Countdown…

…so many hours to go. Pray it rains not potatoes!

But the Shakespeare Centre abuts the Birthplace, which is nothing like what it was when he was born though. It beggars belief to think it stood alone. Prime real estate, so close to the market, never. But supposedly his birthplace, though that too would be scann’d.

I mean he could have been born in a field for all we really know and then registered resident of Henley street on the 26th as a citizen in the parish of Stratford legally encoded as baby Gulielmus. BTW ponder on the effect of knowing that was your official name as a little boy. Might spur an interest in Latin?

But the location is correct, his dad John, Chief Alderman of Stratford owned the property now known as the birthplace. Stratford as Shakespeare lived it, left long ago after Garrick had his knees up there (balls up some would say). Some of his townsmen are horrified at his fame and all of this heisa. I think always had and have been.

By the time Shakespeare retired, the Town Council had a predominantly Puritan tilt. Stratford Council had paid groups of actors NOT to play there from about 1607 onwards. And that date i have to check, as i think it’s earlier even still.

Shakespeare, the Stratty one, at that date would be busy (in Jacobean London or his home in Strat) with his romances and his mad old man strain of writing, culminating in his Lears and Leontes.

Unless these are lying-in-waiting, for them to be “created” by Shake-speare, whose corse was stinkin e’en but now, as I passed Oxford, with the manuscripts in me saddlebags to be fair copied and returned to that secret place Chris and Ed share. Conspiracydom!

BTW et tu Kenneth? You who played Hal? Have you been dining with Sir Guiles? Begorrah you’re beguiled lad. AN Oxfordian? A Baconian yes but an Oxfordian? Even Marlowe or a group theory, but The Blue Boar?

Seductive as the dark side Ken.

Song of the siren mate.

I can only weep you’re gone.

Splitter!

I can only base my judgement of Shakspeare on the world around him as he negotiated it. There was in London a literary and theatre scene which collided in productions first for outdoor theatre for everyone to a true indoor theatre for the massive in-crowd and the elite. The Stuarts loved to party and throw events. Witness the rise of the masques.

All this happened after Elizabeth’s death, and if i accept the Oxford argument, ie we back date the creation of his plays to be written before de Vere’s death in 1604, then he anticipated his own death and the cultural literary cycle that lead up to the later tragedies and their transmutation into the Romances.

Or could it be there was a one off cultural/literary/dramatic genius craftsman, which allowed this one lucky bastard to be Shakespeare. And to spawn an industry that spans the world, naming him as a cultural/literary/dramatic marker.

To want someone else is selfish and unkind to him that is and was. For its him I support here. Conspiracydom is populated by educated converts, who stop at nothing to declare, him false, who i think best.

Fie, fine actors and justices too. But other actors and justices, as fine and finer, lack their conspiracist finery. Now if they could convert Sir Anthony Sher and Greg Doran or Peter Brook and SIr Peter Hall to Oxfordianism the Stratford monument may crumble yet.

Yet even if all the actors and justices of the world deserted our Will, enough of us would find and love him for who he is and not who he was. And i have 2,155 lines of his I want to share for love of him or at the least his legacy. No one died and made me executor, i took on the role voluntarily, and to speak them is a must.