC, a photographic facsimile of the Quarto and Folio texts, The Complete King Lear, 1608 - 1623, prepared by an academic called Michael Warren [University of California Press]. It has the Quarto text and the Folio text printed side by side, so you can see in an instant what the differences are. Having all available texts with us in rehearsal was the closest we could get to having the author in rehearsal with us. The playwright Ben Jonson said of his friend, Shakespeare, that he was ‘not of an age but for all time’. Shakespeare’s works transcend his period to achieve a kind of universality, which is why, in the late C.20th/early C.21st, people have always thought of King Lear as a particularly modern play - it has a sensibility and vision we feel we can understand particularly well. That is perhaps why, since the 1960s, productions of King Lear have often been done in some version of modern dress. Three distinct overlapping periods, or ideas about history, come together in King Lear, which the set designer [Tom Piper], the costume designer [Kandis Cook] and I have tried to combine in our production, namely: 1. the very ancient world of possibly imagined, mythical Britain c. 800 BC 2. the Renaissance world of Elizabethan England which Shakespeare inhabited/ a world of Jacobean sensibilities 3. the modern world, which seems to recognise in the play certain things about itself. According to what you have experienced in life and the state you’re in at a given time, you will draw conclusions about what a play like King Lear means to you. It is not the director’s job to put before an audience the idea “This is what you should be thinking this play’s about” because Shakespeare’s plays are too multi-layered and contain too many potential meanings for that to be anything other than confining and ultimately distorting. When staging King Lear there needs to be a sense that people actually do live in castles (the interior locations are Lear’s castle, Gloucester’s castle and Albany’s castle) but audiences also need to be able to access, in a sharp, modern context, what Shakespeare is saying, for example, about the big issues of religion and politics. The designers and I have aimed to create, therefore, a feeling of huge inner spaces inhabited by an elite (the king, dukes, earls, etc.) who own large chunks of land, while the rest of the population is virtually invisible. There are references in the play to whipping, riding, gods and swords and to distance that physically demands written communication - they don’t just pick up the phone in the play or send a fax. It’s important to convey a sense of physical endurance experienced because of moving from one place to the other, the likelihood of messages going astray, the idea of armies deployed in ways that people can only rumour about where they are. I didn’t want to change every reference to the fact that people have got to ride from A to B in order to deliver a message. The society in which a production is set has to be a bit alien: the familiarities take care of themselves through the people of the story. It would be incredibly inconsistent to create a world in which the audience was always saying ‘Oh, why don’t they just pick up the telephone?’ And so we have tried to bring together an imaginary or parallel world, a created world in which you’d say that the clothes are recognisable from some time in the late C.19th or early C.20th so that the audience feel simultaneously comfortable and yet slightly distanced. I wanted the world we created to be plausible within the implications of the text, to be simultaneously partly crude and yet sophisticated, brutal and atmospheric and a little bit modern. On the first day of rehearsal I talked for an hour or two about the play - and about concepts, but you can’t play a concept as an actor. It’s no good to Gonerill, for example, to know it’s a play about the nature of kingship. Shakespeare’s great tragedies are actually about something very simple and human and that is playable. Othello, for example, is about jealousy. That’s not a concept - it’s a real human feeling that everyone can understand. Similarly, it’s no good to say that Macbeth is about remorse and the workings of remorse - that doesn’t mean anything. To say it is a play about regicide gets to the heart of it. King Lear is about getting old and everything that follows from that: losing power realising that you have not used your life properly the reality of love and understanding what love means when you begin to accept your own human weaknesses the way in which love can be distorted and become hypocritical the attitude of younger people to age and the fear that many young people have of it, the contempt in which they hold it the sense in which people, as they become old, are terrified of becoming disempowered in their personal relationships. So you begin to understand that all the characters are linked by simple, human, obvious, ordinary things, which you can play. In order to help the audience understand what the story is in the opening scene of the play, I wanted to create three strongly contrasting atmospheres, composed of three very different sets of human tensions. What Lear has in mind in Act 1 scene 1 is clearly two separate familial political situations: he’s going to announce to his immediate family and closest political colleagues his plans for abdication he’s going to make, publicly, a decision about which of the two Frenchmen he’s going to allow to marry his daughter. My idea was that in his mind there was always going to be a restructuring of the room. What Lear doesn’t expect is for Cordelia and Kent to say what they say and so the reshaping of the room (which takes place during the row between Lear and Kent) is extremely chaotic. King James VI/I was keen to unite the kingdoms of Scotland, England and Wales, so it is interesting that one of Lear’s first lines is ‘Know that we have divided in three our kingdom.’ That might lead you to think that this is a pro-James play and yet, for all kinds of historical, cultural and political reasons, an awful lot of people were against the unification of England and Scotland. Lear hopes to avoid future strife by dividing his kingdom now. What we don’t know is whether the characters knew the kingdom was going to be divided in the way it was. Kent says ‘I thought the King had more affected the Duke of Albany than Cornwall’ but from the way it’s divided, it’s impossible to tell which of his sons-in-law is Lear’s favourite. We’ve decided that Albany and Gonerill are given Scotland and Regan and Cornwall are given Wales and Cornwall. England, the jewel in the crown, will go to Cordelia, which would concede immense political influence to France and create a potentially dangerous political entity. Lear is a man who doesn’t make distinction between being king over his family and a father to his country. He’s not able to dissociate those things, which is why he can’t tell the difference between a real expression of love and a false one. In rehearsal we talked a lot about the background between Lear and his three daughters and their individual relationships to him. In Shakespeare’s source material (Monmouth and Holinshed), Lear goes to his daughters individually and asks which of them loves him most. We decided that Lear has probably dropped hints about what he’s going to do, so that the abdication and division do not come as a total surprise and that’s why Lear can’t understand why Cordelia won’t play the game, why she won’t simply do what she knows he wants her to do. She must know how much he loves her because he’s always telling her, even at the risk of permanently upsetting the other two. It’s more than he can bear that she won’t play the game, that she embarrasses him in front of everyone: ‘Thy truth then be thy dower’ he says - that’s all you’re going to get - Nothing. ‘Nothing’ - the word reverberates through the play. Lear is a jealous man and a bully who believes he owns his daughters. He has probably bullied Cordelia considerably less than her sisters, part of whose stories is discovering that they can escape from him and, in a way, take their revenge on him for the abuse they’ve suffered. I’m not talking about sexual abuse but sometimes there’s a fine line. He’s certainly made sure that he’s married off his two elder daughters to men who they’re not going to love because he wants to retain all their love. He’ll probably choose Burgundy over France for Cordelia because Burgundy seems to him someone that Cordelia won’t love. The idea that France actually loves her, and that she loves France, is more than he can bear. Cordelia says ‘I will never marry like my sisters, to love my father all.’ The Fool is an old man, the same age as Lear. They’ve known each other all their lives. There’s a very deliberate scheme in the Fool dropping out when he does (at Act 3 scene 6 line 80): in Lear’s mind, as he goes mad, he goes beyond the kind of wisdom that the Fool can impart - he needs the stronger meat of Poor Tom, who, ironically is only pretending to be mad. So Archie (we call the Fool ‘Archie’ after Archie Armstrong, jester to King James VI/I and his son Charles I) gives way to Poor Tom, whom Lear thinks has come in answer to his prayers. When Poor Tom’s around, Lear ignores Archie, who drops out. Lear disappears from the play for a long time and by the time we see him again he has, in his madness, become his own Fool. In those wonderful scenes on Dover Cliffs, where he suddenly he sees the truth about life and people, he has acquired wisdom. It’s very important that Shakespeare drops the Fool at a certain point. Try to imagine the character of Hamlet, or Macbeth, or Othello without soliloquy or interior monologue. They’re all deeply self-reflective people who, when they are alone, think about the consequences of their actions, their hopes and fears and their state of mind. Lear doesn’t have any soliloquies. Now try to imagine Othello, Macbeth or Hamlet with a Fool. They don’t need it. Lear has a Fool because the Fool is his soliloquy. The Fool is his inner voice, worn on the outside. I going to try to stage the play’s violence fairly realistically. There will be blood in the gauging of Gloucester’s eyes. We’ve spent time in rehearsal with the fight director Malcolm Ransom working on the technical problems of plucking out eyes on stage. I think the audience have got to be shocked, but not alienated and the violence certainly must not be risible. Initially we wondered whether the line ‘put the eye beneath my foot’ might mean that Cornwall was going to put out Gloucester’s eyes with his heels, but that would have been extremely difficult. The thumb is the obvious thing: he’s gauging out the eye with his thumb and then stamping on it. Anatol [who plays Cornwall], standing out of sight of the audience, will pretend there is an eyeball - there will be no actual solid objects left on stage for stage management to clear up! To improvise the thoughts in your own words is destructive and dangerous, because if you are encouraged to speak words that roughly convey the thoughts, you’re liable to start thinking like that. Take for example the phrase ‘Light thickens, and the crow makes wing toward the rooky woods’: it means precisely that. It doesn’t mean that it gets darker and a large black bird of the raven family is flying through the air towards the wooded area. If you’re to understand how to play Shakespeare you have to understand that the fabric of the language is the total and elaborate thought of the individuals. To try to think about it in a more modern way only alienates you from it further. In order to dress yourself in the fabric of the language you have to become completely at ease with it. Obviously you have to sit down from time to time and work out what your character means but it’s no good having pretty much roughly the right thoughts and then saying the language: you should only be thinking exactly what you’re saying.