Maggie O’Farrell

So I'm always really pleased when I hear people say, I didn't think I was going to like Shakespeare, but I did.

You know, and I think it's, I really, really wish that Shakespeare was more on the curriculum.

You know, he used to be.

When I was at school, I was at comprehensive school and in the 80s, and we used to do a Shakespeare play every year from the age of 11.

And I loved it.

It was so exciting because you knew that you'd go from Romeo and Juliet, then you did Julius Caesar, then you did... And, you know, it's...

It's not kids' fault, but they don't have access to that, unfortunately.

It's not teachers' fault either.

I just wish that... Because if you don't get the chance to access his language and his world at that age, you do feel that it's elitist and you feel excluded from it.

But then you shouldn't be.

I did, yeah.

Well, obviously, there's no shortage of books about Shakespeare.

So I really, I dived into those.

And I love reading about that kind of thing.

And there's lots of incredible works of scholarship and biography about Shakespeare.

But especially in terms of

the women of the book and the children, of course, there's very, very little written.

It's very little we know about them.

There's very little written about the life of ordinary people.

Like you say, you can find out all about what it was like living in a palace or wearing clothes that a queen would wear, but you don't really, it's very hard to find out what ordinary people living, you know, on the streets of Stuttgart would have been like.