Wednesday, 6 March 2024
Government House
Her Excellency the Honourable Margaret Beazley AC KC

Bujari gamarruwa

Diyn Babana Gamarada Gadigal Ngura

In greeting you in the language of the Gadigal, Traditional Owners of these lands and waterways, I pay my respects to their Elders past, present, and future. I extend that respect to the Elders of all parts of our State from which you have travelled.

There are moments in one’s life when an event so concentrates the mind that it is forever fixed in one’s consciousness. For some it was JFK’s assassination. For others, September 11. Often it is a far less dramatic moment.

For me, one of the latter occasions was the first time I heard John Bell do a reading of Shakespeare. I remember exactly where it was – a dinner at the University of Sydney, in the late 1970s. So transfixed was I by the delivery that, as I speak, I cannot quite bring to mind the piece he delivered. But I was hooked, if not on all of Shakespeare at that time, certainly on any of John Bell’s performances.  

It was his vision that brought into our midst the Bell Shakespeare Company, which over its nearly 35-year history has matured into a premier arts institution and a leading Shakespearian performance company. We are blessed.

But why is this important? Indeed, why is Shakespeare even relevant some four centuries after his plays were written and performed. This is probably a rhetorical question, given the number of biographies of Shakespeare, the books written about his works, what must be the millions of performances of his plays.

Shakespearian scholar Harold Bloom sees Shakespeare as not a mere observer of the human condition, but as the inaugurator of that condition in the first place. In his 1998 work Shakespeare: Inventing the Human, Bloom wrote: “Shakespeare will go on explaining us, in part because he invented us.”[1]

Thus, when in 1891 Oscar Wilde wrote that “Life imitates art far more that art imitates life,”[2] he was, I would suggest, echoing Jacques in As You Like It, in one of Shakespeare’s most quoted observations: “All the World’s a Stage / And all the men and women merely Players”[3].

Coming from a melancholic ruminator, as Jacques is, this soliloquy draws the listener into what seems to be a mediation on the misery of life; after all, none of the ages of man he then runs through, comparing them to the acts of a play, sound much fun. Take old age: “with spectacles on nose and pouch on side” and the final age, one’s dotage, “Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.” And As You Like It is one of Shakespeare’s comedies.

I first found my Shakespeare home in his comedies, probably as an antidote to studying King Lear - one of his three great tragedies – at school. The other two are, of course, Macbeth and Julius Caesar, in which we find Shakespeare’s unravelling of the human spirit cleverly crafted through language and history.

Take Macbeth, for example, which introduced the word ‘assassination’ into the English language.[4]

In Julius Caesar, which was written at a time following a series of religiously motivated attempts on the life of Elizabeth, Shakespeare understood the power of brevity of language: “Et tu Brute”.[5]  Nothing more needed to be said.

Of John Bell, there is much to be said. 

Tonight, we have the extraordinary privilege of hearing from an individual whose knowledge of Shakespeare’s plays – both as text and, perhaps more importantly, as performance – is unequalled in this country. He has been pivotal in making accessible to countless audiences the rich experiences those plays provide. He established a company that has educated, enriched, and expanded our world.

I thought, however, that much could be understood of this consummate artist who has played such a seminal role in Australian theatre and in modern Australian thought by reference to his university friends and contemporaries, and his sometime housemates; the names are a litany of the movers and shakers of the 1970s in the arts, in literature, in journalism.

There were political activists and political commentators, including Clive James, Germaine Greer, Bruce Beresford, Ken Horler, Mungo McCallum (of whom it is reported Gough Whitlam described as “a tall, bearded descendant of lunatic aristocrats”— Gough did have a flair for the ‘magisterial statement’). There was also Richard Wherrett, John Gaden, Laurie Oakes, and Les Murray.

It might not be surprising, therefore, to find that the title of tonight’s presentation, in what is the 9^th iteration of Ideas@theHouse, held in collaboration with the Royal Society of NSW, is Shakespeare on Politics – What Can we Learn? 

Ladies and Gentlemen:  John Bell.

[1] Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, New York, Riverhead Books, 1998, p.20.

[2] Oscar Wilde, ‘The Decay of Lying’, in Intentions, 1891, available, for instance, here

[3] As You Like it, Act II Scene VII Lines 139-140. The motif of the world-as-stage is repeated in several other of Shakespeare’s plays: "Life’s but a walking shadow and he himself nothing but a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage” (Macbeth Act V Scene 5); “I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano; A stage where every man must play a part, And mine a sad one” (The Merchant of Venice, Act I Scene 1). Although emblematic of Shakespeare’s work, the motif is not originally his, appearing in Damnon and Pythias, a play by Richard Edward published the same year Shakespeare was born.

[4] James Shapiro, 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, p. 160

[5] James Shapiro, 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, p. 152