Back in the childhoods of the baby boomers everyone seemed to know that Shakespeare was born in 1564 because there was a tremendous fuss about the 400th anniversary of his birth – Richard Burton played Hamlet on Broadway, Christopher Plummer did it at Elsinore for the BBC and Peter O’Toole opened Olivier’s National Theatre as the Prince. In Australia, J.C. Williamson’s had a Shakespeare extravaganza with Googie Withers and Keith Michell which ended with an abridged version of Antony and Cleopatra.

In fact, I went backstage to get the autograph of Keith Michell who was one of Australia’s most celebrated expatriate classical actors and who was performing with the woman who had appeared in Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes and done Ionesco’s Exit the King with Alec Guiness. I wasn’t the only stage door visitor. ‘Keith’, a small, middle-aged woman said boomingly. ‘What are we to do with these Melbourne audiences? I must get your autograph too,’ she cried and seized my pen which she twirled with great expressiveness. Well, you didn’t have to be a ballet freak to realise this was the most famous ballerina in the world: Dame Margot Fonteyn. Still, you had to have your priorities. ‘Excuse me,’ I said to the partner of Nureyev, ‘could I have my pen back, please?’

It’s a moment of my stage door johnnying that belongs with the autograph I got from Sir John Gielgud. I presented him with Marchette Chute’s Stories from Shakespeare. Wiping the tears from his patrician eyes he proceeded to write at the very front of the book. The upshot was that my schoolmates refused to believe the book was mine: it belonged to this Guile Good person.

All of which made it odd to hear someone say Shakespeare wrote six hundred years ago, didn’t he – this, despite knowing that Macbeth had been written for James I. Maybe we’ve just let go of our sense of dates. It didn’t help matters that there was a clear apprehension that Shakespeare was tied up with the Renaissance somehow.

Well, the confusing thing here is that the great Giotto frescoes in Padua – which broke with Byzantine convention – were painted in 1304-1306 and Dante’s great poetic trilogy (Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso) is set in 1300 and was, in fact, completed in 1321.

Giotto and Dante represent are supreme summings up of the Middle Ages and revolutionary works of the Renaissance.

But the thing to hold onto with Shakespeare is that the English Renaissance comes late and is primarily literary and dramatic. We have to allow for the advent of Christian humanism – so grandly and calmly articulated in Thomas More’s Utopia – and the wave of intense Protestantism that overtook the country in the wake not simply of Henry VIII’s break with Rome but Thomas Cromwell’s attempt to cement it by seizing the monasteries.

The great Harvard literary scholar Harry Levin says Elizabethan England remained Catholic in its deeper instincts. In Henry VIII there are shimmering bits of dramatic sympathy for Catherine of Aragon, for Cranmer (and the miracle of Elizabeth) even though the old rogue Wolsey gets the standout speech: ‘Farewell, a long farewell to all my greatness.’ There’s a superb BBC radio version of Henry VIII with Sian Phillips as Catherine and John Gielgud as Cranmer from the 1980s Vivat Rex series and an unusually vibrant BBC television version with Claire Bloom as Henry’s first wife.

Sir Toby Belch mocks Malvolio’s puritanism ––’Dost think because thou art virtuous there will be no more cakes and ale?’–– but he is a tragi-comic figure. Milton, that great hater of ecclesiastical and monarchical despotism, was born while Shakespeare was still alive. The Globe Theatre burnt down during a performance of Henry VIII in 1613, three years before Shakespeare died.

Isn’t it somehow typical of Mel Gibson that he should go on Joe Rogan’s podcast and associate the terrible Pacific Palisades fires with his new project The Resurrection of the Christ which is a kind of Paradise Lost where he will show the fall of the archangels.

Nine times the space that measures day and night / To mortal men, he with his horrid crew / Lay vanquished in the fiery gulf, / Confounded though immortal…

It’s breathtaking, it’s majestically baroque and it’s also, as Dr Johnson said, the work of a poet who ‘writ no language’: it’s at the furthest remove from human speech.

But how typical it is of Mel Gibson to bring together the bizarre fires in Los Angeles with his own intimations of Armageddon. The man who was such a conservative Catholic that he thought the pope was a heretic and was also accused of anti-semitism is utterly extraordinary. He did a Hamlet in which he played the title role under Zeffirelli’s direction with one of the greatest casts ever assembled (Glenn Close as the Queen, Alan Bates as the King, Scofield as the Ghost). He made Apocalypto in the Yucatec Mayan language and with the image of hearts plucked from breasts and The Passion of the Christ in recapitulated Aramaic, one of the languages Jesus would have spoken although we only have the merest fragment of his doing so. The new film is to be co-scripted with Randall Wallace who wrote Braveheart and with Gibson’s brother Donal.

While Gibson was talking to Joe Rogan in Austin on January 9 his $14.5 million-house in Malibu burnt down. All that survived were his chickens. ‘It was amazing We checked the chicken coop and they were fine. So, we gave them some grain and water and they are happy and laying eggs. They weren’t roast chickens.’ In the filmed discussion the 69-year-old Australian/American empire of a man attacked, with Rogan’s encouragement, the enviroment-oriented Californian governor Gavin Newsome. Gibson said of The Resurrection of the Christ: ‘It’s an acid trip.’ He believes the Resurrection actually happened. ‘Every single one of those apostles died rather than renounce their belief and no one dies for a lie.’ He is aware that the Resurrection is the greatest challenge for putative believers. ‘Who gets back up three days later after he gets murdered? Buddha didn’t do that shit.’ Mel Gibson says he was a born alcoholic. ‘That I was able to appeal to something beyond myself stopped me doing that.’ Computer-generated imagery will be used to de-age Jim Caviezel who will play the Risen Christ, probably in English this time.