Tom Sutcliffe: Alas, poor Chekhov, it wasn't you

I woke the other day to the sensational news that the skull which David Tennant apostrophised in his recent performance of Hamlet had belonged to the great Russian dramatist Chekhov. Sadly, this news had become considerably less sensational by the time I came to my senses. Chekhov, it turned out, was a bit of dreamwork by a still groggy mind, and the skull actually belonged to Andre Tchaikowsky, a Polish pianist who had requested that his cranium be given to the Royal Shakespeare Company after his death and used in performances.

I relinquished my imagined version with some reluctance, I have to say. Chekhov was both a doctor and a man of the theatre, after all, and might have liked the idea of a posthumous walk-on, even if it was a little difficult to work out why he should have conferred this honour on the RSC. Then again, the various actors who'd previously had trouble concentrating, while holding a genuine human relic, would presumably have been even more freaked out if they'd known they were staring into the empty orbits of the man who wrote The Cherry Orchard.

According to Gregory Doran, who directed Tennant in that performance, he didn't mention the fact before now because he thought it "would topple the play", his point being that the knowledge might have distracted the media from the real issues. The idea that anything could have cut through the Doctor Who hysteria that surrounded his production made me smile a little, although I also thought he might have had a point. There would certainly have been an extraneous frisson when the skull made its first appearance and – possibly – a bit of audience distaste at the levity of Hamlet's speculations. If we know that the skull belonged to a real Polish pianist it's a bit harder patiently to entertain the character's sardonic guesses that it framed the thoughts of a courtier or politician or a lawyer.

Thinking about it since, though, I wonder whether such a frisson really would have been that unhelpful. The skull scene is so famous now – even to people who've never read a Shakespeare play or been to a performance of Hamlet – that it's all but impossible to recover a sense of how daring it is as a piece of theatre. The Elizabethan stage wasn't exactly a squeamish place, of course, eyeballs and hearts and tongues flying about all over the place. But, even so, this scene must have made audiences murmur, must have startled them a little. It surely means something that it has become one of the commonest short-cuts for a cartoonist to convey the concept "Shakespearean"; and something else, besides, that so many of our cartoonish emblems of Shakespearian drama revolve around a distinctly physical bit of staging or prop-work.

You can't do Racine or Euripides or Aeschylus like this – sketching in a bit of business to allude to the whole. But Shakespeare offers a lot of examples, from Macbeth's "is this a dagger" to the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet or the handkerchief in Othello.

Our popular sense of Shakespeare isn't just about language, but about stage directions, too. This points, I think, to the great and enduring vulgarity that lies at the heart of his art – the fact that we're not just thinking about words in the gravediggers' scene but about a prop as well, and that the question of who that skull really belonged to isn't a distraction but a part of the wonderful impurity of the scene. Shakespeare is playing with words and ideas but also with human curiosity: the very thing Hamlet himself is displaying. Doran is right not to want to do anything to topple the play, but this scene is meant to make it wobble a little.

Who's Jack come back to torture?

Fans of 24, which this week ran a two-hour taster for the upcoming series, will surely be curious to know which way its politics will tend under the new administration. Students of American history might be intrigued too. Can any other television drama claim to have played such a part in the country's constitutional history? The West Wing may have predicted but 24 influenced. On the one hand Jack Bauer's fictional use of torture has plausibly been linked to the mind-set of those who condoned (indeed encouraged) the use of duress and worse under the Bush administration. On the other hand the series arguably also played a part in persuading the American electorate that a black president would be calm, authoritative and capable under pressure, rather than a problem or a comedy gimmick, as they had been in several previous films. If the seventh series reveals that Jack has ditched his giant SUV for a mountain bike we'll know that the producers are ready to do their bit in the War on Global Warming.

I've spent more time than was sensible looking at the Oxford English Dictionary website and wondering whether I could justify the expense of a subscription. I always decided I couldn't, but someone told me the other day that he was able to access it remotely through his local library website. I checked mine and it turns out that I can too. Just key in a library card number and the Taj Mahal of lexicography is spread out before you. It is as if I've been walking past a bank vault for years, quite unaware that the door was in fact unlocked.

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