I too placed my hand on the drawings, as if I feared the breeze.
'No, Peter,' I said. 'What king is that?'
But Wheeler did not reply to my question, he went on, instead, to quote out loud, and this time I was in no doubt that he was quoting, for very few writers other than Shakespeare would ever have written 'great greatness' (and so many teachers and critics in my country now would have crucified him for doing so).
'"What infinite heart's ease must kings neglect that private men enjoy! And what have kings that privates have not too, save ceremony, save general ceremony?" That is what the king says when he's alone, and a little further on he reproaches ceremony for singling him out: "Oh ceremony! Show me but thy worth!" And he goes on to challenge it: "O! be sick, great greatness, and bid thy ceremony give thee cure!" What does it actually achieve, if it achieves anything? And later still, the king dares to envy the wretched slave who labours in the sun all day but then sleeps deeply "with a body fill'd and vacant mind" and "never sees horrid night, the child of hell" and who "follows so the ever-running year with profitable labour to his grave". And the king concludes with the obligatory exaggeration of all those monologues that no one else hears on the stage and which are heard only off-stage, in the auditorium: "And, but for ceremony, such a wretch, winding up days with toil and nights with sleep, had the fore-hand and vantage of a king.'" That is more or less what Wheeler said and quoted, then he added: 'Kings of old were shameless creatures, but at least Shakespeare's kings did not entirely deceive themselves: they knew their hands were stained with blood and they did not forget how they came to wear the crown, apart from murders and betrayals and plots (perhaps they were too human). Ceremony, Jacobo, that's all. Changing, limitless, general ceremony. As well as secrecy, mystery, inscrutability, silence. But never speaking, never talking, never using words, however exquisite or captivating they might be. Because that, deep down, is within the grasp of any beggar, any outcast, any poor wretch, any one of the dispossessed. In that regard, they only differ from the king in the insignificant and ameliorable matter of perfection and degree.'
'What infinite heart's ease must kings neglect that private men enjoy!' were the words quoted by Sir Peter Wheeler, as I found out later, when I located and recognised the texts. And he recited word for word the whole of the rest of the soliloquy, for that kind of memory he preserved intact.