Ambassador Baker: Shakespeare promotes "universal
values"
(Vatican Radio) The British
Ambassador to the Holy See, Nigel Baker, said he hopes Shakespeare’s treating
of humanity will lead people to “universal values” ahead of the first full
performance of a Shakespearean play at the Vatican.
A special production of
Hamlet was scheduled to be performed on Wednesday in the Vatican’s Palazzo
della Cancelleria.
The Globe Theatre of London
began the international tour in 2014 to mark the 450th anniversary of the birth
of William Shakespeare. The tour – called Globe to Globe – ends this year,
which is the 400th anniversary of the playwright’s death.
Ambassador Baker spoke to
Vatican Radio about the significance of bringing Hamlet – Shakespeare’s
“greatest…in many ways most difficult” play – to the Vatican.
“It tackles extraordinary
complex issues around human relationships, around revenge, around mercy, around
madness, around families, around dysfunction in families,” Ambassador Baker
said. “It will be a challenge for the audience as well as for the Globe theatre
production.”
Although no Shakespeare play
has been performed in full before in the Vatican, there was a Shakespearean
performance in 1964. The Royal Shakespeare Company performed excerpts of
different plays for Pope Paul VI in the Vatican’s Palazzo Pio.
“I hope that one of the
things people will take away is very much this insight Pope Paul VI had: It is
through Shakespeare’s treating of humanity - with all of its foibles, and its
ups and its downs, and its good and its evil - actually brings us to the great
moral issues,” – Ambassador Baker said – “That in turn, potentially, leads us
to universal values, and to transcendence and faith. I think that if anything, people
will see that although Shakespeare was not a religious writer, he was a writer
who treats the big issues that religion treats and focus on.”
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