After Hamlet.(Mark Rylance)(Brief biography)

One early-winter evening in London, I walked with Mark Rylance, the founding artistic director of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre and an actor regarded as one of the finest contemporary interpreters of Shakespeare's plays, across the Millennium Bridge, over the Thames, to the Globe. St. Paul's Cathedral loomed on the opposite shore. The tide was out. "Do you want to go down to the river?" Rylance asked. We climbed down the steep stone stairs to the bank. Looking east, we could see the Globe, lit up like a top. He said, "The Globe is a mercurial building. It changes in my mind. Sometimes it seems quite large, at other times small. It has that unusual effect."

The Globe, which opened in 1997, was built two hundred yards from the site of the theatre where Shakespeare's company was based, at the turn of the seventeenth century. We were on our way to a party at the theatre, despite Rylance's reservations about attending. He had left the Globe in 2005: there had been tension with the board, he felt, over, among other things, his charismatic leadership style and his skepticism about whether Shakespeare had even written the plays that bear his name. "It's a house I've left, but it's a house I still live in," he told me.

Rylance almost always wears a fedora, and the light from Blackfriars Bridge elongated its shadow, turning it into a tricorn. At forty-eight, he is a slightly built man, with fine features, high color, hazel eyes, and dark hair. He was soon to start rehearsals for a revival of the nineteen-sixties farce "Boeing-Boeing" at the Comedy Theatre, in the West End, in which he played Robert, a provincial who arrives in Paris and discovers that the love life of his old friend Bernard revolves around the flight schedules of three stewardesses. (The play opens in New York, at the Longacre Theatre, this month, with Rylance reprising his London role.)

Rylance's parts in the past twenty-five years, as a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company and then at the Globe, have included Romeo, Benedick, Prospero, and Puck, as well as Olivia and Cleopatra. He has played Hamlet more than four hundred times; the theatre critic Benedict Nightingale has described him as "among the near-complete Hamlets." Rylance also works in movies; when I saw him, he was filming "The Other Boleyn Girl," in which he plays Thomas Boleyn, Anne Boleyn's father. ("Suddenly, I've gone from being the young dude to being my father," he said.) His other film work includes "Prospero's Books" (1991) and "Angels and Insects" (1995). In 2000, he starred in Patrice Chereau's film "Intimacy," as a melancholy night-club worker who meets a woman every week for sex. The film featured frontal nudity and unsimulated fellatio. "It was disturbing," Rylance recalled. "I thought how easily I could have been that guy." Chereau cast Rylance after seeing him play Cleopatra at the Globe. "Intimacy" won the top prize at the Berlin International Film Festival, and drew general condemnation in the British press.

Rylance's visibility in the debate over the plays' authorship also posed problems for him in his role as director of the Globe. In the British theatre world, he is regarded as an actor whose affinity for Shakespeare's works is unparalleled; it is disconcerting to some that he could persist in doubting that William Shakespeare wrote the plays. The question is considered ludicrous by many scholars. In a letter to the Times, Stephen Greenblatt, a professor at Harvard, compared teaching the authorship debate to teaching intelligent design: "The demand seems harmless enough until one reflects on its implications. Should claims that the Holocaust did not occur also be made part of the standard curriculum?" This past summer, at the Chichester Festival, Rylance had the lead role in a play that he wrote, "I Am Shakespeare," in which a cranky obsessive hosts a Webcam chat show with alternative candidates--Francis Bacon, the Earl of Oxford, Lady Mary Sidney--as guests. At the final performance, Rylance and the actor Derek Jacobi unrolled a "Declaration of Reasonable Doubt," which recited their evidence, including Shakespeare's unfamiliarity with astronomy, Italy, and royal tennis. It was signed, in absentia, by Mark Twain, Sigmund Freud, and ...