….the biggest danger a Shakespeare scholar faces is the identification with his subject. Sam Schoenbaum states that Shakespeare is a mirror for his biographers and they project their own intellects, likes and dislikes onto him. Fashion him in their own image. I do too.
He likes food as much as i do; relishing in tastes, flavours, and textures. He loves music as i do; eclectic and varied in his rhythmical, melodic and harmonic pleasures. He enjoys sex like i do; love forsworn in a waste of shame, growth in spite of conscience. The pure rise and fall of it all; sensually, delightfully, alive.
My Shakes could defend himself; stick, sword, frying pan if necessary. Slow to enrage, but to be wary of when roused. He could sing too; quietly and skillfully. He had a wit backed by a natural intelligence; simpatico and kind. He suffered from an open disposition yet few would penetrate his deeper self.
My Shakes is the ultimate spectator surprised at the access he achieved in Society and at Court. A man alone; free to come and go as he pleased. Ecco Homo – look, here is man.
A man to be envied because he knows his own worth. A flawed romantic idealist chiseled by life into a genius that seems, but never is definitively there.
But he did not live and work alone. Others surrounded him and had lives of their own, as exciting and wonder-filled.
His interest was writing and acting for the Public and Private theatres. A small world though populated enough and yet a world peripheral to the big stuff that was happening in history all around him.
His world of show-business is equivalent to the world of nightclubs and dance halls. Profit was the prime motivator and the punters lined up to spend their hours of an afternoon in the Theatre or the Curtain next door.
Whoever kept up with the changing times and public demand and put on a good show followed by a jig, was who got paid the most. it’s all one what the matter is, just make sure something is always the matter. make that matter most, or no such matter matters anymore.
Profit invested is good husbandry, ten times ten is better than thou art alone. These financial and legal metaphors Shakespeare uses repeatedly in his sonnets and plays reflect how business and law fed hand to mouth in his London at that particular point in Western history. The New World Order was already beginning to take shape.
I attended a concert today at the Engelse Kerk (english church) in the Begijnhof, hier in hartje Amsterdam. A magical place of memory for me; being the first real taste of Holland I got when I visited age 12 and a half. Back then the hippies manned their way around its quadrangle, nowadays the public is kept from doing a round so as not to upset the residents.
The church was built originally around 1392, and for definite 1607 it was the home of the pilgrim fathers and others before their trip stateside to the colonies and/or manahatta island and surrounding areas. Can’t believe the VOC/Dutch East India Company botched that deal up!
Sixty years they had it. Banking system, preliminary Legal and Judicial system, large farms and inter-dependent communities all over the Bronx and beyond. Long Island a paradise, oysters by the gazillion. This church reminds me of the one at the foot of Broadway across from Wall street.
The Dutch famously took Manhattan for beads, yet they brought Dutch individuality and freedom of speech and behaviour, wrote natural histories and studied the Native languages (for profit of course). They cultivated european and new farming methods, and experimented with new fruits and vegetables. They were the first New (Yorkers) Amsterdammers and they came from everywhere the Dutch had ever been.
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