Transcript

[INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC PLAYING]

NARRATOR

It’s October 1599. Shakespeare has finished writing his history play, Julius Caesar, and is visiting a fair in his hometown of Stratford with his daughter. She has just had her fortune told.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Now, dear daughter, what did old Mother Howard say? What does the future hold for us, I wonder?

DAUGHTER

Oh, Father, Mother Howard talked a lot, but she had such a strange accent. I couldn’t understand a word she said.

[LAUGHTER]

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

You’re just like Casca in my play Julius Caesar.

DAUGHTER

Casca? He’s one of the men that kills Caesar, the Roman general. How can you say that, Father? I’m not a murderer.

[LAUGHTER]

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Dear daughter, Casca was in a group of people who were listening to the great Roman speaker Cicero. But Cicero was speaking Greek, so Casca couldn’t understand him.

DAUGHTER

Oh. Why was Cicero speaking Greek?

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

That’s what educated people spoke in Roman times. Casca says that some of the people listening to Cicero could actually understand him. Here are the lines.

‘Those that understood him smiled at one another.’

CASCA

Those that understood him smiled at one another and shook their heads. But for my own part, it was Greek to me.

DAUGHTER

So Casca had no idea what Cicero was talking about just like me and Mother Howard?

[INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC PLAYING]

NARRATOR

We’ll leave them there for now. Fortune tellers were common in Shakespeare’s day, and they appear in many of his plays, including Macbeth, The Comedy of Errors, and Julius Caesar in which the fortune teller warns Caesar to ‘beware the Ides of March’, the day on which Caesar was eventually assassinated by his closest friends.

[SCREAMING]

The phrase, ‘It was Greek to me’ has become ‘It’s all Greek to me’ in modern English. And it’s used when something, not just a foreign language, is difficult to understand. For example, in a report about the 2015 Greek debt crisis, UK newspaper, The Daily Telegraph, carried the headline ‘It’s All Greek To Me: A Glossary of Eurozone Crisis Jargon’.

SPEAKER

I’ll never understand the rules of cricket. ‘Out for a duck’, ‘silly mid-off’, ‘googlies’? It’s all Greek to me.

[INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC PLAYING]

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Now, tell me, daughter, did you understand anything Old Mother Howard said?

DAUGHTER

Yes, she talked about you, Father. She said that you’re going to be the most famous Englishman of all time. But I think she was making it up.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Oh! No, no, no. I’m sure she’s absolutely right about that. She’s obviously a very gifted woman. What shall we look at now, daughter?

DAUGHTER

Can we go to the gold store, Father, please?

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

I didn’t need a fortune teller to predict that. To gold or not to gold, that is the question.

[INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC PLAYING]