A question from Kiri: which one of the tales did you find hardest to write?
It surprised me, this. I found all his comedies extraordinarily difficult to write,
to retell. Midsummer Night's Dream, Twelfth Night, Winter's Tale,
if you can call it a comedy, but I found that they are really, really complicated.
People always dressing up in someone else's clothes:
men were becoming women, women becoming men.
You really don't know where you are at all and that's the fun of it.
Now on a stage, if you can imagine,
you can see it in front of you and it all makes perfect sense,
but all I've got is words on the page and that's harder.
I found that really quite difficult.
And they are so complicated, those stories, and you have to tell it in such a way that doesn't sound too complicated.
At one point in one of these stories, I even apologise for it being complicated.
But you've kind of got to sort of lose your spirit of worry about it and just tell it.
So let me just tell you how I began Twelfth Night, which is a very complicated story
because people will dress up as someone else, okay, and then that does all sorts of things to the plot,
which are really funny but it has to be done lightly.
Here, this is how it begins, Twelfth Night. "Twins are not always identical, of course,
but of those that are, some are born more identical than others.
Sebastian and Viola - everyone said it - were like peas in a pod.
They could not be told apart even though one was a boy and the other a girl.
And they didn't simply look the spitting image of each other; they were like one another in much more than that."
The whole point of beginning it like that is that you have to understand.
If you do not understand that they are really, really identical but a different sex, then none of the story makes sense at all.
So it's sort of like a statement: "Understand this, reader!"
And so that's what I've done. And I love working it, working it out on paper,
trying to make it light and fluffy.
Yet it's important: there are serious things going on.
I mean, there's things about all Shakespeare plays I find quite difficult.
Sometimes in the middle of laughing, I am wondering why I'm laughing,
because what I'm seeing actually isn't that funny.
It's troubling and a bit funny. There's a man in Twelfth Night - look for him -
who's, I don't know, he's a sort of a butler. He's the person who runs the house.
He's called Malvolio and he's really a pretty unpleasant fellow.
He's extremely supercilious and arrogant and pompous
and the people around him don't like him and they bring him down, you know?
They tease him and tease him and tease him, and in the end you feel - they even imprison him at one point -
and at the end you feel sorry for this man. So Shakespeare always does this;
he will not be predictable. So it makes you feel all the time that,
you know, "What am I laughing at here? Am I really laughing at these people, these rather sort of rich layabouts,
who are not doing very much, just spending their time teasing this unfortunate man?"
Yeah, he's a pain in the neck and all but it makes you worry about yourself
and I think that's what's wonderful about all his comedies, is that they're not really what we call comedies.
They're not giggle-giggle laugh-laugh: other stuff is going on as well, which makes you worry,
which makes you think. You never come out of a Shakespeare play without thinking,
which is of course the sign of a great work of art,
whether it's a book or a play. Anyway, so yes, the comedies
are the most difficult, that's for sure. In a sense the tragedies are clearer.
You know where the story is leading and you can tell it more directly
but the comedies sometimes - I didn't curse Shakespeare
but I did wish sometimes he was slightly less complicated.