» L7 Interview: Simon Callow
Lost siblings, rich sexuality and infinite compassion: actor Simon Callow talks to Bella Todd about the real William Shakespeare
Shakespeare: The Man From Stratford follows the success of your one-man show about Charles Dickens. You’ve written that it is Shakespeare’s treatment of sex and love that elevates him above Dickens…
I think it’s what you don’t find in Dickens. Of course, Dickens is always interesting, even in what he doesn’t do. But with Shakespeare you have this astonishing garden of delights – and, of course, of disgust sometimes. Whether Dickens would allow himself to be really overwhelmed by another human being I doubt. He was too frightened of the black waters inside himself to let that happen.
What sense of Shakespeare the man do you get from playing his characters?
Shakespeare is very short on judgement and very high on compassion and a sense of identification. He becomes what he writes about, who he writes about, and he seems to know all and to forgive all. (You have exactly the opposite with his contemporary Ben Jonson who, although he seems to know everything, seems to despise everyone.) With Shakespeare you have this tremendously strong feeling of a man who was open to everything. It’s almost impossible to imagine how he survived as long as he did. If you’re that sensitive, if you’re so lacking in an extra skin that every emotion kind of pierces you, then you’re very vulnerable I would think. There’s this engraving for the First Folio where Shakespeare’s got heavy bags under his eyes, is going obviously prematurely bald, not smiling at all. He looks absolutely exhausted. And I do think Shakespeare must have been exhausted
all of the time.
When someone’s writing feels so miraculous to you, is it hard to think about them as a real person?
Well yeeeees… except we don’t none of us know much about his personal life. But there’s a lot that we can think about, and that’s partly what the show’s about. We know that Shakespeare’s mother lost several children before he was born. Although infant mortality was a great deal higher than it is now, a mother still mourns. Can we conclude that Shakespeare felt the need to make it up to his mother? To be especially attentive to her? To divert her with stories and tales? Is that the source? Well, I don’t know. But it could be! It’s an interesting thought.
Does it matter to you as an actor who Shakespeare was biographically?
If I’m acting in a play I feel that I’m in contact with the author. I can’t do a play without feeling that. You need to get a sense of their world. What their obsessions were, what they responded to especially, what territory is theirs and theirs alone…
You must know a lot of living writers. Do their characters tend to correspond to their words, or have you ever been really shocked by meeting someone whose writing you know well?
Well. Yes. Exactly. Of course that happens, and has happened. But you never know with people, you catch them on the wrong day. Or take Richard Wagner – a very well known case of someone whose music is in some cases absolutely sublime, the most rapturous music ever written, and he was a s***, you know. He was an entirely self-orientated s***, and ruthlessly exploitative. On the other hand, you could perfectly well make a case that he did that to protect his music and protect himself from invasion by other people. It’s unreasonable to expect extraordinary people to behave like everybody else.
“With Shakespeare you have this sense of a man who was open to everything… He must have been exhausted”
Have you encountered any interesting instances or explorations of homosexuality in Shakespeare?
There are a couple of characters who are obviously, explicitly gay, which is Achilles and Patroclus in Troilus And Cressida. Antonio the sea captain in Twelfth Night seems to be desperately in love with Sebastian. Of course the sonnets are full of a passionate avowal of love of the author for a young man. The degree to which they were actually sexually fulfilled relationships, or consummated relationships, is really hard to say because it is undoubtedly true that there was a much greater level of freedom and intensity between men in Elizabethan England, in the same way there was among young Arabs because they were kept away from women. The whole language and body language is so intense, fondling each other, stroking each other. Our tendency is to talk about everything and shine a bright light on everything. Many previous generations have preferred to turn a blind eye and let certain things happen under a sort of veil of, whatever – friendship – and let them get on with it.
How close do you think Shakespeare In Love came to portraying the real Shakespeare?
I think Jo [Fiennes] was fantastic but I don’t think he was exactly Shakespeare as I imagined him. I think he was probably far too good looking apart from anything else. But I believed that he was a writer, and that was wonderful.
You’ve spoken about always being asked to play what you call ‘life and death of the party characters’ on film. Do you think Shakespeare was a life and death of the party character?
No. N-n-no. No, Shakespeare’s the guy who sat in the corner of the room, nursing a bottle of wine, and listening and listening, and watching. And then went home with the most attractive person in the room.
Shakespeare: The Man From Stratford is at Theatre Royal Brighton from Monday 13-Saturday 19 July, 08448 717 650, www.ambassadortickets.com/Brighton
