Doc Barbara and the Bard

 Doc Barbara received a good education with plenty of emphasis on subjects that some consider to be of scant value in modern life. Yet, as she isn't truly a part of modern life, she disregards this snag. Naturally, she studied Shakespeare but has recently started to empathise with the wrong characters. In Macbeth her sympathy reaches out to the witches who hang about either on the blasted heath or in the wings of the stage waiting to come on again clutching the toe of a frog or the leg of a lizard. Do they draw lots, she wonders, for who has to hold the most grisly ingredient? Her grasp of the difference between art and reality is tenuous.

Gadzooks, but I am fed up of this blasted heath. I'm out!

This is her mental image of one witch getting so cheesed off with the blasted heath that she pops into the wings for a cuppa.

Once, during a performance of Cymbeline, (and what a performance that turned out to be!) she had totally lost the plot by Act 3 but kept awake, unlike the rest of the audience who were enjoying a quiet snooze, although less than silent in some cases. Her ancient hearing aids let her down at the line: "Thy mistress, Pisanio, hath played the strumpet in my bed". This is because she had had them expensively adapted to block all rude words which might offend her delicate sensibility, The result was perfect sense, however, much better than the original in her opinion. One letter can make all the difference.

Zounds but I am fed up of meeting on this blasted heath.

 

We asked Doc Barbara, as part of her epic endeavour to illustrate all of Shakespeare, to use her imagination and look beyond the box. Here she seems to have entered into the mind of one of the witches and invented a suitable quotation to match. We admire her sky-blue thinking but are unsure how the rest of the plays will stand up to this open-ended treatment.

Her latest attempt

 

Despite Doc Barbara's evident admirable qualities this newspaper has to admit she has her critics, one of whom is the cynical editor of our sister paper, The Brynbuga Beagle. He challenged her to paint one of the prophecies from Macbeth and sent his own photographer to capture the result. She chose the one which promised security to the eponymous hero until a wood came to his castle: as we all know, the enemy cut down branches and carried them to disguise their numbers. When asked about her primitive canvas, she replied that she always thought there was an element of Dad's Army about this section of the drama. We must try her with something more imaginative and we do not rate his photographer either.