From: henry999@eircom.net   
      
    wrote:   
      
   > > Many people would have shown   
   > > up at the hanging with some beers and chicken legs and a few gags. A fair   
   > > afternoon out.   
   >   
   > I'm in the middle of reading Nothing like the Sun by Burgess and was   
   > reading the Tyburn scene on the train on the way home this evening.   
   >   
   > 'There was the tree.  ...   
      
   I have Burgess' marvellous little _Shakespeare_, from 1970. With all the   
   lovely colour plates, it should have been a simple 'coffee-table book'   
   -- but AB was of course much too prolix for that. Anyway, in Chapter   
   Five, 'London', he describes the milieu in which the young Bard finds   
   himself upon arrival in the Big City.   
      
   "It is difficult for us to match this love of art   
      
   [described in the preceding paragraphs]   
      
   with the known relish   
   for brutality. When we recoil from the brutality of Shakespeare's own   
   plays, as early as _Titus Andronicus_ and as late as _King Lear_; we   
   have made the mistake of assuming that Will is one of us and that he has   
   unaccountably lapsed into the cruelty of a period that is his only by   
   accident. But it is only by accident that Will is 'for all time'; he is   
   essentially one of them -- the pre-Freudian relishers of anything that   
   could quicken the blood and fire the libido. And the brutality was, in a   
   way incomprehensible to us, capable of being reconciled with the   
   aesthetic instinct. Thus, the hangman who officiated at Tyburn had to be   
   more than a butcher. It required huge skill to cut out the heart of the   
   hanged victim and show it to him before his eyes finally closed. And the   
   quartering of the still steaming corpse had to be effected with the   
   swift economy of the true artist."   
      
   cheers,   
      
   Henry   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)