He said: “I’m not a big fan of young people being forced to read Shakespeare. Rylance, who has won Tony and Olivier awards for his roles in Shakespeare plays, added that he did not like making young people read the works.

“Players have always adjusted the words to get on with the powers that be,” he said. He said actors would be “chased out of town” if they did not censor their own plays. “If you went out and played in a puritan town in the north of England, you took out some of the things that were going to offend those people.” “From what I know of talking to scholars, our own practices are not different from what they did at the time. Rylance said: “Mostly you edit the plays because they’re too long and boring. There are only about 230 copies of the folio in existence, experts say. Shakespeare first folio returns to London. The folio is estimated to be worth £3m-£6m, according to Rémy Cordonnier, who uncovered it in the library in St-Omer. The St-Omer folio was found in November in a library, where it had lain undiscovered for nearly 200 years. Rylance, 55, was speaking at the Globe, where he unveiled a copy of Shakespeare’s first folio that was recently found in France. these statements have a lot more resonance now than they did at that time.” “If a character says it, it doesn’t mean the author means it but since the Holocaust. Shakespeare’s plays were supposed to be performed and reading them was “the last thing the author intended,” he said.Īsked whether he ever censored plays when adapting them for the stage, Rylance said: “I have to make the decision, do I include that or not? There are some very unfortunate antisemitic things that characters say. Rylance also warned against making pupils read Shakespeare and be tested about his plays in schools because it was “disrespectful to the author”. “The pressures I feel are more for times where he will say something very antisemitic,” he said.

Shakespeare first folio mark damon