Imaginative approach to Shakespeare works

http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2016/jan/03/imaginative-approach-to-shakespeare-works

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The Guardian suggests that Shakespeare should have one of his less well-known plays produced at Stratford-upon-Avon during this 400th anniversary (This year, more than ever, the play’s the thing, 1 January). I would like to see Julius Caesar. Caesar’s vacillation, some critics have written, was borrowed from Queen Elizabeth. This could be nicely challenged if the play were preceded by Bernard Shaw’s The Dark Lady of the Sonnets, in which Shakespeare’s words are all spoken by the Queen and then hurriedly copied down by Shakespeare.Michael HolroydLondon

• Your leader suggests that we could treat Shakespeare more imaginatively. Having recently consulted the Vaughans’ Arden edition of The Tempest and their Shakespeare’s Caliban: A Cultural History, I could not agree more. Both works reveal readings and performances of the dramatist’s swan song as a solo act that locate the play just about everywhere except England and cast Caliban in just about every conceivable form from feral savage to martyred New World victim of Old World colonialism but never as, say, a landless, English labourer of collectivist philosophy dispossessed by an acquisitive, privatising Prospero. Such an approach, I assure readers, is entirely consistent with the play’s text. I would suggest that such an omission is, to say the least, anomalous, baffling and crying out for remedy.Davie LaingEdinburgh

• Re your new year editorial and John Davies’ suggestion (Letters, 2 January) that we learn more Shakespeare to recite internally when dispirited by current events, we could do worse than take up Bobby Kennedy’s practice, which started when he became attorney general and continued until the end of his life, of listening to recordings of Shakespeare’s plays while he was shaving and playing with his children in the morning (as remarked on by Robert Caro in his biography of Lyndon Johnson, volume 4, page 238).Francis O’NeillKeighley, West Yorkshire

• You report that the Bard of Stratford’s old school room is to be restored and opened to the public (He’s our man, says Stratford, as the world (minus North Korea) salutes Shakespeare, 1 January).

My father and two of his brothers were pupils at the King Edward School in the 30s and well enough versed in Shakespeare to be tasked at times with showing tourists around the school, especially the old school room, at some time also my father’s. During the proposed restoration, desks may still be found with “WS” incised on them in convincing 16th-century script. Many gullible – predominantly US – visitors were happy to part with copper, and sometimes silver, to be shown Shakespeare’s “original” school desk by these enterprising forgers. “He is well paid that is well satisfied” (The Merchant of Venice).Christine HillierHemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire