Essay #15: Five movements

How Anthony Hopkins found his way into Shakespeare... and how we can too

“Learning pieces of Shakespeare as if they were gospel. Now I was beginning to understand them.” • Photo by Leon Hellegers

This tedious triviality

As a boy at school, when he’s told that he’s about to watch Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet, Anthony Hopkins is not enthusiastic. “Now, Hamlet is a very important film,” announces Mr Harrison. Laurence Olivier is the “greatest Shakespearean actor,” and he has made this film because he’s “passionately committed to broadcasting the powerful words and wisdom” of William Shakespeare. In his memoir, We Did Ok, Kid, Hopkins remembers his dread - “Not Shakespeare” - and his desire to be spared “this tedious triviality.” God help us all, he thinks.

Hopkins’s story interests me. First, there’s his honesty. When Hopkins is at school, aged ten, Will is not yet a living, breathing presence. Shakespeare, dead and gone, is something imposed by teachers: his plays are compulsory, his poetry boring, his portrait familiar but distant. Most of us meet Shakespeare in just the same way that the young Hopkins does. We don’t instinctively dislike Will, but we distrust the aura that surrounds him. We sense that Shakespeare is a locked room we’re being forced to enter while being ridiculed for not having yet found the key. The second thing that interests me is that Hopkins doesn’t end up where he begins. He goes from dreading Will to becoming, like Laurence Olivier, one of the greatest Shakespearean actors.¹

How does someone stop running away from Shakespeare and start running after him? Hopkins’s life with Shakespeare suggests five movements, each one capable of moving us a little further from dreading Will to wanting more. Not rules, movements; each a way in: watch, listen, read, recite, repeat.

Watch

Will writes plays. This may seem too obvious to need spelling out, but the obvious is often useful. Will writes plays for a company that stages performances that people attend. Will writes plays to be watched. They don’t belong in a classroom. They belong in theatres and cinemas. And they definitely don’t belong to schoolteachers, or not just to schoolteachers. They belong to the bodies in the audience, the bodies on the stage and screen, to everybody.

Hamlet isn’t homework. The text isn’t there to be deconstructed during a process of finding a right answer to a problem posed by the play. Yes, the words matter, but they were written to be experienced as an event, with pauses, silences, glances, gestures, exits, entrances. This is why watching matters. When Hopkins first watches Hamlet, he doesn’t understand everything: the long plot, the difficult language, the strange characters. Even though the play’s meaning isn’t immediately revealed, he feels the play’s force. He remembers:

I had never experienced an impact like that. It was explosive. I could not yet understand the structure of Hamlet and its nuance - its archaic words, new and unfamiliar language, the rhythm and phrasing.

But I felt that Olivier as Hamlet was speaking to me, referring to some long-vanished, ancient part of myself. It was an unearthly experience. The grief of Hamlet over his father’s death and his mother’s betrayal of her dead husband. I cried, overpowered by the epic depiction of damaged fathers and mothers and of how we’re all haunted by the ghosts of memory. I was too young to grasp a modern sense of the words. But a force had broken into the centre of whatever I was.

Will begins on impact. The mistake is to think that we must deliberately prepare our minds in certain ways beforehand; that we need first to understand the context or the history or the sources of his plays. In fact, the experience of watching Will affects us before we can explain why. Like Hopkins, I know something of this. I remember watching Lenny Henry in Othello, the first Shakespeare I saw on stage. I’m fifteen. And watching Henry as the Moor is changing my perception of the play. The words are no longer marks upon the page of my textbook waiting for me to study them. They have breath as they’re spoken by Henry. They have weight as they land on me. They belong to him, and to me and my Dad, and to everyone else in this theatre just off Trafalgar Square. I’m not mastering Shakespeare, but I am watching him happen. Watching Will moves us past the widespread belief that his plays are puzzles for us to solve. They’re not. They’re events that affect us in real time as we experience them, dramas that move us before we understand what we’re watching.

Listen

This is linked with watch. And sounds do a lot of the work in Shakespeare. When we hear the rhythm of the lines, the tempo of the performer’s voice, we feel the ebb and flow of emotion rather than trying to guess what the language means. This is why it’s important to listen to Will before trying to understand him. A word in our ear makes us sit up. A phrase knocks us down between breaths. This is especially important for anyone who feels excluded from Shakespeare because of the language. Neither the verse nor the prose are what we’re used to. All we know at first is how it sounds. And it sounds as if a character is fearful, or hesitant, or delighted before our minds have a chance to translate Will’s older language into our modern English. When we listen to Will we also hear the sentences thinking as they go. This is because Shakespeare’s language doesn’t merely convey meaning; it creates movement. A character turns, hesitates, accelerates. Sometimes they discover what they want to say only when they say it. Sometimes the rhythm reveals what they really think and feel. Listen to Hamlet:

Understanding doesn’t come all at once. But we can notice what repeats, what quickens, what suddenly become still. When we listen to the sounds, we respond to the music of the words.

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