27th December, 2022
By Nehru Odeh
Gregory Doran, artistic director emeritus, Royal Shakespeare Company has stopped short of saying he worships the English poet and playwright William Shakespeare.
He made this statement in an interview with Stephen Sackur as guest of the programme, HARDtalk, on BBC on Monday 26 December 2022.
Asked to explain what he meant by saying, to paraphrase French Existentialist philosopher and writer Jean Paul Sartre, that he had filled that God-shaped hole in his consciousness with Shakespeare and whether he meant Shakespeare is his religion, Doran said without equivocation that the English playwright is a better fit than the Bible, adding that he finds more wisdom, more truths in Shakespeare than he does in the Bible.
“That’s a quote by Sartre. He said most people have a God-shaped hole in their consciousness. And I recognize that I probably had filled mine with Shakespeare. It’s certainly a better fit than the Bible. I find more wisdom, more truths in Shakespeare than I do in the Bible. It has sustained me. My passion for it means that my life has been spent largely trying to convey that. That enthusiasm to share that enthusiasm with as widely a group of people as possible”, he averred.
Doran also said Shakespeare had not only been a sort of passport through his life, but also knew who he was and said things that he was thinking about.
“I regard Shakespeare as a sort of passport through my life. He’s been there at every stage of my life and he appealed to me at different stages of my life. As a child I was really grabbed by the stories of fairies and people being turned into donkeys and witches and ghosts and battles and shipwrecks and all that stuff.
“And I guess as I grew into my teens what surprised me was that Shakespeare knew who I was and said things that I was thinking about, love or about jealousy or about ambition, whatever. And he seems to put them in a better word than I had to express them.
“To me Shakespeare is like a magnet that attracts all the iron fillings of what is going on in the world. He continues to sort of regenerate. It is an amazing property that Shakespeare’s plays have of being about the moment you are in now,” Doran said.
Doran also said gave the reason Shakespeare has been accepted across the globe in the sense that the playwright has been appropriated by the world.
“Shakespeare’s universality is not because we take him abroad, it is because he has been appropriated, whether it is by China or by Japan, by India, by Germany or anywhere else in the English-speaking world. They have taken Shakespeare to their hearts and adapted him and translated him and the rest of it.
“We keep on going back to him because he keeps giving us this wealth of extraordinary stories and characters that we can relate to. And he does it all in the most memorable language.
“Shakespeare has a way of articulating every human thought and every human experience,” Doran maintained.