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Arthur Clutton-Brock complained that idealising Shakespeare had made him dull.
Arthur Clutton-Brock was, for many years, art critic for the Times, and knew something of the artistic temperament. On the tercentenary of the death of William Shakespeare (1564-1616), he deplored the way that Shakespeare had been turned into a National Institution.
Hamlet cannot understand what his mother could possibly see in his uncle Claudius.
Hamlet, young Prince of Denmark, has returned home from studying in Wittenberg to find that his father is dead, apparently of a snake-bite, and his mother has married his father’s brother Claudius, who is now styling himself King. Utterly disgusted, and far from convinced by the supposed cause of death, he tells his mother exactly what he thinks of the bargain she has made.
If he is going to drop him, the embattled poet would prefer his friend to get on with it.
Sonnet 90 finds the narrator expecting that ‘the fair youth’, a rather worthless young man whom he nevertheless idolises, is going to drop the acquaintance. His only concern is to make his thoughtless friend understand that, given the other pressures the poet is under right now, if it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly.
After the murder of King Duncan, Lady Macbeth is alarmed to see her husband losing his grip on reality.
Macbeth has stabbed Duncan, King of Scots, as he lay in his bed, hoping to give a little assistance to a witch’s prophesy that he would one day be King. Both Macbeth and his wife, who is the driving force behind the plot, are understandably jittery; but it soon becomes clear to the ever-competent Lady Macbeth that her husband is losing his grip.
Juliet complains that the man she loves has the wrong name, and the man she loves hears her doing it.
One night, Romeo Montague slips into a masked ball at the Capulet residence in Verona — chasing a girl as usual. There he meets Juliet, and Rosaline is forgotten. When he learns that Juliet is the daughter of his father’s sworn enemy, he rushes from the dance, and soon afterwards we find him in the garden, thinking furiously. Suddenly he sees a light at a window above: it seems Juliet has been thinking too.
John of Gaunt tries to persuade his son Henry that banishment from England isn’t such a bad thing, if you think about in the right way.
In 1398, King Richard II, unpopular throughout his kingdom and fearing for his throne, ordered his cousin and rival Henry Bolingbroke to leave the country, together with Henry’s father John of Gaunt. As Shakespeare tells the tale, John did his best to bear Henry up under the blow, encouraging him to rock himself with fairy tales into a doze of happy acceptance.