Sweet William by Michael Pennington (From The Oxford Times)

Sweet William by Michael Pennington

8:50am Thursday 5th April 2012 in Books By Nick Utechin

Sweet William by Michael Pennington

Pennington, one of our leading classical actors, has fined down his thoughts on the Bard into a most accessible book that is in 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 hours 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 Shakespearian 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.