Before Any Questions begins its live broadcast, there is a practice question, which all the panellists answer in order to check that the recording system is working properly.
On Friday, the dummy question was "If you were stuck on a Eurostar train?in the Channel Tunnel, which historical figure would you like to be stuck with?"
Sadiq Khan,jordan, the amiable and impressive Transport Minister,jordan pas cher, chose Gandhi and then, in a crowd-pleasing nod to the largely Pakistani audience, threw in Jinnah, too. Simon Hughes opted for Charles Dickens.
No prizes for guessing my choice. ,jordan pas cher, I told the audience, had something useful to say about every human situation,ralph lauren, including being stuck in the Channel Tunnel: "I wasted time,polo ralph lauren, and now time doth waste me" (Richard II, Act V, Scene 5).
Polly Toynbee made the same choice. She would have loved to ask our national poet about the lost years, she said, and to clear up the questions about the authorship of his plays. She evidently had Shakespeare on the brain: is the column that she had just written, and which appeared in the following day's Guardian.
Shakespeare's sorcery is that he always seems . Tories feel in their bones that he was a Tory, radicals that he was a radical. Goethe was convinced that he was who had been accidentally born in the wrong place. GK Chesterton insisted that he was a proselytising Catholic,air jordan, and that Hamlet was more orthodox than sceptical. And,ralph lauren pas cher, in a sense, they're all right. Or rather, as TS Eliot put it, the best anyone can hope for is to be wrong about Shakespeare in a new way.
It is difficult to extrapolate any?belief system?from the plays. As Harold Bloom wrote: "By reading Shakespeare,jordan, I can gather that he did not like lawyers, preferred drinking to eating and evidently lusted after both genders. But I certainly do not have a clue as to whether he favoured Protestantism or Catholicism or neither, and I do not know whether he believed or disbelieved in God or in resurrection. His politics, like his religion, evades me, but I think he was too wary to have any".
Quite so. We can, perhaps, infer that he distrusted mobs,jordan, and also that he disliked authority. Beyond that,air jordan, it seems pointless and somehow small-minded to speculate.
Polly's choice of railway companion didn't make me think any more highly of Shakespeare – - but, I must say,?it did make me think more highly of Polly.
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