Don’t doubt…

This post is about the links: with thanks to the comic talent of Catherine Tate.

If you want to imagine a specific set of circumstances to understand the true meaning of these sonnets, feel free to do so. This young lady learned a sonnet despite her vociferous scottish teacher. He becomes Hamlet for Auntie Beeb’s Christmas TV in 2009.

Feel less free to force-feed me your theory, i’ve looked and look and judged and judge for myself. Nobody coerced or coerces me into believing on the evidence that it could possibly be anybody else who wrote SHakespeare. And i dont care how you spell it! Really, not anyone but the man from Stratford.

I follow the newest scholarship of all the major candidates. I study Sh from any source. If it is a valid source. That I determine. My conclusions on all the arguments for and against that i have read acknowledges both sides. I am like Sh in any argument he ever wrote both pro and con.

But the side that has to do the least fudging or inventing in favour of their candidate remains the Stratfordian. The conspiracy theorists argue from the point that it seems impossible that an unlettered, unscholared, untravelled, unworldly provincial could become a language’s greatest author. Why?

Any trip through the greatest minds of History will prove that nothing is what it seems. But it is nonetheless. Suis je bovvered though?

Stratford Sh had knowledge of pomp and ceremony; albeit when his father was in civic politics. But his dad did travel to London on behalf of the Town of Stratford. He wasn’t a nobody. He did get a coat of arms with or without right, but he got ’em and thus entitled himself and his heirs to be titled Gentleman. Short-lived history shows as his son Hamnet age 6 ended that generational legacy.

Now those noble candidates for Shakespeare may snort and scorn my words but by Occam’s razor edge it is the most likely scenario. The truth is you cannot tell Shakespeare’s story without Shakspere being at the centre of it.

Then two choices offer themselves
either he had to have been co-erced
or he had to have been paid off.

But what was he paid off with?
with gentleman status?
with a nice house in the country?
with a share in the Globe Theatre?
with his name going into literary posterity and not someone else’s?

He could have afforded almost all of the above
only from his acting and ostensible ‘writing’ work.
What’s to say he didn’t hold a stake in his horse-holding franchise at the Theatre? We can never prove something like that. Though it’s only plausible that Sh did have such a franchise as his contemporaries reported. Or were they lying too?

Or was he just an idiot and a willing stooge. Which also doesn’t chime or rhyme with the available facts. All we hear of this guy is that he’s good tempered, and likes to laugh, and make witty. This is from people who hung out with him. Not that that’s factual testimony, it’s just what it is.

If you’ve made your mind up about these sonnets then i hope you will judge my readings kindly despite my non-belief in your cause.

For the majority who have no idea what i’m alluding to in these convoluted lines, welcome to the sonnets. As you’ve noticed by my defence the views expressed on and in the name of these sonnets are quite entrenched and under constant barrage.

I fight on what i consider to be the side of the true english heir to shakespeare’s throne. He’s a Midlands boy with ties to the Catholic North. An actor with the Lord Chamberlains’ Men at the peak of his career.

His two youthful published poems were a smash hit. Both dedicated to his poetic patron, the Earl of Southampton. Southampton is the most likely candidate for being the model for the ravishing lovely boy of the sonnets. Again many candidates vie for biographical and autobiographical identification.

He had many other patrons for his Acting work: Lord Strange, the Lord Chamberlain and the King eventually. He worked in a theatre collective that operated a Public theatre and played at Court. How does this make Stratford Sh ineligible to have written his plays and poems?

The first 126 sonnets indeed echo a presumed relationship in mute dialogue. There are also the poet’s mistress, who betrays him with the sexy young Earl; and a Rival Poet hired by the fashion-conscious Patron, much to the chagrin of our poet’s supposed persona.

Or you can build a monument showing the parallels to the Essex rebellion and Southampton’s imprisonment in the Tower and how each sonnet displays this in ever-growing cryptic narrative.

These sonnets aren’t a flattering display of any of the characters, including the poet’s persona, ie the invention of the poet scratch-scratch-dipping his quill. The thoughts that construct this monument of airy words are of the world and not privy to any one person’s experience.

If the characters aren’t treated as real people and merely represent the feelings of everyman/woman in that character’s position: then you’re absolved from having to look at all the evidence for and against these real people; and why it had to be these real people; and isn’t the work somehow so much better now we know it’s these real people.

Because what’s the upshot if it turns out it was Marlowe or Oxford. What possible benefit lies therein? How do the plays, as mangled as they are by transmission, get better? (study the editing tradition of any play for proof they are mangled).

To be honest I don’t really care that it was the Stratford geezer. But the arguments against him are unconvincing if they don’t convince me how this man played along and didn’t reveal the conspiracy.

NO! The play’s the thing, wherein he caught the conscience of us all. Ring a ding ding. Hamlet is not a real person even if he’s based on one. Neither Shylock, Leontes nor Malvolio. Mark Antony Caesar, and Henry V were real people but not the way Shake-speare (hyphenised or not, it doesn’t matter) wrote them.

Nor all his marvellous female characters be they queens or servants, real or fictitious. Must we base them too on real people and not on the characters in the stories on which these plays and poems are based. The only thing Sh needed to appreciate his sources was imagination and wit. He didn’t necessarily need to be a nobleman.

Nor did he need to pretend he was writing works that were his, and taking the praise and profit for them; whilst their true author pretended to be dead under the Elizabethan witness protection program.

Yes I mean the Marlovians. These plays that Christopher would have penned had to find their way to the PUBLIC stage and Printing Press. Really NOBODY knew except the schmuck at the centre of it playing his part? Or if they did, kept counsel?

Don’t doubt dear reader,
go on have a read or a listen.