Like many young actors, when I started I had dreams of performing some of the great roles of Shakespeare. One of the first things I did as a new actor was prepare three separate monologues, one comedy (Mercutio's "Queen Mab" speech from Romeo and Juliet), one history (the prologue from Henry V) and one high drama ("Now Is the Summer of our discontent..." from Richard lll) in the hopes that one day I would be asked to audition for the Stratford Shakespearean Festival in Stratford, Ontario, Canada.

However, my liking for Shakespeare did not come about just because I was an actor. In some ways it was probably the spectacle of seeing his work (and other classics) performed at the Stratford Festival during the 1970s that pulled me to the stage in the first place. It was, I believe, the Golden Age of the Stradford Festival; in the days before successive conservative governments gutted arts funding in Canada and forced the Festival to turn to Gilbert and Sullivan musicals to pay the rent, and some of the best actors in the English speaking world could be seen performing on a regular basis.

Perhaps that early exposure explains why I never feared the language, or found myself at a loss when reading the text in school like so many of my contemporaries. In fact my problem with Shakespeare is knowing what the language should sound like, and being continually disappointed by the inability of most productions to find actors who at least give the impression they know what they are saying. There's nothing worse in my opinion than an actor taking a deep breath and plowing through a speech as if it were one long sentence without any punctuation. So when the opportunity presented itself to view a package of four Shakespeare plays from the Thames Shakespeare Collection through the Arts And Entertainment network (A&E) I jumped at the opportunity.

Thames Television of England during the 1970s was rivaled only by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) for the quality of their productions, and had a reputation for mounting solid productions of Shakespeare's plays. The four plays in this set, Macbeth, King Lear, Twelfth Night, and Romeo And Juliet was an intriguing mixture as well. Aside from Hamlet, The Tempest, and perhaps Midsummer's Night Dream, these are four of the most well known of Shakespeare's plays, with Macbeth and King Lear being considered especially difficult to stage.