Peter Hall was just organizing the Royal Shakespeare Company. It was going to be an ensemble, it was going to be in repertory, it was going to have a home in London as well as in the Midlands, and all of those things were happening at that time.
I'm sure if Shakespeare were alive today, he'd be doing classic guitar solos on YouTube.
When I was 16, we moved to live in Stratford-Upon-Avon. That was the year of Paul Scofield's 'Lear.' I think he is still widely perceived as the only actor who has got his flag at the top of the mountain.
Mr. William Shakespeare was born at Stratford upon Avon in the county of Warwick. His father was a butcher, and I have been told heretofore by some of the neighbors, that when he was a boy he exercised his father's trade, but when he killed a calf he would do it in a high style and make a speech. Ben Jonson and he did gather humors of men daily wherever they came.
The thing that I had saved up for myself and wanted most to bring off was a fully fledged professional production of Hamlet at the Royal Shakespeare Theater in Stratford.
In actual fact, I doubled 'Twelfth Night' and 'The Avengers'. I was going backwards and forwards to Stratford. I played matinees Wednesday, matinee and evenings Saturdays, and the other days of the week, I was filming in Elstree.
Nobody knows anything about Shakespeare the person. It's all legend, it is all rumor.
Most Britons, and most Americans as well, either thought the Globe was in Stratford-Upon-Avon or didn't know where it was at all.
Entirely incidentally, a little-known fact about Shakespeare is that his father moved to Stratford-upon-Avon from a nearby village shortly before his son's birth. Had he not done so, the Bard of Avon would instead be known as the rather less ringing Bard of Snitterfield.
Gordon Ramsay grew up in a tourist town, Stratford-Upon-Avon, but in a part tourists don't visit - a council estate: a concrete bunker subsidized by the local government, synonymous with deprivation and blight.
I'd love to meet Shakespeare. I've done so much research on him and there are so many unanswered questions.
And it is a very beautiful idea, and possibly true, that a common man from Stratford with a common education was able to write these plays.
I look on myself as a sort of hybrid, having grown up in the world of Shakespeare out in the cornfields of Ohio.
Frankly, the British always looked at this as a dumpy industrial area, but this was where Shakespeare lived and wrote and performed some of his greatest works.
James Agate, a great critic of the day, advised me that the way to learn your job properly was to learn Shakespeare, so I went to Stratford. It really sorts out the men from the boys.
I started off as a theatre designer, and by some extraordinary circumstance I saw something in Stratford-upon-Avon, and realized that that's the kind of design I want, but also that that's the kind of designer I'll never be.
