ABSTRACT
An American veteran of Shakespearean production once took on, in England, the task of directing Henry the Eighth with a cast of eight hundred drawn from the Women’s Institutes. I know exactly how Margaret Webster1 must have felt on the eve of that performance, for I have a cast of about the same size massed for entry into the following pages. Among them are numerous First, Second, and Third Messengers, Citizens, and Soldiers; a host of gardeners and gaolers, knights and heralds, ladies-in-waiting, murderers and mariners; the odd day-woman, haberdasher, poet, vintner, hangman, scrivener, king, cardinal and goddess; John Bates, Tom Snout, George Seacole, Simon Catling, Peter Thump, Neighbour Mugs; and four men who are all called Balthasar. These and many like them have provided me with wonderfully good company over the last few years. But the attempt to muster, within the limits of a book, so multitudinous a company of Shakespeare’s minimal characters does seem to call at the outset for at least some brief justification.
