Vol. 15 No. 24 · 16 December 1993
pages 3-6 | 5048 words
Where I was in 1993
Alan Bennett
4 January. On BBC’s Catchword this afternoon, one of the questions apparently consists of anagrams of playwrights. Mine is Annabel Tent. Nobody guesses it.
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Letters
Vol. 16 No. 2 · 27 January 1994
From John Bayley
Alan Bennett’s quote (LRB, 16 December 1993) from Rosencrantz’s words (‘The single and peculiar life is bound / With all the strength and armour of the mind / To keep itself from noyance’) is a splendid example of how Shakespeare comes to seem so wise; or, as Bennett puts it, ‘how he came to know this’. The words are supplied by Shakespeare: the wisdom by the reader. For the Danish diplomat is actually discoursing at some length on the importance of the King’s looking after himself (‘Never alone / Did the king sigh, but with a general groan’). Rather more banal, in fact, than the perception that we each guard our single and peculiar lives with a more than Larkinian determination.
Shakespeare the novelist, whom we call to mind every day in the manner in which Bennett brilliantly recalls this fragment, is for this reason far more interesting than Shakespeare the dramatist, who would have survived much less well without this mysterious ancillary power. Never mind that Shakespeare, like Falstaff, was witty in himself. He is the unconscious cause of wit in others.
John Bayley
Oxford
