Education Quote by Janet Suzman

The line lands like backstage gossip that accidentally turns into a manifesto. Suzman starts with the bland self-help truism - you learn from mistakes - then swerves into a fan’s incredulity: Shakespeare as the artist who doesn’t even grant you the comfort of seeing the seams. The joke is in the clumsy phrase “one big non mistake,” a deliberately unliterary construction that makes her admiration feel unprocessed, almost irritated. She’s not polishing a thesis; she’s confessing the intimidation.

The intent is praise, but the subtext is professional envy and actorly awe. An actress lives inside other people’s words for a living; to work on Shakespeare is to confront dialogue that anticipates your choices before you’ve made them. “He just got everything right” isn’t a claim of literal perfection so much as a description of how the plays behave in rehearsal: scenes keep yielding, characters refuse to flatten, jokes still sting, grief still feels specific. For performers, that reliability can be both liberation and trap. If the text is already “right,” where do you put your own risk?

Context matters: Suzman’s career is steeped in classical theatre and South African political history, where Shakespeare has often been used both as cultural prestige and as a tool for speaking around censorship. Her offhand certainty hints at why Shakespeare persists in institutions that otherwise struggle to justify themselves: he offers the fantasy of an unimpeachable standard. Suzman punctures that reverence by voicing it in plain language, keeping the bard human-sized even as she crowns him.