All language subtitles for Civilisation.06of13.Protest.and.Communication.720p.BluRay.YIFY

(Bells ring out)

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 Wirzburg,

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 that 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 travelling in Germany at this time,

didn't convince them that 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 - D�rer's Oswald Krell.

Those staring eyes, that look
of self-conscious introspection, that uneasiness,

marvellously conveyed by D�rer through
the uneasiness of the planes in the modelling -

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, though 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 the 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, of course
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 the 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 of course 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 Wareham 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's concerned with the enlargement
of man's spirit through the visual image,

in the north, one's 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, 5th-century Greece
and 12th-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 that 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 that 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'd all the qualifications: a clear, elegant style -

in Latin of course, which meant that he could
be read everywhere but not by everyone -

opinions on every subject,

even the gift of putting things so that
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 an 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
that was 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 D�rer.

(Bells ring)

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 D�rer, 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 D�rer's admirers don't make it much better

by explaining that he thought creative power
was a divine quality

and that he wished to pay homage
to his own genius by depicting himself as God.

Well, it's true that 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, D�rer 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 D�rer 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'.

D�rer's curiosity about nature
had less questionable results

in the drawings he did
offlowers and 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 D�rer 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 I.

In the Middle Ages, melancholia had meant

a simple combination
of sloth, boredom and despondency

that must have been quite common

when people couldn't read
or were cooped up together in monasteries.

But D�rer'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 D�rer
and the Reformation

also produced psychoanalysis.

I began by mentioning
the enemies of civilisation

well, here in D�rer's prophetic vision,

is one more way
in which it can be destroyed from within.

However, what made D�rer so important
in his own age

was that he combined an iron grip
on the facts of appearance

with an extremely fertile invention.

And, 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.

D�rer was immersed in
the intellectual life of his time.

In the same year that Erasmus completed
his translation of St Jerome's Letters

D�rer 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 D�rer 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 fifteen years D�rer'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 D�rer 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 -
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 twenty 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!

(MUSIC) 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,

and 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.

HG 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's 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
ofthose who love what they see,

it was a good deal of a disaster.

(Smashing masonry)

We all know about the destruction of images,

what we nowadays call works of art.

How commissioners went round
not only to 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 of the life of the Virgin was within reach.

And they've knocked off every head,

made a marvellous 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 HG 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.

It 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.

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.

Thirty years earlier,
D�rer 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's 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.

(MUSIC) Melancholy Galliard

Such was the egocentric isolation

that the walls 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.

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, 18th-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, of course, 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 fulfilment
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
as a spirit of passionate engagement,

and instead of the essay,

there's the urgent communication of the stage.

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.

And 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.

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 eight year or nine year.

A tanner will last you nine 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.

(Hamlet chuckles)

Here's a skull that hath lain you in the earth
three-and-twenty years.

Whose was it?

A whoreson mad fellow's it 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.

Prithee, Horatio, tell me one thing.

What's that, my lord?

Dost thou think Alexander
Looked o' 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 into 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.

(Wind howls)