OK here is Me and Will Part Deux and I am sure all readers are waiting with bated breath....
Well, the long and winding road back to loving WS started with the film Much Ado about Nothing with Kenneth Branagh and the then Mrs B, Emma Thompson. Sheer pleasure and fun from start to finish, filmed in Tuscany, sun shining, great music and wonderful acting (well, from most of the cast anyway). Kenneth Branagh looked seriously gorgeous in this film (a great surprise to me as I have always thought he had a face like a current bun); Emma Thompson delightful; Denzil Washington in leather trousers (need I say more?) and Keanu Reeves (OK we know he can't act but who cares...).
My then husband and I and two daughters went to see this singly and severally on at least four occasions and in the end worked out that between us we had seen the film 15 times. I managed to persuade the manager of the Odeon to give me one of the posters outside the cinema and had it framed. Wasn't till I collected it that I realised just how huge it was - it is now adorning one of the walls in my flat and reminds me of happy times.
Next up, Shakespeare in Love, the movie with Joseph Fiennes as Will. Again, 
great fun, witty and delightful. The cinema audience was split into two camps the night I went. Those of us over 40, who picked up every Shakespeare reference in the film and laughed and enjoyed, and those under 35 who did not pick up one and obviously wondered what we were laughing at. It was during this film that I realised just how much I was soaked in Shakespeare's language and just how much of it was familiar and loved by me. The defining moment in my return to the Bard came towards the end of the film when Viola (in the person of Gwyneth Paltrow) was given a copy of the play Romeo and Juliet. She quoted the line 'night's candles are burned out' and to my utter astonishment I found an instant rush of tears to my eyes. It was such a simple emotive line and it finished me off. Cannot explain why.
Then earlier this year a friend flew in from New York with tickets for Henry IV, parts I & II at the National Theatre. She had suggested this some months earlier and I blithely agreed that, yes, this sounded fun. This coincided with a stressful and busy time at work (is there any other I ask myself?) and I did wonder, as I strolled across Waterloo Bridge, if I was stark staring mad to commit myself to 6 hours of Shakespeare and could I keep awake?
Well, the answer is yes I could keep awake and no, I was not mad. Stunning production, from the minute Henry IV entered in Scene 1 (played incidentally by the actor who is the ghastly caretaker in the Harry Potter movies!) and said his first lines, the entire audience was hooked. When I tell you that the Falstaff was Sir Michael Gambon, you will probably need no further explanation for my conversion. Please look up any reviews you can find on the web as my words will not do justice to this magnificent performance. The stage was raked and no curtains so, at one stage when Sir M was in the middle of one of his soliloquies, he strolled around addressing the audience in a very casual way and, as I was in the second row on an aisle seat and some 6 feet away, he fixed his eye on me and spoke directly to me. Slightly unnerving I can tell you. His performance was funny, sly, preposterous and, ultimately, moving as his affection for Prince Hal (performed by Matthew McFadyan just a few months before the release of Pride and Prejudice in which he was Mr Darcy) was clear throughout.
When it came to the final scene and the rejection of Falstaff, you could have heard the proverbial pin drop. It was heartbreaking and quite a large section of those watching were in tears. I went into the theatre at 2.15pm and came out at 10.30pm. I had entered tired and fed up - I exited revitalised and exhilarated and could quite happily have sat through the entire thing again.
I have since visited the Globe a couple of times which is THE place to visit in order to gain the experience of what it must have been like to watch these plays in Tudor times, and then earlier on this year, took a short Open University course on Shrew and Romeo and Juliet, both of which I loved.
I am back to reading the plays to myself just for sheer pleasure and the only thing I am cross about is that I have wasted so much of my adult life disliking Shakespeare. Just think of all the wonderful performances I have missed. Never mind I am back now.
