The Professor and the Madman

by Simon Winchester

Then, as still today, the use of a firearm in the commission of a crime was thought of as somehow a very un-British act—and as something to be written about and recorded as a rarity. “Happily,” proclaimed a smug editorial in Lambeth’s weekly newspaper, “we in this country have no experience of the crime of ‘shooting down,’ so common in the United States.”

The English language was spoken and written—but at the time of Shakespeare it was not defined, not fixed.

He was mad, and for that, we have reason to be glad. A truly savage irony, on which it is discomfiting to dwell.