You would no sooner ask me to play Shakespeare away from the Globe than you'd ask some rock star to make his new record on eight-track tape.

I'm quite simple, really. I like to play and inhabit my character. I really like to inhabit the situation. It's the situation that intrigues me.

Burleigh, absolutely; and a lot about Elizabeth. I mean I found when I play Henry V a lot of connections with the hidden history of the connection between Francis Bacon and Elizabeth.

I think that was very important to Bacon... personally. I think he went to great efforts to get a house for the Stratford man, to make it so difficult for us to prove that it was Francis Bacon, because it is very difficult to prove.

But I find with Francis Bacon, some of the things were in the place, and someone who was connected with these schools of thought, and someone who had a motivation that equals the scope of the comedy and the tragedy in the plays.

I think the idea that life ends when we physically die is as painful as the idea in Cromwell's time that there's some awful purgatory, and you have to give money to the Catholic church to get your loved ones out. I certainly have experienced a lot of evidence that there's a consciousness that isn't physical.