I watched the unsettling, stomach-turning Channel Seven interview with Barnaby Joyce and Vikki Campion just a very few days after my awestruck afternoon at the Globe. Indeed extreme jet-lag was still nibbling at my mind as I settled on a Canberra couch for Seven’s vaunted extravaganza, making Barnabyesque things even more surreal than they already were.

The well-travelled among you will testify that when you rocket straight home to Australia from overseas it can take some time for all of the luggage of the mind to be reunited with you. Yes, your body has hurtled home aboard one of Boeing’s dashing jetliner spaceships but it is as if, meanwhile, your mind’s bags are coming home in the hold of Charles Kingsford Smith’s Fokker trimotor monoplane the Southern Cross, with its top speed of 138 km/h.

And so in a sense the boyish bottom that I plonked down on my Canberra couch for that interview was still half plonked on the Globe’s plain wooden benches (for of course the Globe is a faithful reconstruction of a wooden theatre of Shakespeare’s day) for that performance of Hamlet.

A Shakespeare devotee and with this spellbinding treat high on my bucket list, I could hardly believe that I was there, at the Globe. I begged the woman next to me to pinch me to test whether I was only dreaming.

"Fie, fie! Pinch thyself, you starveling, you elf-skin, you bull’s pizzle, you stock-fish," she retorted, obviously (using some famous Shakespearean insults from his Henry IV) already in the spirit of the theatre where we were.

"Shrew, get thee to a nunnery," I muttered beneath my breath, too pigeon-livered to openly fight with so weird a sister, someone so scarily like one of the witches of Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

It is a long way from the tragedy of poor Hamlet, set in a castle in ancient Denmark, to the tragedy of Barnaby Joyce set in Canberra and New England. And yet here I am discussing the two tragedies in the same breath. This is of course because what lovers and admirers of Shakespeare find so brilliant about him is the timelessness of his observations of our flawed species’ qualities and appetites, our weirdness and wickedness, our helplessness when the gods or our lusts choose to play with us.

This is why Shakespeare productions with the actors in contemporary dress and contemporary settings lose nothing of their impact. A Hamlet, a King Lear, a Macbeth set in and around today’s Parliament House in Canberra (I see the melancholy ghost of Hamlet’s foully murdered father pacing the courtyards of the parliament like one of our several, recent, stabbed-in-the-back prime ministers bemoaning his or her fate and crying out for revenge) would pack all of the dramatic wallops Shakespeare intended.

Like so many Australian viewers I was unable to endure all of Seven’s interview with the two (surely star-crossed) celebrity lovers. Ratings number crunchers report that 500,000 viewers had fled from the sordid spectacle by the 10 minute mark. But what I did watch supported my overall sense that there is something enthrallingly Shakespearean about Joyce’s decline and fall. Even, during the interview, Joyce’s admission "I failed. I failed. I failed. I failed. I failed," was just the kind of thing a woebegone Shakespearean character, his head in his hands, might sigh.

The spectacle of someone omnipotent falling from life’s pinnacles down into life’s gutters, propelled by his own idiocies and appetites, is a common theme in Shakespeare. Old King Lear, of the play of that name, leaps to mind. Barnaby Joyce was never quite a King but as deputy prime minister he did sit at dizzying heights on an important throne. He had greatness thrust upon him. He was a prince of the National Party. He is unlikely to sink to such tragic depths as poor Lear did, but already the swamp of ignominy beckons him with his party colleagues now likely to insist that he leave politics.
All the world’s a stage and if, dear reader, you have no room in your heart to notice and feel for the bucolic, red-faced character shuffling across that stage towards its exit (and deep pity for the folk his behaviour has so hurt) then you are failing to lactate what Shakespeare praised as “the milk of human kindness”.

"So what did you think of that, bull’s pizzle?"my Globe neighbour challenged as the great play ended, the stage strewn with bodies of villains and of innocents.

But the sheer sadness of the tragedy had overwhelmed me, and, dabbing my eyes, I was unable to speak.

My show of sensitivity seemed to impress the weird sister. She patted my shoulder, saying (quoting from Much Ado About Nothing) "Thy tears are a kind overflow of kindness: there are no faces truer than those that are so washed."

Her kind endorsement was still ringing in my ears as my mighty Boeing rocketed me away from England (leaving my mind’s bags there) and off towards the Antipodes.