Most favourite play nominations went to Shakespeare's tragedies - including Romeo and Juliet (Miss Douglas), Macbeth (Mr Sanderson), Othello (Mr Broughton and Mr Hempstead), Hamlet (Mr Williams) and King Lear (Mr Watkins, Miss McLaren and Mr Hager).
Dr Hudson and Miss Gill were the only teachers to nail their colours to the mast of comedy - Miss Gill chose Shakespeare's epic battle of the sexes, The Taming of the Shrew, while Dr Hudson reflected that although his personal favourite Shakespeare hasn't remained constant over the years, he's opting for Twelfth Night, now that he's 'older and more mellow'. Mr Cairns confessed to a soft spot for one of Shakespeare's late romances, the rarely staged Cymbeline, which he first saw on television, with an introduction by the playwright Dennis Potter, no less.
Others stood up for the histories: Mr Girvan chose Henry V, and Mrs Graham backed Richard III - Mrs Graham noting wryly that this is a play that can be adapted to any modern institutional setting ...
Favourite characters ranged from heroes and villains to supporting players, and included Mercutio (Miss Douglas), Prospero (Mr Girvan), Hamlet (Mr Williams), Don Pedro from Much Ado about Nothing (Mr Kerr), Iago (Mr Broughton), Rosencrantz and Guildenstern ('in the Tom Stoppard version': Miss McLaren) and Rosalind (Mr Watkins). Two teachers found their favourite characters in Macbeth - Mr Sanderson opted for the protagonist himself, while Mr Hager ventured further down the cast list and picked out the Porter. Miss Gill chose Katherine, Shakespeare's eponymous 'shrew', selecting two of her most powerful, passionate lines - 'My tongue will tell the anger of my heart,/Or else my heart, concealing it, will break' - as her favourite moment.
Mrs Graham chose an equally strong-willed Shakespearean heroine, Cordelia from King Lear, 'because she is quiet without being weak, and because she told the truth even though it could have meant personal ruin.'
Intriguingly, both Dr Hudson and another teacher's choice of Richard III as their favourite character was informed by their own experience of acting the part, although they actually played him in different Shakespeare plays, and at different points in his rise to power. The latter, who confesses to a degree of admiration for the 'poisonous bunch-backed toad', tackled the early stages of Richard's career, when he was still merely Duke of York, in Henry VI Part III, and Dr Hudson steered the 'bottled spider' towards the crown at the Wolsey Theatre in Ipswich, in 1982.
The Henry VI trilogy was also the source for one of Mr Girvan's favourite Shakespearean moments, this time from Part II, when Jack Cade's rebellion reaches London and is greeted by a mob of exuberant citizens, all with their own plans of what the rebellion can achieve. One of them, Dick the Butcher, has a brilliant idea: 'the first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers'! Luckily for London's legal profession, Jack Cade doesn't heed his advice, but Dick the Butcher's dream has retained its popularity over the years ...
Richard III's smooth but disingenuous advice to the doomed Princes in the Tower, to beware of wicked uncles, is one of Mr Cairns's favourite moments in Shakespeare:
Your grace attended to their sugar'd words,
But look'd not on the poison of their hearts:
God keep you from them, and from such false friends!
He recommends Laurence Olivier's delivery of the lines in his 1955 film of the play, if you want to hear them at their very best.
Mr Cairns also likes Cleopatra's world-weary 'Give me to drink mandragora' and Mr Kerr has a particular fondness for John of Gaunt's description of vanity as an 'insatiate cormorant' in Richard II. Sometimes, people's choices were influenced by more than just the words themselves. Mr Martin, for instance, chose one of Ariel's songs from The Tempest -
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Ding-dong.
Hark! now I hear them - ding-dong, bell.
- partly because of this spell-binding setting by Thomas Ades
Miss Douglas's favourite bit of Shakespearean dialogue comes from the opening scene of Romeo and Juliet, where the servants of rival houses Montague and Capulet wind each other up:
Abraham: Do you bite your thumb at us, sir?
Sampson: I do bite my thumb, sir.
Abraham: Do you bite your thumb at us, sir?
Sampson (aside to Gregory): Is the law of our side if I say ay?
Gregory: No.
Sampson: No, sir, I do not bite my thumb at you sir, but I bite my thumb, sir!
'I chose this primarily because my daughter and I quoted it to each other a lot when she was little. She knew the play from a very young age and the Baz Luhrmann film is one of her favourite movies!'
Mr Broughton also nominated a moment of macho posturing, this time from Titus Andronicus, in Aaron the Moor's blunt but accurate retort to dopey Chiron's allegation that he has 'undone' his mother: 'Villain, I have done thy mother'. Dr Zetie felt that Claudio's line from Much Ado About Nothing - 'O, what men dare do! What men may do! What men daily do, not knowing what they do!' - succinctly 'sums us up'.
Both Mr Hager, Mr Girvan and Mr Watkins chose favourite lines from King Lear. Mr Girvan opted for Lear's bitter reflection on 'filial ingratitude': 'how sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child!', while Mr Hager picked out one of Lear's tragic moments of lucidity during his madness - 'when we are born, we cry that we are come/To this great stage of fools' - and Mr Watkins selected Lear's mighty address to the storm:
Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench'd our steeples, drown'd the cocks!
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Strike flat the thick rotundity o'the world!
Crack nature's moulds, all germens spill at once
That make ingrateful man!
Not just, he says, for the fun of speaking the words themselves, but because 'it blazed through my mind when quivering in a rusty 4x4 beneath an exhilarating (and terrifying!) lightning-and-sandstorm in the Omani desert in my twenties. Quality.' It's a play with which many teachers feel a strong personal connection, Mr Watkins among them: 'my father speaks very movingly of watching Robert Stephens, himself in ailing health, playing Lear. He and I have watched several productions since, so this production has been important to us both, in a funny way.'
Mr Williams chose a pivotal exchange from the end of Act I of Hamlet:
Horatio: O day and night but this is wondrous strange!
Hamlet: And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
And Miss Graham also opted for a line from the tragedy - 'something is rotten in the state of Denmark' - because 'my primary school teacher in America used to say that when we got something wrong. Since we were 7, and not living in Denmark, it puzzled us. The first time I read it in Hamlet years later I burst out laughing. Whenever I hear that line I see that teacher's frowning face!'
Several people were generous enough to share their memories of Shakespeare in the theatre. Mr Hempstead has racked up a mighty five Othellos - four on stage, one on film: 'the first was at the Regent's Park Open Air Theatre in 1976, in extreme temperatures, where the blacked-up white man smeared his make-up all over Desdemona, repeatedly, in 90 degree heat. The best Othello? Lenny Henry, by a country mile. Worst? Laurence Olivier, by the same distance. Funniest? Topol, unintentionally, when he developed an unfortunate knee tremble which reduced the audience at Chichester Festival Theatre to a fit of giggles.
Best directed? Trevor Nunn's RSC version, because it really makes the jealousy believable.' He also recommends Polanski's Macbeth: 'shot on location in its orginal Scottish setting, with the greatest of all Shakespearean soliloquies done as a voice-over as Macbeth looks out over the bleak landscape as realization dawns and retribution closes in.'
Mr Sanderson also nominated this soliloquy as his favourite moment in Shakespeare - 'a bit bleak, I'm afraid, but very powerful':
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Dr Zetie was lucky enough to see some legendary RSC productions: 'at 16, after O Levels, a friend and I went up to Stratford-upon-Avon for a few days, stayed at the hostel, and took in a number of performances including Anthony Sher's famous Richard III (on crutches).
That was good, but Josette Simon as Nerissa in Merchant of Venice was an eye-opener - one of those times you realise there is something special happening on stage.'
Mr Cairns also remembers his 'first visit to Stratford-upon Avon on a summer's evening in June 1987 to see Twelfth Night, produced by Bill Alexander. Forget wacky settings, updating, etc - this really looked like Illyria: azure Mediterranean sky, a sound-loop of cicadas chirruping away and the sea lapping the shore.
As I look back in the RSC's online archive (I do still have the programme somewhere), I see to my amazement some famous names that meant nothing to me at the time: in particular Harriet Walter (Viola) and Deborah Findlay (Olivia). I shall never forget the inflection Olivia, falling in love with Viola disguised as a boy, gave to her line, 'Give us the place alone. We will hear this divinity.' There were so many delicious directorial touches that I wrote many of them down in my Arden copy of the play that evening lest I forget. I use one (rather naughty) example in lessons on Aristophanes as a prime example of how a harmless line can be made hilarious by some appropriate stage business.'
For Miss Graham, 'the great performance that stays in my mind is a production that came over from Britain to Washington DC, starring Sir Ian McKellen as Richard III.
We had a close friend who was deaf so we booked the matinee with the sign language interpretation. As the 'deaf audience' we had special tickets with seating in a reserved section near the stage. The signmaster (the translator) was sitting there so we asked him some questions about translating Shakespeare into sign language. He said Richard III was much more difficult to interpret than other Shakespeare plays. It was an indescribable production in quality, not merely outstanding actors but the concept, costumes, lighting - everything. Equally remarkable were the two signers who between them acted/interpreted the entire play, which was five hours! They even signed to let us know there was war noise going on. At the end of the performance, Sir Ian and the cast applauded the interpreters for several minutes - as did we of course!'
Mr Williams also has extraordinary memories of 'translated' Shakespeare, from when he was assistant director on the RSC's tour of The Merchant of Venice to China:
'watching audiences in Beijing, utterly spell-bound and not needing to look at the surtitles in Mandarin, and meeting an elderly university professor who had gone on teaching Shakespeare right the way through the cultural revolution. For her the RSC visit was a lifetime dream come true.'
He also remembers being 'blown away' by the film adaption of the Ian McKellen Richard III, which Miss Graham saw in Washington, and also by McKellen as Coriolanus at the National Theatre. Dr Hudson also cited a memorable Ian McKellen performance - but memorable for rather different reasons:
Mr Sanderson and Miss McLaren were both dazzled by Helen Mirren's amazing performance as Cleopatra, for the RSC, at the Pit Theatre in the Barbican in 1983.
Miss McLaren also remembers seeing Anthony Hopkins in King Lear, from the third row of the stalls, which was like 'being right next to an impacted atom bomb'.
Mr Kerr was (of course) wowed by Luke Cullen's recent Henry V, as was Mr Girvan, who was also impressed by the performances in recent SPS productions of Julius Caesar and The Tempest, especially Colin Towers-Perkins as Prospero.
Mr Williams was stunned by Ben Allen as Olivia in Propeller's all-male Twelfth Night, and both he and Miss McLaren consider themselves incredibly lucky to have seen Adrian Lester's extraordinary performance as Rosalind in Cheek by Jowl's all male version of As You Like It, opposite a very young Tom Hollander as Celia:
Many thanks to everyone who generously contributed their thoughts and memories to this post. And don't forget, if you want to get involved in celebrating Shakespeare, the festivities kick off this weekend with the Globe Theatre's epic-sounding 'The Complete Walk' - a two and a half mile route along the banks of the Thames, from Westminster to Tower Bridge, featuring specially filmed extracts from all 37 of Shakespeare's plays. Also on the South Bank, the BFI is mounting a two month celebration of Shakespeare on Film - and there's all sorts of other exciting stuff going on under the auspices of the Shakespeare 400 project, co-ordinated by King's College, London. Have fun!
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