I’ve brushed up my Shakespeare - all 37 plays done and dusted. So I’m one up on the new artistic director of The Globe!

A Midsummer Night's Dream

The introduction to my Kindle edition of the The Complete Plays of William Shakespeare informs us that few people nowadays read the three parts of Henry VI unless they’ve set themselves the task of reading all of Shakespeare’s plays “like an obstacle course.” Well, I recently completed that obstacle course - and I thoroughly enjoyed Henry VI, Pts. 1, 2 & 3. I think the first Shakespeare play I read was Julius Caesar, for O-level, so getting from its opening line - “Hence! home, you idle creatures get you home” - to the last lines of Henry VIII - “All the best men are ours; for 'tis ill hap,/ If they hold when their ladies bid 'em clap” (which were presumably written by collaborator, John Fletcher) took me half a century.

Having read all of Shakespeare, I am ahead of the new artistic director of the Globe Theatre, Emma Rice, who leaves the Cornish theatre company, Kneehigh, to take up her new role next month:  “I have tried to sit down with Shakespeare but it doesn’t work. I get very sleepy and then suddenly I want to listen to The Archers.” I was reminded of the bit in the Mike Leigh television drama, Abigail’s Party, when Ange’s husband Laurence refers to the Collected Works of Shakespeare on his bookshelf: “Our nation's culture. Not something you can actually read, of course.” So, in 40 years we’ve gone from poking mild fun at people who revere Shakespeare without having read him, to appointing one of them as artistic director of the Globe Theatre. Dumbing down? No fear!

Fortunately, though, despite her lack of acquaintance with the actual plays (apart from Cymbeline, which she has produced - well done, you!), Ms Rice is an admirer: “He was the greatest poet, writer and storyteller of all time. It is an adventure for me … I’ve got the world of Shakespeare to discover and to enjoy.” How nice for you, dear! Nothing like learning on the job.

Ms Rice’s angle (you have to have an angle to get on these days) appears to be Wimmin. Shockingly, only 16% of the characters in Shakespeare possess a vagina. So Emma (Em?) is going to redress the balance by casting female actors in male roles. Maybe one of the Archers' characters in a storyline about one of Lynda Snell’s amateur dramatic productions mentioned that in olden times all the women’s parts were played my men, and Emma thought, “Hey, sisters, I’ve got a great idea…?” Anyway, as Em notes, “if anybody bended gender it was Shakespeare.” What’s the betting that the Globe stage will be graced by a transgender actor before too long? In case we’re in any doubt that Emma is obsessive about Wimmin, her first season will see a staging of Cymbeline (i.e. the one play she definitely knows) - only it’ll be retitled Imogen, because, you see, the main character is Cymbeline's daughter, Imogen. Because, that’s really important, right? And she doesn’t see why Gloucester in King Lear (hey, why not retitle it Three Sisters? What - Chekhov? No, doesn’t ring a bell) shouldn’t be played by a woman. Actually, there’s nothing to stop you giving the role to a heavily-accented lesbian Kenyan dwarf with a hare-lip and a club-foot - it would make the Guardian and the BBC's pants stick out. (Oops - bit of a gender-specific image there.)

In the unlikely event that Emma can tear herself away from radio soap operas long enough to bother actually, you know, reading the plays (Pro-Plus might help, love), she might discover that Shakespeare plays are absolutely stuffed with superb roles for women, and they don’t all droop around wanly like Ophelia: most of them are tough, resourceful, wisecracking, strong-willed, powerful women who are usually much brighter than the men - and in amongst the lovely, soft, ultra-feminine ones are some truly terrifying “unsexed” monsters, and quite a few lovable old dears (nurses, innkeepers and suchlike) and some benevolent aged wise women. Okay, I realise getting Emma to read the plays might be asking too much, but here’s a Wikipedia list (I suspect Wikipedia is more her level) of notable female Shakespearian characters:

Beatrice, in Much Ado About Nothing
Bianca, in The Taming of the Shrew
Celia, in As You Like It
Cleopatra, in Antony and Cleopatra
Cordelia, in King Lear
Cressida, in Troilus and Cressida
Desdemona, in Othello
Gertrude, in Hamlet
Goneril, in King Lear
Hermia, in A Midsummer Night's Dream
Helena, in A Midsummer Night's Dream
Hero, in Much Ado About Nothing
Hermione, in A Winter's Tale
Hippolyta, in A Midsummer Night's Dream
Imogen, in Cymbeline
Isabella, in Measure for Measure
Julia, in The Two Gentlemen of Verona
Juliet, in Romeo and Juliet
Katherina, in The Taming of the Shrew
Lady Macbeth, in Macbeth
Lavinia Andronicus, in Titus Andronicus
Miranda, in The Tempest
Olivia, in Twelfth Night
Ophelia, in Hamlet
Portia, in The Merchant of Venice
The Princess of France, in Love's Labour's Lost
Regan, in King Lear
Rosalind, in As You Like It
Tamora, in Titus Andronicus
Three Witches, in Macbeth
Titania, in A Midsummer Night's Dream
Viola, in Twelfth Night
Volumnia, in Coriolanus

And that is a very partial list, to which one would add the following: Margaret of Anjou, infinitely tougher and more “manly” than her pallid little wimp of a husband, Henry VI, Paulina in The Winter’s Tale, the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet, Queen Elizabeth (wife of Edward IV) in Richard III, Constance in King John, Queen Katherine in Henry VIII, Mistress Quickly in Merry Wives of Windsor (and elsewhere), Marina in Pericles, Rosaline in Love’s Labour’s Lost, and Joan la Pucelle (i.e. Joan of Arc) in 1Henry IV.

Let’s just forget about monkeying around with the gender balance in Shakespeare plays - there are so many great roles for women, there’s absolutely no need to even think about it. And there are several obviously homosexual characters (in case you're thinking of gaying up some of the roles), and there’s enough cross-dressing to gladden the heart of any metropolitan left-liberal cultural Marxist. What about parking your silly modern notions and prejudices, and just getting the best actors available, sticking ‘em in vaguely period costumes (you are allowed to choose any period up to 1914 - no SS uniforms or council estate hoodies, please), and letting the words do the rest. They’re really not bad, the words.

I found that reading the whole of Shakespeare only began to feel like a duty towards the end, when I was faced with the eight or nine plays I hadn't much fancied reading from the start. As I reported here, I gave up on Comedy of Errors, having found Love's Labour's Lost a real chore. But then I bought Shakespeare the Thinker by Oxford Professor of English, A.D. Nuttall, (who, sadly, died two months before the book was published in April 2007). Nuttall looks at all the plays in roughly chronological order by examining what they tell us about their author's beliefs, attitudes and knowledge. I found Nuttall's approach extraordinarily illuminating (Frank Kermode described him as "probably the most philosophically minded of modern literary critics", which may be why I responded so readily to his book) and it revived my flagging spirits: helped by its numerous insights, I reread Love's Labour's Lost, and loved it, and sailed through Comedy of Errors at the second attempt, again with great enjoyment.

I only found myself getting "very sleepy" while reading Merry Wives of Windsor (which, legend has it, had to be written in 12 days when Queen Elizabeth demanded a play about Falstaff in love - it's awful), and sections of Henry VIII (Shakespeare's final play, and I chose to blame the boring bits on his collaborator). Titus Andronicus was too revoltingly blood-soaked, even for this former horror writer, and I found Pericles unpleasant - especially the brothel scenes. I couldn't really understand what Troilus and Cressida was about, and the way it just sort of peters out annoyed me - but, armed with Nuttall, I'll give it another go. And I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the comedies - especially A Midsummer Night's Dream, and the utterly enchanting As You Like It,  featuring the distinctly strange wooing in the Forest of Arden of thick posh wrestler Orlando by super-smart duke's daughter, Rosalind (disguised as a bloke, inevitably, and using the name Ganymede - the name of the boy abducted by Zeus during one of his paedophiliac phases): it is quite bonkers, but utterly enchanting (yes, I know I sound like some old opera queen - but it's truly wonderful).

Despite writing that I preferred reading Shakespeare to seeing the plays performed (here), I now actually want to see at least a dozen of the plays on stage, especially the comedies. But not if they've been "artistically directed" by Emma Rice!