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Rh tions, and the new demand of the teachers for higher salaries is making plain that education is of no help to anybody except teachers and that section of the Labour Party which needs wastrels. But we are wasting time, Barker.

If preaching to the converted be wasting time, you are wasting it certainly, for I am willing, more than willing, eager to admit that my attempt to couple the National Theatre with Mr Fisher's curriculum was indeed a mistake.

You found Mr Fisher a little obtuse?

Absent-minded, rather—his mind bent on a new curriculum.

We will leave him meditating it, and discuss instead the play that should open the National Theatre.

I have nothing to say against Hamlet.

Nor have I. Better to begin with a masterpiece than to strive to appeal to sentimentality, announcing that the National Theatre will open with the story of England as told by Shakespeare in the chronicle plays.

You are weary of the story of England?

I would like Shakespeare better if people would leave off writing about him. Your advertisement will be applauded until the balance sheet is published, and then your praisers will begin to talk economics. The National Theatre need not make both ends meet, but the hiatus must not run into tens of thousands. If we get a National Theatre you will need all your courage and determination. The pedagogues will ask for nothing but Shakespeare, and for the whole of Shakespeare, forgetful of the fact that the human mind cannot assimilate more than three hours of text. I once heard the whole of Hamlet—five hours and a half. The first act lasted two hours, and was very wonderful, as wonderful as The Ring; but when we came to the fourth and the fifth acts I found it impossible to keep my mind on the stage, and so brain-weary was I that I couldn't have told blank verse from prose, nor could I have sworn that some passages from the Daily Mail were not being introduced. It takes five hours and a half to play The Meistersinger, without cuts, and when we arrive at the glories of Nuremberg we don't know what we are listening to; our minds are away, and it is not until we of wisdom propense cut an act and a half that we can appreciate the end of Wagner's opera. Another difficulty will be to decide what is Shakespeare. You will take advantage, I suppose,