PHILLIP ADAMS
And at the height of naturalism, you get, say, a soliloquy from Hamlet, has to be the greatest sort of existential statement I've ever read, and that would have been delivered how?
JOHN BELL
I wonder about that one. You see, I think that soliloquy doesn't really belong in the play. I think it's a bit of a speech he wrote out somewhere and he stuck it into Hamlet 'cause it comes in a very odd place in the play.
PHILLIP ADAMS
Works like a charm, though.
JOHN BELL
Of course, absolutely. But almost any character in Shakespeare could say that speech. But I imagine it would have been said to the audience very directly, like call-and-response, you know. 'To be or not to be? That is the question.' And looking at the audience and waiting for an answer and then teasing it out and making them think, taking them with you, certainly not as a brown study, or as a piece of oratory, but really sort of question and answer — 'What do you think?'
PHILLIP ADAMS
John is sitting opposite me. John Bell. The book On Shakespeare, a personal insight into the magnificent world of Shakespeare, the man and his writing. Some years ago when I was churning out joke books, we decided to do one on knock-knock jokes.
JOHN BELL
Mm-hm.
PHILLIP ADAMS
And bugger me, Shakespeare wrote the first knock-knock jokes. The porter scene in the middle of Macbeth. Wildly, hilariously funny. In a sense, it's another paradox in the context of the tragedy, but it intensifies the tragedy around it while giving the audience a break.
JOHN BELL
Yeah, a little kind of break, but also it mounts the tension of the piece because Macbeth's just heard the knocking on the door and he rushes off to wash his hands and this knocking continues, and you think, 'For Christ's sake, someone answer that door!' And who's gonna come in? What's gonna happen? He's gonna get caught with blood on his hands. So it's a great kind of teaser as well. But, of course, it goes back to the old medieval plays, the everyman plays, that begins with a, 'Knock, knock.' 'Who's there?' 'Death,' is the answer. And that's how Hamlet begins, with the line, 'Who's there?' And the answer is, 'Death.'
PHILLIP ADAMS
John, someone's knocking on the studio door! We won't open it. This is LNL on RN. OK, look, I want you to come clean. Clearly he didn't write the plays. Who really wrote Shakespeare? Wasn't it the Earl of Oxford?
JOHN BELL
Well, the Earl of Oxford died, unfortunately, in 1604 before the last 12 plays were written, so it's highly unlikely.
PHILLIP ADAMS
Well, no, he just did them posthumously and someone channelled them.
JOHN BELL
A ghost-writer. Yeah.
PHILLIP ADAMS
Very good.
JOHN BELL
And Marlowe died in 1593 before the last 30 plays were written, so I think you can rule him out as well. But I think the greatest insult to writing — and you as a writer, you should appreciate this — that anybody, some aristocrat, can sit down in his spare time and rattle off a play like Hamlet or King Lear in his spare time. You don't do that. You don't write War And Peace in your spare time. You don't paint the Sistine Chapel on your weekend off. You know, it takes years and years of training and skill. As Ben Jonson said about Shakespeare, 'A great poet is not just born, but made,' and he says, 'In Shakespeare, you sweated at it,' he says in his dedication. And he did. You… Playwriting's a very difficult craft. I've been working with writers now for a long time, and you have to work on the floor with the actors, you rewrite and rewrite and, you know, play off, see what the audience thinks of it, and you go home and rewrite it again. You don't do it in your spare time, no matter how much of a genius. You've got to be a practitioner.
PHILLIP ADAMS
You write that he'd write out his whole play and then cut it down to a performance script about two hours long. The stage manager got the original, while actors individual parts were copied and handed out, a bit like getting your pages for a feature-film shoot.
JOHN BELL
Very much so. Two reasons — it was too expensive to print off, say, 20 copies. Bloody expensive exercise. But the more important reason was that the actors couldn't run off and flog it to a rival company. There was no copyright, and once you had the play, you had the right to perform it, so they jealously guarded their prompt copy, the original. Even so, actors could listen in the wings and jot down the lines as best they could and they'd still run off and flog them to a rival company, and that's where we get some rather garbled versions of early Shakespeare plays. They were pirated.
PHILLIP ADAMS
They could write them down, but they could also, of course, remember, and the greatest gift of the thespian, something which I've never been able to comprehend is how someone like you can — if you'll forgive the vulgarism — can hoover in these vast tracts of language and remember them, effectively, for your entire working life.
JOHN BELL
Well, it's partly if you love it, it's easy to remember and you keep reciting it to yourself. You know, it's like having your favourite pop song you sing over and over in your head or your favourite aria or whatever, you do love the stuff. But it's easy to learn in that it's got rhyme, it's got meter, it's like learning nursery rhymes. When kids are very tiny, they love nursery rhymes because they can make patterns in their brains as poetry. But, of course, in Shakespeare's day, all learning was by rote. They would learn great tracts of Ovid and Seneca and Plutarch at school…
PHILLIP ADAMS
So the mind was trained to be retentive.
JOHN BELL
Rote learning, we don't have much anymore.
PHILLIP ADAMS
Well, now we've got Google, don't we?
JOHN BELL
Absolutely.
PHILLIP ADAMS
So you don't need to know anything.
JOHN BELL
No, you don't.