Shakespeare is a man for all seasons

“Oh shut up, Baldrick – you’d laugh at a Shakespeare comedy.”

THAT line, delivered by Rowan Atkinson playing the Elizabethan Edmund Blackadder in the TV comedy, Blackadder, made sense to me as a 14-year-old.

At school, we were reading Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part 1 and laughing, not at the jokes, but at the very idea that they could be considered such. Prince Hal’s putdowns to Falstaff — “Ye fat guts”, “These lies are like their father that begets them: gross as a mountain, open, palpable” — were OK, but nothing as spicy as Elaine Benes’s lines in TV’s Seinfeld.