TWO POETS: BINGO AND THE FOOL

By the time he had written The Sea, Bond found that he had come to a kind of impasse: that first series of plays was not, after all, to comprise his life's work. Rather it had unearthed the issues which he needed to explore further. And so I decided that I would write a series of plays which dealt specifically with this problem of culture, with the problem of the burden of the past which makes a change so difficult: these plays were Bingo, The Fool and The Woman.

With another unmistakable reference to Shakespeare, Bond himself has described these as his ‘problem plays’. Each of the three plays looks at society at a crucial moment of its development. The first of them, Bingo (1973), continues Bond's preoccupation with Shakespeare as a cultural force. Here Bond imagines Shakespeare in the last months of his life, in his garden at New Place, and draws on documentary evidence of Shakespeare's involvement in the enclosures of the common land around Stratford which ruined many smallholders. The focus of the play is the split which Bond postulates must have existed between the moral vision of Shakespeare's artistic creation and the compromises which he made in real life.

Bingo asks once more some of the questions about the moral authority of the poet which had first been raised with the character of Basho in Narrow Road – although in fact Bond paints a far more sympathetic picture of Shakespeare than he had done of Basho. In Bingo, Shakespeare takes on the function of the characteristic Bond hero, watching and trying to understand a world distorted by cruelty. One of the significant things about Bond's Shakespeare is how little he speaks. The language which had made him famous is now deserting him. When Ben Jonson brings news of the burning of the Globe theatre, he tries to find out what Shakespeare is now writing, but is unable or unwilling to accept Shakespeare's simple answer: ‘Nothing … Nothing to say’ (P3 42).