What kind of a man was Shakespeare?
I've always thought," says Simon Callow ruminatively, "that Shakespeare was the kind of guy who goes to a party, nurses one glass, says nothing, and goes home with the prettiest girl in the room."
I imagine 1,000 biographers keeling over in horror. But Callow isn't joking. His new one-man show, which debuted last year in Edinburgh and is about to open at Trafalgar Studios in London, brings audiences face to face with the middle-class Midlands boy who grew up to be the world's most famous writer. The title is serious enough: it's called Being Shakespeare.
There is, however, a rival Bard in town. At the Young Vic, Patrick Stewart is reviving his performance as the playwright in Edward Bond's 1973 play Bingo – a revival that one critic praised for its "truly Shakespearian greatness". The Bardic battle is on: if they feel so inclined, Londoners will be able to do a direct compare-and-contrast.
Fictional representations of Shakespeare aren't unfamiliar: Anthony Burgess's 1964 novel Nothing Like the Sun spun a fantastical retelling of Shakespeare's love life, while the last story Rudyard Kipling ever wrote,Proofs of Holy Writ, worked up the eccentric theory that Shakespeare and Ben Jonson did an emergency rewrite of the King James Bible. Then, of course, there was 1998's Shakespeare in Love, which made an entire generation of moviegoers want to investigate Joseph Fiennes's codpiece...
