Friends and Fellows

…There is a great difference, whether any Booke choose his Patrones, or finde them: This hath done both. For, so much were your L.L. (= Lordships) likings of the severall parts, when they were acted, as before they were published, the Volume ask’d to be yours. We have but collected them, and done an office to the dead, to procure his Orphanes, Guardians; without ambition either of selfe-profit, or fame: onely to keepe the memory of so worthy a Friend, & Fellow alive, as was our
S H A K E S P E A R E , by humble offer of his playes…

Preface to the First Folio 1623

So today’s the day 445 years ago that Shakespeare was christened at Holy Trinity Church in Stratford on Avon. And 52 years later, the day after he was buried in that same church.

The brief quote above is from the dedicatory epistle to his First Folio collected by his friends and fellows John Heminge and Henry Condell.

Sitting outside a restaurant yesterday in Fitzrovia, London, Ben showed me his photos of the monument to Heminge and Condell in the City. This quote struck me as proof positive that the Shakespeare conspirators are deluded: as in spoiled of their game.

Why on earth would these men lie? Their motives for publishing the Folio could hardly have been to assist a long dead Oxford or a still living undead Marlowe. Who benefits?

I’m sure, despite their pleas to buy, buy, buy, that sales were not such that either man got rich from the profits.

Their altruism in this task was perhaps to honour the memory of a friend and fellow. No more, no less. These men knew and loved their friend and fellow, Will Shakespeare, however he spelt his name.

They had worked with him since the mid-1590’s. He left them money in his Will. Interlineated or not, it doesn’t matter.

‘Why what’s the matter? Nothing. A fair thought to lie between a lady’s legs’. Found in Hamlet toying with Ophelia before the play within the play within the play.

If indeed his friends were co-conspirators in some devious plot to dupe their past, present and future, the more treacherous those two worthy words, friend and fellow.

What sort of friend would willingly conspire against their fellow and friend?

Nothing in Stratford Shagsbirds biography suggests anything other than him being a writer and player.

Why and wherefore would Shakespeare seem that much better or worse than his peers? How many writers in his time did not feel himself the better than this upstart crow?

Sh’s influence on writers of the decade after him can be noted in stylistic terms. Suggesting they copied what they liked and made it their own. Just as Shakespeare did when he was learning to write for the stage.

I don’t doubt the influence that Marlowe and Kyd had on SHakespeare. Oxford’s poetry doesn’t twist and turn in thought and argument or roll off the tongue like SH’s does. Or Jonson or Marlowe or Dekker. It doesn’t promise that much for the rest of that writer’s oeuvre either.

To make things simpler, let’s just take Shakespeare out of the equation when we look at Elizabethan theatre. Where would Oxford or any of the conspirators have been then?

Would they have chosen other writers to succubus upon?
The genius must out: and in a cryptic manner be born for ages yet to be.

So there’s all the same writers: University trained or smart grammar school boys both there. There’s the poetry scene too, a much smarter set. And worldlier and more to the manor born.

Though many of these same Nobles were as illiterate as any country bumpkin. Like their illiterate contemporaries this didn’t mean they were stupid. (Snobbism this way lies)!

Admittedly enormous social gulfs existed between the two: but bridges are built when one entertains the other. Especially when one is portraying the inner lives of the other. Men feigning being Kings, Earls and other assorted Courtiers, as well as low life scum and servants.

I’m not trying to convince anyone here but myself. Self and the mirror of self in what one does and how one lives have nothing to do with creativity.

A work of Art can be like polishing or smashing that mirror of self.
If you commit to something creatively you commit from the heart. But a work of art becomes a commodity. Show-business it’s called, not show-Art.

After a while in any art, you realise it has all been told before. In other words. It is still telling what has been told.