Royalty

It is often said that stars of the entertainment world are America's nearest equivalent to the real royalty of its old mother country. So it was hardly lese majesty to give Queen Elizabeth a big Hollywood party on her first visit to the Western United States. She is a movie fan anyway, and why not homage from titans stepping off the silver screen?

Yet we confess to an extra pleasure in the less publicized news of her unveiling a bust of William Shakespeare. Yes, his plays or parts of them were in their day an equivalent to Hollywood. But their tales of kings and queens also reach artistic heights contrary to the conventional Hollywood image - yet echoed in the work of stars who outdo the image and become closer to theatrical royalty than figures of celluloid pageantry.