A Fool for Shakespeare

How do you get a sonnet on the page to come to life? Breathe on it.
Sometimes I drink too much before I go to practice sonnets.

‘When most I wink, then do mine eyes best see,’ Q43:1.

I love the image of a drunk’s eyes winking closed. The rest of this sonnet is stuffed with antithesis reminiscent of inebriated babbling. If you consider that the previous 3 sonnets all deal with the triangle relationship people make so much biographical grist out of, it kinda fits.

That Shakes was a drinker is apocryphal. He supposedly wrote a ditty about a drinking match between the villages around Stratford. His father may have dropped out of civic service due to dipsomania. We are told he was a member of the monthly Mermaid Tavern friday night club.

Ben Jonson said to Drummond of Hawthorne that after he tied night to day with writing he would then do the same drinking. And finally it was a merry meeting of Jonson, Drayton and Sh at his daughter Judith’s wedding that lead to his catching a terminal cold.

This last story is often undermined as Drayton was apparently Teetotal. Why I guess they didn’t need designated drivers back then! (Bewust Onbeschonken Bestuurder, or BOB, in Dutch. Dus ben jij de Bob? of ben ik de BOB? Nee jongens, Bob is de BOB).

‘From such fragile threads are recondite hypotheses spun’. Shakespeare’s Lives, Samuel Schoenbaum. p.537.

One doesn’t want to dally too far, as he says,
‘down the dark path of cryptogram hunting, wherein lies Baconianism and madness’.

If you never read it, my first post promised Sh. without the nonsense. However I recognise my own patent speculations are as insanely constructed, though they often lack the conviction of the extremists. Still it’s worth the struggle. We’re gonna get elemental and archival on their ass! Fight Bacon with Fire, mmm lekker! Oxford with Air, phrummph! excuse me Ma’am i’m off to Europe.

‘Thus do new critical methods furnish a modern variation on age-old Bardolatry.’ ibid; p. 546

I will be true.

‘For if I should despair I should grow mad,
and in my madness might speak ill of thee.
Now this ill-wresting world is grown so bad,
mad slanderers by mad ears believed be. Q140:9-12.