I Love Shakespeare

… Rupert Graves the Poet Laureate who in 1916 eulogised Shakespeare who had died 300 years before, as “the master of the human song”.

he is a freedom chain, smiting the fetters of slavery making the high seaways safe and free…Nature’s poet who never feared his work should fall to fashion’s craze nor pedant’s folly nor devestator, not terror nor wonder…And (oh beauteous lines by Rupert )…oft, as the eyes of a lion in a brake, His presence hath startled me…in austere shapes of beauty lurking, beautiful for beauty’s sake;… the unseen Will stirring with kindling aim the dark fecundity of Being.

Rupert’s world blew apart with WW1 and Art hailed the perceiving and not the receiving of reality. Cezanne had put the viewer in the view and in turn the Cubists recognised that the human is non-exceptional to reality. Post modernism developed and swallowed Art and left us signifying everything and believing in nothing. The Post-modern world belongs to and is defined by the advancements in the New Technologies, and Science, and especially now, the Mass Media and Entertainment.

1.

My name is William S. I sound the way I do because I am an Englishman born to Scots parents in Lancashire, England. My family emigrated to Toronto, Canada, when I was age 16. Currently I am a 20 year resident in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. I started my acting career in 1988 in the Stalhouderij Theatre and have since graduated to bit and bigger bit parts in little known or seen corporate video, demo voice-overs, obscure first films of first time directors and the occasional TV spot. Every friday and saturday night these days I am the unusual bilingual M.C. (host or compere) at the Comedy Club on the Max Eeuweplein in Amsterdam. But is this who I am?

here and now… am I really just an anti-representational, uncertain, interactive, stringily-genetic strain of being who believes we are all of us merely geometric solids derived from and driven by a single unifying ultimate and utterly final Law of Action?, as Albert Einstein argued in his Unified Field Theory. Are we endlessly contemporary? Is Woody Allen’s instant orgasm machine already a post-modern hyper-reality? Is Cyberia just around the corner for all of us?

My mottos for life, and neither are easy, are two-fold:

Fight gravity, not war.
“Love everything that breathes”.

It’s refreshing to know the shallows and depths in Love remain the same throughout the ages and across all cultures. I want you to hear him speak, whoever he was who wrote these 154 Sonnets for his private friends.

I want to patchwork together a character quilt of Sh. and wrap him warmly in your imagination. I want to create a peculiar brand of fiction sewing together truths and realities, lies and realities and certain immutable human laws and realities. Moreover if I can coax you into reciting a sonnet of Will`s to a lover or dear friend I think our world will be a better place. The immortality promised in the Sonnets depends on those who went before, those who are now, and those who will be.

He was such a one.

You may be such a one.

I feel I am one.

2.
William Sh. is best remembered as a writer. A writer at best is an artist. The artist feeds on his own mind and passions to prove to himself the something else that he creates. That thing, his art, is hard to define; it even works with this same principle in mind. A great artist gives from himself what is himself. The true artist and his work are inseparable. This is not to say an artist must share his darkest secrets in his work, but he cannot subdue himself so far as to be totally hidden behind his work. The artist also cannot work without a body of art from past to present, with which to compare and contrast his own art. An artist is usually recognisable through his style. Others copy that style, diluting its art for mass consumption, whereupon it becomes a trend. Trends die as new styles are born.

Shakespeare embodies his Age yet he is always held up for all time. At worst he is severed from his contemporaries as if he lived and worked in an unassailable tower of glory attuned only to cosmic frequencies and universal emanations. Simply I say he was a man, take him for that. What kind of man was he? Not I, nor you, nor a billion experts can ever really know, unless someone finds his diary. His sonnets are often read as a diary. Others shun this idea as ridiculous and say they were simple conventional love poems.

“…Let them say more that like of hearsay well;
I will not praise that purpose not to sell…” Q21.

If, and there is much virtue and better mileage in your if, all the probabilities of the different scenarios of Sh. life and works were added together they could not possibly fit into one life. The real-life Sh. appears to be clear and straightforward. Historians after all know more about Sh. and his works than any other Elizabethan poet or dramatist! The voice in the sonnets is Sh. voice. Sh. is the author and whoever he was, he spoke his sonnets aloud. When I first read the sonnets, these lines leapt out at me:

“Your monument shall be my gentle verse,
Which eyes not yet created shall o’er-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, ev’n in the mouths of men.” Q81.

That meant my mouth, and logically your mouth too. These and similar lines made me catch my breath and almost fitted my eyes from their spheres knowing that I too was a part of that immortal prediction. The poet was speaking through me! Here lies my fascination with these poems.

I determined then to learn these poems and revive them in my way. My research led me to the University of Amsterdam library where I became a bookworm in the Elizabethan section. Strange dry patches and irritations appeared on my fingers. The cause was perhaps the dust of books unopened for many a year. Facsimiles of works by Greene and Nashe and Spenser fed my appetite for contemporary experience with the poet. The Elizabethan mind was voracious in wanting words on how to do it: from fencing to Conny-catching. The con artist had plenty of marks (connies) with the gullibility of new wealth in London town. There were hordes of great pretenders, a plethora of wannabees and stacks of country-cousin arrivals with heavy purses waiting to be lifted.

One story told of a highwayman who stopped a troupe of actors and forced them to play for him something weighty. They complied and were duly rewarded. This same highwayman was a fan of Burbage and Shakespeare and in my crooked imagination no doubt sponsored many an urchin’s entrance to the penny pit perhaps for the nefarious purpose of picking a pocket or two. Violence and crime was a way of life and convicted felons were expected to make a clean sweep before they met their maker. This they did in grand style, killing the calf on the scaffolding, which minutes later would be shadowing their feet. Killing the calf meant making a big speech on their crimes or a repentance of such with all the gory details left in. The crowds loved it.

No wonder then that thousands of more astute and keener minds than my own have debated and commented on the contextual and possible autobiographical fruits of the sonnets. Naturally where biography is concerned the romantic fictions of Shakespearean Orthodoxy confuse me and the legal and class-oriented cynicism of Shakespearean detractors puzzle me; yet the possible and probable psychological, philosophical and physical realities of Shakespeare the man continually fascinate me. If only the Chandos portrait could speak. Sorry, like Polonius I digress, but I swear I will be faithful.

Obviously I was not the first one to enter this mansion, but I did not care; he was there, an unruly spirit, alone and angry, and full of love. A man with whom I felt I could indulge and identify. The master-mistress of our passions had words for those who would pluck him bare:

“…a true soul
When most impeached stands least in thy control…” Q125.

Personally, I neither advocate nor represent with total conviction any of the candidates for Mr W.H., the friend, the Dark Lady, or the Rival Poet (all characters in the sonnet sequence). However I accept no rivals: not Bacons’ nor Oxfords’ nor any of the host of poets who others would have usurp the natural genius of that outcast, in all his humanity: William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon.

The big split currently playing itself out on the Sh. scholarship fringe is whether William Shakespeare, of Stratford upon Avon in Warwickshire fits the psychological profile of the Universal genius displayed in his Canon of 37 accepted plays and 3 major pieces of poetry or not. By the way, spelling was not fixed in his time, so all the nouns of all the other candidates are subject to variation. There is no doubt, we all agree that they are attributed to a William Shake-speare. However the biographical evidence collected around and about William Shagsbirds of Stratford does not necessarily directly connect him with writing the Canon. The inference is all.
3.

Any person studying Sh. is dependent on the skill and authority of Scholars who collectively agree and disagree on the contents of Sh. Canon. And horribly of late in whether it was him or not. O horror that academe has succumbed to such twisted first principles! Horror, horror, horror!
Everyone has a theory. Even worse, most are leaky theories channeled from the fast running waters of assumption and prejudice. Even and especially mine.
The man from Stratford has to my understanding mostly either been under or over-estimated, yet never been treated as a full normal human being of his time, living under difficult circumstances, creating his life’s work, this collection of artefacts which is his writing. I never felt I was getting the full story where Sh. was concerned. I was fed the stories at school of him poaching rabbits and deer, killing calves and holding horses. There were his business dealings, his neglected wife and family, his rich then poor father, his coat of arms and title, his scrawly signatures, and his will leaving that second-best bed. Then someone set up a monument at Stratford, then his whole Folio series started and then he ascended to the status of demi-god. Then he bored young minds to death.

Sometimes I think the man who is all men for all time really was just an uneducated misogynist small-town hick with a ready wit, a huge talent for words, and a smile that wouldn’t quit. It may well seem to be true as the detractors say that Shakespeare was a doggerel-spewing heretic and deer-hunter, who desperately fled Stratford to avoid a flogging by Lousy Lucy in front of his new wife’s eyes. Alternatively maybe she, the older fading siren, lured him into getting her pregnant twice, one year apart.
Or maybe as others conjecture he came clean out of the closet joining his haberdasher brother Gilbert in the gay Sh. annals. The Ivory-tower Shakespeare merchants would have us believe that he set off for London one balmy day in may, full of dreams and cares, yet missing no flowery outgrowth along the way.

Some say that Shaksper as he appears on the record had to have been a charlatan, foisting some other’s works as his own. Some say that Shake-speare as he tells us of himself in his plays and poetic works had to have been of noble birth, ashamed of his own immortality. Some say that Shakespeare was a conspiracy of gentlemen, and others say a more specific gentleman, and one even says he was really a nun!

Yet some say his learning and acquaintance was only possible if the artist experienced the noble and knowledgeable life he was describing in many of his plays. Some comment on his lack of intellectual interests and vulgar money grabbing being out of character for our greatest teacher of kings. Further his knowledge of subjects such as law, medicine, maritime affairs, war, falconry, botany etcetera are to some astounding, to others the consequence of the application of wisdom and natural insight, and to others still sheer bloody ignorance.

“…But these particulars are not my measure,
all these I better in one general best….“ Q91.

4.

The Sonnets of William Sh. based on the Thomas Thorpe Quarto version of 1609 are one hell of a time-consuming yet fascinating and rewarding hobby. I felt the need as an actor to deepen my knowledge of his work, but the quagmire of opinion regarding his Complete Works seemed a daunting task for one man alone. So I searched and found, or thought I found, a back door to that mansion of poetry. I discovered the poet in a room on his own bent over his verse, intent on making it immortal.

24.4.91. I didn’t remember it was his birthday the day before until it hit me in actor’s flash that it was and as an actor I thought, ‘I should know more about Shakespeare than I do’. So armed with a book coupon I received for acting in Nancy Gould’s directing class at the Amsterdam Filmakademie, I bought an English-Dutch book of sonnets. Basically this was a compilation of other scholars’ works translated and introduced by W. van Elden. Oh boy, I was far from being alone with Shake-speare. I found to my enlightenment and horror thousands of seriously poetic travellers and potty tourists had sifted the beach and left it littered with commentaries.

“…But since your worth-wide as the ocean is,
The humble as the proudest sail doth bear,
My saucy bark, inferior far to his…” Q80.

…was yet to be launched. I stood and sat aghast looking at the flotsam and jetsam of the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth century criticism against poems

“…Whose action is no stronger than a flower.
O! how shall summer’s honey breath hold out…” Q65.

Then I thought what is a sonnet? If I tripped over one, would I recognise it? The introduction kindly gave me an explanation. It talked of metre (or rhythm of the verse, the basic ta-tum, so many to a line), and rhyme scheme (abab cdcd efef gg), and enjambement (a spillover of poetry from one line to another forcing a pause in reciting ) and even gave examples of these things. Therefore I bit and I chewed, and eventually gained the rudimentary knowledge necessary to recognizing poetic devices, style and convention, which attracted me then about as much as tax forms do.

But now I can deliver an example of enjambement.

“…Sweet thief, whence didst thou steal thy sweet that smells,
If not from my love’s breath? The purple pride…” Q99.

…is ten ta-tums stuffed with alliteration (repetition of consonant sounds) and assonance (an internal rhyming of vowel sounds) with a plosive pride after the enjambement. A typically Shakespearean sonnet-line consists of five ta-tums (iambic pentameter), and a typical sonnet contains fourteen lines, of three quatrains of four lines and a final couplet of two lines.

However, my untypical Sweet thief example is drawn from a fifteen line sonnet, ninety-ninth in a series of one hundred and fifty four, written by a poet who cared less what others thought of his style.

“…But since he died, and poets better prove,
Theirs for their style I’ll read, his for his love…” Q32.

Occasional weekend and week long workshops and a year at the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford helped to tie up the knowledge of how literary convention and form combine with the practical skill of dramatic representation. But I, maybe as you, was unmoved.

“…I grant, sweet love, thy lovely argument
Deserves the travail of a worthier pen…” Q79.

“…Nay, if you read this line, remember not
the hand that writ it…” Q71.

…nor the mind that hung the ‘not’ at the end of the line leading to another enjambement. Of course he was not the only sonneteer of the age in which he lived. He did not then possess the knowledge that the abab cdcd efef gg riming scheme would later be attributed the epithet, “Shakespearean Sonnet”. How could he so challenge the established order of the Elizabethan or English sonnet as to usurp it with his name?

“…My name be buried where my body is,
And live no more to shame nor me nor you…” Q81.

I wanted to know more about this poet, the man that went by the name of William Shake-speare in the years of our Lord, 1564-1616. His poems are so heartfelt that each one seemed to demand a real circumstance for its expression.

6.

The closest thing we have to a description of William Shakespeare’s appearance is the original colouring of the monument set up in Stratford after his death. His eyes were coloured light hazel and his hair and beard were auburn. Further he wore a scarlet doublet, a loose black gown without sleeves, a plain band around the neck and white wrist bands. (Personally I feel the Chandos portrait hanging in the National Gallery in London and purportedly painted by Richard Burbage is the best likeness we have of Shakespeare).

His contemporaries invariably described the character and disposition of William Shakespeare of Stratford upon Avon as honest, open and free. A man possessed ‘of integrity, ingenuousness, amiability and a lively wit. A man combining rare industry, a sedulous attention to business, an unusual skill in the direction of his affairs, of the right personal ambition, of admirable judgement; in other words a natural gentleman.’