Immortal Bard QI

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

Good evening, good evening, good evening, good evening, good evening, good evening.

Good even and welcome to a special Shakespearean edition of QI,

dedicated to and entitled The Immortal Bard.

Strutting and fretting their hour upon the stage tonight are The Two Gentlemen of Verona -

David Mitchell and Bill Bailey!

APPLAUSE

The Merry Wife of Windsor, Sue Perkins.

APPLAUSE

And Much Ado About Nothing, Alan Davies.

APPLAUSE

So let the trumpets sound. David goes...

TRUMPET FANFARE

Nice. Sue goes...

TRUMPET FANFARE

Bill goes...

TRUMPET FANFARE

And Alan goes...

CHEESY TRUMPET MUSIC

Of course he does.

So let's take to the stage, good gentles all.

When David Tennant played Hamlet at the RSC, what did Tchaikowsky play?

-What?

-Tchaikovsky?

-LAUGHTER

-Tchaikovsky being the composer Tchaikovsky?

-Was he in the cast, Tchaikovsky?

-He was.

-Was he?

-Pyotr Ilyich?

Not Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, the Russian composer. Another musician called Tchaikowsky.

He was also a pianist, a startling, amazing pianist, most eccentric.

-Richard Stilgoe?

-No, I've already told you his name. It was Tchaikowsky.

Are you saying he played Richard Stilgoe?

He blew into Richard Stilgoe and a noise came out the other end?

You're putting him in the past tense, so I'm assuming he shuffled off his mortal coil?

-To quote Hamlet.

-That will be the only quote. That's it. I've blown all my quotes.

-You've done damn well. Good start.

-So if he's dead...

-He was dead.

-He's not alive?

-The skull?

-Yes, he played the skull.

-APPLAUSE

-We don't have the real skull there, but that's what a skull looks like.

He was a very passionate Shakespearean.

That is the real thing. Tchaikowsky bequeathed it to the Royal Shakespeare Company,

asking that it be used in productions of Hamlet for the part of... Do you remember the character?

-Is it Yorick?

-Yorick, yes.

"Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest..."

-"Wait a minute, this is Tchaikowsky!

-It's not Yorick.

"I'll play a tune on his teeth."

There was a bit of trouble, health and safety issues.

A human tissue licence had to be ordered for him to appear on stage.

Did they cut his head off? He's gone, "When I die, I'd like my skull to be used by the RSC."

Someone's got to saw it off and rot it down.

The funeral directors thought it might be illegal. They had to get clearance.

David Tennant every day held it in his hand. Tchaikowsky would have been very pleased.

-There he is.

-Look at that - a tramp yesterday!

You hope they've had to dirty it up again.

-Very much.

-That's not just a bit of the guy still clinging...

There's a little face still on there he's got to wash off!

It's a long time since I've seen Hamlet.

Because it's such a well-known bit, you don't really question what happens in it.

It's an odd thing to do, to pick up a bloke's skull from a graveyard.

-It's someone he knew...

-Then to go, "Alas, I knew him,"

rather than going, "I feel a bit weird, having picked up his skull."

He's sort of saying, "It's ridiculous, I knew this man. I sat on his lap when I was a boy."

His jests "were wont to set the table on a roar". He says, "Where are your jokes now?"

-Not so funny now!

-It is one of the great contemplations of death and mortality and it must be weirder

when you're doing it to a real person.

I presume David Tennant knew he was doing it to a chap who wanted it to be a symbol of death.

It'll be like I'm A Celebrity. Agents are going to put their acts down to have their skulls used...

"I'll get you your skull. You'll be in Shakespeare...one day!"

It would be awful if for your whole life you'd wanted to be an actor and it hadn't really worked out,

so you bequeathed your skull and it was used in a production of Hamlet,

then all the reviewers said, "I don't know, Yorick, it felt a bit stilted. It ruined that scene."

LAUGHTER

Leonard Bernstein's musical based on Romeo And Juliet was set in New York. What was it originally called?

TRUMPET FANFARE

Was it West Side Story?

KLAXON SOUNDS

It became West Side Story, but it was originally called...?

-East Side Story.

-Yes!

-APPLAUSE

BILL: I was so close!

Originally, when they were working on it in the late '40s,

it was gangs of Catholics versus gangs of Jews in the Lower East Side, then five years later,

they decided they wanted Puerto Ricans against white gangs.

Catholics would just have to tap someone and they'd go, "I wish I hadn't done that. I feel awful now."

-It's just ten years of terrible guilt. Puerto Ricans are a bit more feisty.

-They are.

-Let's admit that it worked.

-Gay and feisty, by the look of them.

-The world of the musical.

-Yeah.

-Showgirls all!

And all their pipes have been airbrushed out of this photograph.

LAUGHTER

APPLAUSE

Oh, heavens above!

West Side Story may be the best and certainly the best-known musical based on a Shakespearean fable.

But do you know of any others?

-Points going...

-Kiss Me, Kate.

-Kiss Me, Kate, yes, by Cole Porter, was based on...

-The Taming Of The Shrew.

-Exactly.

-Is Cats based on Hamlet?

-No.

But, odd as that sounds, there is a stage musical playing in London at the moment based on Hamlet.

-Is it "Hamlet! The Musical"?

-No.

There is "Hamlet! The Musical", but this is a big West End musical based on a big movie

-that is the story of Hamlet.

-Not Spamalot?

-No.

-It's a young prince.

-Oh!

-Born...

-Yes.

-He's not a human.

He's not a human? Is it ET?

Thank you, audience. The Lion King is based on Hamlet.

Did you not know?

At what point does Hamlet say, "Hakuna matata"?

LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE

-What about The Tempest? What would they have made of that?

-Wicked.

-The Perfect Storm.

-LAUGHTER

- Speed. Speed 2. - Twister.

LAUGHTER Harold And Kumar Get The Munchies.

Prospero's Books is one, but there's a '50s classic sci-fi movie.

-SHOUT FROM AUDIENCE

-The audience are really joining in.

-Rip One Out?

-Forbidden Planet.

-Yes, with monsters...

-Or its working title, Rip One Out!

There was one based on The Comedy Of Errors, a musical.

-What happens in The Comedy Of Errors?

-It has two sets of identical twins.

One of them's shipwrecked, who's a girl, who's a boy? I'm married. Everyone's dead!

-The Boys From Syracuse is the name of the musical.

-Terminator...2.

-No!

Shylock is sent back from the future to...

Oh, I've got my chain stuck in my ruff!

LAUGHTER

Oh, that was embarrassing.

-Yeah. Hmm...

-It sounded like it should sound rude.

Then you think about it...

No, not really.

So, there we are. What do Sigmund Freud, Mark Twain, Henry James,

a Looney from Newcastle and the Holy Ghost have in common?

Mark Twain had a link, but I don't know about the others.

He was sceptical about Shakespeare because he thought a toff wrote it.

He didn't believe that a normal boy from Stratford could write properly.

He was a Shakespearean sceptic, as were the others.

Sigmund Freud also believed that and Henry James

and Professor Looney, that was unfortunately his name, from Newcastle

who wrote a book in 1920 called Shakespeare Identified.

This movement in the 19th century had the idea that Francis Bacon may have written Shakespeare's works,

particularly a woman, Delia Bacon, an American, completely insane.

She came over to England and wrote a 625-page book in which she didn't even mention the name Bacon,

then when she died, she claimed she was the Holy Spirit.

-SHE claimed SHE was the Holy Spirit?

-Yes.

The Holy Spirit, if she was right, also doesn't believe Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare.

There were two other main candidates.

Hang on. TRUMPET FANFARE

What was it? LAUGHTER

-Marlowe.

-Christopher Marlowe.

-Christopher Marlowe is one.

-But the most popular one...

-Earl of Oxford?

-The Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere.

-Is that Edward de Vere?

-That's Edward de Vere.

-Wow, there's a lot going on there!

-There is.

How did he keep that hat on?

It's sort of Cate Blanchett with a moustache.

-LAUGHTER

-But there are serious people.

Freud liked the fact that he lost his father early on like Hamlet.

Of course, Freud had an Oedipus Complex theory about Hamlet, so he liked that idea.

Looney invented a fanciful scenario because the Earl of Oxford died in 1604

and Shakespeare carried on writing plays many years after that.

That might be the point at which to abandon the theory.

You'd think. Instead of which, he claimed that before dying, he'd left a whole sheaf of plays

and that his servant Shakespeare produced them one after the other.

Isn't The Tempest written four or five years after he died, six years maybe,

referencing stuff of the time, so after de Vere's dead?

-Yes, quite.

-He probably just left, "Insert topical gag here."

-That's right.

There are... Mark Rylance and Derek Jacobi, both supreme actors,

they believe it was the Earl of Oxford.

There isn't a shred of evidence.

It doesn't matter. On the basis that what Shakespeare means to people is "the guy that wrote those plays",

so if the guy that wrote those plays is a different guy, that's still, "What a great guy!"

-Yes.

-It's not an earth-shattering conspiracy, really, is it, that perhaps it isn't him?

-No.

Over 5,000 books on the subject, incredibly.

-It's extraordinary.

-Yet no scrap of evidence?

-Not real evidence, just speculation.

They say, "We know so little about Shakespeare."

There are very few people of the Elizabethan era about whom we know more.

Ben Jonson, a famous playwright, we don't know where he was born or how many children he had.

If other people were writing the plays, why didn't they say so at the time?

-Quite.

-They always say, "He didn't write all that." Wouldn't it have come out?

If it was Ben Jonson or any of those others, jolly good luck to them, I say.

Was it just because he wasn't posh?

It's snobbery. They think he was just this kid from Warwickshire,

but his father was a glover which was a decent trade and he went to the grammar school almost certainly.

He's sort of, you'd think, exactly as far up the society as you'd expect a major writer to be.

-Yes.

-It's not like now the best novels are written by the Duke of Westminster.

LAUGHTER

His vocabulary - how many words do you think he used? I'm not counting repeats. "The" he used a lot.

-Dagger, murder, wife.

-This could take us a long time.

-We've got to start somewhere.

-You're right.

-5,000.

-There are 20,000 words. 20,000 words.

How does that compare to the average vocabulary of a Briton, would we say, roughly?

-Four times as much.

-No, half as much.

-Less.

We're not saying Shakespeare used every word he knew in his books.

-He left lots out. I don't remember the word "clitoris" in any of them.

-I think it's in the Second Folio.

It might be. It's about half out of the modern English person's vocabulary.

He didn't have certain words to call on like "texting" or "vajazzle".

On the other hand, he did have "guerdon" and "bodkin" and "fardel", which we don't use so much.

-Yogurt.

-I don't suppose Shakespeare knew what yogurt was.

-Broadband.

Broadband. There are a lot of words.

In The Sun, David Crystal, a well-known linguistic fellow,

estimated there would be about 6,000 words in any complete history of The Sun,

whereas the King James Bible has just 8,000.

The idea that we're dumbed down to a lower vocabulary may not be true.

Shakespeare coined over 1,000 new words, but not all caught on.

Here are some that didn't. See if you can put them into a sentence.

-Swoltery. Quatch.

-I've got a swoltery quatch at the moment.

Already we're there, aren't we?

It happened when I put my kickie-wickies on.

I've always been near-legged.

You're a boggler in those.

Your Foxship, what happened to cockled boggler?

-Carlot - that's a thing.

-A sexy garage.

-It's true, actually.

-Ahead of its time.

-Way ahead.

-A boggler is a very clumsy burglar.

A burglar that can't believe the stuff he's getting his hands on!

"Look at this DVD player!"

He used it to mean a hesitator. One who boggles.

-I don't know if it's as in boggling the mind.

-What is a kickie-wickie? Is it Russell Brand's football?

It's an affectionate term for a wife. "Ah, my dear kickie-wickie."

-That's not an affectionate term!

-Domestic violence was more acceptable...

Ah, the old smashie-washie. Battery-wattery.

Punchy-wunchy.

And the quatch? Or is it a quatch? It's actually an adjective. It means to be a bit podgy.

-A bit quatchy?

-Yeah.

-Luckily, I'm wearing a surgical truss.

-Plump, shall we say? Wappend is corrupt.

-Wappend.

That's never really caught on, but look at the ones that did.

Here's just a small example of words first used in Shakespeare. Accessible, acutely, assembled...

even-handed, eyeball, Frenchwoman, hunchbacked, neglected, overpower,

-radiant, revealing, rose-cheeked, schooldays....

-Frenchwoman? That's a bit of a stretch.

LAUGHTER

He invented it.

-He invented it by taking the space out.

-Yes, well done.

-Even-handed.

-"Zis is my wife. She's a...

"A thingummyjig. I don't know. What can I call her?

-"Oh, Frenchwoman!"

-"I think you'll find she's a Frenchwoman."

You can't be absolutely certain. They may have been in use before,

-but he is often the first printed source we have.

-He'd have to have a pretty good idea

-that people would understand him.

-Yes, exactly.

-Oh, I've done it again.

-Oh, no. LAUGHTER

No...

This bit of ruff is not behaving. I've said that before.

-LAUGHTER

-Oh, dear, oh, dear.

So there we are. Call me a swoltery boggler if you like,

but answer me this. How did Shakespeare's Bottom get to Norwich?

-Are there relics? Bits of him?

-He had a famous comedian who played Bottom and Falstaff.

-Who did?

-Shakespeare. And he created him for him. He was the funniest man in England.

And his name is sometimes put. It says Kemp instead of Bottom on the original play script

because it was so obviously Kemp who would play him. Will Kemp.

But he had a dreadful falling out with Shakespeare or whoever ran the company

and he went off in a right huff. But he decided as a publicity stunt to Morris dance

-all the way to Norwich from London.

-That's unnecessary.

-LAUGHTER

-It took him about three weeks, but he did it over nine days

-and a famous phrase comes from this.

-Cocking about?

-Er, no.

-Making a right tit of yourself?

Kemp's nine days wonder. It's where "a nine days wonder" comes from.

He just did it for publicity. "I may have left Shakespeare's company, but they will go down now."

Quite the reverse happened. He went off to Italy and died in penury.

-His gravestone says, "Kemp. A man."

-LAUGHTER

And after he left, the first play Shakespeare wrote was Henry V in which Falstaff dies offstage.

Kemp was kind of got rid of that way and a new man came in and played the comedians.

While we're on the subject of Will Kemp and his Morris dancing,

-what do you call a group of Morris dancers?

-An arse.

-A swarm?

-A swarm...

-An embarrassment.

-Oh...

-A plague?

-A bell-end.

A bell-end!

-LAUGHTER

-Honestly, poor old Britain. We've got one folk tradition in England

-and all we do is laugh at it.

-It's true.

It really generates hostility, Morris dancing. I think...

-We're so mean about it.

-I think we think they're up to something.

(BILL) A perve of Morris dancers!

I think it's very valuable that we can point to that and say, "See? It's a free country."

LAUGHTER They're not doing that in Afghanistan!

If we were going to ban anything, we'd ban that.

What'll happen is if this scene of all of us dressed like this now and this photograph behind us

is shown, we'll end up as an "And finally..." section on foreign news programmes.

"Les anglais... Haha!" LAUGHTER

It's known as a side, anyway.

-A side.

-A group of Morris men. No one quite knows where it comes from. They think it's from Moorish

to celebrate the expulsion of the Moors from Spain.

Certainly not pagan and mystical or anything.

It's pretty recent. 14th century is the earliest you can go back to it.

There are 150 sides now registered in the USA so American Morris dancing is taking off in a BIG way!

-That's three per state, on average.

-(AMERICAN) "I've joined a bell-end!"

"This is what they do in Old England.

-"Merry England."

-There's an Arctic Morris group based in Helsinki.

But now time to visit that undiscovered country from whose bourn no idiot returns,

as we bring down the curtain on general ignorance. Sound trumpets! Farewell, sour annoy!

For here, I hope, begins our lasting joy. Fingers on buzzers.

What best describes, in one word, Richard III's appearance?

Hunchback! KLAXON SOUNDS

No!

No, there's no evidence at all that Richard III had a hunched back.

It's just the black propaganda of the Tudors who succeeded him.

-The character in the play does.

-Certainly.

-And a sort of twisted arm.

-A bottled spider is one of the things he's called. Hideous name.

It seems he was rather a decent fellow. Intelligent, kind.

A man called Polydore Vergil, a historian determined to paint him as black as possible,

described him as ugly. They associated ugliness with wickedness.

So while on that sort of thing, how beautiful was Cleopatra?

She was minging.

A bit weird looking, but striking?

-Yes, that's probably fair.

-Long nose?

-It seems possible she had a long, pointy nose.

There's no contemporary suggestion that she was particularly beautiful.

-She had a very beautiful voice and was charismatic.

-She seemed sexy.

She seemed sexy, which I find is half the battle.

Her mouth is very small. It only extends as far as her nostril.

-That isn't necessarily Cleopatra.

-No?

-That's just a woman...

-An artist's impression.

-Just a woman going mad with some napkins.

-She's gone serviette crazy.

"Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety," as Enobarbus said about her.

How did Christopher Marlowe die?

Well, now... Da-dum!

-Yes?

-Let me say it so you can mock me. He died in a bar brawl by being stabbed.

KLAXON SOUNDS

Oh, dear me. He was stabbed, but not in a tavern brawl.

It was thought so for many years, but it wasn't until 1925 that the documents came to light

that showed he was killed at the house of a Mrs Eleanor Bull by a man called Ingram Frizer,

-with whom he'd spent the day and argued over the bill.

-Over a bill? That's a bit harsh.

-"I only had a mineral water!"

-Yes, exactly.

-So it wasn't a tavern?

-No.

-What was the bill for, then? A restaurant?

-A pop-up restaurant!

-They call it a tavern. It was a smart restaurant, but went downhill after a stabbing.

-It might have been a prostitute.

-Right.

-A brothel.

- So a brothel bill. - "I didn't have that. No."

To be honest, the service charge is redundant.

"I had one of them, two of them. I asked for that, but it never happened."

-It was off.

-"If we all chip in, we can afford that."

Why don't we just get one big one and all have a bit?

Oh, I don't know... Oh, no. Dear me. Anyway...

He was unlikely to be in a brothel. He didn't trust anyone who didn't like tobacco and boys.

-What made Lord Byron limp?

-LAUGHTER

That's a follow-up question.

Item four on the brothel bill?

Eight hours of Morris dancing?

He had, from birth, a pronounced limp.

L-I-M-P. Pronounced "limp".

-They're not sure if he had a club foot.

-We know that, in fact, he didn't have a club foot.

It's often said that he did. That's what people have heard of.

He had a sort of withered leg. He was very athletic and hated this limp,

but he swam the Hellespont and he boxed and was very worried about his weight.

He was possibly an early male anorexic.

And he liked to spend money, did old Byron.

He ordered batches of two dozen at a time of white linen trousers and silk handkerchiefs by the hundred.

Each one was nine guineas, an average man's pay for the year.

Was he coining it in with the writing at this time?

He inherited at an early age, which he spent very fast,

but he was, in fact, incredibly highly paid.

For every canto of Don Juan, his last great masterpiece, he got thousands.

-So he'd run out of hankies, "Oh, I'll write another canto."

-Hugely successful.

-White linen trousers?

-Yes.

-Sounds like something out of Miami Vice.

It does a bit. He had to leave England because there was a scandal about him possibly having had sex

-with...

-A young... < Goat.

LAUGHTER

He kept a bear at Cambridge in his rooms.

The Master of Trinity said, "The rules are absolutely clear. No domestic animals."

He said, "I assure you, Master, he's not domestic. He's entirely wild."

So he was allowed to keep it.

-There was a rumour that he had shagged his sister.

-I thought you were going to say the bear!

-No!

-As far as I know...

-Is that more horrific than shagging your sister?

-It's just different, really.

-It is.

-It's probably braver.

LAUGHTER

Lord Byron limped because of an abnormality in one leg.

Now what can the Queen do that an idiot can't?

By the looks of it, kill people with their own eyes.

-She doesn't look in the best mood.

-"One tires of Morris dancing..."

-This is something she's allowed to do, but doesn't. An idiot is not allowed.

-Drive? Vote?

-Vote.

Most people think the Queen can't vote. She has every right to vote, but she's never exercised it.

But idiots are not allowed to vote. And lunatics may only vote during their lucid periods.

LAUGHTER

They test them on the way in.

Most people think the Royals can't vote. They just choose not to.

Alas, alack and well away, our revels now are ended.

All spirits are now melted into air, into thin air, and we must consult the scores.

Oh, my gracious heavens.

I'm afraid, rather down the bottom of the list, with minus 14 is Bill Bailey!

APPLAUSE

And four to the better with minus 10, Sue Perkins!

APPLAUSE

Second witch, with a very creditable plus 3, Alan Davies!

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

Very good.

But tonight's Prince of Denmark with six points is David Mitchell!

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

Well, it only remains for me to thank our dramatis personae - Sue, David, Bill and Alan -

and leave you with this perceptive thought from Robert Wilensky.

"We've heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the complete works of Shakespeare,

"but now thanks to the internet we know that this is not true." Good night.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd