Could Prince Hal in the Boar’s Head be thinking aloud how well his riotous years will go down with the public ‘when this loose behaviour I throw off’? Well, yes he could. Such cold calculations by ambitious young men are now familiar to us — Michael Heseltine at Oxford allegedly tracing on the back of an envelope his flight path to Downing Street. As for a riotous youth, these days every successful political leader needs to have inhaled a little.
Nuttall has a sharp ear for social nuance, pointing out that the Boar’s Head scenes should not be played too downmarket. Falstaff, Bardolph and the rest are decayed military men, a little like Captain Grimes, and the mixture of posh and louche in the clientele requires Mistress Quickly to be given a touch of Muriel Belcher rather than Annie of the Rover’s Return.
Shakespeare always returns us to earth, and to the city. The dukes driven out into the forest always go back. Celia and Rosalind toy with the idea of buying a country cottage together, no doubt pricing out local forest-dwellers, but return to South Ken, preferring hedgefunders to hedgerows. The beauty of Shakespeare’s forests is that they are full of real mud and the milkmaid’s hands are chapped from pumping at the cow’s dugs and in winter Marian’s nose looks red and raw and birds sit brooding in the snow. Shakespeare’s pastoral is proper country, not a conventional daydream of ‘when I was a child and it was all green fields round here’. In Shakespeare’s Arden there is no pathos of distance, rather a poetry of presence.
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