Driven by a passion for the greatest playwright

By PETER CALDER

Academics don't really retire; they just stop teaching and, with a sigh of relief befitting an unchained slave, stop going to meetings.

Professor MacDonald Jackson, who was last week packing up his office at the University of Auckland in preparation for his retirement on the last day of January, was looking forward to freedom from the tyranny of the timetable and "countless committee meetings". At the same time he was relishing the prospect of working harder than ever.

Jackson, acknowledged as one of the world's leading Shakespeare scholars, will devote even more energy than he has done to the works of Shakespeare's younger contemporary, John Webster.

The second of a three-volume edition of the playwright's works, which he has co-edited with two other New Zealand academics, was published last year and he is hard at work on the third.

Beyond that, his many plans (which include a book on the sonnets and research into Shakespeare's early writing) reflect his abiding interest in the greatest playwright, for whom he conceived a lifelong passion while at Auckland Grammar School in the 1950s.

Like all sixth-form students of the day, he was studying Hamlet, and he went to see Laurence Olivier's 1948 movie. "I was bowled over," he recalls. "I still am, actually. I went again and again."

Though he doesn't doubt he was responding to the Oedipal dynamics of the story he says he felt in tune with "language which has never felt particularly alien to me".

"The thing about Shakespeare's language is that it is so concrete. Things are always connected to things in the real world. He doesn't talk about compassion but about 'the milk of human kindness'."

Jackson has been named among the university's top teachers and in 2000 received a Distinguished Teaching Award. His Shakespeare on Screen course has been particularly popular and he has been excited by recent film versions of Shakespeare, notably the Branagh version of Much Ado About Nothing, Baz Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet, and Richard Loncraine's Richard III.

He is not concerned by the "modernisation" that has ruffled some feathers. "No productions since the Restoration have been in the theatres the plays were written for," he says. "Every age has adapted Shakespeare to its own needs so I have no problems with adaptation."

Shakespeare's genius is exceptional for the reason that it is so accommodating of reinterpretation, Jackson says. Prospero in The Tempest has changed through the 20th century from the benign ruler of an island kingdom into an arrogant British imperialist imposing his will on indigenous minorities; Henry V, in Olivier's morale-boosting 1944 film, recalled England's glorious past under charismatic leadership but "these days he is usually denounced as a war criminal".

"I think both those aspects are there in the play. But I also think Shakespeare liked his characters a lot more, was much less judgmental about them than many critics are."

For all his meticulous scholarship - a recent book "goes a long way to proving" that the first two acts of Pericles were written not by Shakespeare but by a contemporary hack writer - Jackson is a man who loves Shakespeare in performance.

He describes himself as "an avid theatregoer" who devours all the Shakespeare he can find in London and Stratford whenever he is in Britain. He also sees everything here, though admits he goes to some shows out of a sense of duty.

He reckons the best productions he has seen here have been Murray Lynch's of Richard III and As You Like It at Downstage, though he says Michael Hurst's productions of Hamlet have been "interesting". He also singles out Don Selwyn's Maori-language film of The Merchant of Venice as possibly the most interesting he has seen here. "I found it very enjoyable even though I didn't hear a single word of Shakespeare.

"Because there is no resident Shakespeare company here like the RSC in England, there is not the same traditional training. People are always putting on plays but there is no serious centre and many people have trouble speaking the words."

He does not mean by this that he longs for the orotund, sing-song deliveries of the mid-last century stage knights Sir John Gielgud and Sir Ralph Richardson.

"It is more about the response to the poetry, a feeling for the words," he says. "Doing Shakespeare is different from acting in Shortland Street and there are not many actors who can do it.

"There are some but it is seldom that sufficient talent converges on one production for it to be completely satisfying."

At the end of his teaching career, the research goes on and Jackson says that new technologies mean new research possibilities. In the 1970s, he tried to answer questions about the authorship of plays attributed to Thomas Middleton, one of the greatest of Shakespeare's contemporaries.

His method was to compare the plays Middleton indisputably wrote with plays by other dramatists of the time. He worked through the early printed texts in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, counting the incidence of various language features and turns of phrase to construct a "Middleton profile" against which the doubtful plays could be tested.

"These days it is possible to compile lists of this kind by searching electronic databases. What took me months can now be done in a matter of weeks."

Jackson's teaching interests have extended well beyond Shakespeare - he is a notable expert on New Zealand poetry and edited a selection of A.R.D. Fairburn's poetry in the 1990s - but Shakespeare has been his chief interest and more than a subject of scholarship.

"I've tried to help students to experience the plays," he says. "King Lear, for example, is not just a text to be studied; it's an experience to be lived through. Once you have felt the power of that play, you have gained an insight that you didn't have before.

"This kind of understanding isn't easily measured in terms of the knowledge economy. But it is what great works of literature, and the arts in general, have to offer, and it is vital to our society."