A Valentine's Day toast to The King, The Queen, and William Shakespeare
At Grosvenor House in London’s Park Lane tonight, we gave a Valentine’s Day party to celebrate William Shakespeare. The Queen came. The Duke and Duchess of Gloucester came. There were other members of the Royal Family there and friends from the world of theatre and film and TV and books and beyond. A dozen theatrical Dames came. At least fifteen actors who have played Hamlet were there. It was a wonderful gathering of gifted and fun people. About 200 of us in all. We all signed a special card for The King and I presented Her Majesty with “his” and “hers” Valentine jumpers to take home.
Before Dame Judi Dench spoke Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116, and Gary Oldman performed a very funny poem about Hamlet, and Robert Lindsay, accompanied by Stefan Bednarczyk, sand “Brush Up Your Shakespeare”, I proposed a toast. Here is what i said.
Your Majesty, Your Royal Highnesses, My Lords, Ladies, Gentlemen, Most potent, grave, and reverend signiors, my very noble and approved good masters . . .
Welcome. Thank you for being here. What a wonderful crowd this is.
I was telling The Queen earlier that I am giving up name-dropping for Lent – so the coming days are going to be quite challenging for me.
It’s wonderful to be here – at the Grosvenor House Hotel, celebrating its 95th birthday this year – our thanks to them and especially the chefs for their Golden Cross-Gartered Goat’s Cheese Mousse with To Beet or not to beetroot Gel – memorable Shakespearean canapes and Lanson champagne. Igor has been playing the piano for us and is happy to take requests later on.
This is a special day – Ash Wednesday – Valentine’s Day – 14 February, the anniversary of the first performance of The Importance of Being Earnest – and Her Majesty has a special connection with Oscar Wilde because her great-grandfather, Alec Shand, was for a time secretly engaged to a girl called Constance who left him to marry Oscar Wilde. And Oscar and Constance Wilde’s grandson, Merlin Holland, is here, so had things turned out differently he and Her Majesty might have been brother and sister, or nephew and aunt – anyway there’s a plot for a play in there somewhere and Michael Frayn is in the room who could make something brilliant out of it.
David Hare is in the room, too – who did make something brilliant out of Oscar Wilde’s story. This is an evening for saluting playwrights and players. We have at least three noted Oscar Wildes in the room. And any number of Hamlets, Romeos, Juliets, Ophelias, Cleopatras, Rosalinds, Shylocks and Lears. I notice The Duke of Gloucester is giving the Richard the Thirds a wide berth.
We have Oscar winners, BAFTA winners, Olivier award winners – and that’s just Dame Judi.
We have contemporary culture here – daytime TV is out in force - and wonderful echoes of the past. We have the son and grandson of two prime ministers here and the grandson and granddaughter of two different sovereigns – and a great grandson of George V. This is our mixed-up ever-evolving national story in a room in Park Lane in 2024 celebrating the golden thread running through our literature, our theatre, our language, our life for more than four hundred years – William Shakespeare. Truly, he was not for an age but for all time.
What was he really like? Well, David Mitchell is here and he can tell you.
All I know is that Shakespeare – his poetry, his plays, his profound understanding of everything has meant so much to all of us for most of our lives – and especially, of course, to His Majesty The King, who had hoped to be with us tonight proposing this toast.
Before we raise our glasses, can I just say on behalf of all of us, how wonderful it is to have a King and Queen whose love of literature and the arts is so deep-rooted and so real and so supportive. It’s wonderful for us and for our country.
So, this is the toast: The King, The Queen and William Shakespeare!