If Ian McKellen, one of my own (and probably your own, unknown theatrical person) favourite actors, says something about Shakespeare, it’s probably interesting to listen to; after all, he has played virtually every ‘leading’ male part in the entire canon over 50 years and has probably spent more time between the lines of the Stratford man than many an academic. He represents one of the two halves of authority on Shakespeare: the world of letters – academics, writers, critics – and the world of performance, of the theatre and acting. These are the two places Shakespeare resides in our minds, and for many, there is no conflict between them. Read him when you want to go further into a play or examine a character, a plot or theme more closely or slowly; see him for the excitement, for his words and meanings come to life before you; sometimes they are changed utterly from how you envisaged them before. And yet, some people seem to find the two approaches incompatible, even mutually threatening or exclusive. Sir Ian, apparently – and, to me, rather strangely – is one of them.

I’ll say now that I really have no preference; I am in the camp that sometimes likes reading plays, sometimes watching them. Sometimes watching can be a lot faster than reading; sometimes (as in, say, Beckett), the need to stop every few sentences (full of silences and emptiness) and consider what you are reading (or not), means that reading can be an arduous, if rewarding, experience. But the fact that Sir Ian, who one would imagine has probably read both the Complete Works and individual plays a hundred times over, would be so decisive on one side is startling. His renowned love for and insight into Shakespeare is unquestionable, as well as his exclusive media soubriquet before his Gandalf days as ‘Famous Shakespearean/RSC actor Ian McKellen’.

His one-man 70’s touring show Acting Shakespeare is a superb and revelatory introduction to Shakespeare ‘as an actor’; and through which we can see the way he gives hints and suggestions to the performer, embedded in the text, to enact and create the character as he illustrates it, within his theatrical tradition. He has also given several other demonstrations (the best being his deep investigation into the ‘Tomorrow, Tomorrow, Tomorrow’ speech of Macbeth) of just how deep, rich, and multifarious the business of interpreting Shakespeare from the actor’s point of view is.

That might explain Sir Ian’s perspective: that of an actor, a man of the theatre, as Shakespeare was. His statement that reading Shakespeare and studying him academically “reduces him to an examination subject” may be slightly unclear in its wording and intention. I absolutely agree with the sentiment; to even suggest that Shakespeare would have had any idea, intention or understanding of the vast majority of theories, “readings” and agendas that critics pin into his work is ludicrous. He was a playwright working for a theatrical company, and he had to get his plays in on time, generally one or two a year; he was a craftsman who plainly often worked for money and not art (although his blending of popularity with pound potential was exceptional). He wrote with specific actors in mind, and with a specific theatre and theatrical limitations in mind. To posit him as some destined final puzzlepiece for all civilisation is the realm of the examination, and explains the frankly Biblical literature in, on and around him. In this sense, I agree with Sir Ian entirely; “reading” him in the sense of “reading English at Cambridge” and “watching” him in the theatre, acted by a McKellen, Olivier or Gielgud, are as different as the hearth and the mind, the emotions and cold facts.

That does not mean such “reading” has no value, but it does definitively make their study and “enjoyment” (for those who enjoy such things) as entirely separate beasts from the phenomenon of enjoying him as a perennially entertaining and personally enlightening theatrical giant. In this sense of “watching”, not “reading”, and seeing and feeling, rather than “studying”, Sir Ian is absolutely correct. Everyone knows and complains of the atrocities of teaching Shakespeare in schools (as Rowan Atkinson’s Blackadder berates Colin Firth’s Shakespeare, after punching him in the face: “Hours spent at school desks, trying to find one joke in A Midsummer Night’s Dream). I believe that this is the main thing that Sir Ian is grumpy about, and so am I. Teaching is obviously important, but for Shakespeare in particular, whose language will immediately signal warning signs to most 13-year-olds, the theatricality and the pure theatrical magic are what can save him from being consigned after GCSEs to the dusty fate of a text-book with a dick drawn on it.

However, I have to disagree with Sir Ian if (which I cannot imagine) he is suggesting that reading Shakespeare’s plays “privately” is a waste of time. For one it would surely make him a hypocrite, not to mention all the RSC and National directors and dramaturgs he has ever worked with. You cannot become a theatrical director, actor, playwright or colossus without studying plays, from both the page and the stage; they are two different worlds but very connected. If you love Shakespeare, or indeed most theatre, reading the plays that you love and want to learn more about is, at some point, both necessary and pleasurable. There need be no disconnect between watching and reading; like a music nerd “that guy” at a concert, carry the script with you as you would a score, whatever.

But stage and text are utterly different sides of the same coin: imagination, and another plane of existence. Whichever way you choose to get there, there shouldn’t be any contest between them.