Wanted Shakespeare…dead or alive?

Wanted.
Shakespeare.
Dead?
Or
Alive?

Baffling sequence of terminology spewed from a scholar’s lips and mind, which brings us to presentism. No capital required, it’s pretentious enough without.

Keyser Sose type babbling of your humble author. 154 sonnets, 2155 lines, 17,520 words…

James Joyce’s voice intones on your internal tympani fom the past,
‘the sonnets are the happy hunting ground of those who have lost the balance of their minds’.

James Joyce is of course a Stratfordian Shapespherean by default. He drew his own portrait of the artist as a young man and his Ulysses nails his will to the wall.

People used to listen to theatre. That’s why we have the word audience. Audio = I hear.
The actors in the first public theatres were surrounded by the audience. The poor people who paid the least were standing the closest to the stage and the rich were up high in the boxes sheltered from the elements and the riff-raff.

Plays were events people came to listen to and view, Plays were not highly regarded pieces of literature for scholars and professors. The performance of the play was considered the First Publication. The Second Publication was the printed one.

The plays were written for a socially mixed audience. From the servants to the masters, plays were popular entertainment for a paying audience. They were the movies of their time, only now we are spectators, and we used to be an audience.

Do you know who Shakespeare is? I mean who he really is? (stepping into role of text book orthodox scholar) He is the most famous playwright on the planet and has been for over 400 years. He’s the man from Stratford on Avon, who died on the same date he was born.

HE QUOTES FROM SH WORKS.
‘Shall I?’ No please don’t.
‘to be or not to be, is that a question?
So Shakespeare was Shakespeare.
Or was he?
Some say, he was one of the big 3.
The big 3?

WASn’t HE really Edward de Vere, 17th earl of Oxford, courtier, poet and patron, child or childhood friend of Queen Elizabeth?

WAS HE Christopher Marlowe, same age and background as Shakespeare, brilliant young playwright writing masterpiece after masterpiece, whilst working for Elizabeth’s spymaster Walsingham?

OR WAS HE Francis Bacon, philosopher, natural scientist, all-round genius?

OR MAYBE he was Shakespeare himself, making others believe that he wasn’t really himself.

But what would be the motive for writing all these plays,
if it wasn’t to cash in on them while they were hot?
All this naturally leads to conspiracy theories and ends in paranoia?

Who benefits? Cui Bono? (Cui gives a shit)?
But on whose authority am I telling you all this?
Is this worth listening to? What is this?
The key word here is ‘this’
Simply put, this is this.
This interaction, between my keyboard and your eyes and ears.

˜The worth of that is that which it contains,
and that is this, and this with thee remains.
Q74

(This Sonnet Book)
This is poetry, this is literature, this is this audience,
this is the bridge between minds and hearts.
This can be the feelings at a family bbq, shindig, party:
love, hatred, jealousy, envy, the whole range of human emotions.
This is the magic that holds an audience captive and on the edge of their seats.
This is that and that is this.
Simple.

As a young lad from the north east of England, my first encounter with Shakespeare at Grammar School gave me a sore wrist; from filling notebooks with plots, sub-plots, characters and themes.˜A Comedy of Errors” and ˜Twelfth Night”and that old Scottish play.

My first connection with Shakespeare’s dramatic power was in the classroom. Our teacher, we called ˜treasure” coz she had a sunken chest, (I was 13)! and she allowed me and Josephine Cunliffe to improvise, playing Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. We had our classmates, Treasure and ourselves in stitches. The seed was sown.

Shakespeare just gets better as you get older. Life experience is what he’s all about, whether you play his Kings or his fools. Circumstance is created by the genre of the piece, and a story, or rather interweaving stories that mirror one another are revealed in ‘this two hours traffic of our stage’.

That quote was from the prologue, a sonnet that starts Romeo and Juliet. Can you imagine Hamlet in two hours? What a whirlwind that would be. And which version? It’s the same with King Lear? I’m always astounded by how brilliant the Elizabethan actors were at memorizing lines and performing it once or twice, before moving on to another 3 plays before the end of the week say.

Actually I think it’s impossible. Nice experiment for the Original Shakespeare Company to do a week of six different plays at the New Globe perhaps?
Records show us that Elizabethan actors might do four or five different plays in a week. There was no run of six weeks, extending to decennia if popular enough. No Mousetrap, except in Hamlet.

How can you put on a full-scale production, if the actors only get their lines and not even the whole play? That was the Standard Operating Procedure. Otherwise someone had to copy out whole plays for each actor etc. so no here’s your part and the last sentence or half a sentence before you come in. If you were lucky you might find a stray stage-direction, in which case look behind you and run!

Plays did stay popular for a decade and more, and would be reworked or rewritten, like a sequel, to suit popular taste. And the actors presumably would have new bits to learn and/or dredge their memories of former glories when they were so much younger.

There must have been an informal Elizabethan BAFTAS, just without the film and television. At least an old boy’s club, a queen’s club, a gossip section? But hell that’s all lost to history.