Ronald Watkins

Biography

Arthur Ronald Dare Watkins (29 August 1904 – 16 February 2001) was a teacher of drama and a director, noted for his work on Shakespeare and was awarded the Order of the British Empire. Throughout his long career, in stage productions, lectures, and writings, Watkins argued for the primacy of language in Shakespeare's plays and attempted to discover and replicate how Shakespeare himself staged and produced the plays. Watkins was born in Kingston Hill, Surrey, the youngest of his parents' seven recorded children. He was educated at Eton and King's College, Cambridge, where he arrived as a scholar and gained a first-class degree in Classics. After a period working as a "reader" at the BBC, he joined the staff of Harrow School in 1932, teaching English and Classics. In 1948 he married Margaret "Bunty" Watson Brown. In 1940, a German bomb severely damaged the Harrow Speech Room. When Watkins produced his first Shakespeare play – Twelfth Night—at Harrow School in 1941, the damaged stage lacked a proscenium curtain and stage lighting. Watkins turned these problems to his advantage, realising that the minimalist conditions of his stage were similar to those of Shakespeare's own theatre. Inspired by the work of John Cranford Adams, Watkins gradually transformed the Harrow Speech Room into an approximation of an Elizabethan stage. The Shakespeare productions became an annual tradition at Harrow, and between 1941 and 1964, Watkins staged 21 plays. One of those whose performances he directed was Robin Butler, who after playing the Duke of Kent in a schoolboy production of King Lear in 1956, went on to achieve wider fame as the United Kingdom's top civil servant. In 1952 some of Watkins' former student actors formed the Old Harrovian Players, and this alumni company returned each year to present its own Shakespeare play at Harrow. In 1962, Watkins's friends David and June Gordon (Lord and Lady Aberdeen) invited him to direct a Shakespeare play at Haddo House, their country

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