Elizabethanise

It is a pity, but it appears to have been inevitable; for to be poet and Englishman, and not to Elizabethanise to the extent of at least a five-act 'tragedy' is to be unworthy the name of English poet.

Orie Latham Hatcher's handbook, Shakespeare Plays and Pageants, not only suggests how a pageant-master might Elizabethanise the landscape with a fair ('any available stream may serve as the Avon and furnish pleasure boats for the people') and how to build a replica Birthplace, but how to embellish a replica of Anne Hathaway's Cottage with a suitable garden: 'with proper forethought there might even be some of the old English garden flowers popular in Shakespeare's time, growing outside the door'.

Durrell's ambition not merely to 'Elizabethanise' but also to 'get modern literature back to Rabelais – out of the mind and back into the belly” recalls the 'freaks' of Volpone – parasite, dwarf, eunuch and hermaphrodite – and the combination, in The Alchemist, of farce and intellect.