Shakespeare’s metrical art…

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!