Stories are not history…

The creators duty is to the story. So let it be with Shakespeare. His first duty as creator is to the story. So whats the story with his Sonnets?

The facts are we have a quarto of Sonnets and A Lovers Complaint, which some now claim may not even be his. It is agreed, a rare thing where the sonnets are concerned, they were composed over a twenty year period until their publication in May, 1609.

Very little else is agreed upon. But that is his story and what he left us is all that we have of him. The Sonnets and Hamlet are supposed to be his most autobiographical pieces. This is where it gets messy. These pieces of fiction, we try to make into a whole person who lived and breathed, and actually wrote them.

Pen and ink and blots and misspellings and autographed pieces are missing. We lack autograph papers of any of the candidates for the title of the writer Shake-speare. No Oxfordian, Marlovian, Baconian, or Shaxperian can claim that.

That would clinch the argument. If only the fingerprint of time would show us his on the smoking gun. He sweat, and breathed these words of magical mystery and enchantment. Words meant to be sounded, even if only for the inner ear: their inception in his inner ear.

There are 154 sonnets in that quarto of 1609 and they are the focus of over a decade of my studying. I learned them to recite them at the drop of a hat. Ive read and heard an awful lot of opinions about the sonnets particularly, but as much again about Shakespeare generally and at large.

Ive seen the movies, the comics, the adaptations, and all of his plays in the theatre from puppets and masks to outdoors to the RSC and the newest Globe on the Bankside in London.

Im a Shakespearean dilettante. Deep down I too dont like Billy Shagsbirds from Stratters with his domestic woes and country cares. How could he possibly have experienced the lives of his plays characters?

Now there were stories. Those characters were Kings and Earls and Romans and Trojans and Greeks and Britons. His story is simply history in comparison: a history rolling on around him, telling of a newly emerging nation and nascent world power.

I repeat: stories are not history.