Jez Butterworth

speaker

446 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 14 Apr

Jez Butterworth’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 2.

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

He says in it, no, I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be.

I am an attendant lord, one that will do to swell a progress, start a scene or two.

And he sees himself very much as a kind of a walk-on.

Towards the end of the poem, he says, shall I part my hair behind?

Do I dare to eat a peach?

I will wear...

Roll trousers and walk upon a beach.

I've heard the mermaids singing each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I find that so unbelievably moving and human and sad that he knows it's there, but he can't reach it.

The poem is about four or five pages long.

It's a good 1,200 lines.

It's an absolutely unbelievably beautiful expression of what it's like to look through a window at the eternal,

and not be able to reach it.

Can I have two?

Of course.

There was a bookshop in St Albans when I was a kid called Payton Books that I used to buy...

books from when I was very small and then between the ages of about 11 and 15 used to shoplift books from.

And it was the only decent bookshop for miles around and it meant an awful lot to me.

But I think my favourite one as an adult is City Lights at San Francisco, which was, I think it's Lawrence Ferlinghetti's bookshop.

Showing 421–440 of 446 · page 22 of 23