Hollow Crowns Simon Schama's Shakespeare

Under the ermine, are they really like us?

That's what we all want to know, isn't it?

Or is the point of a monarch to be NOT like us?

To be a living symbol of the country.

The one who holds us together in times of trouble.

Is the impossibility of their job that they're supposed to be both?

To be recognisably like us but somehow grander, better.

Loftier.

The question of who kings and queens truly are

obsessed the greatest dramatist of all time.

In many of Shakespeare's greatest plays

kings and queens stalk across the stage.

Grandiose, bloody minded, demented, sociopathic.

And the question Shakespeare asked of them more insistently,

more deeply, more tragically than anyone before or since, is this -

what happens when a human puts on the crown?

Can they be just like us and not at all like us?

What happens when the human animal breaks through the mask of royalty?

They told me I was everything.

'Tis a lie.

Shakespeare's plays were performed right in front of Elizabeth I

and her successor, James.

There they sat in their finery watching stage versions of themselves

murder their way to the throne.

Go mad and get turned into pitiful figures.

Shakespeare must have thrived on the thrill of it.

Having his actor king say the unsayable in front of real live monarchs.

He probed deeper into the royal mind

than anyone before or since.

Exploring the great themes of power, war and death.

From that exploration of kingship,

Shakespeare revealed the darkest truths -

not just about them, but about us, too.

By the late 1590s,

Shakespeare was one of England's greatest playwrights.

At his theatre, the Globe, he struck box office gold with hit after hit.

A Midsummer Night's Dream, Romeo and Juliet.

Henry IV.

Thousands poured into the theatre

to cry with Juliet and laugh with Falstaff.

Laughing too was the ultimate drama queen, Elizabeth I.

More than any monarch before or since,

Elizabeth understood the power of performance.

During her reign, protestant England faced the threat

of Catholic invasion and rebellion.

At a time of war, Elizabeth understood

she had to sell the idea of monarchy to her subjects.

She had to persuade ordinary people to fight and die for her if need be.

Elizabeth's greatest performance

came in the year of the Spanish Armada.

England was threatened with invasion.

So Elizabeth travelled to Tilbury in Essex to address her troops.

I am come amongst you.

Being resolved in the midst and heat of the battle

to live and die amongst you all.

To lay down for my god

and for my kingdom and my people

my honour, and my blood, even, in the dust.

I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman

but I have the heart and stomach of a king.

And a king of England, too,

and think foul scorn that any prince of Europe

should dare to invade the borders of my realm.

Elizabeth was a brilliant performer.

She could write a script that would make the public swoon with adoration

and cheer itself hoarse.

But by the late 1590s, her star was fading.

Increasingly, she shunned the limelight.

Her eloquence was mostly a memory.

11 years after her great Tilbury speech,

another invasion scare highlighted Elizabeth's decline.

'This is a public order warning...'

In 1599, London was thrown into a panic by rumours of a new armada.

The chronicler John Stow described a city on edge.

"Lanterns hanged at every man's door to burn all the night.

"Thousands of horsemen, well appointed for the wars,

"were brought up to London."

So where was Elizabeth when she was needed?

Nowhere to be seen.

Was she ill?

Was she dead?

No, just past it.

Mid-60s, can't always get her act together. Too tired.

Behind the scenes, the royal make-up artists are working overtime,

pancaking on the chalk mask to disguise the web of wrinkles.

Fright wigs are being set on top of a closely shaved royal skull

with its layer of grey stubble.

And thank goodness for the whalebone

to give the old girl a bit of uplift

but nothing can disguise the fact

that this is a royal actress well past her prime.

Her greatest performances are very much yesteryear.

By the 1590s, Shakespeare's theatre company of the Lord Chamberlain's Men

was performing at court several times a year.

Shakespeare could see the aging Queen up close.

Perhaps it was the contrast between this Elizabeth

and the commander at Tilbury

that inspired Shakespeare to write a play

that was a tribute to the Elizabeth of old.

And he took a chapter from our history,

when an English army faced impossible odds,

to dramatise his theme.

With Elizabeth missing,

Shakespeare gave the people a monarch as big and brave as the crisis demanded.

A royal warrior, young and charismatic,

who sounded like Elizabeth at her Tilbury best.

We few, we happy few,

we band of brothers.

For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.

Be he ne'er so vile, this day shall gentle his condition

and gentlemen in England now abed

will think themselves accursed they were not here

and hold their manhoods cheap

whilst any speaks that fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.

CHEERING

Sounds a lot like Elizabeth at Tilbury, doesn't it?

And this echo cannot have been a coincidence.

Was Shakespeare doffing his hat to the old trooper on the throne?

And why does the speech still make the hairs stand up on the back of our necks?

Well, because the king is saying,

just like Elizabeth at Tilbury, I'm one of you.

My lot is cast with you. Our blood will comingle.

We're all part of one family.

You're my brother, my kin - the battle will gentle you.

In other words, we will all be equals.

In Henry V, Shakespeare echoed the great theme of Elizabeth's reign.

The link between Crown and people.

The bond was important at any time but in time of war, it was vital.

And that vision of the band of brothers, equality of sacrifice,

the slobs and the stiff upper lips,

all in it together,

has been dusted off whenever Albion's in trouble.

AIR RAID SIRENS

WINSTON CHURCHILL: 'We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be.

'We shall fight on the beaches.

'We shall fight on the landing grounds.

'We shall fight in the fields

'and in the streets.

'We shall fight in the hills.

'We shall never surrender.'

Growing up in London after the war,

there was one Shakespeare play that spoke to me

more deeply than any of the others,

and that was Henry V.

It was not just the "we happy few" patriotic passion,

it was not just the defiance of getting to victory despite being outnumbered,

it was that Shakespeare, in Henry V,

gives us a king who seems to be one of us, one of the people.

What does he say in the speech before Harfleur?

"Dear FRIENDS..."

So I was taken to the Old Vic

and listened spellbound to Richard Burton.

Next morning, there I am on a chair in my mother's living room,

her broomstick in hand, hamming it up.

"Once more into the breach dear friends.

"Once more, or fill the walls up with our English dead."

The stirring patriotic anthem which Shakespeare gives us

in Henry V is lodged so deeply in our memory

we often forget the really remarkable thing about the play -

the fact that in Henry V we have a true portrait of a king,

a man full of doubts and fears.

The climax of the play isn't the battle of Agincourt,

but the night before Agincourt.

The chorus sets the scene.

"The poor condemned English, like sacrifices by their watchful fires,

"sit patiently and inly ruminate the morning's danger."

The king, disguised, tours the camp chatting to his troops.

A common soldier called Michael Williams,

not realising who he's talking to,

questions the justness of the king's war.

If the cause be not good...

..the king himself hath a heavy reckoning to make.

When all those legs and arms and heads chopped off in battle

shall join together at the latter day and cry all...

..we died in such a place.

Some swearing,

some crying for a surgeon.

Some upon their wives left poor behind them.

Some upon the debts they owe.

Some upon their children rawly left.

I am afeard there are few die well that die in battle.

For how can they charitably dispose of anything

when blood is their argument?

Now, if these men do not die well...

..it will be a black matter for the king that led them to it.

Henry is shaken by the soldier's frankness.

He leaves them and broods on the burdens of kingship.

Upon the king...

..let us our lives, our souls, our debts,

our careful wives, our children and our sins, lay on the king.

We must bear all.

What do kings get in return for the burden of responsibility?

Just empty royal ceremony.

What infinite heart's-ease must kings neglect,

that private men enjoy.

And what have kings that privates have not, too...

..save ceremony, save general ceremony?

And what art thou, thou idle ceremony?

What kind of god art thou that suffer'st more of mortal griefs

than do thy worshippers?

What are thy rents? What are thy comings in?

O, ceremony, show me but thy worth.

Henry has stripped away the mask of royalty.

Beneath it he is a frightened, vulnerable man.

On the eve of Agincourt he prays,

"O, god of battles, steel my soldiers' hearts.

"Possess them not with fear, not today, O, lord.

"O, not today."

They're a band of brothers all right - brothers in terror.

How did the audience react when they saw the man behind the royal mask?

Were they troubled or were they swept along

by Henry's victory at Agincourt?

Bashing the French was always a winner.

Maybe they went off to the alehouses happy.

But in those same alehouses, recruiting officers

were lying in wait for the drunken and unsuspecting...

..ready to pressgang them off to real, very deadly, wars.

In the last 20 years of Elizabeth's reign

100,000 Englishmen were sent to fight abroad.

Many went to Ireland to quell a long-running rebellion.

The English soldiers were described as miserable,

naked and hunger-starven.

There were some whose feet and legs rotted off for want of shoes.

No Agincourts in the offing there, then.

It wasn't just the bloody Irish war.

By the 1590s, high prices and low wages produced a crime wave.

People went to the gallows in record numbers.

To many, the afflictions visiting England

were the result of Elizabeth's failing powers.

"We shall never have a merry world while the queen lyveth,"

said John Feltwell, an Essex labourer.

The court was a nest of intrigue.

Elizabeth had a toy-boy favourite -

the Earl Of Essex was a handsome, dashing 34-year-old.

Essex had been sent to Ireland to destroy the rebels.

Instead, he negotiated a truce in defiance of the queen's orders.

Desperate to explain his decision to Elizabeth, he sped to London.

His timing was catastrophic.

Elizabeth had just risen

and the royal face was still being constructed

when Essex burst into the Queen's bed chamber.

It was not just a breach of protocol -

it was tantamount to a dethronement.

By seeing the Queen's body natural in all its aged, wizen truth,

deprived of the make-up that turned her

into the imperishable Virgin Queen,

Essex had shattered the royal mystique.

It was as though he'd torn the crown off her head with his own hands.

Essex was arrested.

When he was released, he was disgraced and deep in debt.

Two years later in February 1601,

Shakespeare's Richard II was playing at The Globe.

If Shakespeare had given us the portrait of a strong king in Henry V,

then in Richard II we get something quite different.

Richard is arrogant and self obsessed,

utterly out of touch with his people.

His enemy is Bolingbroke, charismatic crowd pleaser.

At the heart of the play there's an explosive question -

is it ever justifiable to overthrow a king?

But this was a highly unusual performance of Richard II.

Essex's men had paid for a private showing of the play.

They hoped it would steel their nerves and help justify

the coup d'etat they were launching the very next day.

At the emotional climax of the play, the king turns to Bolingbroke and says,

"Mark me, how I will undo myself.

"I give this heavy weight from off my head,

"this unwieldy sceptre from out my hand,

"the pride of kingly sway from out my heart.

"With mine own tears I wash away my sacred balm,

"with mine own hands I give away my crown,

"with mine own tongue deny my sacred state,

"with mine own breaths release all duty's oaths.

"All pomp and majesty I do forswear."

The scene and the speech is heartbreakingly full of pathos,

but so excited were they by its potential message,

it's unlikely Essex's men noticed that.

Essex saw himself as a new Bolingbroke,

someone who would restore the Sceptred Isle.

Essex believed there were parallels between Richard and Elizabeth.

Both were childless. Both were surrounded by self-interested men

who stopped them listening to the grievances of the people.

Essex wanted to turn Elizabeth into a puppet queen.

He would be the real power behind the throne.

On the 8th February 1601,

the day after the performance of Richard II, Essex's rebellion began.

There was a morning of pathetic skirmishing.

The rebels were arrested.

Essex was later beheaded.

Shakespeare lived in an age when writing was a dangerous game.

Christopher Marlowe was murdered.

Thomas Kyd was tortured.

Ben Jonson was thrown into jail.

So what about Shakespeare?

After the Essex rebellion, could the writer of Richard II

be had up as an accessory to high treason?

It is a dangerous dance.

There's no doubt about it.

And you had to become

as good with antithesis and metaphor

as Shakespeare did

to ski along that razorblade.

The reason Shakespeare managed to stay out of jail and

got his plays on stage and the reason Shakespeare escaped

the lesser role of essayist and commentator on the times

and achieved the role of the greatest dramatist ever,

was that he dramatised opposing positions

in a way that it is almost impossible to nail him down.

Richard II is a case in point.

In the opening scenes the king is complacent,

believing that his majesty makes him untouchable.

After his dethronement, Richard becomes humble and self aware.

He learns what it is to be a man as well as a monarch.

His painful journey wrings our hearts.

Perhaps the play and the lessons of the Essex rebellion

preoccupied the old queen.

Perhaps they reminded Elizabeth that she needed the loyalty of

her subjects, especially when times were tough.

Because nine months after the rebellion

she finally emerged from the shadows.

She turned on that old stage magic

and gave her long-suffering subjects

the swan song they had waited so long to hear.

The great speech of beauty, intensity and emotional power

was late in coming,

but when it did in November 1601, delivered to a parliament hostile to

her government, it was a masterpiece of Elizabethan stagecraft.

The queen revelled gloriously, shamelessly,

just as she had done at Tilbury, in saying, "I am one of you.

"Those unscrupulous men who've committed deeds in my name,

"I am not with them. I am with you.

"There's only one thing that unites us. You know it.

"One word. The jewel."

"There is no jewel

"be it of never so rich a price

"which I set before this jewel.

"I mean your love.

"For I do esteem it more than any treasure or riches.

"For that we know how to prize,

"but love and thanks I count invaluable.

"I know the title of a king is a glorious title.

"But assure yourself that to be a king and wear a crown

"is a thing more glorious to them that see it

"than it is pleasant to them that bear it.

"And though you have had, and may have,

"many princes more mighty and wise sitting in this seat,

"yet you never had, nor shall have,

"any that will be more careful and loving."

In February 1603, the Lord Chamberlain's men

performed in front of the queen for the last time.

A month later, Elizabeth was dead.

Describing her funeral, the poet Thomas Dekker wrote,

"Her hearse seemed to be an island swimming in water,

"for round it there rained a shower of tears."

It was as if her death reminded people of what they had lost.

That rare thing, a queen who was first and foremost a human being.

A monarch who had the common touch.

That's not something that could be said of her successor, James Stewart.

So unlike the Virgin Queen.

One minute a swaggering drunk with an eye for pretty-boy courtiers,

the next a pious pedant reciting scripture at sinners.

And unlike Elizabeth, James was not especially keen

to get downwind of his subjects.

"He does not caress the people nor make them that good cheer

"that the late queen did," said the Venetian ambassador.

"This king manifests no taste for them."

James's official entry into London was in March 1604.

It was the most grandiose affair imaginable.

Triumphful arches thrown up across the city.

A lot of nose-in-the-air Latin poems

which meant nothing to ordinary folk.

So didn't Shakespeare, the god of the groundlings,

feel a bit estranged from all this high culture?

Not a bit.

He wasn't the jobbing, inky-fingered playwright of Southwark any more.

In the last years of the old queen's reign,

Shakespeare had definitely arrived. He was raking it in.

Rich enough to buy the second-largest house in Stratford

and, tellingly, he was using his family's new coat of arms.

Insofar as you could ever be and still stay in a theatre,

he was a gent.

At James's coronation he was dressed resplendently

in four and a half yards of red cloth.

His company, which had been grand enough as the Lord Chamberlain's men,

was now even grander as the King's Men,

their title authorised at record speed by the royal pen pushers.

He was now officially THE court playwright.

The question was, with all that financial security

and royal recognition, would he lose his edge?

James was a notorious big spender

and when it came to the arts he lavished cash.

Shakespeare was among the happy beneficiaries of James's largesse.

Between 10 and 20 times a year, far more than under Elizabeth,

the King's Men performed at court.

Shakespeare was now much closer to the throne.

He could observe James's obsessions at first hand.

Perhaps that's what inspired Shakespeare to dig deeper

and explore what lay in the heart and the head of a king.

In the great tragedies written during James's reign

Shakespeare explored the most profound issues of all.

Madness and sanity.

Good and evil.

The corrupting nature of ambition.

Revenge.

We don't know for sure, but it seems likely

that the first tragedy that James saw

was performed at Hampton Court in the Christmas season of 1603.

At 10 o'clock, after heavy drinking and feasting,

the audience, all 600 of them, stagger in.

On each side, against the walls there are tiered benches

for the less important of the audience.

The aristocrats get the floor

and the creme de la creme have reserved boxes.

There is a throne-like pair of seats for the king and queen.

The audience parts to let the royal couple through.

Much bowing and curtseying.

We don't know exactly what plays were performed that Christmas,

but it seems very likely that for the king and his Danish queen,

it would have been the Danish play, Hamlet.

Where else had they spent their honeymoon but Elsinore Castle?

If there was any question that the royal playwright

had lost his edge, then staging Hamlet was an emphatic response.

Of all Shakespeare's plays about the theatre of the court

it's the one most obsessed with false appearances -

what's fake and what's true.

The biggest faker of all is Hamlet's uncle, Claudius.

Claudius acts like the rightful king.

He acts like a devoted husband to Hamlet's mother, Gertrude.

But Hamlet suspects Claudius of murder.

The murder of HIS father, the king of Denmark.

So Hamlet decides to reveal the truth with, what else? A play.

"The play's the thing," he says,

"Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."

James would have loved the melodrama.

But as Hamlet unfolded he must have felt increasingly ill at ease.

Because what James was watching

was a reflection of his own life played out on stage.

His father, Darnley, had been murdered.

The murderer, Bothwell, had married James's mother,

Mary Queen of Scots.

They lived as king and queen,

flaunting their crime like Claudius and Gertrude.

This nightmare haunted James

and here it was again played out right in front of him.

At one point during the play,

when Hamlet has the players act out the poisoning of his father,

there are no less than three pairs of kings and queens,

all within a few feet of each other.

James I and Queen Anne, Gertrude and Claudius

and the player king and queen.

And what is being acted out

is essentially the crime of James' own childhood.

Now there was no reason why he necessarily

should have taken offence of this.

After all, he hadn't tried to take revenge for the death of his father.

But, all the same, you have to wonder whether,

confronted with these incredible mind games,

his head wasn't spinning.

Hamlet was about sorting out true kings from criminal assassins.

So why would James have a problem with that?

Especially at a time when king-murderers

were lurking around every corner.

On 4th November, 1605,

36 barrels of gunpowder were discovered

beneath the House of Lords.

The plotters were Catholic militants.

Their target was not just Parliament, but James himself.

Shakespeare must have been particularly worried.

His mother was from a staunch Catholic family.

Robert Catesby, the ringleader of the Gunpowder Plot,

was one of Shakespeare's relatives.

In this climate of treason and paranoia,

Shakespeare wrote something designed to appeal to James.

A play about the anarchy engulfing a country

after the murder of its king.

Macbeth.

"Each new morn, new widows howl.

"New orphans cry.

"New sorrows strike heaven on the face."

WEIRD SISTERS: Fair is foul and foul is fair.

Hover through the fog...

James' obsession with sorcery

inspired the very first scene of the play.

WEIRD SISTERS: Macbeth. Fair is foul and foul is fair.

Hover through the fog and filthy air.

Fair is foul...

In the early 1590s, more than 100 Scottish witches had gone on trial.

Under torture, they confessed to casting spells

in order to kill James.

BIRDS SHRIEK

When Macbeth's witches cook up a cauldron

of wool of bat and toe of frog,

James would have been reminded of the North Berwick witches.

He had personally cross-examined the witches.

After the trial, he wrote a book about sorcery -

Daemonologie.

He believed witches got their power through sex with the Devil.

The connection between sex and power

is at the heart of Shakespeare's play.

Macbeth and his wife lust for the throne.

The sexual rush of killing is at the heart of Macbeth.

Macbeth does what his wife urges him to do

because she makes it clear his manhood is at stake.

"Art thou afeard to be the same in thine own act and valour

"as thou art in desire?" she says.

"Screw thy courage to the sticking place."

Macbeth flinches at his demonic conversion, but his wife invites it.

Come here, spirits...

..that tend on mortal thoughts.

Unsex me here.

And fill me from the crown to the toe topful of direst cruelty.

SHE GASPS

Make thick my blood.

Stop up the access and passage to remorse

That no compunctious visitings of nature shake my fell purpose.

Nor keep peace between the effect and it.

Come to my woman's breasts and take my milk for gall,

You murdering ministers,

Wherever in your sightless substances

You wait on nature's mischief.

Come, thick night, and pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell.

That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,

Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark to cry, "Hold!

"Hold!"

When Lady Macbeth says, "Unsex me,"

she's abandoning all the qualities of the right kind of woman -

chastity, humility, and obedience.

And the result is exactly what male moralists would have predicted...

..madness, insomnia, suicide.

Macbeth is a very interesting case in terms of the kingship debate,

because I think it's a completely different quality of play

to any of the other tragedies or the histories.

I think it's an almost unique play in terms of its...

detailed and extremely depressing picture

of a man who undergoes a profound crisis

by having done something dreadful in order to obtain absolute power.

What Shakespeare's interested in is the psychological damage.

He takes the past and the future out of his world, out of Macbeth's world.

So Macbeth ends up living entirely in the present.

And the great "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" speech

is about each day being exactly the same.

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day

To the last syllable of recorded time.

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death.

Out, out, brief candle.

Life's but a walking shadow.

A poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage

and then is heard no more.

It is a tale told by an idiot -

Full of sound and fury,

signifying nothing.

Macbeth explores how men turn into predatory animals

but there's a moment when Shakespeare asks

whether you need witches to convert to the dark side.

Is there something about the crown itself which makes beasts of men?

In one of the strangest scenes in the play, we meet Malcolm.

He's the good guy who will become king once Macbeth implodes.

Through Malcolm, Shakespeare explores the corrupting influence of kingship.

"I'm not what I appear," Malcolm says.

"You think Macbeth is bad.

"Wait till you get King Malcolm."

Were I king, I should cut off the nobles for their lands,

Desire his jewels, this other's house

And my more having would be as a sauce to make me hunger more

That I should forge quarrels unjust against the good and loyal,

Destroying them for wealth.

In Malcolm's experience, a king is either murdered in his bed

or is a bloody tyrant.

That's what a king is.

Does he really want to be that?

Can he avoid either of those fates?

He certainly doesn't want to be murdered in his bed.

So I think it's partly a playing out of Malcolm's own self-doubt

in the face of what seems to be the way of the world.

Through the character of Malcolm,

Shakespeare flags up how whimsical and unreliable kings can be.

It's a dangerous thing to do,

but Shakespeare knows how far to push his luck.

So after his outburst, Malcolm takes it all back.

"Only kidding. I'm a good guy after all."

I here abjure the taints and blames I laid upon myself,

for strangers to my nature.

My first false speaking was this upon myself.

What I am...truly...

..is thine and my poor country's to command.

THUNDER CRACKS

Shakespeare has ventured a shocking line of questioning

about what the crown does to the human, and yet he gets away with it.

But some demon compels him to keep chipping away at the royal mask.

It's as if being so close to James,

seeing at first hand the extravagance and pretension of his court,

provokes Shakespeare to take ever greater risks.

What Shakespeare is obsessed with is the tension between humanity

and the delusions of majesty.

And it's this issue that's at the heart

of his greatest play about kingship -

Lear.

There are many shocking things in Lear.

The eye-gouging.

The most heartbreaking ending in all of Shakespeare.

But performed as it was at the Stuart court,

amidst all that heavy jewellery, the rivers of silk,

the cascades of lace,

nothing is more shocking than its immense moral argument.

That a monarch has to be reduced

to a lightning-struck, destitute, homeless person

before he can achieve real grace

and see the truth about himself and his place in humanity.

And it's not enough even to uncrown yourself.

You have to sink the lowest of the low.

To grasp the level of Shakespeare's audacity,

imagine a command performance in front of the Queen,

featuring a naked, demented bag lady version of herself,

shuffling among the homeless.

Raving and crying and finding salvation.

But Shakespeare is smart.

He doesn't undermine the idea of kingship right away.

Instead, he begins on a theme

which would have delighted his royal master.

Give me the map.

There.

James's great project was to be king of something called Great Britain.

He believed the union of England, Scotland and Ireland

would bring security, prosperity and peace.

"But by dividing your kingdoms," he warned,

"ye shall leave the seed of discord among your posterity,"

and this is exactly what Lear is about to do.

He wants to retire,

so he decides to parcel out his kingdom amongst his daughters.

Know that we have divided in three our kingdom,

And 'tis our fast intent

To shake all cares and business from our age.

Conferring them on younger strengths

Whilst we, unburdened, crawl towards death.

The story of Cinderella and the story of King Lear are the same.

It's two nasty sisters and one nice one

and the two nasty ones are picked over the nice one.

It's sort of based on a fairytale fable construction.

It does run away from him so dramatically

and becomes both operatic, both very grand

and also sort of painfully simple and direct.

The daughters who flatter Lear will get the lion's share of the land.

The youngest, Cordelia, refuses to butter up her father.

But the elder daughters trowel on the praise shamelessly.

Sir, I love you more than words can wield the matter.

Dearer than eyesight, space and liberty.

Beyond what can be valued, rich or rare.

No less than life...

In attacking flattery, Shakespeare was treading a dangerous line,

for Lear's weakness was also, notoriously, James'.

There was no praise, however fawning,

that wouldn't go down well with the king.

James often demanded his subjects address him

as "Most sacred," or "Most wise."

Beyond all manner of so much, I love you.

And there was another striking parallel between the two kings.

The boorishness of the royal entourage.

James' court was a byword for licentiousness.

During a state visit in 1606, one courtier remarked,

"We had women and wine, too, in such plenty

"as would have astonished each sober beholder."

In the play, it's this kind of royal debauchery

that is Lear's undoing.

He wants to keep a retinue of 100 knights.

It's like a travelling band of rowdy football supporters.

But Lear's daughters won't allow it.

And now he's handed over his crown, Lear is powerless to resist them.

There is something deeply painful about a man

who puts himself into that position.

That ludicrous sort of position of the king without a crown.

It's an amazing moment when you can see

a man of huge power and huge influence

just suddenly... his function has disappeared,

so he disappears with it.

And that seems to be an extension of the kingship,

the mask cracking and one's self-worth disappearing with it.

And I think that's a profoundly Shakespearean movement.

Dost thou know the difference, my boy,

-between a bitter fool and a sweet one?

-No, lad. Teach me.

Bling.

# That lord that counselled thee Bling, bling

# To give away thy land Bling, bling... #

Only when his power has been stripped away

can Lear begin to comprehend the human condition.

He's on the torturing road to understanding.

But the man who must help him on his journey is his fool.

# Bling, bling To give away thy land

# Bling! #

Once again, Shakespeare dares to make comparisons

between James' and Lear's worlds.

James was the first monarch for a long time to have a fool.

Archie Armstrong. His very own Billy Connolly.

Archie was paid to be rude to the king on the understanding

that at the end of the routine, everything returned to normal.

King on his throne. Fool on the bottom step, jiggling his bells.

Not in Lear.

The fool is merciless. Piercing.

# The sweet and bitter fool Bling, bling

# Will presently appear Bling, bling

# The one in motley here Bling, bling

# The other found out there Bling, bling. #

Dost thou call me fool, boy?

All thy other titles thou hast given away that thou was born with.

Like Lear, James had famously been called a fool.

The wisest fool in Christendom.

THUNDER CRACKS

In brimful man!

Stripped of his knights, powerless and homeless,

Lear goes out into the wilderness while a storm rages.

Shakespeare views that outside is the point where you discover things

you didn't know and the inside is, you know,

the safe and secure place.

So you know, in the comedies, it's the magic forest

and the magic island and, in the tragedies, it's the blasted heath.

And in the comedies, you learn how to love,

and in tragedies, you learn how to die.

And actually that's what the tragic heroes do outside.

They discover... They confront death.

And there in that terrible place, literally at his wits' end,

the destitute king wises up at last

and does what kings are not supposed to do

but what the Christian saviour required of them.

That they become fully part of the human condition,

no matter how filthy, sick, prostrate or demented.

The homeless, childless, crazy, fallen king

becomes just another un-accommodated man

and into his foaming, roaring mouth,

Shakespeare puts a terrible warning to all the mighty of the world.

Poor, naked wretches wheresoe'r you are.

That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm.

How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,

Your loop'd and window'd raggedness

Defend you from seasons such as these?

O,

I have ta'en too little care of this.

Take physic, pomp.

Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel

And show the heavens more just.

THUNDER BOOMS

I think it is subversive

at the most profound level of all of Shakespeare's plays.

In that it is the play, the reason the poetry is at its barest...

..and simplest and most powerful in that play

is because that is where Shakespeare is testing humanity most brutally.

The sandblasting of experience on the individual of King Lear

is so extreme that you really do see the skull underneath the skin.

The profundity of Lear may have been its saving grace.

It was a searing portrayal of kingship,

but it was also much more than that.

It was a play which transcended court politics

to speak about universal truths.

And its truth is what helped get Shakespeare off the hook.

Got any spare change?

By humbling a king, Shakespeare reveals our common humanity.

The deep experiences we all share -

love and loss and loneliness.

The equality of suffering.

Was James listening to Lear's message to "Take physic, pomp.

"Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel?"

Probably not.

Neither he nor his son, Charles,

had much interest in the plight of the poor.

Why should they? In their own minds, they were gods on earth.

James had written that monarchs were as if on a stage,

but his stage was a platform of incomparable elevation,

closer to the god who had anointed him than to his subjects.

Shakespeare though, knew about both high and low.

He had burrowed through the ant heap of London

and he had strode through the palaces of kings.

His stage was different.

A place where high-born illusions could be brought down to earth,

to the saving recognition

that we are all made of the same human stuff.

At the most heart-rending moment of the play,

Lear uses this image, not preeningly but tragically,

to comfort the blinded, wailing, old Gloucester.

"When we are born, we cry

"That we are come to this great stage of fools."

That the royal lead actor, the wisest fool in Christendom,

was permanently stage-struck by his invulnerable sense of grandeur.

Likewise, James' son, Charles I,

with the result that on a wintry morning in January 1649,

some 40 years after the first performance of King Lear,

and more than 30 years after Shakespeare's death,

Charles I stepped onto the scaffold from this room,

his father's banqueting house theatre.

Lear had won wisdom by losing his mind.

Charles would merely lose his head.

A head which, when held up to the crowd,

was the head of just another man.

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