It looks solid enough, doesn't it?
In the late Middle Ages, the civilisation of northern Europe
seemed designed to last for ever.
Rich merchants, self-satisfied guilds,
a conveniently loose political organisation,
no material reasons for change.
And yet, in a few years, in a single generation,
came the first of those explosions
that were to create contemporary man,
what we call the Reformation.
What went wrong with that solid-looking world?
I can't see the answer outside the Fortress of Würzburg,
but inside it, in this room, one gets a hint of trouble.
It contains carvings by a sculptor named
Tilman Riemenschneider, perhaps the best
of the many skillful craftsmen in late 15th-century Germany.
And these carvings are not only moving as works of art,
they show very clearly the character
of north European man about the year 1500.
They show, to begin with, his serious personal piety,
a quality quite different from the bland conventional piety
that one finds in a great deal of Italian art.
And then, a serious approach to life itself.
These men were not to be fobbed off by forms and ceremonies.
They believed there was such a thing as truth,
and they wanted to get at it.
What they heard from papal legates,
who did a lot of traveling in Germany at this time,
didn't convince them, there was the same desire for truth in Rome.
And they had a rough, rawboned peasant tenacity of purpose.
So far so good.
But these faces reveal a more dangerous characteristic;
... a vein of hysteria.
The 15th century had been the century of revivalism.
Religious movements on the fringe of the Catholic church.
Even in Italy, Savonarola had persuaded his hearers
to make a bonfire of their so-called vanities,
including pictures by Botticelli,
which I suppose was a bad day for civilisation.
The Germans were much more easily excited.
Look at this Italian cardinal by Raphael.
He's not only a man of high culture, but completely self-contained.
And compare him with one of the greatest of German portraits,
... Dürer's "Oswolt Krel".
Those staring eyes; that look of self-conscious introspection.
That uneasiness, marvelously conveyed by Dürer
through the uneasiness of the planes in the modeling.
How German it is, and what a nuisance for the rest of the world.
However, in the 1490s, these destructive national characteristics
hadn't yet shown themselves.
It was still an age of internationalism.
And in 1498, there arrived in Oxford a poor scholar,
who was destined to become the spokesman of northern civilisation,
and the greatest internationalist of his day, ... Erasmus.
Erasmus was a Dutchman. He came from Rotterdam.
But he never went back to live in Holland.
He'd been in a monastery there, and he'd hated it.
And he'd also hated the course, convivial life
of the average Netherlander.
He was always complaining that they drank too much.
He himself had a delicate digestion
and would drink only a special kind of Burgundy.
All his life, he moved from place to place.
Partly to avoid the plague,
because that king of terrors kept all free men
on the move throughout the early 16th century;
and partly due to a restlessness
that overcame him if he stayed anywhere too long.
However, in his earlier life, he seems to have liked England,
and he had a successful stay in Magdalen College,
and so this country makes a brief appearance
in our survey of civilisation
You know, considering the barbarous and disorderly state
of England in the 15th century, Oxford and Cambridge
are astonishing creations.
And the Oxford that welcomed Erasmus still contained a few,
not very many, I suppose, pious and enlightened men.
Of course, the atmosphere must have been somewhat
provincial and unsophisticated
compared to Florence, even Bologna.
And yet, about the year 1500,
this kind of naivety had its value.
And Erasmus, who was anything but naive, recognised it.
He'd seen enough of the religious life to know that
the Church must be reformed, not only in its institutions,
but in its teachings.
It was once the great civiliser of Europe,
and now it was aground, stranded on forms and vested interests.
And he knew that there was more hope of reform
from the teachings of a man like Colet, the Dean of St Paul's,
who simply wanted people to read the Bible as if it were true,
than from the sharp wits of Florence.
The intelligence and the tact, by which Erasmus made himself
so immediately welcomed by the finest minds in England,
are alive to us in his letters.
And by great good fortune, we can supplement these letters
by visible evidence, because he was the friend
of the most incisive portrait painter of the time, Hans Holbein.
Holbein's portraits show Erasmus when he had become
famous and elderly, but they have so complete
a grasp of his character that we can imagine him at every age.
Like all humanists, I might almost say like all civilised men,
Erasmus set a high value on friendship.
And he was anxious that Holbein should go to England
to paint pictures of his friends.
And finally in 1526, Holbein went,
and was introduced into the circle of Sir Thomas More.
The brilliant youth, with whom 20 years earlier
Erasmus had fallen in love, was now Lord Chancellor.
He was also the author of "Utopia",
where, in rather a quaint style, he recommends almost everything
that was believed in by enlightened reformers in the 1890s.
Holbein painted a large picture of Sir Thomas More and his family;
Erasmus was staying in the house at the time.
Alas, the picture was burnt, but the original drawing remains
with the name of the sitters written in.
Erasmus used to say that More's family were like the Academy of Plato.
Well, in Holbein's studies of the heads,
they don't look oppressively intellectual
but alert, sensible people of any epoch.
Thomas More himself, was a noble idealist,
too good for the world of action, where he sometimes lost his way.
It shows how quickly civilisations can appear and disappear
that the author of "Utopia" should have flourished,
should have become, in spite of himself, first minister of the crown,
halfway between the death of Richard III
and the judicial murders of Henry VIII,
of which he was to be the most distinguished victim.
Holbein depicted other members of Erasmus's circle in England,
and I'm bound to say that some of them,
like the archbishops, Warham and Fisher,
look as if they had no illusions
about the transitory nature of civilisation
at the court of Henry VIII.
They look defeated, and they were defeated.
In 1506, Erasmus went to Italy.
He was in Bologna at the exact time
of Julius II's famous quarrel with Michelangelo.
He was in Rome when Raphael began work on the papal apartments
But none of this seems to have made any impression on him.
His chief interest was in printing,
in the publication of his works by the famous Venetian printer
and pioneer of popular editions, Aldus Manutius.
Whereas in talking about Italy, one is concerned
with the enlargement of man's spirit through the visual image,
in the north, one is chiefly concerned with the
extension of his mind through the word.
And this was made possible by the invention of printing.
In the 19th century, people used to think of the invention of printing
as the linchpin in the history of civilisation.
Well, fifth-century Greece and twelfth-century Chartres
and 15th-century Florence got on very well without it,
and who shall say that they were less civilised than we are?
Still, on balance, I suppose, printing has done more good than harm.
One certainly feels that way in the
beautiful humanised workshop of the Plantin Press in Antwerp.
And one can't but look with awe on this simple-seeming invention.
It looks so easy to work. Well, it is easy to work.
Roll it in like that.
Take this arm.
Pull as hard as you can, very hard.
Roll it back.
Open it up...
..and take out your printed sheet.
How easy they are to operate. You would have thought anyone
could have thought of it, ... like the wheel.
Yet it was so effective that it remained,
practically unchanged, for about 400 years.
And perhaps one's doubts about the civilising effect of printing
have been aroused by a later development of the craft.
Of course, printing had been invented
long before the time of Erasmus.
Gutenberg's Bible was printed in 1456.
But these early printed books were sumptuous and expensive,
done in competition with manuscripts.
Men only gradually realised that printed books
should reach as many people as possible.
And it took preachers and persuaders almost 30 years
to recognise what a formidable new instrument
had come into their hands, just as it took politicians
20 years to recognise the value of television.
The first man to take advantage of the printing press was Erasmus.
It made him, and unmade him,
because in a way he became the first journalist.
He had all the qualifications: a clear, elegant style,
in Latin, which meant that he could be read everywhere,
but not by everyone; opinions on every subject;
even the gift of putting things so they could be
interpreted in different ways.
Early in his journalistic career, he produced a masterpiece,
"The Praise of Folly"
He wrote it staying with his friend Thomas More.
He said it took him a week. I dare say it's true.
He had a amazing fluency, and this time
his whole being was engaged.
You know, to an intelligent man, human beings and human institutions
sometimes seem intolerably stupid.
And there are times when one's pent-up feelings
of impatience and annoyance can't be contained any longer.
Erasmus's "Praise of Folly" was an outburst of this kind.
It washed away everything; popes, kings, monks of course.
Scholars, war, theology, the whole works.
This is a page from it, with a marginal drawing by Holbein,
showing Erasmus at his desk.
And over the drawing, Erasmus has written, that if he was really
as handsome as this, he wouldn't lack for a wife.
In the ordinary way, satire is a negative activity.
But there are times in the history of civilisation,
when it has a positive value.
Times when the flypaper of complacency
holds down the free spirit.
This was the first time in history that
a bright-minded intellectual exercise;
something to make people stretch their minds
and think for themselves and question everything;
had been made available to thousands of readers all over Europe.
It happened that, during the same period in which
Erasmus was spreading enlightenment through the word,
another development of the art of printing was nourishing the imagination.
The illustrated book, engraved on a wooden block, like this.
Of course, the illiterate faithful had for centuries
been instructed by wall paintings and stained glass.
But the vast multiplication of images made possible by the printed woodcut
put this form of communication on quite a different footing.
At once more widespread and more intimate.
And as usual, the invention coincided with the man.
And the man was Albrecht Dürer.
He was born and brought up in Nuremberg,
the town of the Meistersingers.
That's his house, just behind me there.
The great German myth of the worthy craftsman
can still be felt in such of its streets and squares
that are still left standing.
But Dürer, whose father had come to Nuremberg
from Hungary, was not at all the
pious German craftsman figure he was once supposed to be.
He was a strange, uneasy character.
Intensely self-conscious and inordinately vain.
This is his self-portrait, now in Madrid.
You might think that self-love couldn't go much further, but it could
because two years later, he did another self-portrait,
in which he deliberately painted himself
in the traditional pose of Christ.
Well, this seems to us rather blasphemous, and Dürer's admirers
don't make it much better by explaining that he thought
creative power was a divine quality
and he wished to pay homage to his own genius
by depicting himself as God.
Well, it's true this belief in the artist as inspired creator
was part of the Renaissance spirit.
Leonardo talks a lot about it in his treatise on painting,
but one can't imagine him painting himself as Christ.
However, Dürer had certain qualities in common with Leonardo.
Although he didn't share Leonardo's positive distaste for women,
he wasn't far short of it, and he would certainly never have
married if the bourgeois conventions of Nuremberg
hadn't compelled him to do so.
And then Dürer shared Leonardo's curiosity.
But it was a curiosity about appearances, not about causes.
He was almost entirely without Leonardo's determination
to find out how things worked
He collected rarities and monstrosities of a kind
which 100 years later, were to furnish the first museums.
He would go anywhere to see them.
Eventually he died, as a result of an expedition
to see a stranded whale in Zeeland.
He never saw it, ... it had been washed away before he got there.
However, he did see a walrus, whose shiny snout delighted him.
Dürer's curiosity about nature had less questionable results
in the drawings he did of flowers, grasses and animals.
No man has ever described natural objects more minutely.
And yet, to my eye, something is missing,
... the inner life.
This drawing of blades of grass, which is greatly admired,
looks to me like the back of a case containing a stuffed animal.
But if Dürer didn't try to peer so deeply
into the inner life of nature, nor feel, as Leonardo did,
its appalling independence of mankind,
he was deeply engaged by the mystery of the human psyche.
His obsession with his own personality, was part of
a passionate interest in psychology in general.
And this led him to produce one of the
great prophetic documents of Western man,
the engraving he entitled "Melancholia 1".
In the Middle Ages, melancholia had meant
a simple combination of sloth, boredom and despondency.
It must have been quite common when people couldn't read,
or were cooped up together in monasteries.
But Dürer's application is far from simple.
This figure is humanity at its most evolved
with wings to carry her upwards.
She sits in the attitude of Rodin's "Penseur",
and still holds in her hands the compasses;
symbols of measurement by which science will conquer the world.
Around her are all the emblems of constructive action.
A saw, a plane, pincers,
and those two prime elements in solid geometry
the sphere and the dodecahedron.
And yet, all these aids to construction are abandoned.
She sits there brooding on the futility of human effort.
Her obsessive stare reflects some deep psychic disturbance.
The German mind that produced Dürer and the Reformation
also produced psychoanalysis.
I began by mentioning the enemies of civilisation.
Well, here in Dürer's prophetic vision,
is one more way in which it can be destroyed from within.
However, what made Dürer so important in his own age
was that he combined an iron grip on the facts of appearance
with an extremely fertile invention.
As time went on, he became absolute master of all the techniques of his day.
In particular, the science of perspective,
which he used, not simply as an intellectual game,
but in order to increase the sense of reality.
His woodcuts diffused a new way of looking at art.
Not as something magical or symbolic,
but as something accurate and factual.
His treatment of sacred subjects carried absolute conviction.
I don't doubt that the many simple people
who bought his woodcuts of the Life of the Virgin
accepted them as a correct record.
Dürer was immersed in the intellectual life of his time.
In the same year Erasmus completed his translation
of St Jerome's Letters, Dürer did this
delicate engraving of his hero at work.
What an Erasmian room; ... clear, sunny, orderly,
with its reminder of death, but also with lots of cushions,
which they don't give you in monasteries.
And Dürer made an even more striking reference to Erasmus
in the engraving of the "Knight with Death and the Devil".
One of Erasmus's most widely read books
was called "The Handbook of the Christian Knight."
It was almost certainly in the artist's mind when he did this engraving,
because he writes in a diary that refers to the engraving:
"Oh, Erasmus of Rotterdam, when wilt thou take thy stand?
"Hark, thou knight of Christ.
"Ride forth at the side of Christ our Lord.
"Protect the truth, obtain the martyr's crown."
Well, that wasn't at all Erasmus's line.
And this grimly determined knight, with his heavy Gothic armour,
forging ahead, oblivious of the rather grotesque terrors that accost him,
is as far removed as possible from the agile intelligence
and the nervous side glances of the great scholar.
For 15 years Dürer's cry to Erasmus
was echoed by his contemporaries all over Europe.
And it still appears in old-fashioned history books.
Why didn't Erasmus intervene?
Well, he wanted, above all, to avoid a violent split
down the middle of the civilised world.
He didn't think a revolution would make people happier.
In fact, revolutions seldom do.
In one of his letters written soon after
Dürer had done his portrait, he says of the Protestants:
"I have seen them return from hearing a sermon
"as if inspired by an evil spirit.
"The faces of all showed a curious wrath and ferocity."
Although Erasmus seems to us so modern,
he actually lived beyond his time.
He was by nature a humanist of the early Renaissance.
The heroic world of the 16th century was not his climate.
To my mind, the extraordinary thing is
what a huge following he had,
and how close Erasmus,
or at least the Erasmian point of view, came to success.
It shows how many people, even in a time of crisis,
yearn for tolerance and reason and simplicity of life.
In fact, for civilisation.
But on the tide of fierce emotional and biological impulses,
they are powerless.
So, almost 20 years after the heroic spirit
was made visible in the work of Michelangelo,
it appears in Germany in the words and actions of Luther.
Whatever else he may have been, Luther was a hero.
And after all the doubts and hesitations of the humanists
and the hovering flight of Erasmus,
it's with a real sense of emotional relief
that we hear Luther say: "Here I stand!"
(Ein Foste Burg)
We can see what this burning spirit was like
because the local painter of Wittenberg, Lucas Cranach,
was one of Luther's most trusted friends.
And Cranach portrayed Luther in all his changing aspects.
The tense spiritually-struggling monk;
the great theologian with the brow of Michelangelo;
... the emancipated layman.
Cranach was a witness at Luther's marriage, and painted
the portrait of his bride, an admirable and intelligent nun.
Even in the disguise he wore
when he escaped incognito to Wittenberg,
no doubt he was extremely impressive.
The Leader for which the earnest German people
is always waiting.
Unfortunately for civilisation, he not only settled their doubts
and gave them the courage of their convictions,
he also released their latent violence and hysteria.
Beyond this was another northern characteristic
that was fundamentally opposed to civilisation,
an earthy, animal hostility to reason and decorum.
One fancies that Nordic man took a long time
to emerge from the primeval forest.
Look at this old troll king,
who seems to have grown out of the earth.
That's Luther's father, painted by Cranach.
He was a miner, with a miner's independence and strength of will.
H. G. Wells once made a useful distinction between what he called
"communities of obedience" and "communities of will".
He thought that the first, the communities of obedience,
produced the stable societies,
like Egypt and Mesopotamia, the original homes of civilisation.
And that the second, the communities of will,
produced the restless nomads of the north.
He may be right. Anyway, the community of will,
that we call the Reformation, was basically a popular movement.
At the end of Erasmus' letter in which he describes
the surly Protestants coming out of church,
he adds that none of them, except one old man,
raised his hat.
Erasmus was against forms and ceremonies in religion,
but when it came to society, he felt differently.
And so, strangely enough, did Luther.
The great popular uprising, known as the Peasant's Revolt,
filled him with horror, and he urged his princely patrons
to put it down with the utmost ferocity.
Luther didn't approve of destruction, even the destruction of images.
But most of his followers were men who owed nothing to the past.
To whom it meant no more than an intolerable servitude.
And so Protestantism became destructive.
And from the point of view of those who love what they see,
it was a good deal of a disaster.
We all know about the destruction of images,
what we nowadays call works of art.
How commissioners went round, not only cathedrals like Ely,
but even to the humblest parish churches
and smashed everything of beauty that they contained.
Knocked the heads off statues, smashed up the carved font covers,
broke the reredos', broke anything within reach.
It didn't pay them to stay too long on a single job.
You can see the results here in the lady chapel at Ely.
All the painted glass smashed,
and unfortunately, the beautiful series of carvings
on the life of the Virgin, was within reach.
And they've knocked off every head; made a marvelous job of it.
There wasn't much religion about it ... it was an instinct.
An instinct to destroy anything comely.
Anything that reflected a state of mind
that ignorant people couldn't share.
The very existence of these incomprehensible values enraged them.
The visible aspect of civilisation took a hard knock
from Protestantism, or if you prefer it,
from H. G. Wells' "community of will".
And in some ways it never recovered.
For example, one can't point to a single piece
of specifically Protestant architecture or sculpture,
which shows how much these expressions of civilisation
depended on the Catholic Church.
But it had to happen.
If Western civilisation was not to wither or petrify,
like the civilisation of Ancient Egypt,
it had to draw life from a larger area
than that which had nourished the intellectual and artistic
triumphs of the Renaissance.
And, ultimately, a new civilisation emerged,
but it was a civilisation, not of the image, but of the word.
Luther gave his countrymen words.
Erasmus had written solely in Latin.
Luther translated the Bible into German.
Noble German too, as far as I can judge.
And so gave people, not only a chance to read holy writ for themselves,
but the tools of thought.
And the medium of printing was there to make it accessible.
The translations of the Bible by Calvin into French,
by Tyndale and Coverdale into English,
were crucial in the development of the Western mind.
And if I hesitate to say to the development of civilisation,
it's because they were also a stage in the growth of nationalism.
And as I've said, and shall go on saying in this series,
nearly all the steps upward in civilisation
have been in periods of internationalism.
Whatever the long-term effects of Protestantism,
the immediate results were very bad.
Not only bad for art, but bad for life.
The north was full of bullyboys.
They appear frequently in 16th-century German art,
very pleased with themselves, apparently much admired.
They rampaged about the country and took any excuse to beat people up.
All the elements of destruction were let loose.
30 years earlier, Dürer had done a series of wood engravings
illustrating the apocalypse.
You can say that they express the Gothic side of his nature,
or you can regard them as prophetic.
Because they show with terrifyingly effective precision
the horrors that were to descend on Western Europe,
both sides proclaiming themselves
as the instruments of God's wrath.
Fire rains down from heaven on kings, popes, monks,
... and poor families.
And those who escape the fire fall victim to the avenging sword.
It's a terrible thought that so-called wars of religion;
religion, of course, being used as a pretext for political ambitions,
but still providing a sort of emotional dynamo;
that wars of religion went on for 120 years,
and were accompanied by such revolting episodes
as the Massacre of St Bartholomew.
What could an intelligent, human, open-minded man do
in mid-16th-century Europe?
Keep quiet. Work in solitude.
Outwardly conform, inwardly remain free.
The wars of religion evoked a figure new to European civilisation,
although familiar in the great ages of China,
the intellectual recluse.
Petrarch and Erasmus had used their brains at the highest level of politics.
They had been the advisors of princes.
Their successor, the greatest humanist
of the mid-16th century, retreats into his tower.
It was a real tower, not the ivory tower of cliché language.
This man who retreated into his tower was Michel de Montaigne.
He was a fairly conscientious mayor of Bordeaux,
but he refused to go any nearer to the centre of power.
He preferred his tower,
where through his window, in his own words he enjoyed:
"A far-extending, rich and unresisted prospect.
"There is my seat, there is my throne."
He was born in southern France in 1533.
His mother was a Jewish Protestant, his father a Catholic.
He had no illusions about the effect of the
religious convictions released by the Reformation.
He said: "In trying to make themselves angels
"men have transformed themselves into beasts."
But Montaigne was not only detached from the two religious factions,
he was slightly sceptical about the Christian religion altogether.
He said, "I will willingly carry a candle in one hand for St Michael,
"and in the other for his dragon."
Actually, he was thinking of a picture of his patron saint
that hung in this room.
His essays are as crammed with quotations
as are the tracts of the warring priests.
But instead of being texts from the Bible,
they are quotations from the authors of Greece and Rome
whose works he seems to have known almost by heart.
He had his favourite quotations
written on the beams of his study.
The one above my head says:
Homo sum, humani a me nihil alienum puto.
I am a man, and think that nothing human is foreign to me.
He used these texts as the reformers
had used the Bible, to find out the truth.
But it was a concept of truth very different
from that which serious men had sought in
Colet's sermons or Erasmus' new Testament.
It involved always looking at the other side of every question,
however shocking, by conventional standards,
that other side might be.
Burning a candle both to St Michael and his dragon.
It was a truth that depended on the testimony of the only person
he could examine without shame or scruple ... himself.
In the past, self-examination had been painful and penitential.
To Montaigne it was a pleasure, but as he says:
"No pleasure has savour unless I can communicate it."
And in order to do so, he invented the essay, which was to remain
the accepted form of humanist communication for three centuries.
These self-searchings really marked the end
of the heroic spirit. As Montaigne says:
"Sit we upon the highest throne in the world,
"yet sit we only upon our own tails."
The strange thing is that people on high thrones didn't resent Montaigne.
On the contrary, they sought his company.
Had he lived, his friend Henry IV might have forced him
to become Chancellor of France.
But he preferred to remain here, in his tower.
(Melancholy Galliard)
Such was the egocentric isolation
that the wars of religion forced on the most civilised man
in late 16th century Europe.
But there was one country in which, after 1570,
men could live without fear of civil war or sudden revenge,
unless they happened to be Jesuit priests,
... England.
England, which was almost untouched
by the visible signs of the Renaissance.
Which had little painting and no sculpture,
but had developed a fantastic architecture of its own.
Cheshire: Little Moreton Hall
I suppose it's debatable how far
Elizabethan England can be called civilised.
Certainly, it doesn't provide a reproducible pattern of civilisation,
as does, for example, eighteenth-century France.
It was brutal, unscrupulous and disorderly.
But if, as I've suggested, the first requisites of civilisation
are intellectual energy, freedom of mind,
a sense of beauty, and a craving for immortality,
then the age of Spenser and Marlowe,
of Dowland and Byrd, was a kind of civilisation.
This is the background of Shakespeare.
Well, we can't compress Shakespeare into the scale of the programme.
But I can't altogether omit him because
one of the first ways in which I would justify civilisation,
is that it can produce a genius on this scale.
In his freedom of mind, in his power of self-identification,
in his complete absence of any dogma,
Shakespeare sums up and illuminates
the piece of history that I've just described.
His mature plays are, amongst other things,
the poetical fulfillment of Montaigne's intellectual honesty.
In fact, we know that the first English edition of Montaigne
made a deep impression on Shakespeare.
But Shakespeare's scepticism was more complete
and more uncomfortable.
Instead of Montaigne's detachment there is a spirit
of passionate engagement. And instead of the essay,
there's the urgent communication of the stage.
KING LEAR: What, art mad?
A man may see how this world goes without eyes.
Look with thine ears.
Thou rascal beadle, hold thy bloody hand!
Why dost thou lash that whore?
Strip thine own back.
Thou hotly lusts to use her in that kind for which thou whipst her.
The usurer hangs the cozener.
Through tattered clothes small vices do appear.
Robes and furred gowns hide all.
Plate sin with gold,
And the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks.
Arm it in rags,
a pigmy's straw does pierce it.
None does offend,
none, I say ... none...
Pure Montaigne, ... with a difference.
You know, this must be the first time,
and may well be the last time, that a supremely great poet
has been without religion.
MACBETH: To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
to the last syllable of recorded time.
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.
How unthinkable before the break-up of Christendom?
The tragic split that followed the Reformation.
And yet I feel that the human mind has gained a new strength
by out-staring this emptiness.
HAMLET: How long will a man lie in the earth ere he rot?
In faith, if he be not rotten before he die,
as we have many pocky corses nowadays
as will scarce hold the laying in,
he will last you 8 year or 9 year.
A tanner will last you 9 year. Why he more than another?
Why, sir, his hide is so tanned with his trade
as will keep out water a great while,
and your water is a sore decayer of your whoreson dead body.
Here's a skull that hath lain you in the earth three-and-twenty year.
Whose was it? A whoreson mad fellow's he was.
Whose do you think it was? Nay, I know not.
A pestilence on him for a mad rogue!
Poured a flagon of Rhenish on my head once.
This same skull, sir, was Yorick's skull,
... the king's jester.
This? E'en that.
Let me see.
Alas, poor Yorick!
I knew him, Horatio.
A fellow of infinite jest,
of most excellent fancy.
He hath borne me on his back a thousand times,
and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is.
My gorge rises at it.
Here hung those lips
that I have kissed I know not how oft.
Where be your gibes now?
Your gambols?
Your songs?
Your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar?
Not one now to mock your own grinning?
Quite chap-fallen?
Now get thee to my lady's chamber,
and tell her, let her paint an inch thick,
to this favour she must come.
Make her laugh at that.
I pray thee, Horatio, tell me one thing.
What's that, my lord? Dost thou think
Alexander looked of this fashion in the earth?
E'en so. And smelt so? Pah!
E'en so, my lord.
To what base uses we may return, Horatio.
Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander
till he find it stopping a bung-hole?
Twere to consider too curiously, to consider so.
No, faith, not a jot, but to follow him thither
with modesty enough, and likelihood to lead it, as thus.
Alexander died, Alexander was buried,
Alexander returneth to dust.
The dust is earth.
Of earth we make loam,
and why of that loam whereto he was converted
might they not stop a beer barrel?
Imperious Caesar, dead and turned to clay,
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away.
O, that that earth, which held the world in awe
Might patch a wall to expel the winter's flaw.
Northamptonshire: Kirby Hall