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(what follows is parsed from Cato’s Distichs which can be found in the links to the right. Cannot be ignored as an influence on Shakes or indeed any educated european early modern).
He passed on up to the grammar school where now his studies were to be
those of the trivium, comprising grammar, rhetoric and dialectics or logic,
and the quadrivium, consisting of arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy.
For the earlier stages of this curriculum the textbooks used were a grammar and a first reader, and until long after our modern times had been ushered in by the Renaissance and the Reformation, Cato’s Moral Distichs was this first Latin reader.
Throughout the early centuries of the Middle Ages schoolbooks were scarce and possession of them was restricted to the masters. By them the subject matter was dictated to their pupils who were required to commit to memory both grammar and reader.
Even after textbooks had come to be so plentiful that the schoolboys could own them, they were still required to commit to memory much or most of what was studied in the schools.
Caxton in England brought out versions of it. That famous publisher who himself translated it from a French edition into English gave as his reason for doing this,
“It is in my judgment the best book to be taught to young children in school,
and also to the people of every age it is full convenient if it be well understanded.” (lol)
In France a parody had been written in the fifteenth century, and in 1605 an English parody was printed,
entitled the School of Slovenrie or Cato turned wrong side outwarde.
Its use in the great English public schools was prescribed by various statutes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries so that it did service in Eton, Westminster, Durham, Sandwich, St. Bees, Bangor and Harrow.
Cardinal Wolsey directed that it be used in Ipswich School which he founded in 1528.
Richard Mulcaster, 1531-1611, for twenty-five years head master of the famous Merchant Taylor’s School, and later master of St. Paul’s, objected to the distichs on the ground that the ethical teaching they contained was too old for boys.
Cato’s Distichs
De Moribus
with a Numerical Clavis and Construing and Parsing Index
The First shewing by Figures, answering to each Word in every Line, in what Order the Words
ought to be looked in the Index, to be Construed into good Sense.
The Second containing all the Words in them digested into an Alphabetical Order, together
with the English, and a Grammatical Praxis on each Word referring to the Rules in Lily’s Grammar.
To which is added. An English Translation of Erasmus’s Commentaries on each Distich. For the Use of Schools.
In a Method so Easy, that Learners of the meanest Attainment in the Latin Tongue may be enabled to Construe and Parse their Lessons with Ease to themselves, and without Trouble to their Teacher.
The Sixth Edition, corrected and improved
By N. Bailey.
London : MDCCLXXI
Printed for G. Keith, S. Crowder, B. Law, and C. and R. Ware.
Marlowe in his Jew of Malta makes Barabas soliloquize in terms of one of Cato’s sayings. Illustrations of these sorts could be multiplied to heap high the testimony to the service of this medieval Cato to English literature.
All over Europe there exist today very many manuscripts in the Latin and translations of it into the dialects and vernaculars of feudal France, of Holland, the Engadine, Italy, Bohemia, Poland, Hungary, Roumania, Denmark, Sweden, Iceland, Ireland and Wales. There are Greek versions and both Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman.
Caxton brought out four English editions, the earliest in 1477, and his successor Wynkyn de Worde one or two more.
While there is nothing certainly suggestive of Christianity in these verses, their pagan flavor was so slight
as to constitute no disqualification, nor do they reveal any special philosophic traces.
What the author seeks most to inculcate is prudence, caution, self-possession,
shrewd adaptation to circumstances, courage, moderation and self-control.
The distichs here presented in translation comprise the common or usual collection made up of four books, of forty, thirty-one, twenty-four and forty-nine two line verses.
Books II, III and IV have each a special preface in verse; this seems to have been lost as to I.
The collection as a whole is preceded by a group of fifty-six very short proverbs in prose, most of them
of but two words each in the Latin, and before these is a brief introduction, also in prose. It seems very certain that both this introduction and the prose proverbs are of different and later authorship than the distichs themselves
THE COMMON COLLECTION OF DISTICHS
[When I noticed how very many go seriously wrong in their
manner of living I concluded that I must apply a corrective to
their belief and take counsel of the experience of mankind in
order that they may live most gloriously and attain honor.
Now I will teach thee, dearest son, in what way thou mayest
fashion a rule for thy life. Therefore, so read my precepts that
thou mayest understand them, for to read and not to under-
stand is equivalent to not reading.
BOOK II
[If it chances that thou desirest to learn farming, read Virgil.
But if thou strivest rather to know the potency of herbs, Macer
tells thee of this in his poems.
If thou wishest to know about the Roman and Punic wars,
enquire of Lucan who tells of the combats of Mars.
If it takes thy fancy to love something or to
learn by reading how to love, have recourse to Naso.
But if thy chief desire is to live wisely, hear what thou canst learn
about those things through which an old age free from vice is
produced.
So come and learn by reading what wisdom is.]
BOOK IV
[If thou wishest to lead a life free from cares, cling not to
faults which injure character.
Remember that these precepts must be read often by thee.
Thou wilt find in them a teacher through whom thou wilt be able to transform thyself.]
(Look what thy memory cannot contain
commit to these waste blanks and thou shalt find
those children nurs’d delivered from thy brain
to take a new acquaintance of thy mind) Sonnet 77
49. Dost ask why I this form of verses choose?
Know brevity did bid me couplets use.
The Scots are in Toon for a spot of fitba. I haven’t seen so much tartan in a while and now we’re festooned with it. Preamble to the day’s matter. It starts with a joke discovered while prepping for a corporate gig.
There are 10 kinds of people in the world, those who understand binary math, and those who don’t.
This post then divides the world into 2 types:
those who do math or numbers, and
those who don’t.
Basta!
Zo gezegd, zo ge-dikkie-daan. The Dutch are good with numbers.
Math as a tool is as old and unique to us humans as long as there have been humans to wield tools. Just as words in all their combinatorial genius, end up as abstract one time utterances. Euphonic, modulated phrases releasing intoxicating prophecies, a fleeting whiff of paradise or hell.
So numbers and their counterparts, geometry and algebra, create an abstract alphabet for excessively symbolic proofs. A language where any finite-infinite definition is simultaneous, and parabolic to boot.
More fiction has been written by, for and about science, than anything religion or literature ever produced. Proof as Truth, applied and pure.
And there have always been those attracted to, and thus abstracted by, numbers. I’m not one, though am one, and therefore can’t be none. Then in the number let me pass untold.
The most basic transactions in society rely on properties of numbers. Our perceptions are deceptive when guessing the actual weight, measure, height, distance, time and cost. Discrepancies between numbers are the difference between profit and loss.
Once again coming from a glove-maker’s family an inherent awareness of these costs and supplies infused our bard’s thinking. But se defendo, i don’t need to defend him, let him fight his own battles.
Math has it’s own heroes. Fermat and Riemann are prime examples.
Mathematicians, by definition can’t be intellectually sluggish. I imagine a proof requires many levels of abstraction and burns many brain cells. My comprehension of differential calculus or algebraic aneurysms is nihil. But Math has driven as many people mad as ever the Arts did. So many beautiful minds wasted. To top it off here’s theatrical proof.
Shakespeare could count presumably, if only to tot up his profits from his various efforts at husbandry. I jest because my Shakespeare loved words as Fermat his theorems. Math as a cornerstone or bedrock of science happened after Shakesez death.
But his Age was shaped by connections to Pythagoras and Euclid, though neither was taught at Stratford Grammar School. He would been taught to count in his head by his father, who had the Glove stand under the Market cross. The rumour also goes that his dad and himself loaned money at interest.
Handy for later in London at the Theatre with his reported franchise, holding horses for the richer punters inside. Good tips I would imagine. I once worked at a popular nightclub running the coat-stand, filling in for a month and was crap at it, but still made a killing. If the myth is true, Shakes did it for years and then franchised it out.
Why not take myth as fact, since the detractors take facts and make myths?
Shakes is taking a right cobbing of myth-making proportions at the moment anyway from his own side. Taking one for the team i assume.
‘his tender heir might bear his memory” I might say to all the retouching fuss that’s happening.
But open your eyes to the following sonnet and behold the reveal showing the debt he owed to artists.
A cornerstone of perspective seeing how sonnets were perceived to be books, looks and paintings.
Q24
MIne eye hath play’d the painter and hath stell’d,
Thy beauty’s form in table of my heart,
My body is the frame wherein ’tis held,
And perspective it is best Painter’s art.
For through the Painter must you see his skill,
To find where your true Image pictur’d lies,
Which in my bosom’s shop is hanging still,
That hath his windows glazed with thine eyes:
Now see what good turns eyes for eyes have done,
Mine eyes have drawn thy shape, and thine for me
Are windows to my breast, where-through the Sun
Delights to peep, to gaze therein on thee
Yet eyes this cunning want to grace their art
They draw but what they see, know not the heart.
(Notice the oft amended lack of punctuation at the end of the 12th line)?
This sonnet portrays my Shakespeare, who lives in my heart and is a metaphor for living an internal and aware life. For eternity if needs be. A final thought from the final couplet of the previous sonnet about an actor.
O learn to read what silent love hath writ,
To hear with eyes belongs to love’s fine wit.
All is one.
Are you one too?
….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.
Would they had kept it!
…I met a descendant of Sir Thomas More on sunday last.
He’s a graffiti artist named Pure Evil whose trademark is vampire bunnies, based in Shoreditch, London.
He told me that relatives had to pay the gatekeepers of London Bridge to release his head from the traitor’s spike for burial. We speculated how that may have been a way to get extra wages.
I just returned from Belgium, specifically the medieval cities of Bruges and Ghent. The old city centres and abundance of churches and castles plus an active imagination bring the past to life. How many wars have intervened, how many re-buildings of ancient structures?
The Belgians have in Gent, a Museum van Toen, literally translated, a Museum of Then, devoted to school furniture, iconographies and didactic methodologies. Erasmus a good friend of SIr Thomas would have been very proud.
Again a portrait appears from the depths of time claiming to be a true likeness of WS.
This time the Cobbe portrait, owned by an Anglo-Irish family, who inherited it from the 3rd Earl of Southampton?
This latter being Sh’s patron and reputed to be the fair young man of the sonnets.
Strangely for Stanley’s sake I hope it’s not Raleigh. Beware the alliance of prince’s, Horace. Oh dear!
The world’s news-desks now issue forth articles geared to their local readership.
I loved the LA column, will link when i re-found. The comments filled with cries of glee, irony, or dismay from enthusiasts and detractors.
I am not enthused. Passionate slave I am, i receive news of Shakespeare’s exploits from a variety of informed and random sources. Often before it hits the wire. Whatever happened to that Early Modern criticism of Richard 2nd, Stanley uncovered some four five years ago?
This portrait for me is old news, 2006 it first appeared says Hardy, and as verifiable as it seems, it’s as unpalatable as cold meats on a wedding table. It smacks of privilege and station, redolent of the Nobility from which it stems.
Yet the sitter was no Noble, the painter either. The great social authorship divide, nay gulf; neither: abysm, shows it’s ugly head each time a portrait paints us into a corner to say yes this was he.
I don’t want him to be identified. i care not for him, except the mantle his words lay on my soul.
But the piece of pottery with his likeness found in Shoreditch at the theatre’s excavation.
That’s my Will! Paying it through with souvenirs on Ale pots, placed and pandered to, among and for those there at that moment in time
Can you hear the cries ringing out in Shoreditch? Get your Ale and Collect your favourite Actor’s Mug!
Sell like ‘otcakes, shouldn’t wonder. It’s Art innit!
…is not lost when it is done for true love. Love’s labour is itself the reward.
So a saturday night in between 2 shows as a comic, i took to my i-pod and the shakespeare application (god bless you guys) to choose a play. Pericles had leapt into mind and scrolling forth i stumbled with chubby thumb on this silly play on words.
Oh fortunate importunate! What frills and fancies filled my cranium’s brain. Our dear author attempting to set down the court of his mind in figures dull and yet refined. Assist, gods extempore, for i’m sure, this is what turned his sonnets.
The parallels twixt one and th’other with such sweet sighs did smother. and with no delight to pass away the time, but merry meetings of unlike minds.
3 Lords make a pact to court nothing but learning for a 3 year spread and 3 Ladies arrive from France to change their hearts’ instead. Along with a slew of servants and learned guests, the play becomes a-whirl with rhyme and jests.
Such is the meat of the tale, that vows forsworn, fashion for this sort a jail. The main is sailed by saucy barks, each attempting good turns unto the other, and love itself within itself doth smother.
Mocks arrive from France and mocked again they bounce in another play to Henry Five’s dismay. The black wanton parallels a self-named lass drawn as you might like it. Renowned Berowne’s wit, as icy as Jacques ire will ever be in Arden or Navarreden forest. The intriguing Boyet appears in other forms in other plays.
A youthful work one well might say and now to stop this rhyme!
I awoke this morning realising that this play is a play about playing, as it is about words, as it is about versifying. The author captured all in one, which his craft and keen eye noted as his life.
One may ask how does he know about the Court of Navarre and these thinly disguised nobles and what could be a true conceit? But then i might ask, is his imagination so limited that he cannot project such simple souls with goodly words?
The whole smacks of conceits that any schoolboy/intelligent audience member would have known. The mythological figures and references were common enough, as seen by their continually being dissected and speared and held up to the light. Then to be cast away like a chewed on piece of hay. (damn the rhyme, though i might say, a thrasonical simile)!
There is latin a-plenty and some of it correct. There is speculation on the pronouncing of words and words coined for the occasion. There are playlets with masks and masques within the play. Plus rehearsals where one must perfectly say lines learn’d by characters pretending to be actors. These same actors put besides their part by plots, on purpose laid to make their bringers mad.
Ink is spilled and paper marked with wrinkl’d wooing, (something else of the day) as sonnetteers sprinkl’d love like showers to the ground. And the whole finishes with a death; a very unsatisfying death filled with unattained desire, not unlike the lovers’ unfulfill’d promised petty deaths.
Let us wait a year and a day
You that way; we this way.
Exeunt, followed by a jig?
Iambicity .- .- .- .- .-
Dat wil zeggen, in da groove, in da groove.
These 10 syllables are an iambic line in Dinglish.
Iambicity is what was happening when Shakespeare wrote his Sonnets. Everyone was doing it or having it done for them. Sprinkle a little sugar on the ink and you deliver a letter to be licked in consummation of the distant lover’s desire for you the object of their desire.
Is the heart more sensitive than the touch? Is inside more important than outside? Beauty, kindness, truth, intelligence, grace, and generosity. Do they dwell in you in harmony or strife; or die neglected like heedless weeds? You decide your self’s verdict. Is this Free Will?
This idea of the wit and the will was very strong in Shakes’ (pron. Shake-sez) time.
A chain of being classified his and everyone else’s life
ascending (despite descending here) from the
level of base existence, i.e.mountains and cliffs, golden streams, rocks, minerals, shells, jewels, etc.
along with and part of the 4 elements of earth, water, air, and fire and their qualities of cold and dry, cold and wet, hot and dry, hot and wet.
To the level of life and life’s cycle, i.e. plants, trees, bushes, insects and bugs and bacterias and butterflies etc.
To the level of life + consciousness, i.e. all 4-legged animals large and small, reptiles and fishes and birds. (no need for an aquarium on board the ark)?
To the level of life + awareness of that consciousness, i.e. humans with all their strengths and weaknesses.
Plus (and or ironically) a range of chaotic passions installed in the brain and body that consciously/unconsciously run contrary to that other splendid god-given, man-developed category of ordered reason and patterned rationale.
The Elizabethans believed emotions and the passions were created by the working of the 4 humours: sanguine, melancholic, choleric, phlegmatic.
And to cap it all off the ability to speak and write. To set the mind a’thinkin about itself a’thinkin and make abstract-concrete that thinking. And finally to determine our sex with an x or y gene, lending a primary urge and drive to unite with that other, in order to propagate more of you both.
Ethics trigger warning signals in your inner world and morals signal your behaviour to the outside world.
Every society develops a set, or honours one in tradition. I lost mine over the years and had to build a set of new ones more consciously. I had to re-learn value and worth, and cultivate common-sense and wit when interacting with others.
This internal-external drama finding a voice in poets and actors in an age when the European renaissance of painting and sculpture and architecture had opened the field for questioning and for creating change.
Then we jump another level closer to where life originates, a host of angels and those phantastical emanations like devils and demons etcetera, fairies and daemons, and nymphs and Nyads in disembodied and incorporeal significance. Oh my! How easily a bush becomes a bear! Exit pursued by a bush.
And finally, ultimately and omnipotently, the level
which is beginning and end, the one itself,
where masculine and feminine unite
and the self can be fully realised in
G— Almighty, who in his infinite wisdom created life and reality itself.
And all its tricky little contradictions.
Meanwhile the process of age and decay is happening, even in you as you read. So in this moment what can preserve you best of best, but these lines? Cheating Time, despite his inevitable victory?
My voice honest before his rage, telling my truth to eternity, or as long as the power grid exists. Man’s oneness in a medium, consisting of aether. The realm of Angels, ethereal yet possessed with mighty powers. And typographical step-by-step we rush to a conclusion, e’en before the argument’s done.
In this sonnet series you win. You just can’t lose, if you stay the course. Stay true to you.
‘In so profound abysm I throw all care of others voices,
My adder’s sense to critic and to flatterer stopped are’. sonnet 112
A line of a sonnet appears as a measured unit 10 syllables long, alternating unstressed stressed syllables.
This inner measure or metre, allows us to hear the line’s inner relationship.
Our ear follows the pattern that is created, or deviated from, through a succession of lines.
Four lines is known as a quatrain, which allows us to hear the outer connections between the lines.
The first four lines are called the first quatrain.
The second four lines the second quatrain.
Together they are known as an octet, or eight lines.
Then there is a turn in the argument a.k.a. the volta or the jump.
The next four lines is the 3rd quatrain.
The last two lines are known as the Final Couplet
which sums up the sonnet,
or expands the argument of the sonnet into another companion sonnet.
So that’s the outward Form of a Sonnet.
NOW let’s go back to the internal aspect of the line for a while.
But Beware!
Because what you are about to read may cause some of you distress!
Remember if it all feels, sounds and looks like Greek to you, it is.
It’s based on Ancient Greek rules.
We say an Iambic Pentameter
verse line has 10 syllables,
or five feet i.e. ta tum, ta tum, ta tum, ta tum, ta tum.
(This basic rhythm changed English dramatic verse from a sing-songy bouncy rhyming language to something closer to speech).
The iambic foot, or iamb,
is an unstressed followed by a stressed syllable.
The trochaic foot, or trochee,
is a stressed followed by an unstressed syllable.
The spondaic foot, or spondee,
is two stressed syllables.
The phyrric foot
is two unstressed syllables.
These last 3 terms are the most common variations from the iambic metre within a pentameter line.
They allow for greater grace, variation and expressiveness.
Two other types of feet need mentioning because they are longer and also occur in this sonnet series.
The Dactylic foot, or dactyl,
is one stressed syllable and two unstressed.
It is used to make a Tetrameter line. Sonnet 145 is written entirely in tetrameter verse lines, which are four feet long.
The anapestic foot, or anapest,
is two unstressed syllables and one stressed.
So as G. T. Wright writes on p. 43 of his magistral book ‘Sh’s Metrical Art’ the features that make an iambic pentameter line are:
1. The 10 syllable iambic line
2. A conventional midline break (caesura and enjambement) in phrasing
3. Line-integrity (most lines were end-stopped)
4. A “smooth” reconciliation of English phrasing and the metrical pattern.
This completes our analysis of the internal aspects of a sonnet.
You can follow the links to the wikipedia pages on each term for more information. But what is on this page is more than enough to let sink in.
Do not attempt to learn this as if you had to pass a test. Just keep it in mind when you’re analysing your sonnet and learning it by heart.
Shakespeare and all his sonnetteering contemporaries were aware of these rules before they ever put pen to paper.
And so you have to be if you are going to understand how a sonnet works.
I live in Amsterdam. My first real contact with showbusiness, real raw unadulterated showbusiness, came through the Christmas Twins. I’d celebrated my 21st birthday a few days before, and a short walk from the houseboat, where I lived on the Amstel river, was the Backstage coffeeshop.
Unlike the coffeeshops Amsterdam is famous for, this one sold no weed or hash. Instead it was run by two outrageous Micnac Indians from Boston. They were twins born one minute before and one minute after midnight in 1931. Inseparable their entire lives they had performed in over 40 countries as dancers and singers.
Anyone who passed by or stepped in the door was greeted by a usually correct guess at their astrological sign. Then followed an in-depth analysis of your personality, focusing on your strengths illustrated by your perceived weaknesses. They called me Wonderboy and they made me feel great! I wasn’t the only one. I used to love the way they greeted people, taking them from stranger to eager participant in their own analysis in mere minutes.
The Twins attracted many performers for an informal coffee and apple pie. But the relationship with their neighbour Merrit exploded like fireworks at a millenium. Oil and water, chalk and cheese reactivity on everything from heels and glitter to who’s hot and who’s not. Or simply a smouldering from yesterday fanned into conflagration with the inevitable tucker and bitch and slammed doors reverberating down the street.
Brilliant spectator sport, arguing queens. Lots of show and definitely the business. The seediness, backstabbing and gossip just exhilarating. And surely Shakespeare met this madness. Greg and Gary are now reunited in spirit. I feel blessed to have known them. Gary often had me recite Sonnet 27:
Q27
WEary with toil, I haste me to my bed,
The dear repose for limbs with travel tired,
But then begins a journey in my head
To work my mind, when body’s work’s expired.
For then my thoughts (from far where I abide)
Intend a zealous pilgrimage to thee,
And keep my drooping eyelids open wide,
Looking on darkness which the blind do see.
Save that my soul’s imaginary sight
Presents thy shadow to my sightless view,
Which like a jewel (hung in ghastly night)
Makes black night beauteous, and her old face new.
Lo thus by day my limbs, by night my mind,
For thee, and for my self, no quiet find.
After reading G.T. Wright’s book Shakespeare’s Metrical Art the persuasions that Shakespeare was any more than an inkfish-thespian spreading his buskins-worth of verse, blank verse and prose for discerning readers and audience doesn’t fly anymore.
There is no reason the Stratford man, little and small knowing we have of him, had to have been a nobleman genius polymath. Or a penniless espionage involved deceased playwright! He is following the dictates of the poetry of the time. Just as Oxenforde, Marlowe, Bacon did.
Poetry was the pop music of the time. In the twentieth Century was Sammy Cahn a Count or an Earl really? Women were doing versifying too. One scholar out there, from the Dark Lady theatre company, identified Aemilia Bassanio, already a candidate for the pen-painted Mistress of the Sonnets, as the true author. His scholarship is not at question here, but I don’t buy the story because it’s not unlikely, that the schmuck from Stratters could easily have done and did it. No conspiracy necessary.
All the elements and ingredients for a young artist to leave wife and kids to venture into the London theatrical, printing and poetry scenes, and remain there for 20 plus years are there. His 1st plays were all potboilers loaned from the theatre world of the late 1580’s ands early 1590’s.
King Henry 6th pts 2 and 3, Titus Andronicus, Comedy of Errors, Richard 2nd, all develop him in his style and the indicator of his change is his metre and how he worked with it. When it wasn’t someone else helping him out. My Shakespeare worked in a world of collaboration. He knew everyone and everyone knew him. In his world of theatre.
Wherefore his working for his apprenticeship in writing like every other schmuck; and acting without notice in the Theatre and the Rose; and then a patron, his distant relative through his mother’s family, the Earl of Southampton, unlawful child of Edward de Vere and Elizabeth Regina, whose birth mum was also a dupe in the plot.
Is it not striking that Shakespeare’s first foray into publishing poetry was with the help of a Stratfordian friend, the printer Richard Field, who though not a verse publisher did it, and then passed on the rights to print to another printer? Where and why for an Oxford or Marlowe or Bacon in this deal?
Field too was as lucky as Shakespeare appears to have been, marrying his former master’s widow to inherit his press. His deceased Master, Thomas Vautrollier had presses in London and Edinburgh, and not enough research has been done in to his life as far as i can tell.
Then he landed the lifesaver job as a member of the The Lord Chamberlain’s Men, and after Elizabeth’s death, James 1st immediately made them The King’s Men. They don’t give this job to some ignorant knobhead fobbing off someone else’s poems and plays as his own. He also became a sharer in the company, receiving a split in money from the house, which once again shows they respected him for something. Or was this his pay for the big scam?
So all you conspirators shaking your gory locks answer me this. How did your candidate influence those men in the front line of rehearsing and performing plays AND proofing and printing poetry into accepting this Shake-scene as the putative author. True, there is no evidence stating WIlliam Shakespeare of Stratford wrote all these plays and poems and was an actor. At least none that you will accept.
But why did this man Shaksberd let it all happen, if he didn’t do it? Was he a good actor? The tradition says older and smaller parts were his. So why was he part of this company of Players? If not as a Dir-actor writing the hits the company was so successful with? These companies played at Court as well as in Public theatre.
His fellowes Burbage, Heminges, Condell, all honourable men though actors, were even beneficiaries in his Will receiving money to buy a ring. Was Shakespeare the Lord of the Rings?
The playwrights Peele, Nashe, Dekker, Fletcher, Beaumont and Jonson all knew this fraud, this charlatan and had either collaborated with or had help from him. Presumably all knew your true genius too, yet they remained silent?
Sidney, Daniel, Drayton poets all of their own sonnet series, knew of, or in the case of this last,
present at his daughter’s wedding months before his death.
Why should these people prefer your candidate and hide the fact from history?
Occam’s razor determines that until you have final and solid proof your reasonable doubts are fact… without resort to ad hominem attacks as we always do to you… or any of the twists of rhetoric that turn the imaginary dagger into fantastic yarn…
without anything but the smoking gun you can’t convince me. I guess that makes me stubborn in thought and unwilling to accept the possibility. No!
Enough diatribe! Let’s listen to what George had to say about the Sonnets in his ‘Shakespeare’s Metrical Art’ :
…an art of small differences chap 5: p.88
This is a wholesale copying from this chapter.
It is evidence.
The Sonnets are inherently dynamic; the speaker is constantly contending,
either with an intractable world and its ways of frustrating his affections, or with his mixed feelings.
The doom of mortality is a perpetual threat. The strategies used to thwart it
-love, children and poetry- are sometimes said to be entirely successful,
but the TRUTH of organic aging; withering – decaying – dying, is at least as prominent in these poems.
Poetry, children, love may do much, but the picture we derive from the Sonnets is of human beings, beautiful and energetic, achieving and lost, asserting their bright resistance to a determined mortality.
Different readers will navigate them differently; what seems clear and certain is that,
whatever subtle views the Sonnets develop, the equally subtle meter
plays a crucial role in reinforcing, undermining, or modifying them.
Questions of style and meaning bear largely on meter.
The complex figurative language Shakespeare uses, especially his strong imagery,
continually magnifies the intensity and emphasis with which his characters’ words must be spoken.
The Sonnets use these figures to convey feelings more intimate, more private, and more problematical
than Shakespeare had usually treated in his his early plays.
Complex turns of argument reveal a speaker often divided in his feelings,
but only some of his divisions are explicitly recognised.
Undertones of ambiguity haunt these poems,
whose ingenious exploration of paradox and antithesis
has seemed to most readers to betray more than their ingenuity.
In addition, the association of the speaker’s feelings with the
imagery of the sea,
of growing things,
with natural cycles of day, season, and year,
and with many other ranges of reference suggests that
the intricate arguments and clever wordplay are being
used to address affections and forebodings that are linked with a larger world.
The plays Shakespeare wrote from the mid 1590’s show how skillfully
he could involve the character’s complex inner feelings
(and the softer tones of private reflection)
in their public actions and conflicts presented on the stage.
Their feelings take form on the stage, or give signs of having been anxiously arrived at.
The language in which they admit to divided feelings or disturbing passions is the
language of “silent thought”,
now for the first time conveyed from the sonnet to the theater,
in dialogue as well as soliloquy.
That is, something of the tone and movement we “hear” in the silent sonnet
read from the page enters and inflects those voices of rant and passion
we hear from the living stage.
The quiet voice of reminiscence or experience, the muted tones,
the pyrrhic dips, the spondaic gravity, the metaphorical and figurative surface,
all the stylistic regalia of troubled reflection familiar from the sonnets
make their presence deeply felt in the plays that follow.
The style suggests a reserve of private observation and insight
on the part of any character and of human beings generally as
harboring unrevealed depths is the chief gift of the Sonnets to the plays.’
…Shakespeare’s Sonnets an art of small differences chap 5: p.88. This has been a wholesale copying from this chapter. It is evidence. Look to it!
oh boy, this captures the position we’re in. Pyhrric, spondaic, help! A bear!
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