 Hi and welcome I'm Will Christie from the Humanities Research Centre here at the Australian National University and with me is Kate Flaherty from the Department of English here. What we're puzzling about today is why on Saturday the 23rd of April we're celebrating 400 years of William Shakespeare. Why are we still celebrating Shakespeare after 400 years is the question that I'm asking Kate today. What is the fascination of William Shakespeare? Why do we keep revisiting and in many ways keep re-performing this extraordinary play right? Kate? Well Shakespeare certainly does seem to be a really tenacious cultural topic and whether that's because people love Shakespeare or hate Shakespeare or feel indifferent to Shakespeare I think that it's worth investigating that tenacity. There are many ways of answering this question but I guess for me it has to do with the responsiveness of Shakespeare's plays to the specific political and cultural moment in which he was working which made them particularly alive and vital and it's that quality that imports so well into future times, into any time in which it performs. So I've often described it as Shakespeare's plays pick up the concerns of the moment like a magnet picks up iron filings. So you're suggesting then that it's a kind of paradox. What made him acutely topical is what makes him larger than the Elizabethan period essentially. What Ben Johnson said he was not for that age but for all time. Yes so I think it's the it's two things it's the precision with which he approached experience in his moment but also some quality of undecidability about what side he came down on if that makes any sense. So he doesn't make a particular political line really clear he doesn't make a particularly clear moral stance. What he allows is play and of course he wrote plays and I think it's that quality of play that intricate live quality of play that keeps his plays enduring and playing with and in further context. That's part of what what what the Romantics call negative well John Keats call negative capability that sense in which Shakespeare could impersonate and would impersonate and enjoy impersonating any any kind of character as they said light and shade he was just totally responsive to individual characters but what you're also suggesting to some different ideas and different immediate pressures of the period. And of course he was writing to different immediate pressures because he was at once a playwright to the Queen he had court performance command performances but also a playwright for this thriving new entertainment context which is the public theatres in London where you could come and see a play for a penny so even an apprentice and an artisan could come in their lunch break and come see a play. So Shakespeare's writing to an extraordinarily diverse audience perhaps a more diverse audience than any playwrights had ever written to in the past and I think again that's where you get that undecidability that kind of almost duck rabbit quality of Shakespeare's character. Has he kept that audience has he kept that that variety in his audience or has there been a danger of sort of slipping into a kind of elitist you know sort of mode so that it only becomes the province of scholars like you and me or people who are particularly interested in so called high culture or something like that. I think that danger has definitely been seen at times so what might be called a sacralization of Shakespeare in the Victorian period that Shakespeare became associated with high art and interestingly one factor that created this was the distancing of the audience from the stage so with theatre technology that permitted stage lighting and a separate stage space to the audience which was so different to the globe where the audience was all around the stage we have this physical distancing of the audience from the stage and going to the theatre becomes a kind of performance of status in itself and I think there's a whole lot of accretions from that period that that people today commonly associate with Shakespeare that really don't have very much to do with Shakespeare but the other thing I observe is a kind of cycle where Shakespeare gets appropriated to make statements about high culture but then then becomes the favorite the favorite thing to be reappropriated to say what is popular and an example that leaps to mind immediately is the Australian writers who wrote Just Macbeth for children which my kids really enjoy so that it's kind of a kooky reappropriation by Andy Griffiths and Terry Denton of this high culture but that's what makes it so ripe to make it so hilarious when it's reappropriated for popular culture and indeed if we started to talk about reappropriations we would be here until late at night and that sort of thing it is extraordinary but it does say something doesn't it about Shakespeare himself that he not just lends himself but actually invites a kind of re- goes back to what you were saying about the undecidability it allows for different kinds of performance it invites different kinds of performance because it is difficult to put your finger on any one Shakespeare this is what puzzled and has puzzled I think so many people over the years has it not as a person as a person as a playwright but but even as plays they won't come down they won't fix on any particular I mean just when you want to make him into a conservative or pro this something else happens within the play itself that just seems to undermine or threaten or qualify and one of the ways I like to to talk to my students about this is that if we think about Shakespeare and the form of blank verse which everybody in most people associate Shakespeare with verse didum didum didum didum didum didum iambic pentameter and and for many of my students they arrived and think why that why that constraining structure of language and I talk about it as a container that a container of convention that invention pushes out against and without that containing structure the play the playfulness which I think is a key note throughout all of Shakespeare's work doesn't have its play it needs something to push against and of course this is what Shakespeare constantly does with messing with genre creating something which was derogatoryly called the tragic comedy it's it's an attentiveness to rules that allows this delightful playfulness and and breaking with rules and pushing against rules and doesn't everybody love that like doesn't that always make for a lot of fun if yeah and the plays itself celebrate their own playfulness and be quite self-conscious when they address the audience it's the theatrical side of Shakespeare isn't it that we're coming back to again and again that's what we're talking about that undecidability that that fascination that investment in just in people for their own sakes a fascination with personality and with dramatic tension and dramatic action that doesn't actually want to push a particular political line or anything that is that's the theatricality that keeps us coming back and the theatre Kate it keeps one director after another director wants to do it wants to keep coming and seeing what they can as it were squeezed out of the Shakespearean text yeah I'll cut their teeth on we'll cut their teeth and I think we often forget that when Shakespeare was doing these things they were being done for the very very first time so certainly we have the classical precedent but the particular complexity of character interaction and that investment in what constitutes an individual consciousness is something that Shakespeare is playing with in in radical ways for the very first time in a new public context where people don't have to be aristocratic to come and participate in in in thinking about this and responding to this so it's an utterly new forum that I think is is constitutive of how we understand ourselves as human beings right through to today right so can we perhaps agree to say that because he was not one thing because he was everything he is constantly being rediscovered and that's the reason why 400 years there's certainly enough there there's plenty there it's a bit like to me it's it's analogous to exploring exploring galaxies or understanding DNA there's enough there to keep us busy and thinking and learning new things about ourselves for a very very long time thanks kate thank you very much