ABSTRACT
Hall had a deep love of Shakespeare; at college he studied not only Elizabethan verse speaking but the punctuation and printing practices of the time and the authenticity of different versions, and he both acted in and directed Shakespeare. Yet Hall came to Stratford not as a classicist but as a director of modern plays. It was this reputation, as well as his continuing direction of new plays, that made his arguments for the company to be ‘relevant’ convincing. He believed the RSC had to be situated ‘in the marketplace of Now … expert in the past but alive to the present’. 1 This was its legitimacy with the public, whom he was trying to woo both as potential audience and as taxpayers funding the company from the public purse. Leasing the Aldwych and, albeit briefly, the Arts to add to the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford allowed, in theory at least, cross-pollination between the RSC’s classical and contemporary work. In setting up the Studio, Hall offered institutional artistic support for exploring the connections.
