Sotheby's Talks | Shakespeare: A Man For All Time, with Tracy-Ann Oberman
39:41 Share

This episode is sponsored by Indeed. When it comes to hiring, timing is everything. Opportunities pop up fast. We've all had that moment where you're staring at a gap in your team, knowing things are about to get busy and thinking, we need someone now. Indeed cuts through the noise and gets you in front of the people who are actually right for the role.

So, when it comes to hiring, Indeed is all you need. Stop struggling to get your job posts seen on other job sites. Indeed's sponsored jobs helps you stand out and hire fast. With sponsored jobs, your post jumps to the top of the page for your relevant candidates so you can reach the people you want faster.

and it makes a huge difference. According to Indeed data, sponsored jobs posted directly on Indeed have 45% more applications than non-sponsored jobs. We find that Indeed makes hiring so fast.

When you know you're always going to get such a high level of potential candidates, you waste far less time finding a great fit to fill the role. Plus, with Indeed-sponsored jobs, there are no monthly subscriptions, no long-term contracts, and you only pay for results. How fast is Indeed? In the minute I've been talking to you, 23 hires were made on Indeed, according to Indeed data worldwide.

There's no need to wait any longer. Speed up your hiring right now with Indeed. And listeners to this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at indeed.com slash intelligence squared.

This Father's Day helped Dad be all he can be with a gift from the Home Depot because he's not just Dad, he's the handyman of the house, the plumber in a pinch, and the emergency mechanic.

Hello and welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm Head of Programming, Conor Boyle. Coming up on the podcast, we've got something from our friends at Sotheby's that we think you'll enjoy.

It's an episode of Sotheby's Talks, the podcast series that takes listeners inside the world of Sotheby's. In this episode, a panel discussion examining the enduring legacy of William Shakespeare and his works and how they continue to evolve within literary and cultural contexts. To listen to more episodes of Sotheby's Talks, featuring the likes of Mary McCartney, Tracey Emin and Julianne Moore, just search Sotheby's Talks wherever you get your podcasts.

For almost three centuries, Sotheby's has been the place to discover the greatest stories of creativity. We've been the temporary custodians of some of the world's finest treasures, which you can see on display in our galleries on any given day. I'm James Holden, executive editor of Sotheby's magazine. Welcome to Sotheby's Talks, the podcast that celebrates art, culture and collecting.

In this episode, which was originally recorded as a live event hosted at Sotheby's, we were joined by Emma Smith, Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Oxford, Tracey-Ann Obermann, who most recently starred as Shylock in her adaptation of The Merchant of Venice, and acclaimed actor Joseph Kloska. Their discussion will focus on how different editions shaped our understanding of Shakespeare's plays and the implication of textural variation.

How and why Shakespeare's language appears differently across sources, and what these discrepancies reveal about the mutable nature of the texts. And, importantly, what do these texts reveal about the many ways Shakespeare's plays can be interpreted? On the page, on the stage, and in the minds of each new generation. Here's host Sam Leith, author and literary editor of The Spectator, with more.

Emma, if I may, can I ask you to start with the text, the basics, the text we have for Shakespeare. Can you tell us a bit about how the text of plays that we have now descend to us and what that says about the way he was understood and valued? Shakespeare, as we always now tell ourselves, is writing plays for the Spange.

He writes out manuscript versions that are performed from manuscript, probably from these wonderful objects called cue scripts, where you have your own part as an actor and just the cues. Printed texts of plays are really an afterthought. If the plays come into print, it's very much a second stage in their life. And my sense is that plays come into print almost at a random point in an ongoing stage life.

So that's to say the plays as we have them printed represent one version of a particular text, probably for a particular performance or a particular production, rather than a final version as Shakespeare might have wanted it to be passed on forever and ever. Some plays are not printed during Shakespeare's lifetime and we don't really know if that's because they

they were not popular and therefore the theatre company might try and get a bit of money from them by selling them as printed texts or whether they were popular and therefore the theatre company didn't want the script to spread more widely because if you had a script of a play you could yourself perform it and if there was a mileage in that performance then that was probably not very sensible. So play texts for me are snapshots of a long theatrical life

which includes the Shakespearean period and actually includes all the period since then. If you're an actor in a rehearsal room, the first thing you will do with a Shakespeare text is to strip out

stage directions, for instance, and work out yourself how the characters are interacting. So these are texts which have a paradoxical value for us. Without them, we wouldn't have Shakespeare at all. And so they're almost sacred documents in the bardolatry, which is so much part of English culture.

But they need to be thought of as contingent or rather sort of momentary fragile documents, documents of a text in motion rather than as printed monuments. So they're a version of your monument that's moving. Can you say what the significance of the folio in particular was? There are a number of plays that only survive because of the folio.

Yes, so as I mentioned, only a few of Shakespeare's plays are published during his lifetime, half of them. And half have to wait until this posthumous collection we now call the First Folio, which comes out in 1623.

for a whole lot of complicated reasons about Shakespeare's reputation at that point, which I myself feel are an attempt to build that reputation rather than reflecting on Shakespeare's great status at that point. I think in 1623,

Shakespeare is actually in danger of being forgotten, as many popular writers are in the immediate period after their death. It's not a good time to be a writer. It's not a good time perhaps for the reputation say of someone like Martin Amis or something like that.

that will come back round, we will come to realise what was great about it but this isn't the best the best moment and I think Shakespeare was in that moment, Shakespeare's reputation was in that moment in 1623, seven years after his death and it

It's this book which establishes that this is a serious writer for all time. And it does that. It's great to have these lovely small format books here. And if we had had the folios, you would see what folio obviously means. I don't need to tell this audience. It's a size of book.

And by that size, you are saying, this is a really important book. It's heavy, it's weighty, it needs your attention. You need to sit and look at it and give it proper time. That's very different from the more throwaway or ephemeral sense that play texts had previously had, including those by Shakespeare. So the folio preserves Shakespeare's plays, including one of the ones that we're going to hear from this evening, but it also establishes Shakespeare.

We don't have the most famous image from it, but you can imagine it, can't you? It's quite hard to have a really super famous writer with no visual image of it, which is why there's been such great efforts to try and find new portraits of, for example, Jane Austen or something like that. We need our authors to be visible in these ways.

Now, turning our attention just briefly to one of the books which is appearing in this auction, this is the 1640 edition of the Sonnets. It looks very odd on the page to those of us who know what sonnets are, doesn't it? Why is that? It really does. It's another example, lovely example of a moving monument. Sonnets are an absolutely historically specific form in English. They really go in the 1590s. The 1590s

If you're anybody at all, you are enormously and passionately in love with a haughty woman who won't give you the time of day.

If you're not, you're just not living. So in this period, everybody is writing sonnets. They're very, very manageable. They've got this 14-line structure. There's a kind of set of, already a set of language and tropes that you use. So even if you're not a good poet, perhaps especially if you're not a good poet, you can turn out a few sonnets. By the time John Benson is publishing this edition of Shakespeare's poems in 1640,

the sonnets look really quite outdated. So you see it's not called sonnets, it's called poems and it's even called a wonderfully arch poems. The 'e' has an umlaut on it so that diacritical, classicising piece of punctuation is elevating these works into something that again will last more than the ephemeral work of the sonnets. They're laid out on the page so you don't see the 14 lines.

So much. And they're also given some titles that help us understand what these longer poems made of sonnets assembled together might be. There's also an intriguing variant reading. There is. The couplet at the end of the Sonnet 101, 'O truant muse'. What we can see there is that Benson has changed two male pronouns into female ones. He's changed he and him into she and her.

Now for some critics that has been part of a wider project by Benson to, let's say, straighten out the sonnets, which as Oscar Wilde and Derek Jarman and many great queer artists have pointed out are not really all that straight, and that Benson is doing a sort of retrofitting to sort that out.

He may also be thinking that this couplet sort of refers to the muse and that the muse should be female. So he may be trying to reorganise it in that way. But it's a great example of how, really for a long time in the early history of Shakespeare's reception, and I would argue we should recover that now if we feel we haven't got it, people felt quite able to make changes to

to Shakespeare to say, I think it's fine as it is, but it would be a bit better if it were like this. And we'll hear some other examples of that later, which are continuing into the present day and which for me are part of why Shakespeare is this man for all times that we're talking about this evening. There are two

variant endings of King Lear, one from the quarto and one from the folio. What is the difference between these two? So what I wanted just to touch on these is King Lear, I think, is the one example that most scholars agree on that is a play that Shakespeare himself revised so that it had a version

perhaps early in James's reign, we know from the earliest printed edition, it was performed on Boxing Day for the King, which was not quite 'It's a Wonderful Life', was it? Rather dreadful Boxing Day, I would have thought, to be trapped with King Lear, wonderful as it is. And that what we see is a Shakespeare who is not quite satisfied with it and is slightly reworking. And we slightly think that because some of the reworking is very minor tinkering and nobody cares as much about your script

as the author does to do that kind of tinkering. Large-scale changes can be made and often are made by other playwrights but this is a kind of working, changing words, changing particular phrasing in a very precise tinkering way. But what's of larger importance I think about the end of King Lear is the kind of tragedy Shakespeare wants it to be at different moments. There's a question about whether

how Lear dies, does he die thinking that Cordelia might be alive? I'm sorry, spoiler alert, she isn't. And if he does die thinking she is still alive, is that

better or worse. Sometimes our theories of tragedy suggest that self-knowledge or true knowledge is the great gift that you get as a tragic character, even if you have to pay for it with your life. There are other versions of that which might think dying with something to hope for might seem a better ending. And it's all about really

a kind of major question which I would add to David's questions about the fatness of Hamlet, which is sort of how sad is King Lear? Is it possible to find something redemptive in it? Is there some reason for this suffering, if not for the characters, then for those of us who watch it? And I think here we can see Shakespeare working quite hard on that and on the precise way in which the ending is choreographed. Even in talking about King Lear and these questions, how sad is King Lear, you know,

touches on something that you speak about often, which is about what you call the gappiness of Shakespeare's work. I mean, I guess your basic Derridaean would say everything's gappy, but Shakespeare is particularly gappy. In what way does that gappiness manifest itself and why is it so important to his enduring importance? I suppose what I have come to think is that Shakespeare has

an awful lot of space in it, an awful lot of air pockets, a lot of space for us to breathe. In some ways that's a feature of drama, that drama needs to be embodied. A drama script is never complete in itself, it needs all the other things to come alive. That's slightly different from what we might say about a novel, say, or about lyric poetry. But I think it's something more specific to Shakespeare. It's partly that he sets

plays at these moments often of transition or of conflict that are extremely repeatable or movable into different equivalents. It's that he doesn't really tell us necessarily what we need to know or feel we want to know about characters and we need to furnish that or a production needs to furnish that. My sense is that one way for us to understand the lasting appeal of Shakespeare

is because Shakespeare is a backdrop against which lots of new creativity in different forms find something to work with. I think that's what I would call gappiness. Well, we now have, I'm very pleased to say, the opportunity to see some of that gappiness in action. Tracey-Anne and Joe are going to...

Give us a sense of how just one section of Shakespeare can open itself up to different ways of reading. So they're going to play Macbeth and Lady Macbeth from Act 1, Scene 7 in two very different ways. Emma, can you set the scene for everyone? We don't really need very much scene setting. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are trying to decide whether they should kill the king. We will proceed no further in this business.

He hath honoured me of late, and I have brought golden opinions from all sorts of people, which would be worn now in their newest gloss, not cast aside so soon. Was the hope drunk wherein you dressed yourself? Hath it slept since, and wakes it now to look so green and pale at what it did so freely? From this time, Statch, I account thy love.

art thou afeard to be the same in thine own act and valour as thou art in desire wouldst thou have that which thou esteemest as the ornament of life and live a coward in thine own esteem letting i dare not wait upon i would like a poor cat in the adage for thee peace

I dare do all that may become a man, who dares do more is none. What beast was it then that made you break this enterprise to me? When you durst do it, then you are a man. And to mean more than what you were, you would be so much more than a man. Nor time nor place did then adhere, and yet you would make both. They have made themselves, and that their fitness now does unmake you.

I have given suck, and know how tender it is, To nurse and love the babe that milks me. I would, as it was smiling in my face, Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums, And dashed his brains out, and I so sworn, As thou hast done to this, if we should fail— We fail! But screw your courage to the sticking-post, And we'll not fail.

When Duncan is asleep, whereto rather this hard day's journey soundly invites him, its two chamberlains will I, with wine and wassail, so convince that memory, the warder of the brain, shall be a fume, and the receipt of ruse a limbeck only. When in swinish sleep their drenchd natures lies as in a death,

What cannot you and I perform upon the unguarded Duncan? What not put upon his spongy officers, who shall bear the guilt of our great quell? Bring forth men, children only,

For thy undaunted mettle should compose nothing but males. Will it not be received, when we have marked with blood those sleepy two of his own chamber, and used their very daggers? That they have dunk'd! Who dares receive it other? As we shall make our greaves and clamour roar upon his death. I am settled, and bend up every corporal agent to this terrible feat. Away!

and mock the time with fairest show. False face must hide what the false heart doth know. You do version two? Oh yes, of course, version two. We will proceed no further in this business. He hath honoured me of late, and I have bought golden opinions from all sorts of people, which would be worn now in their newest gloss, not cast aside so soon. Was the hope drunk wherein you dressed yourself? Hath it slept since?

and wakes it now to look so green and pale as it did what it did so freely from this time forth shall i account thy love art thou afeard to be the same in thine own act and valour as thou art in desire wouldst thou have that which thou esteem'st the ornament of life and live a coward in thine own esteem letting i dare not wait upon i would at the poor cat in the agate trithee peace

I dare do all that becomes a man. Who dares to more is none. What beast was it then that made you break this enterprise to me? When you durst do it, then you were a man. And to be more than what you were, you would be so much more a man. Nor time nor place did then adhere, and yet you would make both. They have made themselves, and that their fitness now does unmake you.

I have given suck, and know how tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me. I would, whilst it was smiling in my face, have plopped my nipple from his boneless gums and dashed his brains up, had I so sworn as thou hast entered this. If we should fail... We fail. But screw your courage to the sticking-post, and we'll not fail. When Duncan is asleep,

whereto the rather shall his day's hard journey sternly invite him his two chamberlains will i with wine and vassals so convince that memory the warder of the brain shall be a fume and the receipt of reason a limbeck only when in swinish sleep their drenchd natures lie as in death what cannot you and i perform

Upon the unguarded Duncan, what not put upon his spongy officers, who shall bear the guilt of our Gwent? I'll bring forth men, children only, for thy undaunted mettle should compose nothing but males. Will it not be received, when we have marked with blood those sleepy two of his own chamber, with their very daggers, that they have daunt? Who dares receive it other?

as we shall make our griefs and clamour roar upon his death i am settled and bend up every corporal agent to this terrible feat away and mock the time with fairest show false face must hide what false heart doth know

Thank you. Tracy-Anne, you recently, most recently, adapted The Merchant of Venice and played Shylock yourself, and you set your production in 1930s East End of London, didn't you? Shylock is one of the most charged and contested characters in the whole of Shakespeare's canon. He's a hot potato even today. What was it that gave you the idea of

playing himself and of setting the play in the situation he did. So I've always hated the play. Back in the Jurassic Age when I was taught it at school, it was taught incredibly badly. Very much Portia was the heroine, Antonio was the hero and the vicious evil Jew wanted his medieval-like pound of flesh. I've never seen productions that I particularly connect

with. I've either seen Shylock completely pitted and a victim or I've seen him as evil and I'm not sure which I dislike more. And I've always wondered, you know, around the same time when they were putting down the statues of Coulson and I think people like Juliet Stevenson and others were saying that the Merchant of Venice should be taken out of the canon.

I thought, let's not take it out of the canon. Let's contextualise them. Let's keep them because they're part of our history. But we need to show them and explain them for what they were. And I have always wondered with this play what would happen if you took Shylock and you turned it into a single mother with a daughter. So it becomes less about a slightly creepy relationship of an obsessive father and it becomes about an immigrant woman who's come to a country...

with this one daughter who has survived and wants her to sort of be part of society, but is frightened of society because she'll never be accepted. And then it became obvious that if I turned it into the story of my great-grandmother, who, like many immigrants, came over to England, she was escaping the violence and the pogroms in Belarus, nearly being beheaded and raped herself. She comes over to England and, like all immigrant women who come over, the very fact of survival means they have to be strong and tough

and keep their families together, and yet it's a complete anathema to the whole society. So those women were very much seen as outsiders, as slightly repulsive. They want their women to look like Diana Mitford and to be apolitical and very decorative, and yet these strong, tough Jewish women in the East End of London. My great-grandmother had a

great aunt called Machine Gun Molly, who herself was a widow who could cut a deal in the East End of London and put the men to absolute shame. And I had another one called Sarah Portugal, who wore a slash of red lipstick and smoked a pipe. These were the sort of immigrant, these matriarchs that I grew up with. I was very lucky because Watford Palace Theatre and then the Royal Shakespeare Company allowed us to workshop it to see if it worked.

having a female Shylock with her daughter. Did anything else have to change in the play other than the pronouns? But also I wanted to take the Venetian aristocracy and the stories that I was brought up with from my grandmother who called England the great, the golden Medina, was the story of the Battle of Cable Street where Oswald Mosley, taught by his great friend Adolf Hitler, formed the British Union of Fascists and he took a march onto the Jewish entity of the East End in the October the 4th, 1936.

fully expecting and having whipped up like the black shirts that he had very much like the brown shirts whipping up this anti-Jewish hatred he fully expected when he marched on the Jewish entity all the other working the working class and minority groups that they'd work with at the East End leafleting and taking them all about the evil Jews taking things from them fully expected them to march with him and my

Bubba, my great-grandmother, always said that on the day, it was the greatest pride of her life that the Irish working class, the English working class, the small Afro-Caribbean community, Somali sailors, the dockers, trade unionists, and ordinary heroes from all over the country came down to the East End to join them, 30,000 of them on the front line to tell the fascists, you shall not pass. And the more research that I did into the aristocratic fans and fascists of Mosley, it became obvious

apparent that the interface of the Venetian aristocrats would merge very nicely with the fascists of 1936. And so it became a very potent rule of a female immigrant, Shylock, very much an outsider. Misogyny and antisemitism, misogyny and racism always go together because if you hate a woman, there's nothing you hate more than an outsider woman who won't shut up. And Moseley had these wonderfully

important and powerful, rather bitter and twisted, of fascist aristocrats as their mansions and their buildings were crumbling and as the old power balance was changing in England, who better to blame it on than the outsider internationalist untrustworthy Duke? And that was where we set it.

But I wanted to stay honest to the text. So I didn't want to make my Shylock a particularly likable Shylock. I wanted to keep it so that it became a very, you know, Shylock is not a particularly likable person. She's driven mad through grief. And, you know, if you monster somebody for long enough and tell them they're a monster and you spit on them and hate them, they become the monster that you want them to. But for my Shylock, the thing that was mattered was that she was in a country where law and church and state is absolute. So when this idiot and

Antonio signs this contract for a pound of flesh and it's a legally binding contract. She truly believes whether she's going to take the flesh or not, that when she gets it into an English court of law, that this contract will stand. And as many after her have discovered, church, state and the law work for the rich and powerful.

Well, let's meet your Shylock. You've chosen two speeches, I think you're going to give. Can you say why these particular two speeches were ones you thought would encapsulate her well? Well, because actually Shylock only appears in seven scenes in the whole of this, you know, lucky, our lucky audience, they only had it for an hour and 45 minutes. It normally runs at three and three quarter hours. So we cut a lot of the fat off it.

But these are the two big Shylock speeches. And I think the first one, Antonio is forced to come into her disgusting East End pawnbroking shop because the boy that he's in love with, Bassanio, needs to borrow 3,000 ducats, which we estimated was about 250,000 pounds. So it's a huge amount of money. And this Antonio has walked into her shop and said to Shylock, I want 3,000 ducats. And she goes to set up to write the bond and he says...

Am I going to be beholden to you? And she puts her pen down and I'm going to, I use a Yiddish accent for my Shylock because I wanted her to be an outsider. I wanted her to be different. Senor Antonio, many a time and oft in the city, you have rated me about my monies and my usances. Still have I borne it with a patient shrug, for sufferance is a badge of all my tribe. You called me misbeliever, cutthroat dog,

and spit upon my Jewish gabardine, and all for use of that which is mine own. Well then, it now appears you need my help. Go to then. You come to me, and you say, Shylock, we would have monies. You say so. You, who did spit your phlegm upon my hair, and kick me as you would a stranger's dog over your threshold.

"Moneys is your suit." What should I say to you? Should I not say, "Hath a dog moneys?" Is it possible a dog can lend three thousand ducats? Or should I bend low, huh? And in a bondman's key, with bated breath and whispering humbleness, say this: "Fair sir, you spat on me on Wednesday last.

"You spurned me such a day. Another time you called me dog. And for these courtesies, I'll lend you thus much monies." And Antonio turns around and says, rather than Tony running and going, "Well, I didn't really mean it," says, "Yes, and I'll spit on you again. I'll kick thee too." And the second speech obviously is, I think, the most, you know, is one of the greatest hits, definitely in the top 10. Shylock.

I can only think of her as a she now, has had her daughter run away and convert, has sold all her money, she's been followed and chased and laughed at, nobody's helping her find her beloved daughter Jessica, most of her money is gone, her daughter's converted to Christianity, and the only thing she's got to hold her together is that she's got this contract with this asshole Antonio. Excuse my language.

And she's devastated. And in our production, it's on the night of Kol Nidre. She's heading towards the synagogue. She's hoping people have found her daughter. The other Jews are heading into the synagogue and she sees the policeman who is our salario and the fascist maid. We turned Gobbo into Mary Gobbo, who was her Irish kind of maid who now works for Bassanio. And they're taunting her. And they say, what do you want this pound of flesh?

And she says, "All right, I'll tell you why I want this pound of pleasure. Peter faults on this. This is why I want it." "He hath disgraced me, laughed at my losses, mocked at my gains, thwarted my bargains, called my friends, heated mine enemies, and what's his reason?" "I am a Jew." "Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands?

organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions, fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is. If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us,

Do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. Tell me, if a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility, huh? Why revenge? But if a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Revenge?

The villainy you teach me, I will absorb, but I will better the instruction.

We're going to pivot from tragedy to comedy and for a change of pace we're going to end with a fascinating, wonderful passage from Much Ado About Nothing in which Beatrice and Benedict go at each other. Again, Emma, your turn to set the scene. It's probably not much more than a sentence either, is it? No, I mean, Much Ado About Nothing is Shakespeare's screwball comedy. Here we've got the first encounter, at least in the play, between these two sparring partners.

What? My dear lady, disdain! Are you yet living? Is it possible disdain should die while she hath such meat food to feed it as Signor Benedick? Courtesy itself must convert to disdain if you come in her presence. Then is courtesy a turncoat, but it is certain I am loved of all ladies. Only you excepted, and I would I could find in my heart.

That I had not a hard heart, for truly I love none. A dear happiness to women. They would else have been troubled with a pernicious suitor. I thank God and my cold blood. I am of your humour for that. I had rather hear my dog bark at a crow than a man swear he loves me.

God keep your ladyship still in that mind, so some gentleman or other shall escape a predestinate scratched face. Scratching could not make it worse, and 'twere such a face as yours. Well, you are a rare parrot teacher.

A bird of my tongue is better than a beast of yours. I would my horse have the speed of your tongue, and so good a continuer. But keep your way in God's name. I am done. You always end with a jade's trick. I know you of old.

I just want to ask all of the panel, why is it, do you think, that that exchange in particular sounds so contemporary to us? I mean, it just leaps into life. Well, it's partly because it's written in prose, wouldn't you say, Emma? He chooses to move away from verse into prose here to give it that vernacular feel, the two characters going at each other and enjoying the game of their wordplay as well. Also, I think you were such a good...

playwright because character is character and there is an eternal truth in relations, right? Probably from Stone Age to, you know, to living on the moon. So I just think there's a truth in the characters. So there's, we, you know, we understand their relationship and if it's not quite in a language we get, we totally understand it. Would you agree with that? No, I really agree. And I was thinking as you were performing, I think Much Ado About Nothing is the only comedy

where there is nothing stopping the couple from getting together but their own bloody mindlessness. You know, so mostly comedies put these extraordinary obstacles, don't they, in the way of, you know, one's dressed as a man and one's, you know, all that. You know, they're really saying this is the reason you can't be together is all these circumstantial factors. Much Ado is much more able to see, I think, what's probably visible to all of us in our own lives, that it's our own circumstances.

that holds us back. It's not, you know, these elaborate narrative kind of conceits and that's so modern. I mean, is Shakespeare in this respect a kind of rebuke to the idea that, you know, there is no such thing as human nature? Well, that's a big question for the last...

I think there are two answers to this, at least two answers. I suppose the best one maybe for what we've been talking about is that many of these elements in Shakespeare's plays don't actually translate across time absolutely and we can all see where the problems are in the plays. So in Much Do About Nothing for example most productions will make you want Beatrice and Benedict after that

and many other sparring matches to get together. But it's quite difficult to think what are we doing with the other couple where the woman is rejected and very, very harshly treated unfairly by her lover. And it's hard for us to, in the modern day, to think about that as a happy ending. So that's a play which in itself has one very modern seeming couple

and one couple where you sort of have to think a bit more historically to understand why does Hero say, okay, I can see you're sorry, I'll take you back. That doesn't seem modern in the way that what you were doing seemed modern. So there's more, maybe there's sort of two things going on at the same time in the play. Outstandingly diplomatic answer.

Anyway, it remains me simply to thank Emma Smith, Tracey-Ann Obermann and Joseph Glosker for joining us today and to you for coming. And finally, to plug this auction, which is in July, there's going to be the 1640 edition of the Shakespeare poems and a late 80s quarto of Julius Caesar in manuscripts from medieval to modern online sale. That's the 9th of July. So go and raid your piggy banks. Thank you for joining us.

To step further into the world of Sotheby's, you can visit any of our galleries around the world. They're open to the public. For more information, visit sotheby's.com. And don't forget to follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Season 3, which features conversations with guests including Kim Jones, is live now. Thanks for listening. That was an episode of Sotheby's Talks from Sotheby's and Intelligence Squared.

To listen to more episodes, just search Sotheby's Talks wherever you get your podcasts.

So Steven at SandCloud got a serious business card. The Spark Cash Plus card from Capital One. We used our 2% cash back to help build our retail presence. Savvy, Steven. And we get big purchasing power so our business can spend more and earn more. The Spark Cash Plus card from Capital One. What's in your wallet? Terms and conditions apply. Find out more at CapitalOne.com slash Spark Cash Plus.