Friday, April 25, 2014

My hero / William Shakespeare by Susan Cooper

William Shakespeare

My hero: William Shakespeare by Susan Cooper


Shakespeare was one of those astounding happy accidents that redeem our imperfect race

Susan Cooper

F
orm 1 at Slough High School for Girls. In English that year we did Julius Caesar, and the next year it was A Midsummer Night's Dream, and every subsequent year another Shakespeare play. Being a shy child who mumbled, I had very small parts in the class read‑throughs (I think I was Wall in The Dream) but I fell in love for life with the characters and the words. And with their author.

He was one of those astounding happy accidents that redeem our imperfect race. He was born 450 years ago; today, his speed and inventiveness, and his brilliance at adapting other people's plots, would have seen him gobbled up by television, and we'd never have had The Tempest or As You Like It or King Lear. And I'd never have seen Olivier's Henry V or Gielgud's Benedick or Scofield's Richard II or, or …
He was a working dramatist within a community of actors, and by the time he died at the age of 53 he had written more than 35 plays, many of which are masterpieces still performed all over the world. Whatever people do to them, they work beautifully on stage. We know remarkably little about his life, which leads some into the folly of claiming he was actually Francis Bacon or the Earl of Oxford, but its emotions blaze out of his characters and his 154 sonnets.
Above all he was a man in love with the English language, so how can he not be the hero of an English writer? Shakespeare delighted in playing with the sense and the music of words; he was a creative lover of words, and unwittingly we quote him every day as we speak the ever-evolving English he helped to score. I wonder if he knew quite how extraordinary he was. Perhaps he guessed at it, now and again:
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.


THE GUARDIAN




2009
001 My hero / Oscar Wilde by Michael Holroyd
002 My hero / Harley Granville-Barker by Richard Eyre
003 My hero / Edward Goldsmith by Zac Goldsmith
004 My hero / Fridtjof Nansen by Sara Wheeler 
005 My hero / Mother Mercedes Lawler IBVM by Antonia Fraser
007 My hero / Ernest Shepard by Richard Holmes
008 My hero / JG Ballard by Will Self
009 My hero / Alan Ross by William Boyd
010 My hero / Ben the labrador by John Banville
011 My hero / Vicent van Gogh by Margaret Drabble
012 My hero / Franz Marek by Eric Hobsbawm

2010

017 My hero / Jack Yeats by Colm Tóibín
018 My hero / Francisco Goya by Diana Athill
019 My hero / Max Stafford-Clark by Sebastian Barry
020 My hero / Arthur Holmes by Richard Fortey

036 My hero / Robert Lowell by Jonathan Raban
037 My hero / Beryl Bainbridge by Michael Holroyd
038 My hero / Charles Schulz by Jenny Colgan
039 My hero / Oliver Knussen by Adam Foulds
040 My hero / Annie Proulx by Alan Warner

041 My hero / David Lynch by Paul Murray
042 My hero / Edwin Morgan by Robert Crawford
043 My hero / Anne Lister by Emma Donoghue
044 My hero / Jane Helen Harrinson by Mary Beard
045 My hero / Edmund Burke by David Marquand
046 My hero / Shelagh Deleaney by Jeanette Winterson
047 My hero / Christopher Marlowe by Val McDermid
048 My hero / Gwen John by Anne Enright
049 My hero / Michael Mayne by Susan Hill
050 My hero / Stanley Spencer by Howard Jacobson

051 My hero / William Beveridge by Will Hutton
052 My hero / Jean McConville by Amanda Foreman
053 My hero / Alexander Pushkin by Elaine Feinstein
058 My hero / Cy Twombly by Edmund de Waal

2011
079 My hero / Gene Wolfe by Neil Gaiman
087 My hero / Alberto Moravia by John Burnside
096 My hero / Isaac Babel by AD Miller
097 Lucian Freud by Esi Edugyan
100 Thomas Tranströmer by Robin Robertson
102 My hero / David Hockney by Susan Hill

2012

190 My hero / Iris Murdoch by Charlotte Mendelson
194 My hero / René Descartes by James Kelman
199 My hero / Albert Camus by Geoff Dyer

2015
2016


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