The British Theatre Guide, Philip Fisher
One sometimes wonders whether the world really needs yet another book on Shakespeare.
Publishers clearly do not as they continue to appear on a constant basis.
Such pondering is certainly not appropriate when considering Michael Pennington’s
charming reflection, based on a quite staggering “Twenty Thousand Hours with Shakespeare”.
Sweet William, which is effectively the child of extensive researches that underpinned
the solo show of the same name, is not pure biography. While it does make reference
to the Bard’s life this is usually for information and there is little of the original
in that element of the writing.
What the author has attempted to achieve is to offer readers a view of the works
themselves from a viewpoint that is rarely mined.
As an actor and sometime director, Pennington is in a very good position to view
Shakespeare’s plays through their characters. He has as deep a knowledge as anybody
of this wide selection of personalities who encompass good and bad, rich and to a
lesser extent poor, male and female and between them define the Complete Works.
Starting from the perspective of reviewing the works chronologically, Pennington
runs through them consecutively though fairly quickly moves out of sequence to explore
themed where he believes that this will help to aid understanding.
There are also sections that become essays on particular topics for example acting
trends and women in Shakespeare, finishing with an overview of his place in today’s
society.
In addition to character, this actor turned biographer has a deep love and understanding
of the language. This becomes the second string to literary bow and he uses it liberally
to make points about the plays that he analyses so instructively.
Ultimately, like the stage version, Sweet William is a love letter to a long lost
and almost completely unknown writer whose genius continues to excite and enchant
viewers and readers almost 400 years after his death.
Michael Pennington’s book will also excite and enchant his own readers ad undoubtedly
give them a better knowledge and understanding of the works of the Bard, whether
they are newcomers, casual fans, fellow actors or devoted academics.
The Stage,1st February 2012, Susan Elkin
I write all the time about learning in these online columns. That’s the whole point.
Education and training is what this blog is about.
Usually, however, I write about other people’s learning. Today I have to tell you
about my own, because I can’t remember when I learned so much from a single volume
as I have from Michael Pennington’s engaging, absorbing, congenial, informative new
book Sweet William, published by Nick Hern Books.
Pennington, who reckons he’s spent 20,000 hours with Shakespeare since first being
blown away by Macbeth at the Old Vic when he was 11 years old, has been touring a
fine one-man show about Shakespeare called Sweet William for several years. But the
book is different. It has time and space to explore the plays and the author’s experience
of, and views about, them in leisurely depth, although it never gets boring ad always
reads like a entertaining chat with a master practitioner.
Pennington analyses every play he has been involved with - almost the entire canon
- taking them in roughly the order they were written, with comments on what might
have been going on around Shakespeare at the time and lots of fascinating digressions.
For example, he says that the equivocator who creeps into the Porter’s drunken stand-up
comedy in Macbeth would have been understood in early Jacobean Britain “to refer
to the trial of the Jesuit priest Father Henry Garnet …a devout and peaceful man
who had been confessor to some of the Gunpowder Plotters and felt that he was bound
by the confessional not to betray their secrets to the government.” And that, says
Pennington (who has misgivings about Macbeth, which he sees as containing far too
much political cow-towing) led to Garnet’s swiftly being reinterpreted as a Satanic
figure. He compares the post-gunpowder plot anti-Catholic hysteria with the Islamophobia
which followed 9/11 and the 2005 London bombings. Interesting stuff.
And, as a former English teacher, who probably taught Henry V more than any other
Shakespeare play, I wish I could have shared Pennington’s insights with my A level
students. And I hope people teaching they play now will do just that. There isn’t
much Pennington doesn’t know about Henry V, whom he regards as a pretty cold fish
until he finally gets a spark going with Katharine at the end of the play, because
he famously played Hal in both parts of Henry IV and then the title role in Henry
V - sometimes all in one day - for the now defunct English Shakespeare Company which
he founded with Michael Bogdanov.
Sometimes he’s anecdotal, often lyrical, always thoughtful and occasionally laugh-aloud
funny. Pennington’s book is a must-read for anyone interested in Shakespeare from
almost any angle - actor, drama student, teacher, director, technician, literature
student or audience member.
The Oxford Times, 5th April 2012
Pennington, one of our leading classical actors, has fined down his thoughts on the
Bard into a most accessible book hat is no way a primer or textbook. As the subtitle,
Twenty Thousand Hours with Shakespeare, suggests, it is, rather, the distilled experiences
of one who first saw Macbeth in 1956 aged 11, and has since given himself to all
those on stage performing - plus rehearsing, and thinking, and writing about - William
Shakespeare.
The title is from his very successful one-man show, recently at the Oxford Playhouse,
but the text is built from those accumulated decades of study: Pennington is already
an avowed and published Shakespearean scholar.
He writes intelligently and intellectually. And he likes to impress - quite justifiably
- by digging into the less obvious plays, suggesting, for example, that Shakespeare
delivers “his most unsparing study of the internal agonies of childhood” with the
young Prince Mamillius in A Winter’s Tale. And then he writes hauntingly about a
speech in one of the great ones - Flute on Thisbe in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Pennington
deems it “this beautiful play - as gorgeous but in some ways as impenetrable as a
perfect diamond”. You should have a touch of Shakespeare knowledge before approaching
this book, but you won’t get a better insight into the verse and history.
Exeunt, 5th April 2012, Neil Dowden
There are few people more qualified to write a book about Shakespeare from a practitioner’s
point of view than Michael Pennington. One of our finest classical stage actors of
the last forty years, he forged his reputation by playing many of the great Shakespearean
roles with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the English Shakespeare Company (of
which he was co-founder and co-artistic director with Michael Bogdanov). In September
he will play Mark Antony is Antony and Cleopatra opposite Kim Cattrall in Janet Suzman’s
production at the Chichester Festival Theatre. Pennington has also directed several
Shakespeare productions, and has written three books on individual plays, so he writes
with insider authority.
Inspired by his one-man show about Shakespeare also called Sweet William, which he
has toured around the world, Pennington takes the opportunity in this book to explore
much more deeply the connections between the playwright’s life and works. Having
himself seen the light as an 11-year-old schoolboy enthralled by a staging of Macbeth
at the Old Vic in the early 1950s, he is determined to relay the torch to others:
“Now I’m an expert of sorts myself, having at a rough estimate spent twenty thousand
hours of my life so far performing Shakespeare, leave alone the time taken rehearsing,
talking, thinking and writing about him…I realise that all I’ve learned over the
years doesn’t add up to a hill of beans unless I can…pass on…that same intoxication
of sound and meaning, its sudden impact on ear, eye and stomach”.
He goes a long way to achieving that in this beautifully written book, which combines
the intellectual rigorousness of academic detailed study of text (minus alienating
jargon or excessive citations) with illuminating references to specific dramatic
productions and performances (minus self-indulgent theatrical anecdotes). The result
is an accessible but not dumb-downed account of Shakespeare’s world. Pennington provides
considerable insights into this complex, much-contested writer, using a modest and
witty approach which, while not claiming to have all the answers, nonetheless comes
across with the passionate conviction of a lifetime of personal experience.
The book ix basically arranged chronologically, alternating between biography and
writings, though occasionally certain themes take over and interesting side-paths
are followed. There is nothing new in the information given about Shakespeare’s personal
relationships or professional career, but the way these are linked with what he wrote
is always thoughtful and usually convincing. Pennington does not idolise his subject,
commenting on flaws in the plays: the beginnings and endings vary widely in their
success, and the humour can often be overdone. And he does not pretend to have special
knowledge of what makes him tick as a man: “It is certainly quite hard to understand
a writer so self-effacing, to whom the autobiographical assumptions we generally
make about artists are so inapplicable”. But he adds to our appreciation.
Like the Bible, Shakespeare is all things to all men, with his ambiguous meaning
and enigmatic personality giving rise to multiple interpretations. As Pennington
points out, “We still don’t know a single one of his opinions, but we often quote
from him without realising we’re doing it, to make our own more persuasive”. Above
all, he highlights Shakespeare’s humanistic ability to inhabit an incomparably wide
range of characters presenting a huge variety of outlooks on the world, thus enlarging
our sympathies: “He brings us together, with each other and ourselves”. And this
highly engaging book helps spread the word.
