Shakespeare had gay characters too, people just ignored it

'I am Gandalf, and Gandalf means me,' he said in The Lord of the Rings. To those who live closer to Marvel Comics than Middle Earth, he's Magneto, the metal-bending X-Man. To some, he's Mr Holmes. To others, Macbeth. The sum of these parts is Sir Ian McKellen, grandee of the British stage and American screen. British Council and the British Film Institute will bring him to India in May as the ambassador of Shakespeare Lives, a global programme to mark the bard's 400th death anniversary which will celebrate his influence on culture, education and society.The 76-year-old actor and gay rights activist tells Joeanna Rebello why everyone missed the gay references in Shakespeare's work.
After 400 years, why does Shakespeare have so much resonance across the globe, even though he pinched most of his plots?
Anyone who has the good fortune to see Shakespeare's plays in the theatre will discover they're more than just the plots; they're full of detail, and characters of different sorts. He seems, more than any other writer, to be familiar with all the different varieties of human nature. He's fascinated by politics and people's private lives -he shows you what they're like, on and off duty. And in the last 400 years, human nature hasn't really changed -people are still ambitious, they're still falling in love.The stories might be old, they might even be borrowed, but it's the characters. We all define ourselves by Shakespeare's interest in us.
You recently launched the Heuristic Shakespeare app. How important a role has technology played in the global 'Shakespeare wave'?
Human nature hasn't changed, but society and human activity has. My motive for being involved in the app is (to help) people who find studying Shakespeare difficult. When you present a student with a script by Shakespeare, he or she might be baffled. Scripts are for professional experts, not for audiences. Shakespeare didn't intend for his plays to be read; they were for the actors to learn. The idea of the app is to make it easier.
You've compared a Shakespeare play to a Mozart score, implying that his works are better watched than read. Should schools rethink their approach to teaching Shakespeare?
I met Shakespeare at age eight or nine, when I saw amateur actors in the north of England doing Macbeth and Twelfth Night. And when I came to study the plays in school and university , I always saw them in the context of a theatre performance. People who don't have that advantage may find the plays difficult and bewildering and begin to dislike Shakespeare. I wouldn't go as far as to say Shakespeare shouldn't be taught in schools, but what a pity it would be if he were just an examination subject. It's like taking a song or a piece of music and just handing out the score and saying, `Now listen to that'.
You're quite active online (your Instagrammed photos with Patrick Stewart are enormously popular). How important is social media to a professional actor?
When I do a film or a play, I'm trying to communicate with the audience. Social media too is part of that process -to directly contact people interested in the same things as I am. Five million people follow me on Facebook and I know that most followers come from the UK, US, followed by India!
You came out in the '80s to protest against a law that discriminated against homosexuals in the UK. India continues to have a colonial-era law that criminalizes LGBT sex. Why is change taking so long?
Because people don't know or talk about the subject. I notice that religious people point to their religious books to sup port their disapproval of gay people. I think it isn't that the books say these things but people start with these prejudices and look to their holy texts for support. There are Muslim gay groups, Hindu gay groups and Christian gay groups -there are devout religious people who have thought it through with humanity and accepted that we're not all the same. I'm not arriving in India with this big campaign to turn people into homosexuals (laughs). It hasn't been a disadvantage to me, but the joy of my life really .
Shakespeare had gay characters too. Antonio in The Merchant of Venice starts off by saying `In sooth, I know now why I am so sad'. We soon find out why , because his boyfriend Bassanio is going to get married. It's right at the start of that play and staring us in the face for 400 years and people have ignored it because they haven't under stood it. It does strike me as ironic that people who are saying homosexuality is not compatible with Indian culture, are insisting on a law that was put in place by a colonial power that was not sympathetic to their culture either.
And finally, which of your two Hollywood characters, Gandalf or Magneto, do you most identify with?
Gandalf. He has a good sense of humour and he enjoys a drink and a party . I think Magneto is just a bit too stern for me. Last night, Vishal Bhardwaj came around. He's showing his Shakespeare films in London. I've watched his films and love them, especially the Hamlet version (Haider). Anyway , I took out my Gandalf hat and sword from my basement and he put the hat on. Both X-Men and Lord of the Rings were very popular films, and I particularly like it when young people respond to them because they're moral stories. The stories of Middle Earth are about good and evil, good and bad behavior. X-Men is about a minority in society -the mutants -and how they fit in with the rest, which could also be a metaphor for being gay .