Daiwa Ichiban Lecture 2023 with Gregory Doran

On 6 June 2023, Gregory Doran, Director Emeritus of the Royal Shakespeare Company, spoke on “My Shakespeare:  A Director’s Journey through the First Folio” at the residence of Britain’s Ambassador to Japan, Julia Longbottom CMG. This was the fifth lecture in the ongoing Daiwa Ichiban Lecture Series in collaboration with the British Embassy in Tokyo.

In his speech, Doran spoke about the First Folio, published 400 years ago this year, without which we would have lost many of Shakespeare’s greatest plays. Every surviving copy of the Folio has its own individual history, which can often be appreciated from the annotations in, and damage to, these valuable books (one has a bullet hole in it). Doran paid tribute to the two actors who collected the plays together for publication, urging us, in their introduction, to “Read him, therefore; and again, and again.”