Mothers…

…Shakespeare’s mum.

Mary Arden. The youngest I believe of 8 sisters. Correcto mundo says wiki. And she made 8 in turn. The first two of whom died. Then William.

Her dad Robert Arden probably did not approve of his youngest daughter’s choice of husband. John Shakspear, Sh’s dad, was one of the four sons of Richard Shaksper, a farmer of Snitterfield. A village close to where the Arden’s lived.

Mary must have loved John, one would assume. (We know, ass u me). Love and Shakespeare never being too far apart as a source of argument.

Mary too, must have loved her first born son, William, especially after bearing and losing two girls before him. And then again loved him more, after a burst of the plague in Stratford when Will was an infant.

He’ll survive, she may have thought, but she could never have imagined in what way. Or has a mother’s love for her child changed these five hundred courses of the sun? Who knows what she thought?

Sickness is the great mediator between life’s dreams and aspirations and the reality that death attends us. Always. And so too does birth, life, renewal.

Sickness in the sonnets is associated with love. A bitter sweet affair inducing fever and madness.

After death, all that’s left is memory. His verse, as he tells us, is that. And that is this. This is the best I have. The rest varies to other words.

‘look what is best, that best I wish in thee,
this wish i have, then ten times happy me!’

Mary Arden’s house was worshipped by Bardolaters for centuries, and turned out in the late 20th C/early 21stC to be the property next door!

Fortunately for the Shakespeare Trust, on its land. The Shakespeare properties are, one might say, little more than a cottage industry. Al Pacino’s reaction to the properties in his film Looking for Richard is hilarious. His disbelief. I wonder where he stands on the orthodox/conspiracy scale?

Poesy is all my argument with these sonnets, not conspiracy. Sweet music is the result, rhythm and flow, let it go.

I think it was his mum who made sure he did his homework and keep an open mind about the relativity of it all.

Then again i also think he taught himself to read. Like a new-born crocodile chomping it’s first water insect. Shades of Cleopatra already forming in the Nile of his creativity.

His mum was also his source for religion. Her family members, not too far removed, were burned and others beheaded for their Catholic conspiracies.

Whether Shakespeare was Catholici or Protestanti is a big question for some. The Old Faith seems to exert a big influence on his works. What with nunneries and friars, but they could just reflect his sources too.

However the Protestantism of England cannot have been the Protestantism of Europe. Elizabeth was Henry’s daughter and no-one’s mum, and her dad created the Church of England, not from religious conviction. But for love and lust. He said.

But politics is politics and myths are to be made, and Shakespeare definitely helped there. See his major and minor tetralogies. Though of course he was no less than his fellow playwrights, helping to create the myth of Elizabeth, mother to her realm.