![]() ![]() The past 12 months has also seen two screen versions of one of Dickens' best-loved books, Great Expectations. "There's no question that his great contribution has been his books but, for his personal pleasure and needs, theatre was absolutely central to him." In contrast, Callow has chosen to highlight the importance of live performance to Dickens, an aspect of his character that has inevitably been overshadowed by the ubiquitous popularity of novels like David Copperfield and A Christmas Carol. With this year marking the bicentenary of Dickens' birth, we have seen the publication of several biographies, including Claire Tomalin's much vaunted Dickens: A Life, which concentrated on the author's troubled childhood and marriage. The thing is, Dickens was always in denial about things like that while I doubt that Shakespeare was ever in denial about anything." Maybe that's the point where he and Shakespeare connect most completely, because Shakespeare was no stranger to such emotion. He therefore turned against her in a big way. She was crushing his spirit and prohibiting his freedom. "For reasons we can comprehend but not admire, he began to feel that she was a burden on him. "Dickens was a tremendously open and largely affable person, except in certain circumstances - most famously with his wife," he says. He moved in aristocratic circles because of his work but he can hardly have been an equal in that sense."Īccording to Callow, the crucial common element between the pair is that they were both flawed human beings. Shakespeare must have spent his whole life being patronised, as he was an actor first and then a playwright, neither of which were particularly highly regarded occupations. "He was very conscious of his status and one of the things that would make him turn quite savage was when he was taken for granted or patronised. "Shakespeare didn't have any celebrity status in the same sense that Dickens did," says Callow. Dickens was many, many things but he was not really a poet, while Shakespeare was extremely and sublimely that."īorn nearly 250 years apart, the two authors were products of very different historical eras, with Dickens utilising the development of mass printing technology to cultivate a form of fame that would be easily recognised today. He was much more responsive to emotional states and, of course, the language is much more lyrical than Dickens'. "Dickens was so massively extrovert and he really did set out to conquer the world, while Shakespeare was a more feminine kind of author. "They're such different writers," he says. The London-born actor and author has dedicated much of his career to bringing the work of both William Shakespeare and Charles Dickens to life, either mounting shows such as his one-man play Being Shakespeare or penning literary analyses of their legacies in his latest book, Charles Dickens. When I meet Simon Callow at his club in Covent Garden, I can't help but wonder which of Britain's two leading writers he identifies with the most. ![]() Actor-cum-writer Simon Callow tells Stephen Jewell about his fascination with two very different famous literary icons - and how they share one crucial trait.
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