My good friend Professor Carl Dolmetsch responded to my last post by sharing a story he heard from a British friend of his. The friend’s uncle was a sergeant in the British army, who served in Burma during World War II.

Burma was a relatively quiet theatre in that war, and boredom was a major morale problem. So the uncle, who taught English in civilian life, offered to give some instruction to the troops to help relieve the tedium. When the company commander approved his proposal, the sergeant major assembled the men and announced: "Blokes, this here is Sgt. Murdoch, and ‘e's volunteered to tell you all about Keats … And I'll bet none of you buggers knows wot a Keat is!"

Apparently, the rank and file of the British army in those days had little acquaintance with the glories of English literature.

That wasn’t altogether unfortunate. I once heard Sir John Gielgud give an interview in which he said that the wonderful thing about performing Hamlet for the troops back then was that most of them had no idea how the play would end.

Oh, to have been in one of those audiences! It would have been the closest one could get in the 20th Century to one of Shakespeare’s openings.