You told me once that you were fearless at that age. I'm like the Wizard of Oz, this tiny thing behind a curtain, going grrrr . . . Because I was so embarrassed at the notion of fearlessness, I said that I had been daunted by doing Richard II and hadn't felt in tune with Richard II because it was the verse of a sort of person that I wasn't let alone gender. But I went home and thought that I actually was fearless about it. There are certain things you shouldn't be frightened of.
Language is such a friend.
I didn't understand The Waste Land when I first dealt with it, and I was in awe of it, but I wasn't fearful of it. What is wonderful about Richard II is that Shakespeare writes a different language in Richard II than he does in the other plays. The way I understand it is that Shakespeare wrote in a sort of patronizing way in a sort of reduced, childlike language that he imagined people used in the fourteenth century. So Richard II doesn't have nearly the dexterous variation, the flirtation with feminine endings that fly off into prose, or the half-lines that don't finish that he has in the more advanced plays. It's completely even, and that gives it a sort of formal structure which tells you everything about what he knew about that period.