Acknowledgements

I told my wonderful editor Arabella Pike at William Collins that I wanted to write a memoir about my life with Shakespeare and a book about the effect of mental illness on some writers I have loved, including Samuel Johnson, Edward Thomas, Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath. She saw, as I had not, that by yoking the two themes into a single book I might alleviate some of the self-absorption that is inevitable in a memoir and test the proposition that literature in general, and Shakespeare in particular, may bring solace in the face of adversity. Whether or not I have succeeded is for the reader to decide, but I am deeply grateful to Arabella for giving me the opportunity to try.

My account of different actors’ approach to King Lear was given a trial run in The Lancet, where I also wrote about Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy; my memory of Cheek by Jowl’s As You Like It draws on a more detailed account that I contributed to a book in honour of Stanley Wells, my guiding light in writing about Shakespeare in the theatre and for the common reader.

Stephen Pickles read a draft with a friendly but very sharp eye and ear, and much has changed as a result: my thanks. Philip Davis encouraged me to go on when I nearly stopped after the first two chapters. I am grateful to my copy-editor, Linden Lawson, and to Iain Hunt and Jo Thompson at William Collins. Ernest Michael Bate, Richard Bate, Jon Campbell, Ian Huish and Christopher Ridgway helped me to remember my past. Paula Byrne has been my present joy for more than twenty-five years. Tom, Ellie and Harry Bate are my future, and Ellie especially has been kind in letting me write about things that are painful to recall and record. Ian McKellen, Simon Russell Beale and Simon Callow generously allowed me to report private conversations.

The book is an elegy for a lost age of youthful reading and a tribute to my teachers in both the classroom and the theatre. If it reignites a passion for Shakespeare (or indeed for literature more generally) in just a few teachers burdened by the bureaucracy and constraints of today’s assessment regimes, it will have done its work.

Shakespearean quotations are from The RSC Shakespeare: Complete Works, edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen (Macmillan, London, and The Modern Library, New York, 2007).

For purposes of criticism, the book includes insubstantial quotations from the following works that remain in copyright: A. Alvarez, The Savage God (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971); W. H. Auden, Another Time (Faber and Faber, 1940); The Diary of 85 (Essex) Medium Battery Royal Artillery 1943–1945, edited by Monty Bate (W. J. Parrett, 1947); Peter Brook, The Empty Space (McGibbon and Kee, 1968, repr. Penguin, 1972); T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems 1909–1935 (Faber and Faber, 1936) and Four Quartets (Faber and Faber, 1944, repr. 1959); William Empson, The Structure of Complex Words (Chatto & Windus, 1951); L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between (Hamish Hamilton, 1953, repr. Penguin, 1958); Ted Hughes, Introduction to A Choice of Emily Dickinson’s Verse (Faber and Faber, 1968) and The Letters of Ted Hughes, selected and edited by Christopher Reid (Faber and Faber, 2007); Robert Lowell, Robert Lowell’s Poems: A Selection (Faber and Faber, 1974), The Dolphin (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973) and The Letters of Robert Lowell, edited by Saskia Hamilton (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005); Charles Marowitz, ‘A Macbeth’: Freely Adapted from Shakespeare’s Tragedy (Calder and Boyars, 1971); Vladimir Nabokov, Bend Sinister (Henry Holt, 1947, repr. Penguin, 1974); Sylvia Plath, Ariel (Faber and Faber, 1965) and The Bell Jar (Harper and Row, 1971); Vita Sackville-West, Knole and the Sackvilles (Ernest Benn, 1969); C. H. Sisson, In the Trojan Ditch: Collected Poems and Selected Translations (Carcanet, 1975); L. C. (‘Kim’) Taylor, Introduction to Experiments in Education at Sevenoaks (Constable, 1965); Helen Thomas, As It Was and World Without End (William Heinemann, 1935, repr. Faber and Faber, 1972).

The poetry anthology mentioned in the final chapter is Stressed Unstressed: Classic Poems to Ease the Mind (William Collins, 2016), all royalties from which support the work of the ReLit Foundation for reading and well-being (relitfoundation.org).