I Love Shakespeare

…whoever loved but not at first sight?
whoever wrote but not for themself?
whoever thought but not to extend that thought into the world?

how worldly we are in 21stC literary endeavours. Our knowledge informed by myriad sources on a sliding scale from Pre-Christian to Pre-Raphaelite.

Our philosophies shaped by thinkers whose philosophies in turn became histories. Think Freud or Marx and the world is divided and ratified from the personal to the cultural. Yet both theories, like authors and G-d, are dead.

where is the personal agency that started this post?
Its influences and purpose? Writing may be the most magical of the arts and the author’s mind and language is its straight-jacket.

Coldly, calculatedly, inculcated with a past spitting words into a future which is past as soon as its written. Once bitten, twice shy.

Convention holds a form: an empty form filled only by the echo of a shared past.

Delight my ears with a thrush’s wings beating branches back revealing a densely hidden nest. And all might be forgotten.

Reminded the words are constructs and all dies. The flight into imagination and association and soon to be forgotten memories succeeds where mere words, grammars or logics fail. Read the gap. Mind the gap.

The gap gapes ope for all men.

It’s almost become commonplace to say that if Sh were still alive he would be a scriptwriter in Hollywood. Or a DJ.

Despite the hours sucked up by our Will, YLS doesn’t sit around and watch Sh all day. He does watch HBO and is a massive fan of Ari Gold, the agent of agents.

For those that never heard of Entourage, it is centred around a group of guys in Hollywood: Vinnie, future moviestar; his brother Drama established TV actor; then there’s Eric, Vinnie’s best friend and manager; and finally Turtle, the go-fer of the group who when not working is bonging and obsessing about getting laid.

Their Agent is Ari Gold. Ari has no sacred cows or taboos in any shape or form. His purpose is to get his clients the job, by any means. Hollywood is filled with competing power agents pushing clients, and chasing scripts which are bought, or optioned, or passed around as useless.

The potential star actors read these scripts (or their manager does) and if they think it’s right for them they phone the agent to see if there is a studio involved and a director attached. And if any more future or established stars are on the project.

Now the differences between the Elizabethan Theatre world are enormous but the drive to be there in the first place isn’t. Sh and his contemporaries had to join or be accepted into a group of Players. Easier said than done.

Amateur players had existed since the Middle Ages in the form of Guilds, who were cast and performed in the Mystery and Morality plays, that lead to the formation of Public Theatres.

Professional players had existed since Henry 8th and his peers started their own private acting companies for their own entertainment. But then in Elizabeth’s reign one leader of an Earl’s company decided to open the first public theatre in England in Shoreditch, London.

Within a year a second had opened right next door to it. Add to this the Inn courtyards and other spaces that had served public theatre until that point and a fledgling Hollywood system begins.

Actors need scripts. Scripts need writers. Writers need to be paid, and so the Producer is born. A producer needs to make sure his script is first created and then sold to the right actors. And so the role of agent is born.

The super agent of Elizabethan times is the one who left us what is popularly known as his ‘diaries’. Phillip Henslowe started out as a dyer, moved into brothels and other louche forms of entertainments, and finally legitimised himself with Theatres. Notably the Rose theatre on the Bankside.

Phillip’s daughter married Edward Alleyne who was destined to be the first Elizabethan superstar actor. Edward finally made his fortune out of showbusiness and set up Dulwich College as part of his legitimising process.

Phillip’s diary is actually his account book covering about five years in the mid 1590’s. This account book is the inside source of practically everything we know about Elizabethan Theatre.

However it is not everything.

St Paul’s in the background. Willl in the foreground on the Bankside, on the Globe Piazza.

Yesterday I came across this brilliant website based on Van Gogh’s letters. Now i love Vincent as much as our Will, just in a different way. I even have voice-overed Vincent’s Brother Theo in English at the Van Gogh Huis in Zundert. But hey, enough about me…

…well let me tell you a story about Vincent van gogh, he loved colour and he let it show…

Song text by Jonathan Richman. Who can forget Don Maclean with his song ’starry starry night’?

And finally Bob Dylan. All these artists songs can be heard on this blog.

So today i’d like to show how Van Gogh was a Stratfordian.

Shakespeare — who is as mysterious as he? — his language and his way of doing things are surely the equal of any brush trembling with fever and emotion. But one has to learn to read, as one has to learn to see and learn to live.

Reminds me of sonnet 24:
Mine eye hath played the painter and hath stell’d
Thy beauty’s form in table of my heart.

and the final couplet of sonnet 23:
O learn to read what silent love hath writ,
To hear with eyes belongs to love’s fine wit.

Here’s Vincent comparing Sh to others, in a letter to his brother Theo September, 1880:

I took up the study of this writer a long time ago now. It’s as beautiful as Rembrandt. Shakespeare is to Charles Dickens or to V. Hugo what Ruisdael is to Daubigny, and Rembrandt to Millet.

A year later another letter to Theo in Dutch:

The struggle with nature sometimes resembles what Shakespeare calls ‘Taming the shrew’ (i.e. to conquer the opposition through perseverance, willy-nilly). In many things, but more particularly in drawing, I think that delving deeply into something is better than letting it go.

Then again about portraiture to Anthon Rappard in 1881:

The portrait of Shakespeare by Menzel is unknown to me; I’d very much like to see how the one lion interpreted the other. For Menzel’s work has some resemblance to Shakespeare’s in that it LIVES, so.

For the curious you can see what Vincent missed with Menzel’s Sh portrait here.

Vincent writing to his brother in 1889 thanking him for buying him a Shakespeare edition:

I thank you also very cordially for the Shakespeare. It will help me not to forget the little English I know – but above all it’s so beautiful.
I’ve begun to read the series I know the least well, which before, being distracted by something else or not having the time it was impossible for me to read, the series of the kings. I’ve already read Richard II, Henry IV and half of Henry V. I read without reflecting on whether the ideas of the people of that time are the same as ours, or what becomes of them when one places them face to face with republican or socialist beliefs &c. But what touches me in it, as in the work of certain novelists of our time, is that the voices of these people, which in Shakespeare’s case reach us from a distance of several centuries, don’t appear unknown to us. It’s so alive that one thinks one knows them and sees it.

Finally Vincent writing to his brother and sister in 1889:

I enjoyed myself very much yesterday reading Measure for measure. Then I read Henry VIII, in which there are such beautiful passages, like the one about Buckingham, and Wolsey’s words after his downfall. I think I’m lucky to be able to read or re-read this at my leisure,

Ah yes the quotes:
Shakespeare’s Henry viii (1623), act 2, scene 1, is a ‘mirror for magistrates’. While Henry viii tries to overcome the problems created by his divorce, the fallen characters comment on their own ruin. Thus Henry, Duke of Buckingham and Earl of Stafford (1454-1483), is accused of high treason and sentenced to death. On the scaffold he addresses the crowd that has quickly gathered to witness his execution:

‘You few that lov’d me,
And dare be bold to weep for Buckingham,
His noble friends and fellows, whom to leave
Is only bitter to him, only dying;
Go with me like good angels to my end,
And as the long divorce of steel falls on me,
Make of your prayers one sweet sacrifice
And lift my soul to heaven. Lead on a’ God’s name.’

The manipulative Cardinal Wolsey (1471-1530), Archbishop of York, loses his wealth and power when his crimes are revealed. He forfeits his royal protection and is attacked from all sides. Full of remorse, Wolsey addresses his servant with great emotion (act 3, scene 2):

‘And when I am forgotten, as I shall be,
And sleep in dull cold marble, where no mention
Of me more must be heard of, say I taught thee;
Say Wolsey, that once trod the ways of glory,
And sounded all the depths and shoals of honour,
Found thee a way (out of his wrack) to rise in …
Cromwell, I charge thee, fling away ambition,
By that sin fell the angels; how can man then,
The image of his maker, hope to win by it?
Love thyself last, cherish those hearts that hate thee;
Corruption wins not more than honesty.’

See Henry viii. Ed. R.A. Foakes. 3th ed. London 1957, pp. 55, 124.

Ah Reggie Foakes, another day another blog!