Ambassador Baker: Shakespeare promotes "universal values"

(Vatican Radio) The British Ambassador to the Holy See, Nigel Baker, said he hopes Shakespeare’s treating of humanity will lead people to “universal values” ahead of the first full performance of a Shakespearean play at the Vatican.

A special production of Hamlet was scheduled to be performed on Wednesday in the Vatican’s Palazzo della Cancelleria.

Listen to the interview with Britsh Ambassador Nigel Baker:

The Globe Theatre of London began the international tour in 2014 to mark the 450th anniversary of the birth of William Shakespeare. The tour – called Globe to Globe – ends this year, which is the 400th anniversary of the playwright’s death.

Ambassador Baker spoke to Vatican Radio about the significance of bringing Hamlet – Shakespeare’s “greatest…in many ways most difficult” play – to the Vatican.

“It tackles extraordinary complex issues around human relationships, around revenge, around mercy, around madness, around families, around dysfunction in families,” Ambassador Baker said. “It will be a challenge for the audience as well as for the Globe theatre production.”

Although no Shakespeare play has been performed in full before in the Vatican, there was a Shakespearean performance in 1964. The Royal Shakespeare Company performed excerpts of different plays for Pope Paul VI in the Vatican’s Palazzo Pio.

“I hope that one of the things people will take away is very much this insight Pope Paul VI had: It is through Shakespeare’s treating of humanity - with all of its foibles, and its ups and its downs, and its good and its evil - actually brings us to the great moral issues,” – Ambassador Baker said – “That in turn, potentially, leads us to universal values, and to transcendence and faith. I think that if anything, people will see that although Shakespeare was not a religious writer, he was a writer who treats the big issues that religion treats and focus on.”