Justices Blinder Than Usual

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 400, 21 February 1947, Page 10

Justices Blinder Than Usual

HAKESPEARE is on the Christchurch air again. In a studio recital, we had Len Bernes singing "When Arthur First in Court," which was the ditty warbled by Falstaff when entering the Boar’s Head Tavern and the expectant presence of Doll Tearsheet ("Hang yourself, you muddy conger, hang yourself!" "What the good-year! You are both, i’ faith, as rheumatec as two dry toasts, you cannot bear with each other’s infirmities.") Resuming the Falstaffian theme the BEC Sh.akespear’s Characters series gave us Justices Shallow and Silence, that garrulous and convivial pair of old gentlemen with whom Sir John fell in while recruiting in Glouces(continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) tershire. "I do see the bottom of Jus-. tice Shallow," he crows, regarding him throughout with a diverting but total lack of respect; but it may be doubted if he does, or ever sees him quite as we do. Shallow is a braggart and a liar: he is the sort of old gentleman who will never stop showing off the (probably fictitious) wildnesses of his youth; his roguishness is at moments hardly to be further borne. Yet ‘Shakespeare useg his tiresome reminiscences, his inconsequential patter, and the cavernous interjections of Cousin Silence, to create an extraordinary atmosphere of leisure, kindliness, and the ripeness of late afternoon sunshine in an orchard of slightly over-flushed apples-a maturity and tolerance quite unknown to any. other a —

clowns and butts in all literature, So that. it comes about that we think of Shallow and Silence as forever conta ned and content in their own comic but lovely world.