Home > The Magazine > Cartoons

Wednesday 9 July 2008

Dare to dream and make your ultimate trip a reality

The latest culture as recommended by our staff

Liz Anderson

Liz suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value reader offers and events

Click here for the latest Spectator Wine Offers

The divine pork butcher

Ferdinand Mount

Wednesday, 25th April 2007

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.

Previous page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 Next page

More articles from: Ferdinand Mount | this section

Print this article | Email to a friend | Permalink | Comment

Post this entry to: del.icio.us | Digg | Newsvine | NowPublic | Reddit

Et tu, Scott? Bush’s press aide turns on his boss

James Forsyth

James Forsyth talks to Scott McClellan, former press secretary to the President, about his new book attacking the Bush administration, its methods and its deceits

The Law Lords are right to resist the government

Lord Lloyd of Berwick

Lord Lloyd of Berwick says that the government’s emergency legislation to overturn their lordships’ ruling on witness anonymity is part of a ‘gradual usurpation’ of our liberties

I was starstuck by David Cameron

Steven Berkoff

In the week of the Spectator Summer Party, Steven Berkoff recalls another of our celebrations at which he sought out the Tory leader and forgave his confusion of Brando and Dean

Glasgow East is Brown’s dirty little secret: a hideous, costly social experiment gone wrong

Fraser Nelson

Glasgow East symbolises — as few other places in Britain can — the fact that the problem Labour faces is not just lack of leadership but lack of mission. What is to be seen in this constituency encapsulates and dramatises Labour’s abject failures to comprehend, let alone tackle, the nature of the poverty which grips our council estates.
For all the latest on the Glasgow East by-election, visit Coffee House

Brown’s security strategy is the worst of all worlds

David Davis

It’s draconian, expensive and ineffective, says David Davis. All the evidence shows that the Prime Minister is eroding our civil liberties pointlessly