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Good Morning, Is this life ‘a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing?’ Or should we think of it a comedy of errors where all’s well that ends well? To celebrate the 400th anniversary of the first printed edition of the bard’s plays, The Royal Shakespeare Company are searching for 37 new plays - the tragedies, comedies and untold histories - that best capture the spirit of the times. But what is the spirit of these times? The zeitgeist, the characteristics that best describe our age? If you were to write a play attempting to capture it what would your subject be? Environmental degradation? Anxiety? The fragmentation of the self under an onslaught of technology? Distraction in the age of wall-to-wall entertainment? Perhaps you would explore the unbridgeable divide between left and right, or poverty and stunning wealth. Or would you see ‘the web of our life as a mingled yarn, with good and ill together’? Depict selflessness where there was narcissism, understanding where there is ignorance. And imagine grace where there was condemnation. Shakespeare had a story for all situations and set his plays in many different periods; but the spirit of a particular time seems less important to him than the timeless nature of the human condition. He knew that no one period in history had a monopoly on greed, sex, insults, war, treachery, hate or reconciliation. The spirit of an age might be summarised by one adjective – golden, dark, enlightened – but it takes a storyteller to show how noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, as well as how base this quintessence of dust called a human being can be. When the apostle Paul wrote ‘do not conform to the pattern of this world. He might have been saying don’t go along with the spirit of the times. But how do we avoid doing this? Telling stories is part of the answer. They enable us to see something of ourselves as players in the play we are watching. They are mirrors in which we can see all our messy, fallen glory. The gospels – which can be seen as tragedy, comedy and history - are full of mini plays in which Jesus puts his listeners right into the dust, dirt and heat of the tale. He might have chosen to dish out instructions; but instead he chose parables; as if he knew that by engaging our imaginations we were more likely to feel what it is to be anxious about the future, rejected by our peers, or to lose something precious and find it again. It is important that we tell the stories of these times, but I feel sure that the stories that people will be telling in 400 years will be the ones in which they are able to see and find themselves.