Remember that you are a human being with a soul and the divine gift of articulate speech, that your native language is the language of Shakespeare and Milton and The Bible-Prof Henry Higgins.Bernard Woolley: As they say, it's a custom more honoured in the breach than in the observance.
Jim Hacker: Oh really, Bernard, must you and Humphrey really always express yourself in this roundabout and pompous way? "More honoured in the breach than the observance"! Must you always distort and destroy the most beautiful language in the world - the language of Shakespeare?
Bernard Woolley: That is Shakespeare, Prime Minister.
William Shakespeare, like Mark Twain and Emily Dickinson is forced upon an unsuspecting and unappreciative youth. When I had to read Romeo and Juleit in high school it was quite simply baffling. Filled with words I had never heard, poems that weren't really poems, prose that didn't seem to be prose, and a teacher telling us How Wonderful Shakespeare was. Over the years I have gained a bit more of an appreciation for the The Bard's works.
I am rather fond of that whole little genre of Shakespeare plays rendered in alternate universes-Richard III was bloody amazing! And Romeo and Juliet as Mob families was a bit of fun as well.
But what about Shakespeare as old Will was meant it to be? Well, head over to Shakespeare's Globe Theater for a feel of the Good Old Days. For example Shakespeare's Globe Theater has the first Thatched Roof in London since the Great Fire. Lots of fresh sunlight for lighting. Some times all male casts are used, just as they were in Shakespeare's day.
There is the Globe Exhibition-which has been refurbished with most exhibits re-presented to improve your journey through the history of Shakespeare and the Globe. Find out about extravagant Elizabethan costumes, Renaissance instruments and how they were used, and the dramatic stories of the first Globe crossing the Thames, and the new Globe being reconstructed on Bankside.
This year the shows at Shakespeare's Globe Theater include the performance of his most searching tragedy, King Lear; his most wild and inventive comedy, A Midsummer Night’s Dream; his most thrilling and savage satire, Timon of Athens, and his invention of a new form, the sit-com, in The Merry Wives of Windsor.
It's a very pretty building which brings back a bit of the good old days. While London is full of real old buildings, Shakespeare's Globe doesn't have it's going to fall over at any moment feel to it. This is another London Attraction that should be on everyone lists of things to see, well, if they like Shakespeare anyway.
