And Another Thing | 2 February 2008

The litigation about the death of Princess Diana drags on, to the confusion of most of us, the satisfaction of none, and I imagine to the great distress of her two sons. And what is forgotten in this grimy attempt to prove conspiracy theory is the woman herself, a true princess of delight and fantasy. She was a wonderful example of a certain type of gifted woman, the epitome of whom is Rosaline in Love’s Labours Lost. She always insisted that she was uneducated (though her handwriting was excellent) and far from intelligent — ‘thick as two planks’ was the expression she used. But I have never met anyone, male or female, who had such strong powers of intuition. And intuition, I have come to realise, is often as important, sometimes more important, than intellect. She could not reason very well but she could intuit, deeply and instantly, and this enabled her often to understand people the moment she met them, and to communicate with them, to their enormous delight. This was the secret of her popularity, which baffled and angered Prince Charles, and irritated other members of the royal family — for intuition is a royal gift, which none of them possess. She intuited, and communicated, through her eyes, which were very fine and sensitive in expression.

The reason I connect Princess Diana with Rosaline in Love’s Labours Lost is that I have just been reading an essay on Shakespeare’s philosophy by that delightful scholar of the Renaissance Frances Yates (it is in Volume 2 of her Collected Essays). She, too, was an intuitive woman, capable of snatching from the air historical aperçus no one had thought of before. In the essay she argues that Shakespeare was not so much an Aristotelian, as were most writers and intellectuals in his day, as a Platonist, or perhaps one should say a Neo-Platonist — the Plato as perceived by early Renaissance scholars such as Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa.