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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!
…could never be day. No in the Sonnets we are looking at a writer with an inventive vocabulary. A word as we learned can be anywhere from 1-5 syllables long. If you’re not sure of what a syllable is, bol-locks, that’s two. And interesting because where is the divide between the two?
But let’s move on to 4 words somewhat longer…
here follows a list of 5-syllable words:
determination (count the syllables, go on use your fingers and count) See Sonnet 13
insufficiency (same thing as above right)? See Sonnet 150 or previous post
effectually (now try this one and keep an open mind) See Sonnet 113
preposterously (they are slippery these words) See Sonnet 109
So the last two are shape shifters.
This medium. This digital domain is amazing like God used to be amazing. (dripping with innovation and miracles) For example my thick fingers are tapping an I-pod touch’ screen, not even a phone, and within seconds…I’m online for as long as the power grid lasts.
… is to achieve an examination of the punctuation of Q1609 Sonnets to show how it would affect a Jacobethan reader’s experience. It is not to try and recapture Shakespeare’s experience as writer and persona in the Sonnets. His love is history.
But he was representative of his peers in how he approached the dramatic spoken and written word. He wrote on parchment with a goose feather quill and blacke inke. so each stroke cost time and ink. If it was evening there’s candles to be burnt and eyesight to be strained. These are not romantic musings, rather the consequence of imagining my world with those restrictions.
So how do you produce a 154 Sonnets? Or was it only during the writing of the first 17, that he realises this is something much bigger? The sonnet series to top them all. Not Spenser, nor SIdney, nor Drayton, nor Daniel, had a 154 in their series. And his would be a sequence, and way more real than those ponsy old lot. It’d show he saw life in Nature, saw the ideal in Art, and chose to see life through the ideals.
Fair, Kind, and True, is all his argument, he finally states in Sonnet 104. And if that’s the case then it could all get a little bit boring. But of course life steps in and love is no longer that knocked me off my feet wow anymore. In fact you are reprehensible.
Both of Shakespeare’s beloveds’ in his Sonnets are reprehensible in affairs of the heart, which kind of says something about Shakespeare, not too flattering that he attracted that to him. Coz it feels real. But then he was manipulating a verse line and poetic form into something new. something confessional. or seemingly confessional.
Imitation is at the heart of the Sonnets. Just as Aristotle prescribes in his Ars Poetica. But it is Horace in his Ars poetica, who produces the rules of decorum that govern these Sonnets. These, alongside Longinus’ and his emphasis on sublimity, cap the triad of ancient textual heroes Shakespeare (whoever he was) seems to have followed. The form imitates the content, as the content is patterned on the form. Verse cannot be speech yet this verse speaks. Therein lies the central antithesis of this sequence.
Finally over the course of 15-18 years his sequence is finished and then someone puts them into print. and this it what we have. 13 Quartos extant, a gazillion reprints and copies, baroque, romantic, enlightenment and post-modern philosophizing about Renaissance practice, generations of actors spewing them out in rehearsal and in practice at wedding and funeral.
Yet they live. These brief minutes of poetry. Descended from a provenance many claim and none can own. We are working here from several reprints of extant copy of Q1609 Sonnets. It’s been a passion for a while now. We will examine it for clues as to how Shakespeare (whoever he was) wrote solely in the style of his time and uniquely for all time.
These poems have sparked a thousand stories on their genesis. We will travel no farther than under the length of his verse line and up to his facility with manipulating the form to the max. That he did that, I am thankful. So we need to go into this printed quarto a little deeper, but not too deep.
In Q1609 Sonnets the punctuation, capitalicisation, italicisation and spelling could as easily be a compositor’s or copier’s and not necessarily Shakespeare’s, though it could be. In other words this is the closest we have to Shakespeare’s own hand scratching ink on parchment. Best of all it opens up his thinking about how to develop arguments in verse.
We are allowed in to a drama happening totally in the reader’s head, almost like in the writer’s head, after he got his head around them. This drama is seemingly intentionally personal; and concerns me and you and thou, him and her, and us and them. These personal pronouns are of utmost importance in the syntax of the sonnets. Who, specifically is referred to is irrelevant to the understanding of these sonnets. They make perfect and imperfect sense all on their own. So, who? Who cares?
Shakespeare’s involvement in his Sonnets is proven through his phoneticisation, ie sounding of his syllables, his use of a syllable’s fluidity in expanding or contracting it’s length and/or stress value. Syllables are long or short and in-between, as they are unstressed stressed or somewhere in between. His sense of euphony is astounding and is comparable to the jazz i’m listening to now. (Coltrane).
The only way we can hear Shakespeare in his Sonnets
is below the surface of spelling and punctuation
through his use and interaction with
consonants and vowels,
clusters of sound open or closed or checked,
making the syllables contained within, or
the syllable sound, comprising the word:
the same for words within a phrase, and
the phrasing within and/or often running over
the verse line, which is always 10/11 syllables long.
Lines are frequently end-stopped and often run-on
to the next line to stop boring delivery.
The line is always in war with the sentence,
which can be from 1 to 14 lines long.
Sentence or sentences create a syntactical whole,
within the apparently fixed Sonnet form:
or 14 lines, comprising 3 quatrains
of 4 lines length,
crowned by a
final couplet
of 2 lines.
Each piece of the puzzle exerts an effect on the final outcome of the Sonnet under examination. Word affects word, phrase phrase, line to lines to quatrain, sestet, octet to sentence or sentences that make the 14 lines.
And some of those pieces are invisible in modern editions of Shakespeare’s verse, although they were valid for their author. Their relevance for the argument we will be developing is minimal anyway.
We will discover there was a method to the madness and seeming chaos that reigned in Elizabethan orthography. And much of that is based in turn on the rhetoric any grammar school boy had studied ad nauseam.
Now let’s say you’re a writer wanting to embark on a career as a wordsmith in Elizabethan England.
What are the rules? And more importantly, how do we break them?
Say we have a word in Q1609, let’s say ‘beauties’,
which is made up of a possible 1 to 5 on a scale of poly-syllables used in Q1609 Sonnets.
‘Beauties’ contains 2 syllables without a doubt,
and to the ear starts with a ‘bju’ sound and ends in a ‘teez’ sound.
And you should notice it could never, without severe contortion,
be shortn’d to 1 syllable, or expanded to 3 syllables.
Now let’s take another word like ‘powre’
This monosyllabic word could reasonably be expanded to 2 syllables.
Let’s consider the following line beginning sonnet 150,
the only sonnet in the sequence exhibiting itself as the ‘perfect’ sonnet,
i.e. 14 consecutive end-stopped masculine lines,
arranged by question-mark punctuation after 1st, 2nd quatrains,
and full-stopped after the 3rd quatrain and final couplet.
OH from what powre hast thou this powrefull might,
Is ten mighty syllables laid down in an end-stopped verse line with immediate visual differences for the modern reader. It’s spelling is different, though the words seem to mean the same. It uses an unusual verb form with ‘hast’ and ‘thou’ meaning have and you in its then familiar 2nd person form. And the capitalisation of the first exclamation ‘OH’!
But it’s the scansion that is most relevant to how the line is packaged to be spoken. The meter is iambic pentameter with the odd change in foot that needs to be scanned. the oddness occurs at the first with an exclamation. Immediately the foot is shuffled to stressed/unstressed to resume the regular unstressed-stressed pattern to the end of the line.
We have seven monosyllables leading to and, broken by the semantic or ‘meaning’ break on the 4th syllable, up to the next repetition of the same word in a slightly different form, in the strong 8th and weaker 9th syllables, finishing the line with the strongest and most important 10th syllable, in an incredible display of suiting the word to the action, the action to the word.
You notice in the above line, a word is two things at once: written and spoken. When it is written its spelling may be peculiar or different, when it is spoken even more so. Its meaning can run the scale from fluid and elusive, to fixed and immutable. So the word can be showing off on a written level, and/or/as well on a spoken level.
Speech differs absolutely from verse, as black from white, yet the verse in the Sonnets uses this dichotomy, exploring all its shades of grey throughout its exegesis. Antithesis is the soul of Shakespeare’s wit on all representational levels, internal to external.
These pecularities of rhythm are the writer showing off his rhetorical prowess, involving his entire conception of the graphic or written word, opposing and in conjunction with the utterance of it.
This spelling you might conclude is Shakespeare’s because the compositor would have ruined the metre if he had printed ‘powerfull’ and/or ‘power’.
This idiosyncratic spelling ‘powre’ when printed mostly indicated a monosyllable. And indeed it seems we might say the writer’s intention for both instances was to use 1 and 2 syllables, instead of 2 and 3 syllables.
I say seems because we can never know the writer’s intention and it is a pathetic and intentional fallacy to believe we can.
Yet we can see what range of strategies he used to create his effects.
His verse line dictates 10 or 11 syllables and he complies in iron-clad conviction.
But we have to remember that a word does not live in isolation.
It needs other words to explain itself in relation to something else,
or to develop an extension of its meaning into an idea or concept.
This noun ‘powre’ chosen by the writer is conjectured amongst lowly meaning words like ‘oh from what’ which launch the conjecture, to heighten the adverb and noun ‘powrefull might’ it speculates the person addressed contains in ‘hast thou‘.
Elizabethan orthography was in the process of simultaneously inventing and defining itself through print, in order to standardise itself. That standardisation didn’t happen during Shakespeare’s years of writing, leaving him free to play with words on many different levels, especially contrasting or highlighting the graphic or written, with the phonemic or sounded.
The verse line was found to be an adaptable workhorse for metrical and elocutionary parts to interact and imitate spoken speech and inner thoughts. The whole process starts on the level of the phonemes or smallest units of sound within the syllable. These can be altered by deleting a phoneme or fusing phonemes initially, medially or finally.
Try following it in this ‘perfect’ example of Sonnet form, One Hundred and Fiftieth in the sequence.
i.e. 14 consecutive end-stopped masculine lines,
arranged by question-mark punctuation after 1st, 2nd quatrains,
and full-stopped after the 3rd quatrain and final couplet.
OH from what powre hast thou this powrefull might,
VVith insufficiency my heart to sway,
To make me giue the lie to my true sight,
And swere that brightnesse doth not grace the day?
Whence hast thou this becomming of things il,
That in the very refuse of thy deeds,
There is such strength and warrantise of skill,
That in my minde thy worst all best exceeds?
Who taught me how to make me loue thee more,
The more I heare and see iust cause of hate,
Oh though I loue what others doe abhor,
VVith others thou shouldst not abhor my state.
If thy unworthinesse raisd love in me,
More worthy I to be belou’d of thee.
Anyone notice the 5 syllable ‘insufficiency’ and 4 syllable ‘unworthiness’ and the 3 syllable ‘warrantise’? or the extra e’s on the end of do and hear? Or the i instead of j in just? Or the u instead of v in love? Or the missing e in raisd? Or the 2 V’s forming a capital W? Or the missing l in il? The extra m in becoming?
…sounds like the beginning of a fairytale instead of a series of 154 sonnets. But we don’t know for sure if he intended to write a series of 154 sonnets. I believe he did, but then i would, to support the things I’m about to outline. See circular thinking is so easy to do.
Now this exposition today depends on Helen Vendler’s ‘The Art of Sh’s Sonnets’. We are going to follow her idea that sonnet 1 was deliberately composed late, as a ‘preface’ to the others.
As she says,
‘the sheer abundance of values, images and concepts important in the sequence (ie following on, as preferable to series…and)…the number of significant words brought to our attention.’
She sees this first sonnet as an index. Let’s follow her whim.
Values: (ie what the speaker of the sonnets finds self-evidently good)
Beauty, increase, inheritance, memory, light, abundance, sweetness, freshness, ornament, springtime, tenderness, and the world’s rights.
Images: (ie what we see in our mind’s eye as we read or speak them)
fair creatures, the rose, bright eyes, flame and light, fuel, famine, abundance, foe, ornament, herald, spring, bud, burial, tender churl.
Concepts: (ie the author’s basic thoughts and ideas used to develop his argument, often paired in Sh)!
increase and decrease, ripening and dying;
beauty and immortality versus memory and inheritance;
expansion and contraction;
inner spirit (eyes) and outward show (buds);
self-consumption and dispersal, famine and abundance, hoarding and wasting;
gluttony, debt.
Finally resonating words repeated throughout the sequence:
fair (43x), beauty (52x), time (53x), tender (7x), bear (12x), memory (8x), bright (11x), eyes (51x), self (11x), make (43x), sweet (55x), cruel (8x), world (27x), waste (7x), pity (8x).
Helen includes more words than this list (ripe, heir, feed, light, flame, substance, abundance, foe, fresh, ornament, spring, bud, bury, content, eat, due, grave) and indeed they are repeated but fewer than five times, which doesn’t hold that much resonance other than a vague memory. I would include rose(s) (6x, 7x), die (12x)on this list. Either way Shakespeare is concerned in this sonnet with a profusion of repeated images, values and concepts.
Shakespeare always uses a multi-layered approach to his subject. Here the object of his devotion is a beautiful young man, who is so beautiful, he forces all descriptions of his beauty to be incapable of capturing his beauty, while at the same time his behaviour is not beautiful, ie not good, not kind, not clever! and deserves little praise.
This is the core or basis for the circular, or rather spiral, thinking that the Speaker will explore in Sonnets 1-17. He is convincing the Young man to get married and have children, thereby fulfilling the prophecies predicted in this first sonnet.
What we don’t know yet is that he won’t listen and so the more negative aspects predicted will come true. His tender heir will be thwarted by this tender churl and his all-consuming beauty.
Now a word about reciting and listening to a sonnet. As a thought arises and is developed, allow it to take shape in your mind, and then drop it as the next thought arises. A single line usually contains a thought and even a contradiction of that thought!
The original punctuation of this Sonnet dictates that all 14 lines are actually one sentence! There are 3 uses of the colon (:) to end each quatrain. Modern editors often change either one, two, or all of these colons to a period (.) as befitting modern grammar.
Now this begs the BIG question of whether punctuation, in such an early stage of development was there to help speaking (ie Actors) or reading (Publishers). I take David Crystal as my authority here, backed up with readings of Hart and Puttenham and other contemporaries of Sh writing on orthography:
‘Between 1590 and 1630 it is possible to sense a sea-change in the way people thought of punctuation: early on, the phonetical/elocutional approach was the dominant one; later, the grammatical/semantic approach ruled.’
p.68, Think on my words’ CUP 2008
The idea that punctuation is authorial (i.e. belongs to the person who wrote the sonnets) speaks to me the actor (It may be just wishful thinking from this well-wishing adventurer).
Although many modern scholars poo-poo the idea; claiming the compositors could as easily have changed or inserted it, the phonetics often backs me and Shakespeare up.
Examples will appear as we work through the sequence. In any case it is but one aspect in the foundation of my exploration of these poems.
As Helen reminds us, authorial instruction is embedded. Quatrains cannot be re-ordered at will. The author is instructing you to speak his words and feel his words as you speak them. Categorise, box and pigeon-hole as much as you like if it o’er-flows its gotta go.
She continues, (There is)…
a very permeable osmotic membrane between the compartments holding his seperate languages: pictorial description, philosophical analysis, emblematic application, erotic pleading. Words leak from one compartment into another, rejuvenating the diction.
10 sonnets begin with A.
185 words begin with A
7 sonnets begin with B
213 words begin with B
2 sonnets begin with C
227 words begin with C
1 sonnet begins with D
217 words begin with D
5 sonnets begin with F
188 words begin with F
7 sonnets begin with H
135 words begin with H
12 sonnets begin with I
76 words begin with I
12 sonnets begin with L
140 words begin with L
8 sonnets begin with M
146 words begin with M
6 sonnets begin with N
60 words begin with M
14 sonnets begin with O
78 words begin with O
1 sonnet begins with P
215 words begin with P
14 sonnets begin with S
401 words begin with S
30 sonnets begin with T
208 words begin with T
1 sonnet begins with U
64 words begin with U
23 sonnets begin with W
203 words begin with W
1 sonnet begins with Y
22 words begin with Y
112 words begin with E
211 words begin with G
18 words begin with J
29 words begin with K
13 words begin with Q
156 words begin with R
48 words begin with V
1 words begin with Z
0 words begin with X
which makes a grand total of
154 Sonnets using some
3,239 different individual words
traversing, creating, and conversing within its paradigm.
The next post will introduce us to 33 of these words, all concepts stuffed into the first sonnet, which begins with the letter F.
The word is From and there are 82 examples of that word in the Sonnets.
Lest we forget there are of course 17, 520 words spread over 2155 lines of verse so there is plenty of space for repetition or saying over the old anew.
Funny how the largest number of words begins with S!
The title of this blog is now a call number like they use on the radio.
Ladies and gentlemen welcome to immortality radio here at
TW SOIL AMBH NFC UYPD
that’s
30. 23. 14. 12. 10. 8. 7. 6. 5. 2. 1
on your dial, playing for all eternity!
i am your host Mr WS and wish you the well-wishing adventurer 10 times your best in setting forth!
because…being devil’s advocate is stimulating? The underlying message of the authorship question is that i am a fool for supporting the legacy of the Warwickshire man, Gulielmus Shakespeare of Stratford on Avon.
Yesterday or the day before google tipped me off to Hank Whittemore’s blog, which he’s building in support of his MONUMENT.
Hank claims that the Earl of Southampton is the Earl of Oxford’s son and the Sonnets are that monumental proof. He also states that the Orthodox response to this revelation is fight or flight.
Once again I stand and I’m only going to fight in the sense of drive-by highlighting what i think to be the nonsense in setting up his candidate versus mine .
First we all have to agree as blatant Stratfordians the onus for proof is on them. I don’t care if you’ve signed the declaration of reasonable doubt, I’ll have the law!
History records my guy as receiving a coat of arms, as sharer in the Globe theatre, as a member of the newly formed King’s Men after Elizabeth’s death, and as an honest and witty person. This last speaks to me the most.
For if he is honest, then why should he lie. if he lies, then he is not honest. Some 200 years after his death, honorable men first doubted this honest man, this liar. Ergo it must be someone else and this man merely lies i’ the earth, deservedly denied, rebuked and spat upon.
O rheum-laden corpse, be like the Jew and take thy revenge!
Once more our guy (bloke, chap, fellow) from Stratters is the dupe ,who as always was obviously, certainly, incapable of writing said verbiage along with the delectable quotable snippets and the ‘oh so educated and travelled and mondaine’ characters the wordsmith Shakes-spears created.
Behold a crest!
Lo a motto!
Hark an anagrammed name!
Poof! some air!
The main difference between our approaches is that for me the interfacing with the Sonnets themselves constitutes my Monument. One, or few, or any of these all. Not the identity of its characters, who are but a lyrical fiction, despite their supposed roman a clef suggestiveness. His mistress eye is my mistress eye. Fiction and reality intermixed in modern invention.
My monument is a fleeting vortex of phraseology, that seems to hide the truth in all its beauty and virtue. You probe it, and it probes you revealing an elision here, an ellipsis there, like Bach, inspired by the music of words. Only they claim the inspiration is reserved for an OxfloweBaconian alone.
Although few care, I like to ascend and descend my monument’s scale of being and matter, fixed in time, defiant of time, wholly because it is.
Fixing poetry to historical autobiographical fact seems to me futile, outside of devoted scholarly self-interest. It makes you feel good to know your truth. Your truth excites you and stirs your passions.
The proponents of other shakespeares gather under a banner of reasonable doubt and spout thousands of ‘not enough time in life to spend on refuting it’ heresies and unorthodoxies, in favour of one or more of some 60 odd candidates. The main ones are in descendance of historical incipiency Bacon, Oxford, and Marlowe.
For argument’s sake suppose i do convert to this version of your candidate. How does this knowledge of the real author exactly influence my analysis, reading and performing of them again?
Is a sonnet read by an Oxfordian, Marlovian, Baconian etcetera, per se better than that read by an muddled, stodgy, slow-thinking Stratfordian? Because the OxfloweBaconian knows his reading holds a hint at a far greater mind, the mind of who really was the real creator?
And as always the man who is the dupe, is the land and property loving businessman, the perhaps shareholder of the Globe, the unschooled glovemaker’s son, who finds himself the mid-point of their argument.
They can’t argue without involving him some how, but just how he was involved, and why he did this, they never explicate. Instead reminding you with quote and allusion of just how bad a choice a candidate for Shakespeare, Shakespeare himself actually is.
The Stratfrodians argue in circles btw. As in He loved words that’s why he wrote. Sh. wrote in circles too.
To quote him:
Your monument shall be my gentle verse,
which eyes not yet created shall oer’read,
and tongues to be, your being shall rehearse,
when all the breathers of this world are dead,
you still shall live ( such virtue hath my pen)
where breath most breathes, even in the mouths of men.
Sonnet 81
Trace the path of thought to breath in this quote and you will find you are the beloved. He is writing to you in the guise of an arrogant young nobleman unaffected by his love.
It strikes me as I read yet another ‘true’ replication of the Sonnets, that in their version, the Stratford ignoramus is relegated to the sidelines, as their candidate’s hidden genius acts on the worldly stage, in positions of high power and influence, whilst quietly enriching English literature for us, the time to come.
The time when we Stratfordians wake up and realise the Orthodox Hegemony is stifling true historical research! By god you fiends at the Birthplace Trust, you satanic practioners at the RSC, you bardolatrous swine! You are wrong, so wrong! You smug bastards!
Memorising and performing those words that make up my monument time after time does not make me an authority, it makes me a familiar. Each newly spoken sonnet plants the seed for the next time I say it. His words, my mouth just as he predicted in this sonnet.
Their content is fast becoming second nature and that nature is my higher nature nurtured in the miscreancies of my lower nature, and fashioned by reason and grace into what you will.
If any take offense, it is merely words, and thankfully you are not of such a majesty as could have my head, for the uttering of them.
…of this idiosyncratic idiocy, I wish you all a bardiculous 2009!
Lest we forget, 2009 is the 400th anniversary of both the Sonnets and Pericles in May.
Celebrations will be year long.
NEWS: This site may be off the ether for a few days whilst the old server is being rigo(u)rously renewed by a newer one.
The risibility factor will increase as the technology matches the output. ie videos and photos will begin to claim a space.
Who knows even the Rose theatre sonnet marathon might find its way after a fashion.
Here’s to putting out in 2009!
Now altogether:
should auld acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind,
should auld acquaintance be forgot for the sake of auld lang syne!
Who knows after James was made King in 1603 it’s possible our Will sang that!
Ok it’s belongs to Rabbie Burns but check this:
“Auld Lang Syne” is a Scottish poem written by Robert Burns in 1788 and set to the tune of a traditional folk song (Roud # 6294). It is well known in many English-speaking countries and is often sung to celebrate the start of the new year at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Day.
The song’s (Scots) title may be translated into English literally as “old long since”, or more idiomatically, “long long ago” or “days gone by”. The phrase “Auld Lang Syne” is also used in similar poems by Robert Ayton (1570-1638), Allan Ramsay (1686-1757), and James Watson (1711) as well as older folk songs predating Burns.
Complete lyrics
Burns original Scots verse.
(as Scots speakers would sound)
(minimalist)
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And never brought to mind ?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And days o’ lang syne ?
CHORUS:
For auld lang syne, my jo,
For auld lang syne,
We’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet,
For auld lang syne.
And surely ye’ll be your pint-stowp !
And surely I’ll be mine !
And we’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet,
For auld lang syne.
CHORUS
We twa hae run about the braes,
And pud the gowans fine ;
But we’ve wander’d mony a weary foot,
Sin auld lang syne.
CHORUS
We twa hae paidl’d i’ the burn,
Frae morning sun till dine ;
But seas between us braid hae roar’d
Sin auld lang syne.
CHORUS
And there’s a hand, my trusty fiere !
And gie’s a hand o’ thine !
And we’ll tak a right gude-willy waught,
For auld lang syne.
And for the teuchters:
CHORUS
Should old acquaintance be forgot,
and never brought to mind ?
Should old acquaintance be forgot,
and old times since ?
CHORUS:
For auld lang syne, my dear,
for auld lang syne,
we’ll take a cup of kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.
And surely you’ll buy your pint cup !
And surely I’ll buy mine !
And we’ll take a cup o’ kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.
CHORUS
We two have run about the slopes,
and picked the daisies fine ;
But we’ve wandered many a weary foot,
since auld lang syne.
CHORUS
We two have paddled in the stream,
from morning sun till dine ;
But seas between us broad have roared
since auld lang syne.
CHORUS
And there’s a hand my trusty friend !
And give us a hand o’ thine !
And we’ll take a right good-will draught,
for auld lang syne.
CHORUS
Dedicated to thae auld yins who taught me this and first-footing when I was a wee bairn. Also my faither distilled a love of a dram in me that still matches the tweed of my jacket.
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