I confess it: Tish, thought I; surely I did rather well on my Shakespeare paper in Part One of Tripos? Wasn’t my USP my access to the text as it would be on stage? Hadn’t I actually got rather a decent idea of all this stuff, and hadn’t I in some ways rather less to learn that some of these people?

Naturally, and as is generally to be expected in life when one feels too sure of one’s own competence a long time after last exercising it, I was utterly, completely, and embarrassingly wrong.

Within ten minutes of the start, I’d remembered that, set against every inward textual thought I’d ever had whilst contemplating the performance of Shakespeare from my university sofa, there existed the actual production of it for an audience- a group of people who collectively constituted the fundamental reason I as an actor am on the stage, and whose presence profoundly inflects every turn of phrase or the foot. What the Riverside Shakespeare describes (with its own distinctive dry humour) as “bawdy quibbles” turned into the most outrageous innuendos. The driest, flattest text with the least connection between the characters on the page pops up into a fast, witty, and far from trivial construction that holds the audience spellbound and reshapes the stage for those on it as well as those around it.

Essentially, I’m saying I got rather over-excited by the whole thing and thoroughly enjoyed it. Bring me a board. I wish to tread it.