First sources…

…or rather the works that Shakespeare himself would have read and been affected by (choose your candidate, it’s irrelevant to this argument). One of these books is George Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie. Now Sh must have read this treatise, published in 1589, as this is the basis of his art and artifice, both linguistic and poeticall. He would at that time been have been learning his craft of penmanship and budding as a scribbler of poems and plays.

Gary Schmidgall’s Shakespeare and the Poet’s Life is an excellent examination of the question: Why did Sh give up poetry in favour of playwriting. He adequately supports the argument for the aristos/demos split, the anxiety of performance and jostling for favour.

His work on the dedications and front matter of poems and plays is as refreshing as slurping from a mountain stream after a hard climb. An appendix reproduces John Hind’s dedication to Shakespeare’s patron (Southampton) in almost identical wording to the dedication of Venus and Adonis.

There is no necessity for the dead carcass of another poet upstream to contaminate this kind of scholarship. There is no orthodox short-sightedness and bias here. This work tells more than many a biography.

Of which James Shapiro’s rather good A Year in the Life of WS: 1599 forms more of my present reading and study. Although the speculative factor is great when discussing any of the candidates, it’s always interesting to see how they blend the times and the to few known facts.

Recently I picked up Martin Lings book the ‘Secret of Shakespeare’ and therein lies a tale. It sent me back to Islamic Scientists and Sufism and Archetypes and Symbols and something greater than pathetic Renaissance man. Sheikh Sapir, O sapient one, send me a message via Saker falcon to whet my dull lines and save me from misery.