Interview by Rhys Davies and Joe Westhorpe from the Beacons Project:

Q: What inspired you to write 'Shakespeare's Words' and 'The Miscellany.'

Ben: "Well Shakespeare's Words was, um, in the first instance my idea. I was in drama school and there was a book called 'Onions', and it was the main glossary for people who wanted to study Shakespeare. I was using it when I was in drama school, and, as I was leaving, I helped a friend with a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, and I was reading the book and I needed an explanation of a few words I didn't understand. I had my copy of Onions with me, and it didn't have all the words I needed, it was missing quite a few. And I said to Dad that 'This book isn't everything it's cracked up to be,' and he went away and had a think about it. At the end of the weekend we both talked to each other on the phone, and Dad came up with the idea that , 'if a new version needs to be written, why don't we do it?'"

David: "It took three years to put that book together, there were a lot of words to be studied and a lot of words to be sorted out, and it proved to be a major project; we thought it would take a year and in the end it took three, and that's very different from the Miscellany, the Miscellany didn't exist this time last year, we're talking June of 2005. Well, it was only in July 2004 that Penguin rang up and said 'we would like you to write a Miscellany book to go with the series, and could you have it done by the beginning of this year?' So we suddenly found ourselves with the question of 'do we do it or not?' because it's completely the opposite of 'Shakespeare's Words', we had all the time in the world, three years, and this had to be done in two months."

Q: What is it like writing and performing with family members?

Both: (laughing) "That's a very good question."

David: "Yes, I can imagine it being difficult with some people, but it hasn't been a problem with Ben, I think we worked together very well, we don't have rows."

Ben: "I mean, sometimes, we'll debate over points that are going in the book, but I think that's the thing we tried to work towards more than ever, because Dad's from a different generation from mine."

David: "Different schooling as well."

Ben: "For example, he studied Latin when he was at school, and I didn't. He's a linguist, I'm an actor. We come from different directions and that makes our point of view on Shakespeare better."

David: "At the same time we overlap, because, I do linguistics, and Ben did a first degree in Linguistics at Lancaster University, so he knows some of my subject. Ben trained as an actor, I've been in an amateur repartee company for many, many years and have played some Shakespearian characters on stage like Tony Belch and Shylock, so I'm interested in his profession. I think it's this overlap of interests which makes us think and perform well together."

Q: When you first came on stage and started bouncing off each other I was struck very heavily how much your banter was like Harrison Ford and Sean Connery in the last Indiana Jones film, The Last Crusade.

(Roaring Laughter)
Ben: "Harrison Ford, that's a compliment."

David: "Well, I can't do Connery's accent."

Ben: "But given how good the script for that film was, I'll take that as a great reflection on our improvisational skills."

Q: As an actor, which Shakespearian character would you most want to play?

Ben: "Five years ago, when I was in Drama School it was Romeo, and now it's probably Richard II, it's a beautiful play and I think it's very difficult character to play, because he starts off very young and childish, and though he only becomes a degree older, he's a lot wiser, and it's got some of the most beautiful writing and the most beautiful poetry. But, as I get older and I get a few more years experience I become more like Dad, you know, King Lear."

David Laughs.

Ben: "Yeah, he's a great King Lear, definitely King Lear."

Q: How important do you feel Shakespeare's work is, in relation to modern literature?

David: "Ah well, I think his relevance hasn't changed at all in 400 years. I mean, every time you go and see a Shakespeare play, I think the audience warms to the themes of the play, identifies with the characters, it hasn't changed, the language might have changed a bit, the dress might have changed a bit, but the themes are still there, and everybody enthuses about it. We go to most of the big Shakespeare plays every year, this year we've been to probably four or five, I was at The Globe a couple of Sundays ago, looking at their new version of The Tempest. The audience was, everybody from the youngest child, 6 or 7 years old, to the oldest person you could imagine, and at the end there was applause that went on and on and on. Well, what's that all about? It's the theatre, you don't have to be so enthusiastic, but these are people who felt that they'd seen a fantastic production, understood what it was about, recognised the characters, and so on and so forth. And it's a mixture of I think character and story and theme and language, which makes him as, as they say in the book, for all time."

Ben: "Absolutely. I mean, you know, you go from Sheridan and the Restoration period, forty years after Shakespeare and he's got a character Mrs Malaprop, very very similar to some of Shakespeare's characters. And then you go through, right to the present day. I've just read David Mitchell's 'Cloud Atlas', and the amount of Shakespeare references in this is just amazing. I think as far as modern literature goes, Shakespeare goes beyond theatre into literature and out into every part of the world. There hasn't really been a writer like him that has just spread himself through so many different places. "

David: "I travel the world a lot, doing lecture tours and things like that, language topics and the only author that ever gets regularly mentioned at question time, to do with language and English and so on is Shakespeare. I mean, other writers sporadically, of course, but Shakespeare always turns up. We were in Calcutta a little while ago, and we walked down Shakespeare Street. In Calcutta. Which other author has a street named after him in Calcutta? And so this is what we find all over the world."

Q: And against that, there's also controversy about whether he finished the plays or not. For example, Christopher Marlowe died before Faustus was finished.

David: "Well I don't have any doubts about the issue of whether he wrote the plays or not. Let's put it this way: the argument that he didn't, all the arguments that he didn't come down to one basic thing at the end of the day, that somebody without a university education couldn't possibly have developed an understanding of all the things in the world that he writes about. And this seems to me to absolute nonsense, for tow reasons. Firstly, if you do have a university education, it does not guarantee that you are going to write brilliant plays. Most of the people in Shakspeare's day who did write plays did have a university education and they wrote lousy plays. Conversely, if you are a genius, and whoever wrote these plays was a genius, then to be a genius is to be a genius, whatever background you have it doesn't much matter. We mustn't forget that Shakespeare did move in circles where he picked up a great deal of the information he needed to write these plays. He was a member of the King's men, after all."

Q: And finally, is there life beyond Shakespeare, for both of you?

David: "Well, for me, most of my books, the vast majority of them have nothing to do with Shakespeare. So I've spent most of my life just working on language as a subject, and exploring it through as many points of view as I can. At the moment, I'm actually working on language in relation to the internet, which is nothing to do with Shakespeare at all. But on the other hand, once Shakespeare gets hold of you, he doesn't let you go, so he's never very far away."

Ben: "Is there life beyond Shakespeare? Well, as far as writing goes, I don't know. I'll probably write more on Shakespeare, and hopefully on other topics as well. As far as acting goes, which is my main love, if you wanted to spend your whole life doing Shakespeare roles you could. You'd start off doing Romeo, then you'd move on to Hamlet, and then you've got Leontes and Lear waiting for you. But I'd probably go crazy. There are too many other great playwrights. So yes there is life beyond Shakespeare, but he's definitely a very large slice of the pie."

Interview by Rhys Davies and Joe Westhorpe from the Beacons Project.