Epilogue: Eight Decades with Shakespeare – and More

Summary

I have been going to see performances of Shakespeare’s plays since the 1940s, and have seen most of the plays many times, in a wide range of production styles, on film and television as well as on the stage. I have seen some of them played in French, in German, in Swedish, in Romanian, in Hungarian, in Polish, in Greek, in Japanese, in Chinese, and in Russian. I have seen them given in pure and in heavily adapted texts. Early in my career I was a schoolmaster, struggling with the problems of making Shakespeare understandable, and if possible enjoyable, to the young. Later I taught Shakespeare in universities both in England and overseas. On being appointed director of the Shakespeare Institute of the University of Birmingham I became, I believe, the first ever Professor of Shakespeare Studies – there are quite a lot of them now.