(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 - Dürer's Oswald Krell.
Those staring eyes, that look of self-conscious introspection, that uneasiness,
marvellously conveyed by Dürer 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 Dürer.
(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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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.
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.
Dürer was immersed in the intellectual life of his time.
In the same year that 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 fifteen 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 - 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, 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 clichÃ© 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)