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Introduction
How to Cheat Death Without Cryogenics
The buzz around
Shakespeare these days is whether Shakespeare was
Shakespeare, or Francis Bacon, the courtier Edward de Verre,
the alchemist John Dee, or the playwright Christopher
Marlowe in disguise after feigning death in a bar fight so
he could quietly disappear, beating John le Carré at
the game of spycraft by a neat four centuries. The debate is
whether Shakespeare, a simple country bumpkin, was capable
of writing the intricate poetry and politically engaged
plays which carry his name. Commonly, the theories presume
that Shakespeare was paid to act the part of the playwright,
fronting manuscripts written by a noble and educated man who
had to protect himself by remaining anonymous, because only
an educated nobleman could possibly have written such great,
sly, and soaring things.
Sure. In towns like
Alexis Creek, out in British Columbia's isolated Chilcotin
Plateau, in which poverty and the legacy of
largely-successful attempts to destroy native languages have
produced a generation of children barely able to deal with
linguistic subtlety, a lot of instructional time is spent
deciphering Shakespeare's deliberately obscured and
antiquated vocabulary As quite a number of teachers have put
it to me, "It's a rare child who comes through the school
system caring anything at all for poetry."
Will Shakespeare
would have been on the side of those poor kids. After all,
his Globe Theatre was in the bad part of town. Women weren't
allowed to work there, because while the plays were
unfolding -- while Hamlet, for instance, was teasing his
girlfriend with talk of oral sex (it's in the text) --
prostitutes worked the crowd standing in the pit, while
other women were shouldering through, selling dried fish,
just as teenage girls today will sell you popcorn slathered
with butter down at the Cineplex before any Sunday matinee;
while Romeo was falling in love, pickpockets were plying
their trade in the crowd. It was a circus.
Shakespeare's plays
weren't exactly politically correct, either: boys dressed
themselves as girls, girls dressed as boys, men loved men,
women loved women (and even a donkey), sexual innuendo
abounded, and anything went which the mind could imagine --
a far cry from the paragon of aesthetic conservatism and
social responsibility which Shakespeare has become today, as
he is used to teach the young how plotting and symbolism are
an elite, intellectual game. No wonder people are turning to
Francis Bacon: the simplest detective story is an
improvement on this schlocky romance.
But forget about
Bacon. After four centuries, let's talk about Will, as a
man. In his sonnets, Will was worried that the beauty of his
young lover would disappear with age and death, even though
the love he felt for him was eternal. Time was the enemy:
elite, disdainful time. Will proposed to fight Time by
distilling his lover down to perfume. Will's perfume bottles
are his sonnets; the perfume is his verse, held in solution
by his rhymes. Will wrote that in the future (where we live
now) men will only need to read his sonnets to experience
his love, to become a body housing the soul of a lover made
eternal in his magical engines. It was not exactly a
metaphor.
But then,
literature had not exactly been invented yet. Talk of souls
hadn't become New Age yet, or even Pentecostal. When
Elizabeth consulted her court astrologer John Dee on how to
best counter the advancing Spanish Armada, he advised her,
and her admiral, Sir Francis Drake, to refrain from pursuit,
because the Spanish fleet would be broken up by storm. When
a storm did destroy the Armada, many courtiers were
convinced that Dee had conjured it. A reader curious to know
what John Dee's spell might have been like, needs only to
crack open Shakespeare's The Tempest: John Dee is the
Duke who conjures up a storm, which rescues him from his
island, which...well, you see. It is all gently mocking and
delightful, the kind of thing you can laugh about with a
lover, after drinking way too much peapod wine.
Except it was very,
very real. In his sonnets, Shakespeare didn't play the
20th Century game of irony. Shakespeare's sonnets
are revered today as the greatest poem sequence in the
world, and, indeed, a good two dozen of them are among the
most moving poems ever written. On the other hand, another
two dozen are among the most convoluted. I swear that
Shakespeare crumpled them up in a ball and tossed them into
his wastepaper basket -- and was appalled after someone
rescued them, smoothed them out, and published them because
they came from the Great Man. Please. We have been reading
the things for 400 years, or, more likely, not. It ends
here. Now.
I have taken the
cap off of the sonnets. I have taken the bone cloak of death
off of the man who bottled them. Here he is, in a series of
notes scribbled to his lovers after lovemaking, or while
waiting for them when they're hours late, even while they're
cheating on him, separately and together, in a ménage
a trois which in the end goes very sour.
Will pleads,
taunts, caresses, and rages. He writes in ecstasy and even
after his love has turned to hate, self-pity, and despair.
If some of these poems are shocking, so was Shakespeare --
but that shocking man holds the creative soul of our
language. If we don't get to know him, we'll never get it
right, and will never write with his creativity again.
Like Shakespeare's,
my versions mock, taunt, jibe, mourn, celebrate, whisper,
cajole, caress, laugh, and even, sometimes, spit. I have
removed the magical field of Shakespeare's rhyme, because I
believed he used it as a cloaking device to protect himself
from the censors, and because at times it broke his message.
I have included Shakespeare's versions, and most of the
enthusiasm of their original punctuation, so you can read
between the originals and their reincarnations, to share the
process of liberation and incarnation at the heart of this
book. Shakespeare really did say all this stuff, although at
times only slyly and out of the side of his mouth. I have
put the sonnets into the present day, because as readers we
deserve the same ability to stage one of Shakespeare's
performances as a stage director does, setting Hamlet
in 19th Century Russia or late 20th Century New York,
London, Vancouver, or Berlin The alternative, to read
Shakespeare reverentially, in period dress, denies
Shakespeare's one truth: his lovers will live in
us.
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Sample
Poem
16
- Time is Stalin. There's only
one way to really
- outlive the bastard: join the
underground. So,
- why don't you? What good will
my words do
- in the end, if you don't
memorize the Kama Sutra?
- You've spent the last few years
happily teasing
- and being teased, but there are
many girls
- who'd be thrilled to spread
their legs for you
- and have you pump them up. Your
sons
- would be more like you than any
picture
- I can paint with words. These
are just trinkets.
- Hang them above your bed. Burn
them in a candle.
- Circle them in, with salt. Rip
them up. Only life
- can resist death, and nothing
that anyone says
- or does, whether acted with the
best of intentions
- or wrapped up with a bow at the
Christmas
- office party can make you live,
like a baby in a petrie dish,
- in the eyes of men. You can't
turn lead into gold, either,
- and no-one has ever shown that
Elvis lives.
- Don't just sit there. Get out
of the house!
- Call some young thing up. Your
only chance
- of survival lies in how good
you are in bed.
-
-
- XVI
-
- But wherefore do not you a
mightier way
- Make war upon this bloody
tyrant, Time?
- And fortify your self in your
decay
- With means more blessed than my
barren rhyme?
- Now stand you on the top of
happy hours,
- And many maiden gardens, yet
unset,
- With virtuous wish would bear
you living flowers,
- Much liker than your painted
counterfeit:
- So should the lines of life
that life repair,
- Which this, Time's pencil, or
my pupil pen,
- Neither in inward worth nor
outward fair,
- Can make you live your self in
eyes of men.
- To give away yourself, keeps
yourself still,
- And you must live, drawn by
your own sweet skill.
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