Brush up your Shakespeare

Shakespeare, of course, never said: ‘The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.’ That was just one of his characters, Yorkist rebel, Dick the Butcher in Henry VI Part 2. For the Bard, with a sure touch on every nuance of the human condition, had a deep understanding of the ‘infinite variety’ of character. And that includes artful lawyerly language. So, when Hamlet, examining graveyard bones (as you do) along with his friend, Horatio, noticed a lawyer’s skull, he wondered what happened to all the deceased’s smart forensic antics: ‘Where be his quiddities now [the essential nature of something], his quillets, [subtle distinctions] his cases, his tenures, and his tricks?’

But since the gangsters in Cole Porter’s Kiss Me Kate insisted we: ‘Brush up [our] Shakespeare’, I thought I better had. So I’ve written a detailed explanatory guide to Richard II, Henry IV Parts 1 and 2 and Henry