July 12, 2008,

Everyone who studies Shakespeare should actually perform Shakespeare. Playwrights in particular should perform Shakespeare, to get the swooping daring of his lines, like the flight of swallows. Some lines and particular moments are actually quite bad. Wording so awkward it must have been perversely intentional. Passages so brittley and snobbily witty you hate everyone who’s speaking. But the whole is so wonderful you actually feel the sensation of slack moments pulling into line and becoming part of an unassailable structure. Touchstone is over-clever and unnecessarily obscure. Ask him a question and he’s the bore’s bore. I suppose he was so even in his author’s time. But the effect of this is to display the actual process of human thought, the private, the inane sinking back into the well of the utterly dark, then coming forth, radiant, in true if episodic wisdom.

Auditioned for Doctor Faustus. Don’t know why. Maybe as a courtesy to Jason. Maybe because I’m having fun at Montford Park. Never imagined that happening. It is one example of an institution which drew deep breath and went forward revitalized once its founder had gone.