Learning with the U3A (University of the Third Age)

How times have changed? Will Shakespeare wrote Richard II, Henry IV (both parts) and Henry V (remember Laurence Olivier and Agincourt?) around 1594 – 414 years ago. The sort of anti-hero of Henry IV was Sir John Falstaff, a gluttonous drunken conman of the first order.

U3A tutor Marian Ezzy has brought Shakespeare alive again for us in her group …. What a crew of names Shakespeare invented 400 yeas ago - Shallow and Silence , the country justices, Fang and Snare, the Sheriffs officers and Mouldy, Shadow, Wart, Feeble and Bullcalf, the country soldiers

Not a great deal about human behaviour – if anything – has changed since Shakespeare’s time – as you will see from this …..

Sir John Falstaff (denying he might be getting old): Virtue is of so little regard in these costermongers’ times that true valour is turn’d berod; pregnancy is made a tapster, and his quick wit wasted in giving reckonings; all the other gifts appertiment to man, as the malice of this age shapes them, are not worth a gooseberry. You that are old consider not the capacities of us that are young; you do measure the heat of our livers with the bitterness of your galls; and we that are in the vaward of our youth, I must confess are wags too.

The Chief Justice (attacking Falstaff): Do you set down your name in the scroll of youth, that are written down old with all the characters of age? Have you not a moist eye, a dry hand, a yellow cheek, a white beard, a decreasing leg, an increasing belly? Is not your voice broken, your wind short, you chin double, your wit single, and every part about you blasted with antiquity. And will you yet call yourself young? Fie, fie, fie, Sir John.