 Welcome to the library, the home of words and people who love them. My colleague B wrote that. She thinks it's a really powerful statement. My name is Jonah Albert. I am one of the events producers at the library and it's a pleasure for me to welcome you. It's a special night for us. We're celebrating two very big occasions. The first one is of course the 400th anniversary of the publication of Shakespeare's first folio and the second one is a very important British library one which is that we have just turned 50. Happy birthday to us. Thank you. Now we all know that the British library is home to the folios and all the famous stuff but did you know that right here within our notorious stacks, I always thought stacks is a weird word for like shelves but anyway, is the only surviving literary manuscript that features William's handwriting. The book of Sir Thomas More is a play about the life of Thomas More, clues into title. The Tudor lawyer and polymath Shakespeare along with four other writers provided handwritten edits. I thought that was a very interesting Shakespearean fact. This evening we are delighted to welcome Ben and David Crystal. They have gathered the finest lines from lesser known corners of Shakespeare's plays and poems in their new book, Everyday Shakespeare Lines for Life. This evening you're in for a special treat as they take us into a journey of language, a journey of Shakespeare. Well, that's why you're all here. A special welcome to our online guests. We should have over 100 people joining us from across the country and hopefully across the world. We're glad you're able to join us. Welcome. You can also take part by submitting questions. There's a question box just below the video. If you've got questions pop your questions in there and towards the end of the session we will take questions from our online audience and for those of you here in the theatre a roving mic will come to you and you can also take you can also ask questions. Also for those of you online you can buy copies of the book by clicking on the bookshop tab at the top of the video just about here and for those of you who are lucky enough to be in the Pickup Theatre here at the British Library we will be having a book signing and book sales out in Defoyer. I think that's enough for me isn't it? No one came here to hear me do a bad job of introducing an event but without further ado we will hand our time over to Ben and David Crystal. She up stages us every time doesn't she really? Yeah. The star of the show going down. She's been a Shakespearean actor you know she played crab once. Yeah you stay there. Right well what hoe peace here grace and good company. How many goodly creatures are they here? How beautious mankind is. Dad how can you possibly tell if everyone here and online are goodly? Well I'm imagining I mean they wouldn't be here at all if they weren't goodly would they? I mean look you are goodly aren't you? Sorry I couldn't I couldn't hear it I didn't hear it online please. Are you goodly? I could actually hear from online then. Prove my point prove my point. Imagine imagine imagine you're arriving at a party. What hoe peace here and good company. That line has a lot more zing to it than evening hey how's it going? Imagine that you're meeting just one person. It gives me wonder great as my content to see you here before me. You could of course just say nice to see you. Imagine you've been talking about someone and they suddenly show up. Your worship was the last man in our mouths. Oh woman of course if you happen to be talking to a woman. Imagine you're feeling confused about something. I know you don't normally but imagine you are all right. My thoughts are world like a potter's wheel. I know not where I am nor what I do. So imagine once again Ben or indeed any of you a situation where it gets you've got so out of hand you just no idea what to do about it. Time thou must untangle this not I it is too hard a not for me to untie. Imagine imagine that you've secretly fallen in love with someone and you finally get to tell them with the words. I do love nothing in the world so well as you is not that strange. Mums blushing in the front row. So is the man next to it. This sort of thing was our tea time table chat for years. We were working with Shakespeare's. We have done on well this is our fifth book together now and remembering lines almost by osmosis of Shakespeare and then we would find ourselves dropping into normal every day conversation and the game grew and the game grew and the game grew. And that's what happens when you spend a couple of decades working with an author who has such a tremendous ability to write memorable lines like the ones we've been using. And this is where the book comes from every day Shakespeare. I mean we happen all the time wouldn't it. Mum would be would look up the weather online and being in the UK often it would be raining so she would say rain later so I would mutter from Macbeth it shall be rain tonight and then in the other room dad would call out the bank woes reply let it come down and mum would be like get out of the house. And we were working on the book during the uncertainties of lockdown and the pandemic now while the following lines are from King John are about a political situation they capture well the confusion that many of us probably felt. As I travelled hither through the land I find the people strangely fantasied possessed with rumours full of idle dreams not knowing what they fear but full of fear. We felt that we'd be reading through as the the works as we'd be making this book and every now and again one of us would go oh found a good one or like a few months ago whilst we were just punishing putting the finishing touches to the book my back went out. Oh yes I remember what pops out of my mouth you are not shaped for sportive tricks Richard III Richard III sympathy from a parent no Shakespeare I'm surprised I'm still alive actually and but these are the sort of lines that we filled the book with yeah lines for everyday life which is why we called it everyday Shakespeare and subtitle lines for life and as I said it is our fifth book together we started with Shakespeare's words the glossary and language companion and we've been working on Shakespeare together on and off for the last couple of decades but always making books that we hope we're creating bridges towards Shakespeare making Shakespeare more accessible in some way and of course this year as Jonah said is 2023 the 400th anniversary of the publication of Shakespeare's first folio so it's very much a shape not happened yet in November really it's November that's true it's very much a celebration of Shakespeare too and and we must say at this point we've got great thanks to give both to the spoken word poet Lionheart who is very instrumental in our imagineering of this book but also very much to chambers and especially to our editor Sarah Cole who has helped us make this book and it is an absolutely beautiful thing to hold and to see so I thanks both to Lionheart and to Sarah so what we did you see was Ben and I first of all decided to read through the entire canon all the plays and all the poems he did it I did it I did it chronologically yeah and I didn't yeah and then we compared notes I'm a geek I'm quite happy about this and we compared notes and um you know which ones did he like which ones did I like actually most of the time we found the same ones didn't we we didn't disagree too many times yeah we ended up with how many we ended up with uh well out of 36 plays and three long poems and the 154 sonnets we ended up with a well about 5000 lines that we thought this this you know it's the sort of thing that we might include in the book yeah and we actually in the end included a thousand of them in the book I mean not just the 366 for every day of the year but lots of other associated ones that we put into our commentary right there is one for each day of the year but then others follow on in the commentary other lines that we felt might resonate with one of the league quote lines and just juxtaposed it nicely so all the big plays and all the plays and all the big poems are represented aren't they everything's represented apart from edwin the third which you were quite firm about not including yeah that's true now we didn't choose famous quotes like is this a dagger which I see before or a horse a horse my kingdom for a horse now these these are great lines but not very relevant to everyday life I mean how many of you how many of you have actually seen a dagger in front of you regularly so that you need to use that line how many people here have lost their horse and need a new one well absolutely yeah not one day we're going to say that line in a literary festival and somebody's going to say I just lost my horse and I needed a line from Shakespeare and it wasn't in your book but here's a great example of the sort of lines that we did include and and how we dealt with it yeah so imagine you're going somewhere and you want to catch a train well what sort of person are you this is the quote for January the second better three hours too soon or a minute too late everyone will relate to a line of Shakespeare differently there are those each in my father who arrived at a station to catch a train uh that they're so early I'm able to take the previous train actually yeah and then there are those E.G. Ben who arrive at the last minute and almost miss their train but always catch it always always I don't know well anyway that quote better three hours too soon than a minute too late is from the comedy of errors no it isn't it's from the merry wives of winson why did I say the comedy of errors I've got an answer dad but never mind yeah now the speaker of this line is evidently of my father's mind listen I think most people are like me better three hours too soon than a minute too late now I think most people are like me better a minute too early than three hours too soon yeah look let's have a vote all right okay all right so you're going to catch a train let's have a show of hands how many people here get to the station an hour before and how many people are right up to the minute I think I win you do don't you yeah all right and there are a fair number of people who don't do anything don't travel by train at all we don't say train at all yeah what about the online people I mean oh we can't work that out we'll find out later if you're off if your line's got a strong opinion about this put it in the questions and we'll we'll speak to it okay so right where are we now yes let's read an entry to give you the kind of flavour of the of the way we've done this all right well um last week we recorded the audiobook for the book that'll be coming out in a month's time so why don't we do it in the style of the audiobook oh yeah well in that case we'll need a special guest ah well yes indeed uh ladies and gentlemen guys gals and non-binary pals please welcome on stage my mother his wife and the maker of all things good hillary crystal now you'll notice that um my dog rose at the applause i um she's been coming to performances ever since she was a wee puppy and she knows uh that when the applause happens that she can come back to me so now she runs towards applause yeah she thinks the show is over now she thinks the show is for her yeah yeah so we have our female voice now which day shall we choose hillary why not today's date well what is today's date the 18th of july oh yeah okay thank you all right so well okay let's let's find it in here yeah uh oh lovely one wrong okay so this is how we record it uh dad and i share the commentary in the audiobook and you get to hear the lead quote of the day uh spoken twice you get to hear it at the beginning of the uh of the day's recording and then dad does it at the end in original pronunciation as well the accent that shakespeare and his actors would have or a reconstruction of the accent that shakespeare and his actors spoke in 400 years ago july the 18th so doth the greater glory dim the less a substitute shines brightly as a king until a king be by and then his state empties itself as doth an inland brook into the main of waters now substitute here has the sense of deputy or subordinate we see something that attracts us a thing that we can only describe as beautiful shines out at us and then something even more beautiful comes right next to it suddenly the bright one that we thought was so wonderful the first object of our amazement seems slightly dull by comparison just like mum standing next to you i suppose yeah ben that is not in the script every day shakespeare dad you know you get the interpretation from the moment anyway well absolutely and yet crete worth was considered to be found in the every day among common folk henry the eighth offers a beggars book out worth a noble's blood this is spoken by the duke of buckingham and he thinks that a beggars possessions being few have more value to them than rich ancestry at least to the beggar that merit and personal achievement are are more valuable than what comes naturally and thereby that learning from books is worth more than noble heritage a books were held in great appreciation in the place 80 percent of people in london at that time were illiterate couldn't read or write and books were thought to hold magic especially from the point of view of those who could not pass them today's lead quote is from the merchant of venus the lady pausher is on her way home in the dark and sees a candle shining from her house she's impressed by how far its beams travel her maid narissa adds that they weren't able to see the candle light when the moon was out and this makes pausher reflect on the nature of greatness so doth the greater a glory dim the less a substitute shines brightly as a king until the king be by and then his stead empties itself as dothan inland brook into the man of waters nice so that's a typical example of how we've written the book and how the audiobook will sound when it comes out next month thank you mum yeah not yet edy not yet go down go down and i should have just remembered um Sarah will the publishers will probably thank me for saying this i believe in the book there's a discount for the audiobook as well all right yes with the added bonus of you doing op unless you could rock up to everybody that's bought a copy of the book and do the op for them individually well i could try us no i'm i'm getting a bit puss that's what it's nice to hear the op at the end well it is i'll talk more about the regional pronunciation in a in a little while so but for the book there's a different page for every day of the year a different quotation for every page and sometimes more than one i mean remember that there's a thousand quotes in here so several pages have got two or three i mean as you heard just now many of the pages have a commentary either to explain what particular words mean or to relate other kinds of ideas to the lead quote or just to reflect on the everydayness of the quote that we've actually chosen now of course these commentaries are our interpretations that often from a linguistic point of view mind from an actly or from a an everyday-ish point of view and having removed the quotes from their original context sometimes we draw on their original meanings like what it would have meant in the play in that moment to that character but often having isolated the quote it inspired a particular interpretation that for instance the line better three hours too soon than a minute too late and we applied it to catching a train but there are as many ways to interpret that line as there are people watching and listening to this talk which is a part the point of Shakespeare there's so much room for you to decide what it means to you or how about this one make not your thoughts your prisons what does that mean to you i mean in the book in several cases like that one we felt there's nothing else we can say we'll just let the quote stand alone on the page with little that we can add how about this one we use this one from the merchant of Venice when Portia refuses payment for saving Antonio's life he is well paid that is well satisfied again you know can't add anything to that one really good one to remember next time you do someone a favour and they want to pay you something and you don't want to take it he is well paid or she of course is well paid that is well satisfied and most of the quotes inspired us to bring in similar lines from elsewhere in Shakespeare because they they carry a kindred idea or resonance or offered a fun juxtaposition i mean you heard that when we did the the full page for the audio book we started off with the merchant of Venice and then in the middle did you notice we had a little bit of quote from Henith VIII about the beggar now a few of the quotes have been selected to chime with particular days or dates there's a love one on February the 14th for example valentine's day english valentine's day not on the welsh valentine's day they're not on no that's a bit later no it's earlier 25th of january well yeah it's win wednesday well a bit earlier then help me but for those of you that are interested in in pursuing the quote further if you want to know like more about where the quote came from then it's hard to show actually but at the bottom of every page is a stamp what we call a play stamp that the name of the source the play of the pym is is stamped on every page and in fact every month there is a a collection of these play stamps they've been beautifully designed by Antonio Weir and they've become a real nice feature of it so that so that essentially every page lives by itself but then if a particular quote does resonate with you and it really strikes a chord then and you want to go and find out where it came from then you can be like oh yeah all right i'll give king john a read whereas before you might never have even heard of the play king john or want to go and see it or or read from it yeah and there's an index at the back of the book see which gives you the the play the act the scene the line number and so on so that you can look it up and see where the quote comes from and put the if you want to look it up on a site like our shakespeare's words dot com see exactly where it fits into the rest of the scene and there's also an index of themes which i absolutely thoroughly enjoyed making which will be very useful if you need a Shakespeare quotation on a particular topic very good indexes they are too well thank you very much ben president of the indexing society i was once yes when i was young so imagine here's an example of what i mean ben yes father you've been invited to a wedding reception not the wedding itself just the reception just the reception yes that's right and somebody has foolishly asked you to say a few words okay okay now you're thinking about what to say and you're wanting to say something really really innovative and creative not the usual platitudes that you you can do on that occasion shakespeare can help you so choose choose your topic i suppose i'd probably choose something to do with love yeah okay now if you look love up in the back of the book in the in the thematic index yes you'll have plenty of choices over 20 quotations on love to choose from um here's one febri the ninth i've told you that yes you do that one all right uh this is from love's labours lost a lover's eyes will gaze an eagle blind a lover's ear will hear the lowest sound that reminds me you know you're at a party or something and your partner or your love is on the other side of the room and you hear them laugh or say something and your hearing is taken immediately to i bet you could make a nice speech out of that one well i just started well you did absolutely sure you prove me right and it's not just for formal occasions of course you know we chose the quotes partly because they felt like tangible and pick-up-able enough and and that no quote is too long or unmanageable to reflect on or to chew on ideally to say it to try saying out loud or to offer to a friend or to remember to memorize or dare to drop it into everyday conversation yeah you keep wondering how people again end up using yeah i don't know what's the best way of using this book actually i mean you could sort of say all right every day at breakfast time i'm going to look up today's quote in every day shakespeare otherwise the day will be rotten i mean you could do it that way or if you're a teacher maybe at the beginning of a class you might drop one in to give the class something fresh to think about from the routine maybe maybe just sit and under comfy couch and read it in a few sittings or just flip back and forth you know until you come across a quote that strikes a chord with you that was one of the inspirations for the book actually both um the shakespeare's sonnets which would be deadly if you tried to read them from one through to 154 you wouldn't get to sonnet the best one of the best ones you wouldn't get to 18 if you tried to read them sequentially um but rather to flip around and find one that really grabs you and then the other inspiration was the taotei ching as well you know flipping around until you find a a few words that really strike a chord in you um well talking of strike a chord why don't we do um some top fives dad top five what well um let's start with you said there were 20 quotes of love why don't we do the top five plays or poems that we took most quotes from oh yeah yeah oh absolutely oh yeah of course i did a bit research on that of course you did yeah so and and i did a totting up of course you did yeah and i always carry this with me because you never know you never know when somebody's going to ask you just which is the most important that happened a lot to you yeah that's right so if i open this up i can tell you exactly how many quotes there are now which do you think is the most quoted play in the book which do you think romeo no not quite hamlet who said hamlet yeah bang on hamlet absolutely what about the next one yeah that's a bit trickier i think yeah mid seven minutes dream big bath no no next next one is surprising one it's 12th night it's 12th night yeah of course we were picking these but still we were trying to pick them as objectively as possible hamlet is a very very quotable play yeah one after that yeah and then the next one is as you like it as you like it yes which is a very very wordy play it will play playfully wordy indeed absolutely yeah but then comes romeo and juliet whoever said romeo and juliet and and romeo and juliet had one more yeah and then king lear comes next and then three four five six king lear then henry the fourth part two then henry the fourth part two henry the fourth part take like if someone can name me a line from henry the fourth part two right now i couldn't even name a character from henry the fourth part Ben yeah henry the fourth yes okay thank you the fourth not not the son get dad yes exactly oh okay all right good yep so the top five hamlet 12th night as you like it romeo and juliet and mcbeth which explains in a way i suppose why those are the often the plays that are most studied they're some of the most performed and produced plays as well i suppose because they are filled with these drops of wisdom these one liners that really seem to to to grab hold of people's attention well um why don't we do a line from each of the plays okay um hamlet start with for this relief much thanks yeah a quote from if you're busy or in a stressful or difficult situation or doing something you really don't want to be doing and then wonderfully someone comes along and offers you help for this relief much thanks next 12th night a line for anyone who might be carousing into the small hours into the late or early hours not to be bed after midnight is to be up the times the times means early yes and the third one was as you like it the one i've chosen here is live a little comfort a little cheer thyself a little excellent line to say when you're trying to cheer somebody up um then romeo oh i'd go for um no it's not romeo romeo or anything like that tis an ill cook that cannot lick his own fingers ill means poor or bad right but the character who said it the maxim is the ultimate test for fine food applicable to chef's amateur as well as professional right is an ill cook that cannot look his own fingers and one more then from top five from mack beth i know this is a joyful trouble to you but yet tis one and you've just asked someone to help you out you or to help you move or to dry whilst you're washing the dishes or to keep you company whilst you perform a tedious errand it's a perfect opportunity for that line i hear this from dad an awful lot i know it's a happy pain but still a pain i know this is a joyful trouble to you but yet tis one the number of times i've said that to me and come on look dead dead i'm sure they're dying to know i am dying to know give us a line from henry the fourth part two part one whichever one it was part two yeah okay this one something you can say if you step into a room perceive that the mood is low and think a jocular remark will help lighten the situation how now rain within doors and none abroad it's a good one isn't it really good one this is the sort of thing that started this book of these great lines in the plays of pimes but ones that rarely heard or said or pulled out to to to be distinguished from the biggest and most famous lines all right so the ones that we just heard were all actually spoken by male speakers so what about a top five of female lines oh no problem i mean we you'll find an excellent selection of goodly selection in january alone but female lines we need our female voice back for the quotation so hillary again ples oh yeah it's not over yet edi yeah right so this is queen kathryn in henry the eighth reflecting on what people have been saying about cardinal woosie men's evil manners live in brass their virtues we write in water the bad things we hear about people who remember long after the good things about them are forgotten and men's evil manners live in brass the line begins but the line actually does apply to everybody yes man or men in shakespeare had a much more general sense of human being as you know what about this one the countess in all's well the denswell saying goodbye to her son bertram love all trust a few do wrong to none fine words to offer someone about to travel who you won't see again for a long while and then there's lucrice in the poem the rape of lucrice looking at a picture of a tragic scene and comparing it to her own terrible situation it easeth some though none it ever cured to think their dollar others have endured you know that was one of the first quotes i read that quote for the first time in university it was one of the first shakespeare quotes from you know the rape of lucrice a long narrative poem it was one of the first quotes from shakespeare that really sort of struck a bell in me and i wrote it out and put it on a little piece of paper and on a pen board and it was up there for 15 years or so ease of some though none it ever cured to think one's dollar one's pain others have endured it's a lovely line and a bit like of course it basically means misery loves company and the quote had a special force during the time when shakespeare wrote it because it was during a time of widespread disease when the plague was rife in shakespeare's england and then twelfth night so we've got olivia now trying to reassure viola disguised as cesario be that they are noist thou art and then thou art as great as that thou feast which is a way of saying be yourself i suppose as fully as you possibly can and then you'll be bigger than anything you fear there's a lot of very good advice in shakespeare as well and lastly is a bella in measure for measure trying to convince the duke of what has happened to her make not impossible that which but seems unlike unlike means unlikely or difficult to believe you could say those lines are a warning against groundless self doubt make not impossible that which but seems unlike nice thank you thank you again so if there's one thing we discovered it's that there's a line in shakespeare for almost every occasion now in the book rather than presenting just a jumble of emotions and ideas and reflections scattered across the year we gently curated the passing of the year nudging each month towards a loose collection of themes and inviting a series of thoughts to flow together over the course of a week as well january sees a grouping of what what we thought were the best quotes that we could find well you've just heard some of them you've just heard five of them so we won't do any more there febury is a swing through love and laughter so here's an example from henny the sixth part one again a play that not many people know much about the duke of suffolk at the end of the play sees margaret daughter of french nobleman for the first time she's going to become queen margaret later for henry but he falls in love at first sight so if you lack words to describe the sight of someone or something you love well this quote can provide it listen as plays the sun upon the glassy streams twinkling another counterfeited beam so seems this gorgeous beauty to mine eyes the image is one of a beam of sunshine being reflected in water a second time counterfeited means make a duplicate of that sort of sense it's better than wow she's all right isn't she tis a bit uh in the month of march we take a deep dive into grief grief makes one hour seem 10 sorrow hope and then peace his uh character could live few at the end of all's well the ends well that famous play that everybody loves and the few overcome by the situation he finds himself in says mine eyes smell onions i shall weep anon i smell onions it's not brilliant beautiful line if you find yourself welling up or overcome by your emotion or after seeing a friend come to tears april brings a month of every dayness that can be found in shakespeare this is the month that collects the quotes which most frequently made a sort of nod and say to each other uh you know i felt this the other day or or that'd be fun to say ben wouldn't it hey really his trinculo in the tempest stifano asks him how he managed to escape the wrecked ship on the sea and he says i can swim like a duck anyone ever asks you if you can swim you never have to say yes ever again i can swim like a duck if they say what do you mean just before you jump in the water you can say i'm quoting shakespeare yeah may the month of may invites a touch of nature you look outside and see that it started to rain what would you say ben oh it's raining oh come on boring try try this one from richard the second like an unseasonable stormy day which makes the silver rivers drown their shores as if the world were all dissolved to tears all dissolved to tears that's amazing and you can use the weather to talk about people like these lines from henny the fourth part one as full of spirit as the month of may and gorgeous as the sun at midsummer yes you are it's a good line to describe anyone who's full of energy and enthusiasm i suppose i should use it to you really me yeah you can do if you like yeah you're sort of sometimes full of energy and enthusiasm sometimes june offers a useful selection in case you find yourself needing to insult somebody or or argue with them as many a man have more hair than wit thank you ben that's from the comedy of errors wit means intelligence i fight back with societies from troilers and cresciter criticising ajax that has no more brain than i have in mine elbows okay about this from timing of Athens as much fullery as i have so much wit thou lackas i give you Horatio from hamlet these are but wild and whirling words on the Shakespeare's they're not mine well let's be nice to each other here's a nice one from the sonnets a decrepit father takes the light to see his active child do deeds of youth decrepit i thought we were going to be nice well actually decrepit isn't what you might think it means i mean it's very negative term these days but in Shakespeare's time it had a much more neutral meaning it meant sort of powerless or old and weak but not necessarily in a nasty kind of way powerless because of the young son you see that's taking over the world yeah like the tennis really isn't it you know i'm a sort of jock of it well sort of older than him actually so let me tell you my age my age is as a lusty winter frosty but kindly that's old adam talking in as you like it yes i identify with that yes you're very frosty i mean kindly mum says lusty hang on July explores politics and tyranny topical another area Shakespeare was especially good at talking about political leaders unpopular decisions mutual suspicion between politicians and so on and so forth and the dangers uneasy lies the head that wears a crown well that's another one from henny the fourth part two perfect for a country that changes its leader every few months which country are you thinking of dan can't imagine ha what about this one from the lucris poem again lots of lines from the lucris poem about any unpopular decision maker why should the private pleasure of someone become the public plague of many more about this one from as you like it the fashion of these times where none will sweat but for promotion i love all these we love this one from pericles uh it is time to fear when tyrants seem to kiss august leans into lines of well profound yet accessible wisdom um like this one from king lear nothing will come of nothing that's a line to think about if you want a reason to get out of bed in the morning and forge your own life's path or if you're uncertain whether to follow a particular course of action yeah well in fact you love this one so much ben that you he actually tattooed it on his arm i did i did it's it's right here nothing will come of nothing uh it's uh i uh hated shakespeare in school i truly did um and i i really grew to hate it studying king lear and then oh gosh about six or seven or eight years later it was playing uh we made a production of king lear in a castle in austria i think we made the whole thing in about 10 days um and i play dead girl which is a brilliant part and i transformed my appreciation of the play and you know you sort of grow up thinking oh i don't like peas and then you get older and your taste changed and you go actually i love peas and and and i'd always loved this line that nothing will come from come out of nothing and that you can change your opinion about things and as i said it's as a self-employed actor a reason to get out of bed in the morning and not wait for the phone to ring but to make things happen so uh it's written in um uh dad's writing and my grand's writing and my mom's writing as well because i'm a romantic oh yeah that's what they said actually that's not what they said um mum said but but you can't ever take it off it's a good line uh do you uh which line would you get of Shakespeare dad tattooed on you a tattoo on me well maybe the question should be where listen there are no lines in Shakespeare that can express my emotion at this moment about tattoo no i can think of two oh god help us yeah pish and where and where would you get a tattooed and and tush okay i know where you'll get that one tattooed uh well september brings a month of work honesty secrets and money here's a good one from the winter's tale one good deed lying tongueless slaughter's a thousand waiting upon that our praises are our wages our praises are our wages a reminder that our good deeds need to be appreciated with words and not by silence not dying tongueless and someone may have a store of worthy initiatives in mind but failing to acknowledge just one can be enough to make the good angel who's all inclination to do more october takes us through life with quotes about birth love marriage having children and some grounded observations about death my favorite is actually the opening one we have in october we are born to do benefits lovely line if you want to help someone offer them and something and they find it difficult to accept we're born to do benefits to each other and it reminds me one of my favorites from october is also a testament to friendship it's from the two noble kinsmen but it's a testament to us all being together the world has gotten so divisive over the last few years here being thus together we are an endless mind to one another we are one another's wife ever begetting new births of love we are father friends acquaintance we are to one another families i am your heir and you are mine this place is our inheritance no hard oppressor dare take this from us here with a little patience we shall live long and loving it's a reason to read to noble kinsmen it is indeed november brings a celebration of friends and friendship close friendship as well as a few useful quotes to for when friends have to leave each other like this one for instance when romeo has to leave friar lorrens but that a joy past joy calls out on me it were a grief so brief to part with thee perhaps the most beautiful way to say you'd like to take more time in the moment of leaving someone you love but you have something joyful to go to that you're late for and you've got to hurry in this case this was romeo's leaving for his first night with Juliet so it's kind of understandable but and finally december takes us home with lines of arrival celebration and kindly spirits we chose this one uh english has no expression for bon appetit you know before a meal has it really you offer somebody good wishes and the common sort of waiters you know enjoy it isn't really very good in by comparison with these lines like beth now good digestion wait on appetite and health on both it's one of the quotes you don't want to think too much about the context of the situation that he said no and we chose this one for december the 25th from the comedy of errors small cheer and great welcome makes a merry feast that's the line for anyone that feels they might need to apologize for having limited fare they can offer their guests welcome is the best dish on the table so there we are a thousand or so quotes grouped into themes at span the month all of which will hopefully offer a moment of resonance or reflection talking of resonance um something about the sound of the language i was going to say look is winding up the watch of his wit by and by it will strike right yes yes i was going to tell you about the original pronunciation that's right that's what it was i was going to tell you remember when we did our whole day reading with uh hillary we spoke the lead quote twice once in modern english and once in original pronunciation or op for short at the end well that's one of my contributions especially to the to the audiobook it's something that's become very popular it started with shakespeare's globe back in 2004 when they did a production of romeo in original pronunciation i was advising them on that and then it became so popular it spread around the world i mean people just loved it they did another production the next year troilus and cresciter and then there were people in the audience from all over the place americans in particular loved it because you know r is pronounced after the vowel and that of course takes shakespeare more towards american english than to you know laurence levier sort of english and op has has just really really taken off um give you a couple of examples now so that you can tune your ear in once again what about this one ben um from the sonnet uh when to the sessions of sweet silent thought i summon up remembrance of things past i sigh the lack of many a thing i sought and with old woes new whale my dear times waste well there we are it's a sonnet it's got a rhyme it always did audio rhyme in those days and what have we got we've got past and waste come on shakespeare you can do better than that or even past and waste well i'll add past but the thing is of course pronunciation has shifted so in op it would be when to the sessions of sweet silent thought i summon up remembrance of things past i sigh the lack of money a thing i thought i sought and with old woes new whale my dear times waste waste and past you see so that's my world um what about yours ben uh what's your contribution do you think to all this it's just sort of eight popcorn really in but i mean things have changed so much like when you always told me that when you did exams in shakespeare you had to learn huge chunks to to pass them you'd have to use huge chunks of shakespeare i believe you can still quote and i know mum can too some of the lines that you learnt was it 100 200 years ago now like when you were when you were in school and it's a crappy comes to mum yeah fair um and uh yeah i suppose i've grown up with an idea that being able to quote shakespeare was something both impressive but also something that's quite far removed from me something that i didn't feel particularly qualified for um and uh and the generation after me didn't even have to read a whole shakespeare play in order to pass their exams there's something that one of the reasons that i wanted to write this book and to make the could choose the quotes that we chose but also make them not short enough for people to speak you know to dare to speak out loud or even remember them and and drop them into daily conversation is that we're missing and have been missing for a long time um the teaching of of oracy the teaching of the ability to speak your heart but use your words to speak how you feel we tell our younglings say how you feel but we don't teach them how and certainly not in mainstream education i think that's something that's been uh missing for a long time literature studying literature doesn't help the theater does of course the theater and the arts are fantastic for that but they're usually the first departments to be cut which is a huge shame the arts theater shakespeare their factories for empathy and compassion which arguably is what the world needs now more than ever um i you know we were talking about this we did the the bbc radio three show the verb last week up in hebden bridge and it was live and they said could you speak to to why shakespeare why is it relevant to you and i wrote this uh it's sort of a a poetic bit of speech i'll read it for you now in theater i found my greatest teacher in shakespeare's works they taught me empathy creativity reasoning compassion conflict resolution maybe not so much but there is a place we can go can't sleep no balm for hurt minds waking up in the middle of the night in a fight unhappy in your job family problems fancy your neighbor's husband your best friends intended thinking of the end i know now there's a body of work that captures much of what we need to thrive to help us avoid the first fist fight on mars there's a place you can go a sandbox to explore in a fireproof place to test drive the thoughts and the feels and i have heard it said unbidden guests are often welcomist when they are gone society is no comfort to one not sociable in sooth i know not why i am so sad grief makes one hour ten and that deep torture may be called a hell when more is felt than one hath power to tell make not your thoughts your prisons give sorrow words the grief that does not speak whispers the oaf fraught heart and bids it break for gnarling sorrow hath less power to bite the man that mocks at it and sets it light since i left you my eye is in my mind ah thought kills me i am not thought to leap large distances when thou art gone the miserable have no other medicine but only hope yeah i felt like this theatre gifts the education of an emotional life the that which was missing from my school's curriculum the theatre is an empathy drum and shakespeare bangs dragging and drawing us to everything we are the good and the bad the kind and the sad the loved and the lost the worth and the cost of living and loving winning and losing shakespeare offers us words to speak truth to power and questions to ask i do love my country's good with a respect more tender more holy and profound than mine own life shakespeare's theatre is a mirror she reflects on to us images of humanity and they make us reflect in the elizabethan we reconsider we check our beliefs the web of our life is of a mingled yarn good and ill together our remedies oft in ourselves do lie which we ascribe to heaven wisely and slow they stumble that run fast well well that sums it up really should we go then you mean shall we shog i should we shog yeah i mean shog really mysterious word because nobody knows where it came from really it um it means sort of be gone in some ways it's it's from henny the fourth part one this yeah it's one of nim's favorite expressions um and he's the only character who uses it it means no no we can't go yet then there's there's one more thing in our hour which we've got to put in is there more toil that's from park in midsummer night stranger yes remember the line from richard the second a while to work and after holiday all right okay before we go we need to talk about sleep it's mentioned sleep is mentioned you know in every play and vividly described in mcbeth sleep that knits up the raveled sleeve of care the death of each day's life saw labour's bath balm of herk mines great nature's second course chief nourisher in life's feast i love sore labour's tremendous chief nourisher in life's feast it's a great one i know i like this one from symboline as well he that sleeps feels not the toothache indeed so instead of saying just you know to somebody sleep well you know oh boring try this one from julia Caesar enjoy the honey heavy dew of slumber yes these jewels of lines we've shared with you today they make a treasure chest of everyday language so as well as the the special day language of love and longing well lines hold up a mirror in a way don't they to for us to peer into to see if there's any part of ourselves familiar or strange is visible hopefully there's well they provide the space for us to step back from taking part in life and instead to simply reflect for a while on on how we live you won't necessarily see yourself every day um but as shakespeare holds this mirror up to us and the light refracts you might get glimpses of you know loves you've known jealousies you've felt relationships you've entered into and situations you've encountered of let's bring a sort of smile or a wintz of familiarity oh there we are there we are there oh look yes gosh bang on yeah yeah we we are time's subjects and time bids be gone that's from uh henry the fourth part too but how do we leave all our goodly friends wow bye a god give you gideon no that's a bit better ben you know a fair be all thy hopes and prosperous be thy life in peace and war live and be prosperous and farewell it's not quite spox live long and prosper but it's not far off is it farewell the gods with safety stand about thee parting is such sweet sorrow it's a famous juliet bidding romeo good night shakespeed does it so well i like lepidus in antonie and clear patra let all the number of the stars give light to thy fair way and the one that we finished the book with them to thee no stars be dark yeah athesius oh athesius in a mid-seminist dream joy gentle friends joy and fresh days of love accompany your hearts or simply uh fair you all well and see you at the book signing thank you thank you so much thank you edy thank you mother well done and thank you all for coming we do have some time for questions as well and maybe if we can have a little bit of light at thank you very much we can see everyone there are some mics rolling around the room please throw your hands in the air like you just don't care my lady was first here in the third row and i'll please if you're online as well pop your questions in i think we've got a couple here already okay my name is Helen I work for UCL university creche london you say you had five thousand quotes and you're publishing one thousand what was the process to move from five to one thousand and what's happening to the four thousand we took our shirts off put on the boxing gloves and it was quite contentious from time to time i have to say um we would have our favorite i mean actually about about two thirds or more of them we've chosen the same ones you know so there's no question about that um and then the real trick was to find which one was going to be the lead quote and which ones were going to be in the commentary you know some of those commentaries that we have have four or five supporting quotes inside and that was where um well we each had our different role to play ben would try and choose quotes that would provide a kind of artistic arc to the entry and i as a linguist would be worried more about whether the language needed too much explanation you know and things like that and try to try to find some of these quotes reinforcing quotes from elsewhere in the canon the first the first process was literally going through every single play and we had like post-it notes and every time i saw a quote that i thought all that might do that that resonates in some way i put a sticker next to it and then dad had the joyful task of putting them all of these into a database and he'd put a yes or no or maybe next to them and there were a good chunk that were really nice but they really were so context-dependent they didn't quite live enough well enough by themselves yeah they've got to stand on their own two feet these now what's going to happen to the other four thousand or so this is one of the online questions as well do the discount did four thousand quotes mean that there are potentially four more volumes coming one can only hope congratulations on this beautiful book for the heart soul and mine for this lovely evening of Shakespeare sharing thank you jillian that's pretty kind of you yeah well that is you know a possibility it's taken us quite a while you know the best part of a couple of years to put this one together a lot of the issues were to do with getting the design right and i mean you know each page is only that big so we've got what 300 odd words in 50 words to play with and when the first time we did a draft sometimes it was 500 words you know so we'd have to cut it back quite a those five thousand are very much the sort of the wheat from the wheat not even the wheat from the chaff and then the one thousand are the wheat from the wheat so it wouldn't even be like a follow-up book would be the b sides they'd still be pretty good a sides actually but um yeah well but it all depends how this one sells really i mean that's a that's a publisher decision we're just authors here you know although we have just heard that they're going to turn this one into a calendar which seems quite fun as well so i know oh yeah that's right um there was another question yeah there's a couple in the front row here which of the quotes in the book would you say gains the most from being read in op oh anything with rhyme in it definitely i mean there are two sides to op one is the things that you notice because the the rhyme doesn't work you know when when um puck says in midsummer night stream and it has it two lines about stars and wars and they're supposed to rhyme you know it has to be stars and wars you know and then it works fine or flower of this purple die hit with cupids alchemy says um the the what's his name please yes um um Oberon Oberon thank you yeah you know so the rhymes are the ones that jump out at you and where you think oh you know it's easy but that's only half the story the other half of the story is the overall phonesthetic novelty of hearing familiar lines read in a certain way you see when people hear op for the first time most people say you know gosh you know we speak like that where i come from people will recognise aspects of the aesthetic the phonesthetic in their own regional accent regional dialect that's why i said the american americans on the whole were very pleased with this because of the hours after the vowel all the time you know heart and car and and they were pleased there's so many people are around the world because suddenly there's a sound of shakespeare being spoken that they naturally have are already speaking and they have an agency over speaking shakespeare and a familiarity with it rather than being told oh you don't have the right sound for shakespeare because you're not speaking received pronunciation yeah and so when you listen to a piece of op i mean you know oh for a muse of fire oh not you know oh for a muse of fire no no no no we're not we're not in that accent nothing wrong with that accent but no this is all and anybody who's welsh for example you know that's that's all you know oh i look i've got a good one for this um there's a a line in um richard the second he goes um i have been studying how i may compare this prison where i live into the world and for because the world is populist and here is not a creature but myself i cannot do it yet i'll hammer it out and that yet i'll hammer it out is half a line of shakespeare um and you can go all the way around the world and half a line of shakespeare an op so you can yet i'll hammer it out or yet i'll hammer it out in received pronunciation it would be um uh yt oil hammer it out so uh yt we don't say a yt the australian say yt we say yet yt australia oil oil oil is oil oil you'll hear that in in dublin and all over that's a part of the world hammer hammer is kind of got that strong r sound that that any southwestern people here you know devlin colm all summer says and america of course it it is just it so you already speak some original pronunciation and then out becomes ute which is canadian canadian yeah anybody from canada here you know so half a line of shakespeare you go australia ireland west country america canada yeah it's very it's got a lot of gives a lot of agency we've got a question actually to do with op here um from ansofi what was the most difficult part of recreating original pronunciation oh ben performing a sonnet in op is one of the most beautiful things i have ever heard oh thank you very much ansofi that's wonderful to hear what was the most difficult part in recreating it uh the you can say it was easy if you want yeah you know well you did actually say that it is doing recreating old accents is relatively straightforward linguistics yeah it is i mean i'm i'm standing on the shoulders of a hundred years of research here you see people have been reconstructing older pronunciations for 200 years going right back to anglos accent times you can hear old english in original pronunciation there's a website for that go to originalpronciation.com you'll hear some old english spoken in that way chaucer is often very commonly done in you know when that april with the sweet showers when that april with the chaucer the truck of march of persit or the rotor you know each each of these periods has had a lot of research into it shakespeare perhaps more than most so that wasn't the difficult part except that no reconstruction is 100 percent perfect you know so i would always say you get to about 80 or 90 percent and there's a 10 percent that it drives you crazy didn't it does it does i can't sleep because there's no evidence for it you know there are no rhymes to help you there are no spellings to help you uh people wrote books on pronunciation in shakespeare's time which is one of the big sources of evidence for op and they don't talk about this particular word you see or this particular name of a character so they were the difficult bits um there's a question in the front here hello my name is susan and i'm not english you are welcome here i'm i'm getting ready to volunteer with a group in wales who represent a late 16th century farm community and i joked that they'd have me sit in the corner and be quiet because of my accent and they said that previously they had an english uh an american volunteering so it wasn't a problem and they said that that man was designated a mute and i make bad mute i really do my question i was curious with david's comment that the american accent lends itself because of the rs in that and is there a chance that i can represent myself well in a community like that coming from an american accent oh absolutely and there are some theatres in america now where they have so fallen in love with it i mean the baltimore you know whether you know the baltimore shakespeare factory um for the last few years they've done a play in op every year i mean they've really taken it to heart and uh when op i was i was amazed that it would be taken up so much you know but um i was a bit worried to begin with i what i don't want was people to go to a shakespeare play walk out and say wasn't the op wonderful you know no then we failed you know because op is a tool to get into the play and give it a a sense of novelty freshness and a sense of ownership i mean every american actor and director i've ever talked to when i was over there doing um some work a few years ago they all said uh we many many of us felt that we couldn't get ownership ownership was the word ownership an agency and it's a tool and also a bridge i think back to a place where um it's if you want to speak shakespeare you don't have to pick up receive pronunciation and nor do we think that the future should be everyone speaking shakespeare an original pronunciation because of that familiarity because of that 10% actually that's space for people's own accents i think people the world the audiences are getting used to hearing shakespeare spoken in the accent of whoever wants to speak it and i think that original pronunciation has allowed that transition oh that's a very important point so that any if you want to speak shakespeare the right sound for it is yours your voice there isn't one oh you've heard tonight david crystals op with my background my mix of well my normal accent what is it you know i was brought up in wales i spent 10 years in liverpool and that's what you're hearing as much as anything else and so you're hearing op through me one of the first questions i got asked at shakespeare's globe in 2004 from all the actors that were there was do we drop our accents and speak your op no you keep your accent and super impose it on top of the op so in that romeo in juliet production we had a scottish juliet a a cockney nurse uh we had a actually an rp um background persons doing romeo a northern island person doing the servant and so on and this variety of course will have reflected exactly what went on on shakespeare's stage yeah 100% because the actors came from all over the country and there's another question in the house yeah there's a couple here oh and sorry gentlemen half first well thank you very much this has been a very special evening i think it'll it'll be something that i'll recall very sweetly you know this idea of holding up a mirror and it seems that shakespeare can absorb almost any age in the sense that i know after the second world war lear was the play that was most played but recently it's been a fellow i hear that a fellow in a sense speaks to the types of tensions in our society and i'm just wondering whether in the way you select things because as an actor you know playing a fellow or playing shylock or playing caliban um is a way in which we also begin to get outside our comfort zone yes um and is there a way in which you are able to sort of you know capture something of that that where it's not just about a feel good factor but something that makes one uncomfortable especially issues of yeah issues of the other and absolutely see each other yeah and thank you for speaking to that we we talk about this a bit in the introduction um there's a lot of um you know especially in the last few years there are parts of the world that are keen to put a moratorium on shakespeare why are we studying in america the or australia um the the works of a dead white colonialist male um and uh and there are lots of people that say that shakespeare's works are uh racist that they're misogynist that there's lines in it that are really really offensive and um and that's true now was he did he have those beliefs and those ideals of the and those sort of uh did he think those things about different sorts of people well first of all we're never going to know what the man himself actually thought and i think you know that's part of the reason for for writing this book and the celebration of the first folio this year is that our attention needs to be on the works and not the person who ever created them and what they thought and the brilliance of that mirror i think is that he holds it up or that in fact he doesn't hold it up he we have gifted these lines from this person we get to hold them up the we actors and performers and producers of shakespeare and authors to you all and we don't with this mirror it doesn't just reflect about the things of our species that we want to see and because we're not a nice species all the time we're pretty good at doing really horrible things to each other too and he's good at holding up the mirror to make us look at the beautiful parts of us the love and the longing and all that kind of thing but he also makes us look at the things that we should not be proud of when we've got more work to do to avoid we'll get to mars but we may not avoid that first fist fight unless we start gaining more empathy and compassion and doing some of the work and avoiding some of the choices that some of these characters make so yeah we didn't ignore them i mean there are a few pages in this book where um well they're a bit dark actually and that's fine yeah thank you thank you the question i'm from india what is the significance of the number three in shakespeare's plays you know like horror horror or three widgets where's the magic number isn't it yeah i mean actually and truly it's a fantastic rule of thumb for any comedian the third is always the funniest the three stooges and everything else and uh and has got the number has got a long history in in all sorts of magic and folklore that's why i imagine um there are the the three weird the weird sisters in mcbeth a lot of the ideas that shakespeare writes about and uses in his works were absolutely not his he was a fantastic magpie i mean feste in 12 night for instance you know one two a trollus to this cresa day you remember that bit three absolutely and so is the third um was there another question just further along so one i maybe shouldn't say this too loudly one of the best shakespeare plays i've seen was not in english um but in polish which is my mother tongue and um it was translated into modern polish which was obviously easier for me to understand do you have any any opinions on when shakespeare is translated or experience of this and and how you view it and as a little aside do you have any favorite misquotes of shakespeare or mis misattributions of shakespeare well um you can maybe do the misquotes but uh some of the best productions that i've seen in the last 20 years were were not in english um one of the most startling productions of pericles i have a saw was in japanese the best production of marry wise of windsor i have a saw was in slavakian um and there's a real joy to going to see shakespeare in a language that isn't english because i think partly going to see shakespeare in english i remember the midsummer night stream that they did at stratford and then in in london and around the world with half a dozen from india you know with half a dozen languages in there as well as as well as english i think you're really released from how are they going to say that line if you know the play particularly and is there any kind of idea of op when it's translated is that in anyone's mind oh you mean when the when they're translating shakespeare into other languages well i was just working in turkey uh in istanbul with the shakespeare company out there and um this is a common thing actually the translators often have a choice of whether to translate for sense or for poetry and you're always going to lose one thing or another a friend of mine was translating uh midsummer night's dream into japanese which doesn't have rhyme and of course every time the lovers start talking about love or the forest in midsummer night's dream they switch to rhyme so he um i think he decided to adapt uh towards a sort of haiku rhythm to emulate the similar sort of effect that shakespeare has so translators have a deal with the job with translating shakespeare and that's for misquotations well one of the things you have to remember is that in shakespeare's day the concept didn't exist i mean today if somebody misquotes people can say look it's in the book here get the line right dear boy you know but no books in shakespeare's day the actors didn't have a sense of the whole play you do a lot of this bend don't you when you do your quick raise plays and you give the actors just their cue scripts in other words just their lines you use the analogy of an orchestra a lot don't you um that uh all the musicians in an orchestra they only have their own part they don't have the overall score and it's the same in shakespeare's day the actors had their individual parts and so and they only had two or three days to prepare uh this is something ben does a lot of you can talk to you about that if you like um but the thing is so if an actor goes on stage and forgets a line or misquotes it nobody would know and nobody would care particularly particularly they care if you screw up the last line of their speech because that's their cue but that's their cue for the next one yes absolutely that's right so we we have a much more liberal approach to the whole operation and that's very important for the book because when we offer you a quote we don't mean use it exactly as is in the book we mean adapt it to your own circumstances you know change he to she or whatever it might be you know and things like that hey we've got a question here from um sarah uh sarah uh it's my cousin go on this is a good one for you dad what is your least favorite play and why oh i don't have a least i knew you were going to say that uh nor do i have a favorite one i knew you were going to say that i mean the one the one that's my favorite uh is is always the one i happen to be studying at the moment in studying at the moment yeah and and i don't i'm afraid i can't i can't give you any satisfaction merry wise of windsor all's well that ends well terrible play and i don't have a lot of time for love's labors lost but that being said even these plays in the corners of the canner that you'd never read because why would you read a play anyway right but you'd rarely go to sea because very few people produce it um and there's not a lot going on in it to take from it but even those plays i've got a new appreciation for because of doing this book i mean that that surprise that we wrote into the script about henry the fourth is real there's some really great lines in that play yeah um is there a there a couple more questions in the room up there oh and there's one oh sorry i just had a quick question one i just wanted to thank both of you because i use your publications and the videos in the classroom all the time oh great and to see the kids kind of light up and see how the language can say what they are feeling as you stated we are missing so much oracy in education so as a drum and English teacher thank you both power to you um and um self-serving question this book seems like it would be amazing in the classroom do you have any or maybe it's a public publication question but do you have any idea of or any plans to maybe do some outreach with schools using this book as a foundation i go into schools at least once or twice a month and um we can certainly talk about that afterwards if you'd like to be glad to yeah uh right there and i and i don't you used to i used to do a lot but you know a bit decrepit far you know i'm going to hear a lot about that yes please um oh i've got a question first for that's okay yeah of course um i think you said no quotes from edwin the fourth edwin the third edwin the third king edwin the third yeah how come yeah in fact that is a question that we had uh online as well why is edwin the third not included father yeah well in shakespeare's see when we first started working together ben and i we did this book called shakespeare's words a glossary and language companion and uh for that we cast our net very wide and worried about the question of how many plays on the so-called periphery possibly by other authors should we include because just to be clear it's the 400th anniversary of the first folio there are 36 plays in that book 18 of them were not published during shakespeare's lifetime they were decided by the actors that edited it that they that those 36 would be in in the last 20 years that we've been working together the total number of shakespeare's plays went officially from 36 to 37 to 38 to 39 and then back to 38 yeah now at the time you know we're all we're all human and i'd just been to see a splendid production of king edwin the third at strathford and was completely bowled over by the shakespearian bits in that enough i thought that and we had a good latter about it yeah let's let's put it in but it's the only one of that range of marginal plays that we dared to do now over the years we've we've you know followed the the climate of opinion really and so many of these um co-authored plays or are they by shakespeare at all they've been sort of put into a separate kind of category by the scholars who do this kind of thing all the time so we felt in the end that maybe that wasn't one of the ones that should be alongside the others because you just don't know actually we may have put in some i mean henry the eighth for instance or two noble kinsman or two noble kinsman may it was maybe we've put in a bit of Fletcher or middleton you know we you say we're only human there's the last complete works i think by oh god was it oxford or someone they they put all the works through a computer and the computer decided based on the computational linguistics algorithms that they can do now it wasn't before AI uh by looking at the word shakespeare tends to use was this line more likely or less likely by shakespeare and they came up with all sorts of different things but um yeah um i there's one great scene in it with the third that's worth a read but the rest not so much hello um my name's amy and i run shakespeare workshops in prison oh where i bring an extract and then we have discussion and a lot of the quotes you've mentioned i've used but i wonder what kind of lesser known quotes might come to mind that you think might be particularly powerful in that context make not your thoughts your prisons well i have used that one yeah that's fantastic where there's a um uh kurt tofflund is it i think the american shakespeare in prisons work i'm going to san quentin in august to do more of it so and i've just been out working in sydney with bell shakespeare who have a fantastic education programme all over the country and for a few years they went into juvenile detention centres as well there is i mean there is power and resonance in shakespeare of of that will offer some great and deep reflection for us all and it seems to be particularly nurturing and nourishing to folk in intense situations like that of all ages and situations so it's a fantastic work that you're doing i mean what we'd like to know is what what you find when you do that yeah absolutely tell us um i think it's just so powerful because of you know in prison again there are a lot of people that can't read and write and may think shakes is very inaccessible but the themes just resonate so intensely that they pick it up and it's amazing to watch um i mean you know themes of guilt and revenge and thoughts of like is salvation possible and blood on my hands all of that just becomes so meaningful yeah absolutely yeah thank you for that done in a very safe and careful and supported way um getting to discuss mcbeth with people that have actually you know experienced what it is to take a life it's it's can be profound yeah yeah power to you and we've got one last question in the room a lady at the front right here you mentioned earlier that students today don't have to um memorise long lines or long plays uh a section sections of plays as you did do you think the teachers think that shakespeare is not as important as they used to be or the students are just aren't interested and so they say well let's just you know skip over that and what's the trend today with the younger people are they more interested in shakespeare or less i think i mean thank you for that it's a really great question uh i would first of all stand up for the teachers who are around the world are going through incredible terrible things first of all they're not being paid nearly enough for the jobs that they're doing just like the nurses in the hospitals and the doctors too um as as um uh all the writer the western said you know schools should be cathedrals teachers should be on six figure salaries so should the doctors and nurses they the teachers in this country in australia and america are leaving their profession in droves partly because we're experiencing a mental health crisis as a result of the pandemic and the isolation that is causing the need for so much um pastoral care of these young minds that are struggling to deal with having lost years of their young life and sociability and that kind of thing so yeah i think the teachers are interested and i don't think it's the the next generation's faults that um that they have had to go through this experience without sufficient support from from us all let alone we don't really understand fully the degrees to which our minds are being changed and our attention is being lost from these wonderful weapons of mass distraction um that are great tools but have become terrible toys and um i think uh you know again with the way that the world's turning everyone is thinking about needing to earn money and i can testify to the fact that the arts and theater are not great sources of um finance so uh they are as i said earlier some of the first parts of education to to go and to be cut and we are not gifting the next generations with the power to speak but then so it's it's a very tricky time but i do think that it's they are valuable works we need to give them more space yeah and i've seen you do it i mean i've i've i've seen a class uh say shakespeare is not for us boring ben goes in and does a day's workshop the end of the day they are going shakespeare is fantastic you know can we do some more it all depends how it's done shakespeare on the page no shakespeare on the stage yes and if you can why i tattooed that line on my arm that was my own experience yeah that's right it can be done you can change young minds that are against shakespeare in a day or in a few hours really if it's done in the right way and there's an awful lot of actors and there are some in the room here now who do this kind of thing through their education projects as part of their theater work and incredible number of teachers some in this room right now that have the passion in the heart to do this we've just got to be able to give them the time the space and the funds to do it better time to the question thank you all for coming today a massive thank you to ben and david thank you to our online audience for joining us and to you guys here in the pigot theatre at the British Library ben and and david are going to be outside signing copies of their books do keep your eyes on the British Library what's on website because there's lots more exciting and wonderful events coming your way in the autumn thank you very much thank you