It was my first Jubilee moment — Judi Dench on Radio 4’s Today programme suddenly launching into Shakespeare mid-glam (incredibly glam) party. She was talking to Jim Naughtie at the Queen’s gala for the arts at the Royal Academy and bewailing the decline in the teaching of Shakespeare in schools. Mid-sentence, she breaks into Cleopatra’s lament: ‘I dream’d there was an Emperor Antony/O! such another sleep, that I might see/ But such another man.’ It was so natural, so heartfelt, so extraordinary that she could remember the speech line-for-line and give it to us, just like that, with no preparation, no sense of performance or theatrical delivery. I just had to stop and listen; to pause instead of rushing on with the day. Her intense relish in the power of the writing and her desire to get this across was tangible.
Maybe this is the point of the Jubilee. Never mind the trading days lost, the business not reaped, the feeling that the country is going off on an extended junket without thinking about who’s going to pay for it.
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