And the last time I played Hamlet—this is a digression, but it’s about the soliloquies—it’s about that soliloquy—I was—it was in Sidney, Australia, at Her Majesty’s theater, and we were coming to the end of a long, long tour, and our interval in the play was at the end of the rogue-and-peasant-slave soliloquy, at the end of the arrival of the players.  And so we started the second half with the nunnery scene.  So the first thing Hamlet has to do in the second half is, “To be or not to be.”  And I was standing in the wings and thinking, “This is the soliloquy that everyone knows”—well, they know the first line.  They might know the first two lines.  But this is the one they are waiting for.  This is the one that they will say with you.  What happened—what would happen if you forgot it?  (Laughter.)  And it was an idle speculation.  And I went on, and I started, and I forgot it.  (Laughter.)  And automatic pilot took over—it came out.  I kept talking, and the soliloquy came out.  But I had no idea what was coming next.  And so terrified was I that my—every pore in my body opened, and sweat poured out of me—my face, my body—poured out.  And it happened again the following night—not in the same place.

        What I had done, and what I will never do again—even talking about it is a bit scary. What I had done was I put a worm of doubt in my mind, which had never existed before.  I questioned by saying, “What if I forget it?”  I played it 300 and seventy-odd times by then.  I had questioned by saying that to myself my ability to act, my desire to act, my love of acting.  And when people say to me, you know, “How do you get up and stand up in front of a thousand people?,” and “How do you remember all those words?,” they were silly questions to me—I mean, that’s what I did.  But I mean suddenly, Yeah, how do I get up in front of a thousand people?  How do I remember those words?  And that worm in my head stayed with me for three years.  I had in fact caught stage fright, and it was a terrifying time—terrifying time.

        And it happens to lots of actors.  I had discovered later that it had happened to even the greatest of them, Sir Laurence.  And in those years he was playing Othello, he was combatting stage fright, which is a disease—which is awful.  I mean, you just imagine you are going to fall over.  You go out onto the stage, and you are gripped with a gut-rotting terror—not the apprehension that the actor can use—not the excitement and the apprehension that goads an actor to do his best, but actually catatonic, mind-numbing, and body paralyzing terror.

        And I remember when Sir Laurence was playing Shylock at the National Theatre, and I was playing Graciano (sp) in Jonathan Miller’s (sp) production many years ago, and Graciano (sp) has this speech to Shylock in a court scene, a very passionate, violent speech at Shylock.  And Sir Laurence called me into his dressing room and said, “Baby, darling, when you do that speech to me, don’t look in my eyes—look at my forehead, look at my chin—but don’t eyeball me.”  I wasn’t to question him.  I said, “Yes, sir, of course I won’t look in your eyes.”  But I didn’t realize then that the reason he said that, because he had this disease.  And when you contact—when you make contact and you’re in that state it can throw you off balance unbelievably.  I digressed, but I—it’s a thing that happens to many actors, and it’s a horrible thing.

        Another actress friend of mine—it often happens when you’re having a success.  It often happens when you are kind of riding a wave.  This actress friend of mine was in London—(inaudible)—production of (“A Song Time”?), a musical about Sweeney Todd.  And she had it.  She had to mock up a faint.  She hit the deck, and the company manager came up and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, this actress is ill, she can’t continue.”  She wasn’t ill at all, and she could continue.  She was terrified, and the only way to get out of it was to pretend to faint.  And that’s the situation you get in.  Many actors have it.

        And it took me three years to get out of it.  I get out of it by fulfilling an—I had always wanted to go to Stratford on Avon, I always wanted to be part of the Royal Shakespeare Company.  And the call came, and the call was to do four wonderful plays.  And I thought if I don’t accept this offer I will never walk on the stage again.  And I did accept the offer, and the first night of the first one was the “Much Ado” that eventually came to Broadway, and I should never forget that night, walking out onto a—it was a glass set, glass walls, the men were all in high heals or Restoration shoes.  It was like walking into space.  And again every pore opened, and I battled through.  I battled through.  And eventually, eventually, it started to recede and started to disappear.  I get little bouts of it now and then, and I’ll stop (looking after it?)—it will come back.  (Laughter.)

        MR. SAMMON:  There’s a lot of talk these days in the United States about reassessing the need to teach the classics, the great books.  We have all genuflected so long at the sound of Shakespeare’s name.  Is there real worth of spending months of each academic year studying the lines, the imagery, the use of symbolism.  Is the play doomed to be dry and boring when studied line by line?  Should they be viewed onstage and as a movie only, and never presented as text to students?  

        SIR DEREK:  No, not at all.  I think they live as much on the page as on the stage.  Shakespeare wrote for the stage, and of course they come alive on the stage.  And perhaps a moving image is more delightful to the senses and more immediately available to the mind than words on a page.  I as an actor of course am privileged in that that is my work.  The study of a text for me is a wonderful opportunity to read, to get to know those plays, to find what is behind those lines.  And of course Shakespeare’s plays are open to so many different interpretations that it’s a rich voyage of discovery and you never discover all that is in those texts.  I do—I think it is difficult—much more difficult for people who are not actors, who are not part of the performing arts, to only read those texts.  Children are particularly vulnerable to do this.  Your first meeting with those plays when you are young is a very, very difficult time, because unless your attention is grabbed immediately—unless you have a very sensitive teacher, a very caring teacher with those texts, then Shakespeare can become an immediate bogeyman and remain so for the rest of a child’s life, because Shakespeare and those texts become associated with questions on examinations, with learning when you don’t want to learn—learning lines and then the recitation of lines when you don’t know what they mean.  So the teaching of Shakespeare is very difficult and very, very important.

        If the child can be got to the stage where the words themselves are as beautiful and as moving as the spoken word and the moving image, then that is the ideal situation.  But it is very difficult.  It is very rewarding if you can actually manage to get to that state, because I find just on the page the words appear beautiful.  They have a bloom of poetry about them, like the grape—the bloom on a grape—I always see that when I read the poetry.

        I think one of the ways to do it is to present the poetry of Shakespeare as prose, and to present the prose of Shakespeare as poetry.  In a sense that’s what I try to do when I act it.  It’s not to deny the poetry of the poetry—that is there.  That is I think almost indelible.  And it’s like finding—when you are playing a king in Shakespeare, you don’t play the king, you play the man inside the king.  And when you are playing a man in Shakespeare you play the king inside the man.  And I think it’s the same with the text.  But it’s difficult.  And unless it’s started early it’s very difficult to acquire it later on.

        But there are also some actors and performers who have the ability to communicate to people a love of Shakespeare late in life.  I am very pleased and proud that people have come up to me and said, you know, “Until I saw you do this, or heard you say that it never meant anything to me.  But I realize I could understand him.”  The whole essence to me is to make those texts accessible and understandable.  If thereby you have to in performances alter the punctuation, I am all for that—a healthy respect for punctuation is number one on my list.  (Laughter.)  If you want to move the comma, if you want to move the full stop—if you want to make it sound—mean something else, by all means do it.  It keeps the text alive.  If you present the text always as meaning the same thing every time I think it deadens it.  I know again scholars might—and I look at Dr. Gundesheimer (sp) over there behind me.  (Laughter.)  I think anything to keep the text alive and fresh and new.

        And this is why I think our “Hamlet” film was such a brave thing to do, because it was not only for us, but it was on film.  And you’re not really used to listening so much on film—you’re looking—but with that you have to listen obviously.  And you hear many of the lines that people have never heard before.  And I think that is to be highly commended.  A film like “Romeo and Juliet,” “William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet,” as its title is, is wonderful, because it brings the younger generation to Shakespeare.  I only hope that they will go on after that to the real thing, because the real thing is harder, but ultimately it’s more rewarding, because ultimately it is different.  And it’s fine to present Shakespeare in terms—in current terms—but there is more to it than that.