ABSTRACT
THERE is no doubt in my mind, from what individual members of this audience have told me, that Shakespeare, for many of you, was largely spoilt in school; partly because of the pressure of examinations, and the often unenlightened drudgery of ‘set books’; partly because few teachers manage to make Shakespeare ‘live’, and dissection is probably easier on the dead. They fail in this last, I think, because they tend to suggest to the schoolboy that the plays are museum pieces (understandable only with notes, and in essence and situation quite unrelated to modern thinking), and stress insufficiently what every great Shakespearian critic has noted—the psychological truth (even to the psychological inconsistencies) of Shakespeare’s writing. No one who has served in a great headquarters in war can fail to be astounded at the accuracy of the picture of a General Staff given in Troilus and Cressida; some of you will know the living quality of certain of the issues presented, say, in Measure for Measure, or A Winter’s Tale. (I give these as examples, because I hope you will start again on some of the lesser-known plays.) King Lear remains a living presentation of the central problems of the relationships between parents and children, problems which look like being accentuated by our present taxation, the social revolution, and the operations of the welfare state. You doubt that? Listen to Lear, denied by Regan, told by her to return to Goneril and beg his daughter’s pardon: Ask her forgiveness? Do you but mark how this becomes the house: ‘Dear daughter, I confess that I am old; Age is unnecessary: on my knees I beg That you’ll vouchsafe me raiment, bed, and food.’ 1
