Windows on Shakespeare

We measure the power of lighthouses in terms of candle-power. Some lighthouses are so bright –their candle-power is so great –that we are dazzled by them, just as we are by the sun. Our eyes cannot cope with the glare. Some of us lose touch with reality.

Shakespeare has this effect on some people. His candle-power is so great that people cannot believe their eyes, or even their ears. They cannot believe that this obscure Englishman called William Shakespeare could have written all these mighty masterpieces. This disbelief is frequently rooted in the kind of snobbery so well described in Amadeus – Salieri just could not believe that God had poured all that immeasurable genius into that disgraceful little punk called Mozart. What, you might ask, is par for the course for geniuses like Shakespeare or Mozart?

His disbelief drove Salieri mad. It has had a similar effect on those who could not bring ‘his’.fairies in the bottom of the garden – they talk to them.

Well, these conspiracy theorists are harmless enough. They do not want to fly aeroplanes into tall buildings, and they caused The Observer on 14 March 2010 to publish a piece setting out .le,‘I..…A Midsummer Night’s Dream tells us he was stage-struck with wonder at the make-.’‘the’.:‘What–whoever he was –he makes you proud .’Coriolanus,‘he holds her by the hand, silent. … it .’

There may not be all that much more we can add. In 1946, Dr. M.C. Bradbrook published her wonderful book Ibsen, the Norwegian. In the Preface, Dr. Bradbrook said:

A picture book of Norway is still, in my opinion, the best Companion of Ibsen Studies. The reader should banish from his mind the whiskered old gentleman of the portraits, and call up instead the tides foaming round the skerries, or the little wooden houses in the mountains.

Much the same goes for Shakespeare. Very few people have had their enjoyment of his plays enhanced by studying the little that we know of his life. All you need is a good impression of Medieval and then Elizabethan England, and then banish all preconceptions about theatre.

On the first page of that book, Dr. Bradbrook said the following in a footnote:

Purely as a theatrical, as distinct from a dramatic, artist Ibsen offers the actors more than Shakespeare. Hjalmer Ekdal, or Hedda Gabler, as parts are more fully within the scope of a great actor than Falstaff or Cleopatra, where the interpretation must always be partial. And though an actor may prefer that his reach should exceed his grasp, and attack Hamlet rather than achieve Rosmer, the theatregoer will derive a satisfaction from having Ibsen in a performance which no performance of Shakespeare can give.

Part of the trouble with this observation is that it leaves far too much work to be done by the distinction between theatrical and dramatic, and it comes from the background of an academic rather than a theatregoer. If Dr Bradbrook derived more satisfaction from Hedda Gabler than from Cleopatra in performance in the theatre, she was short-changed by her Cleopatras.

This book is not written by a literary scholar or academic. It is written by a theatregoer, one who has seen and heard all of the plays of Shakespeare more times than he can recall. (If you spend an hour a day walking to and from work, you can listen to all 38 plays in under four months.) The book is written for people who enjoy watching or listening to Shakespeare, or who want to be introduced to the experience of Shakespeare.

The book has a short introduction to the background of the plays and the life of Shakespeare. There is then a note on each of the plays, separately. Substantially more weight is given to the four greatest tragedies, the character of Falstaff, and the major Roman plays. In each case, a reference is made to the films or recordings of the play that are available, and there is a general discussion toward the end of the book of those reproductions and of the critical ’s.have sought throughout to concentrate on the plays in performance. I have not referred to the pieces that were not written for the theatre.

While I believe that Shakespeare was, for the want of a better term, the greatest genius the world has known, anything like idolatry would be an insult to this playwright and a disservice to his audience.

The literature, films and recordings that I refer to are not esoteric. They are all in my library here in the bush. Citations from the plays are from the Everyman edition.

Geoffrey Gibson,

Malsmsbury,

Victoria,

Australia

Melbourne Cup Day, 2013.

CONTENTS

Foreword

1. A writer in time and space

2. The Plays

Henry – Parts,

Richard III

Two Gentlemen of Verona

Titus Andronicus

Comedy of Errors

Taming of the Shrew

Love’s ’s Midsummer’s Dream

Romeo and Juliet

Merchant of Venice

Richard II

King John

Henry IV, Parts I and II

Merry Wives of Windsor

Much Ado About Nothing

Henry V

Julius Caesar

As You Like It

Hamlet

Troilus and Cressida

Twelfth Night

All’s Well Ends

Measure for Measure

Othello

King Lear

Macbeth

Antony and Cleopatra

Coriolanus

Pericles

Cymbeline

The ’s

The Tempest

Henry VIII

Two Noble Kinsmen

3. An overview

4. Recordings

5. Criticism

6. Conclusions

Notes

CHAPTER I

A WRITER IN TIME AND SPACE

Putting to one side cricket and football (team sports), and their language, the English have good grounds upon which they can claim to have paid their way in our world: the common law; parliamentary government (which, combined with the common law, gives the rule of law); Shakespeare; and the abolition of slavery. All of these four happenings were uniquely English, and the first two helped make available the third.

What is known about the life of Shakespeare can be set out on a postcard. He was an Englishman and a product of his time. The only other thing that you need to know about him is that he was a professional entertainer. He was an actor. He was a playwright. He was involved in managing theatres. He was involved in selling a product in the market. If he did not sell enough, if his plays were not entertaining enough, his income would dry up, and he and his family might have starved. There is a booming cottage industry pumping out longer and longer biographies of Shakespeare but they have about as much use as they have foundation in evidence.

We therefore need to look at the Elizabethan theatre scene, but in the context of the history of England to that time. We will first notice an outline of ancient history because of the weight put on the values of the ancient world in Renaissance Europe, and because the playwright wrote a number of plays set in ancient Greece and Rome.

Greece and Rome

Modern Europe looks back at ancient Greece and Rome as having been civilized. Ancient Greek civilization flowered – exploded, perhaps – in the fifth century BC. The ‘bible’ of those Greeks was Homer, who was the author of The Iliad (the wrath of Achilles during the Trojan War) and The Odyssey (the journey of return from the Trojan War of Ulysses). These two epics were compiled in about the eighth century BC, probably after being passed on by word of mouth.

Ancient Greece never unified until the Macedonian Alexander the Great in the fourth century BC conquered all of it – and he then went on to conquer most of the world. The Greeks were racially proud and prejudiced, but they lived in separate city states. They went from kings to oligarchies, through tyrants to a kind of democracy in the ‘Golden Age’ of the fifth century BC. Only a very small class of citizens had the vote. Women were not much better than slaves; and young boys were subject to casual buggery by their elders. Non-Greeks simply did not count – they were ‘barbarians'. The Spartan model was a police state run on SS lines. The religion was barbarous. The economy was built on slavery.

The Greeks however produced Socrates and Plato and the great tragedians, Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. Sparta produced nothing intellectual. The Greeks fought off Asia in the form of the Persians. Athens then turned a protection racket into an empire. War with Sparta became inevitable. Athens lost and Alexander the Great put an end to all the internal squabbling. The Greek city states would simply fall into the Roman Empire.

The play Troilus and Cressida is set during the Trojan War, and features most of the main characters including Achilles and Ulysses. The play Timon of Athens is set at about the time of the war between Athens and Sparta, but the dating of the play is not central to its themes.

According to Virgil in the Aeneid, Rome was founded by Aeneas, the Trojan, on his way back after the fall of Troy. Rome started in about the eighth century. Government by kings became gradually a form of republic with a very complicated structure to reflect a class, or caste, division between nobles and plebeians. Rome expanded militarily and came to control most of the Mediterranean by the time that Jesus of Nazareth was born. The English came later to respect Rome for its competence in running an empire and for its laws (although the English did not adapt Roman law, and there are good grounds for saying that the laws of Athens were superior) and Roman roads. Rome did not produce anything like the intellectual firepower of the Greeks.

The Romans never developed a way to ensure a smooth the succession of their leaders. In the Republic, almost all of its leaders died violently. Caesar was assassinated because some other big-hitters thought that he might make himself king. This led to another civil war until the exhausted body politic was quietly led into empire by Octavius (Augustus). After that the succession was effectively determined by the soldiers, just as the succession of a Fuehrer in the Third Reich would have been determined by the SS. As Gibbon remarked, ‘almost every reign is closed by the same disgusting repetition of treason and murder.’ Julius Caesar is a paradigm case; so is Titus Andronicus.

Rome occupied England from about the time of Julius Caesar until in the fifth century AD. The play Cymbeline appears to refer to that period. Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra deal with the events that led to the start of the empire, the reduction of power brokers from three to one. Titus Andronicus is set during the period of the decline of Rome, when Rome was under threat from the Goths, and other barbarians. Rome fell physically in 457 AD.

The Roman economy was based on empire and slavery, and its religion was even more magical and superstitious than the Greek. Few Romans of substance believed their own nonsense about ‘religion’, but what might properly be called its saving grace was that the devout polytheist ‘admitted’, in the words of Gibbon, ‘with implicit faith the different religions of the earth’. Mere superstition that makes no claim to exclusive truth is not likely to lead to theological rancour.

It is therefore curious that the spiritual descendants of ancient Athens and Rome persist in describing them as civilized while purporting to subscribe to the teaching of the Sermon on the Mount which, if nothing else, shows these cruel, bloodthirsty pagans for what they were. The myth of the civilization of ancient Greece and Rome is an Indian Rope Trick of Oxford and Cambridge and the other great universities of Europe used for the delectation of their better classes – but it flourished when Shakespeare wrote, and when the French overthrew their ancien regime, they cast themselves as heroes of the ancient world.

England

The British nation as we know it does not owe much to the Romans. Rather it was the Germans – the Anglo-Saxons – who settled and took root, and who introduced customary law that took hold and that enabled England, unlike almost all of the rest of Europe, to resist the adoption of Roman law. The Norman Conquest did not erase the Anglo-Saxon legal groundwork. Although French was the court and legal language, it, and other Norman influences, came to be absorbed. William Blackstone, the English lawyer whose book achieved biblical status in the US, dismissed the Norman Conquest as a ‘rude shock’.

We tend to talk of the period from the sack of Rome to about 1500 as the Middle Ages, and of the period up to say 850 AD as the Dark Ages. It is a curious tradition for scholars brought up under the teaching of the young Jewish hasid called Jesus to say that pagan nations unenlightened by his teaching were ‘civilized’ but that Christian nations were not.

Certainly the Middle Ages were dominated in Europe by the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth, and by mountains of doctrine that his followers constructed from Greek philosophers with Byzantine complexity. It was probably just a matter of time before some impatient matter-of- fact northern European – a German, or an Englishman – denounced all of these philosophical add-ons and suggested that it was time to go back to the unchallengeable bedrock of the preaching of the founder.

But, for the moment, medieval kings ruled by divine right and society was based on the feudal model – there were strict ladders of status and dependency and obedience. It was a give and take world – you gave obedience and loyalty and service and taxes and you got some security. The role of the Crown and of the feudal structure would eventually come under challenge. The Renaissance involved the opening up of minds by going back to the learning and literature of the ancient world and of science and exploration. The Reformation was the break from Rome and the creation of the Protestant churches. This happened in England because of fears for the succession when the Queen of Henry VIII – the first Queen – could not give him a male heir. Ann Boleyn gave the King a daughter and was beheaded. Catholics regarded that daughter, Elizabeth, as a bastard. Protestants regarded prior issue of the first Queen as bastards.

When Elizabeth became the Queen she did not help by refusing to be married so that she could produce an heir. But she had felt the wrath of Rome. Rome issued what we would now call a fatwa, an incitement to holy war, promising grace to anyone who murdered Queen Elizabeth, and Rome was right behind Spain when it launched its Armada in 1587, when Shakespeare was 23, to conquer England.

Three parts of the play Henry VI showed the problems facing England with a weak king. These were the times of the Wars of the Roses. Richard III is about a power crazed psychopath. Richard II covers the awful deposition of a king. Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2, form a precise snapshot of the British nation at the time, and reflect also the problems that can arise when kings are overthrown. Henry V shows a king bringing people together by going to war against others. King John was a one-off that landed some big hits on Rome, while Henry VIII has a more balanced look at the marriage crisis.

The play King John does not touch on Magna Carta. This Charter recorded concessions that the Barons extracted from King John at the point of a sword in 1215. While Divine Right was still official policy, the Barons had shown that the Crown is a political office. Rather than look to God for protection, a King had to be prepared to negotiate with his subjects. It is the first deal between the Crown and its subjects. Neither Athens nor Rome had known anything like it. It was the beginning of constitutional government, and a red flag to wave at any arrogant king. This is just what the Americans would do with it and George III.

Elizabethan England

Shakespeare lived from 1564- 1616. He spent most of his life in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, the last Tudor, and finished it during the reign of James I, the first Stuart. What was England like then? Population figures are very difficult, but it is thought that the population of the whole country was about three to four million, having returned to the level it had reached before the Black Death a century earlier. (That population is less than half the population of London now.)

London was by far the biggest city with up to half a million inhabitants. The recently incorporated borough of Stratford was tiny. It had about one thousand inhabitants. Stratford was at least a two-day horseback ride or a four-day walk from London. The population was perhaps five percent Catholic, fifteen percent Puritan, and the rest Anglican. It is thought that the Jews of London then numbered as few as two hundred. (An expulsion of the Jews in 1290 was lifted by Cromwell.)

What was London like? The stench of the whole town and most of its component parts would probably have been enough to knock us over. If we could go back there now, we would be nauseated by both the smell and the sight of almost every aspect of daily life, as we commonly were in the poorer parts of Asia, and as we commonly are in the poorer parts of Africa.

Thomas Macaulay wrote his wonderful History of England during the reign of Queen Victoria. He went to a lot of trouble to give a picture of London in 1685. That is about a century after Shakespeare arrived in London, but the remarks of Macaulay would afford us good guidance.

Nearer to the court, on a space called St. James’ Fields, had just been built St. James’ Square and Jermyn Street. ... Indeed, the only dwellings to be seen on the north of Piccadilly were three or four isolated and almost rural mansions … He who then rambled to what is now the gayest and most crowded part of Regent Street found himself in a solitude, and was sometimes so fortunate as to have shot a woodcock ... In Covent Garden a filthy and noisy market was held close to the dwellings of the great. Fruit women screamed, carters fought, cabbage stalks and rotten apples accumulated

… The centre of Lincoln’s Inn Fields was an open space where the rabble congregated every evening, within a few yards of Cardigan House and Winchester House, to hear mountebanks harangue, to see bears dance, and to set dogs at auction.

Rubbish was shot in every part of the area. Horses were exercised there. The beggars were as noisy and importunate as in the worst governed cities on the Continent. ... St. James’ Square was a receptacle for all of the offal and cinders for all the dead cats and dead dogs of Westminster. … The pavement was detestable: all foreigners cried shame on it. The drainage was so bad that in rainy weather the gutters soon became torrents.

… The houses were not numbered. There would indeed have been little advantage in numbering them; for of the coachmen, chairmen, porters, and errand boys of London, a very small proportion could read. … When the evening closed in, the difficulty and danger of walking about London became serious indeed. The garret windows were opened, and pails were emptied, with little regard to those who were passing below. Falls, bruises and broken bones were a constant occurrence. ... Most of the streets were left in profound darkness. Thieves and robbers plied their trade with impunity: yet they were hardly so terrible to peaceful citizens as another class of ruffians. It was a favorite amusement of dissolute young gentlemen to swagger by night about the town, breaking windows, upsetting sedans, beating quiet men, and offering rude caresses to pretty women.

The crime figures were not academic for authors. The writer, Christopher Marlowe, was killed in a tavern brawl in 1593. Actors appear to have been at home in the demi-monde. Ben Johnson killed the actor Gabriel Spencer in an unlawful duel with rapiers, and Spencer himself had felled the son of a goldsmith in a brawl at Shoreditch.

Government of the realm was personal. The government consisted of the Crown surrounded by his or her advisers, although lower offices, like judgeships, were the subject of patronage, the currency of any administration for hundreds of years in England (and later in the United States). But government did not reach far into the lives of ordinary people. That was the job of the church, and it sought to intervene everywhere, with the aid of the law. The fact that the government and the church have since traded places does not help most of us. You could be fined then for not going to church, and the father of Shakespeare was. On a bad day you could be burnt to death for expressing or denying a doctrine that most would not have understood. Science was awaiting the insights of Isaac Newton of Trinity College, but he was to say quietly that he did not understand the doctrine of the Trinity.

Science had just reversed the position of the earth and the sun, but had not yet seen the connection between dirt and disease. What could have caught our eyes as much as the ugliness and dirtiness would have been the cruelty. Here is Macaulay again:

There is scarcely a page of the history or lighter literature of the 17th century which does not contain some proof that our ancestors were less humane than their posterity. The discipline of workshops, of schools, of private families, though not more efficient than at the present, was infinitely harsher. Masters, well born and bred, were in the habit of beating their servants. Pedagogues knew no way of imparting knowledge but by beating their pupils. Husbands, of decent station, were not ashamed to beat their wives. The implacability of hostile factions was such as we can scarcely conceive. … Multitudes assembled to see gladiators hack each other to pieces with deadly weapons, and shouted with delight when one of the combatants lost a finger or an eye. The prisons were hell on earth, seminaries of every crime and of every disease. At the Assizes the lean and yellow culprits brought with them from their cells to the dock an atmosphere of stench and pestilence which sometimes avenged them singularly on bench, bar and jury. But on all this misery society looked with profound indifference.

The meek had to wait a very long time to begin to come into their inheritance in a world of ignorance, filth, cruelty, and misery.

Elizabethan Theatre

Shakespeare lived during a boom time for the theatre in England. He was not alone in driving that boom – he was helped by Marlowe, Kyd, Johnson and others. Just as importantly, London was filling theatres with crowds who kept their authors and players in work until a nervous government closed them down in 1642.

London now has a replica of The Globe theatre at about the position on the south bank of the Thames where its predecessor was located. In 1595 two acting companies had audiences of about 15,000 a week. Reading aloud would have been the manner of learning a new play. There was usually only one rehearsal before a play was put on. With six different plays to be put on each week, there was no room for more. When a performance was on, the house flag was put up and a trumpet was sounded to summon theatregoers. Patrons could cross the Thames by boat or walk over the London Bridge, past the heads of traitors.

A penny entitled you to stand in the yard. Another penny got you into the gallery. For sixpence you could have a seat. The best people sat in the Lords’ Room which cost a lot more, although the prices defied inflation. (If a journeyman earned a shilling a day, entrance of one-twelfth of a day’s pay was not too dear.) Ale and nuts and tobacco were sold to the audience. The money collectors or ‘gatherers’ performed different functions and at some times performed the role of extras. Some people who were usually described as ‘gallants’ elected to sit on the stage. The stench on a hot day – or indeed a cool day – does not bear thinking of. Nowadays, you only notice that you are under a flight path to Heathrow. Those who justly complain of the dreadfully deficient loo facilities at great modern opera houses like the Bastille in Paris will be gratified to learn that the old Globe theatre dealt with the problem by not having loos at all; presumably, you held on to it or legged it over to the Thames.

The parts of women were played by boys. They may have gone on with some kind of falsetto voice to the age of eighteen or twenty. It must have been some test to play Goneril, Lady Macbeth, Volumnia or Cleopatra. Cleopatra said she would not endure ‘some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness’ (5.2.220). The programme usually concluded with a jig.

The final theatre that Shakespeare wrote for is north of the river at Blackfriars. It was enclosed and smaller and a much tonier audience attended. It only held one fifth of the numbers at The Globe, but it made more money for Shakespeare and his colleagues than The Globe did.

Elizabethan Education

It shows how little we know of the life of Shakespeare that we can only infer that he attended the Grammar School at Stratford. This school arose out of the Reformation. In two years of pre-school, small children learned their letters and their numbers, and elements of religion on the Catechism. In the school proper, the whole education was based on Latin. Grammar meant Latin grammar. In the upper school they would study Ovid, Virgil and Horace, as well as Sallust and Caesar. You see evidence of these authors in the plays of Shakespeare.

In summer the school day began at 6.00 a.m. and in the winter it began at 7.00 a.m. At 11.00 a.m. came a recess for lunch. Since young Will lived only a few hundred yards away, he may have gone home for lunch. Instruction then continued until about 5.30 or 6.00 p.m. This went on six days a week, twelve months of the year.

Ovid stayed with Shakespeare all his life. Jonathan Bate has written a book about ‘Shakespeare and Ovid’. The students also had a chance to look at Roman playwrights, Terence and Plautus. These were supposed to be expurgated for the pure young sons of

Puritans and Anglicans, but it is not possible to produce an expurgated Terence or Plautus. During the upper school, the boys – there were no girls – graduated to logic and rhetoric.

Additionally, Shakespeare was taught what many in those days thought was all a person needed to know about the world in church. He looks to have finished with a Genevan New Testament, but he was fixated on the language of the Old Testament, especially the Psalms, and the simple majesty of the Prayer Book.

All Elizabethan education was built on training the memory. Writing in 1962, A.L. Rowse said of this training of the memory that it was ‘as the classical grind in our public schools was until yesterday. (It is a loss that modern education is not.)’ Well, we have continued to improve, so that children are not taught to memorise anything. Shakespeare was growing up in a very oral culture where invention was rewarded, but where set orations were encouraged. People were brought up on sermons and other formalized kinds of public speech. They were willing to listen to a speaker if the speaker was any good. Their sovereign was highly regarded as a speaker. When the Armada was bearing down on her people, she donned armour and on horseback delivered a speech that became part of the fabric of the nation, and which is recorded as follows:

My loving people, we have been persuaded by some that are careful of our safety, to take heed how we commit ourselves to armed multitudes, for fear of treachery ... I have placed my chiefest. strength and safeguard in the loyal hearts and goodwill of my subjects; and therefore am come amongst you, as you seek, at this time, not for my recreation and disport, but being resolved, in the midst and heat of the battle, to live or die among you all, and to lay down for God, for my Kingdom, and for my people, my honour and my blood even in the dust. I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and a King of England too …

The English people have never discouraged their leaders from making great speeches. A facility with and a respect for language are parts of the fabric of the English nation that help to explain the enduring part that Shakespeare plays in England.

Shakespeare had no university education, and it has not been said that his writing suffered as a result. He probably left grammar school at the age of about fourteen. But he had by then acquired enough knowledge of language and logic to supply the skeleton of the greatest body of literature that the world has seen. He therefore had a wonderful education and it is important to recall that members of his audiences, at least the more fortunate ones, were able to get such an education. Shakespeare was not writing for idiots. His plays are for the most part addressed to those with sense and judgment. It is hard to imagine Shakespeare being as successful with his plays as he was if he had not had the benefit of a well educated audience.

When we look at how backward Elizabethan England looks in the amenities such as transport, health and police, it is remarkable how well the education available to the Elizabethan English looks. We are doubtless doing better in the sciences, and we spread literacy around much more, at least literacy of a sort, but are we seriously saying that the education we offer to young children is as good as that provided to young Shakespeare? And on one count, that education was undoubtedly better than what we offer now. Shakespeare’s education was free. And, also, more than four hundred years ago, children were taught grammar, logic, and rhetoric – before they got to fourteen. Nowadays we just let them annihilate their sweet little brains with doof-doof from the iPod.

A Brief Life

William Shakespeare was born at Stratford, England in 1564. He died and was buried there in 1616. His father, John Shakespeare married Mary Arden. Neither, it seems, could write. The father was successful as a glover and was moving up the social scale until for some reason he stopped. William Shakespeare probably went to the Grammar School, as we have seen, and he helped his father in his business. When William was eighteen he married Ann Hathaway. They had a daughter, not long after the marriage, and later had twins, one of whom died.

William Shakespeare spent most of his working life in London. He commuted between London and Stratford. His work make him comfortably well off, mainly because of the success of his plays. He also published a collection of sonnets and two sustained poems that were written while the theatres were closed for plague reasons. His burial place is in the Church at Stratford just up the Avon from the theatres of the Royal Shakespeare Company.

His plays were produced from about 1587 until 1613. That is a span of about twenty six years, for thirty eight plays. Ten of those plays involve English history. Six were set in ancient Greece or Rome. There were four major tragedies. Four romances came at the end of his career. The balance of fourteen consisted of comedies or other works. What many would regard as his greatest works were written in a period of about ten years from 1596 to 1606. The works written during that time include Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2, Much Ado About Nothing, Henry V, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, Hamlet, Twelfth Night, All’s Well That Ends

Well, Measure For Measure, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra. We are therefore faced with a course of creation that just defies belief.

Between the Swan Theatre and the church where Shakespeare is buried there is a pub called the Dirty Duck. It is a great spot for a beer and a meal, especially outside on a sunny day. More than fifty years ago, a young Welsh actor, who had exploded on the scene as Prince Hal, was introduced to an older Hollywood actress at the Dirty Duck. Although she was with her husband, the unstoppable Welshman insisted on taking the actress out after only thirty minutes, to show her not the burial site, but the birthplace. ‘Recited great lines on the spot of course. It wasn’t exactly a pass, but what the hell was Bogie to make of it?’ This was Bacall and Burton. We might know nothing about Shakespeare, but we are allowed to fancy that he would have been happy to have been celebrated in this way – two great actors living life to the full and, in his name, pushing what we now call the outside of the envelope.

CHAPTER II THE PLAYS

HENRY VI, PARTS I, II AND III THREE MEDIEVAL CROWD PLEASERS

Believe in a family; believe in a code of honour, older and higher, believe in roots that go back thousands of years into your race.

Make a family, Michael, and protect it.

These are our affairs, sono cosa nostra, governments only protect men who have their own individual power.

Be one of those men... You have the choice.

Vito Corleone in The Godfather

Priests pray for enemies, but princes kill.

(Henry VI, Part 3, 5.2.72)

The American War of Independence, the Wars of Liberation in Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan: which of these is best described in the following words?

… here you maintain several factions,

And whilst a field should be dispatched and fought, You are disputing of your generals:

One would have ling’ring wars with little cost; Another would fly swift, but wanteth wings;

A third thinks, without expense at all,

By guileful fair words peace may be obtained.

(Henry VI, Part 1, 1.1.71-77)

The thoughts are timeless. They could have been uttered by the mothers and wives awaiting the return of their men or boys from Troy or the Crusades. Indeed, of the Crusades, Gibbon spoke dryly of those ‘who remained at home, with sense and