anonymous and other tosh

One of the many reasons for loving Shakespeare is that he helps you win trivia contests!

At our church weekend away a couple weeks ago, the inevitable happened, and a Shakespeare related question came up. I didn't even get to answer it, another member of our team jumped in swiftly to answer, "what 2011 film questioned the authorship of Shakespeare's plays?"

Anonymous played with the ever-popular idea that it was Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, and not William Shakespeare who penned the plays, that theory and many others consistently kept alive by the intellectual snobbery of academics through the centuries, agog that a small-town boy like Billy, who, as far as we know, never travelled beyond England, could possibly have written novels of such depth, political and social intrigue, set in far and fantastical locations, having nothing more than a primary school level education.

Well, beyond the fact that primary school level education for William involved Greek, Latin, maths, history, English, poetry etc etc etc, and that the whole world was opening up to the British mind during the Elizabethan 'Golden Age', it has surely always been true that imagination is a boundless facility, crossing every boundary of human experience, reaching into the limitless and grasping at the divine.

Ie, pretty sure Bill could figure out how to represent life in Verona, having never been there, especially as, conveniently, everyone in his Verona has an English tongue in an English head!

I can of course, like many others, credit William with the expansion of my imaginative and artistic horizons over the years, and I can certainly understand why an artist more educated than I by age 11 (and I have a post-graduate for heaven's sake!) was quite capable of spinning the majestic prosody of the Shakespearian canon.

And rather than snob about that, I want to encourage it! If imagination is not sharpened and encouraged, we never shall see again the like of William's capability. Our literature will grow poorer and narrower as our minds do.

Every school child should be encouraged to imagine fantastic worlds, create in their minds a full gamut of personalities, thus increasing their ability to empathise, analyse and strategise, three skills that will improve their life immeasurably.

So, I thumb my nose at Anonymous as an idea, and all the others who push Kit Marlowe, Francis Bacon, Edward de Vere, and indeed, any other candidate, not only because they have a ridiculously small island to stand on historically, but because I think every child, guided and encouraged, can unleash their own Shakespeare within.

So get to it! Read the Bard! And have a bash at your own iambic pentameter!

insomnia

I totally shouldn't be blogging right now... It's 2:50am on a Sunday, I've gotta get to church in like, 7 hours, which means I should be 'up' in at least 6, BUT I JUST CAN'T SLEEP.

So, I turn to you, dear readers for the succour of an audience to bombard (like man-flu, my affliction is comforted by sharing the pain as much as possible with the strong and healthy around me, leeching their joy in an effort to bolster my delusion that I suffer more than you all).

I wonder if Will ever found himself like this, at 3am, hunched over a manuscript, criss-crossing, re-scanning and screwing up parchment. Or did the words just pour from him like coke from a can that's been shaken repeatedly and then kicked around the floor.

For that is what I feel like on the inside as a writer. Effervescent, ephemeral words, buzzing constantly through my mind, combining, collapsing, sparking, a never-ending fountain of sweet, sticky, 'devil's urine', as the Black Death of Coca Cola Amatil is fondly known in my household.

Where Billy and I differ strongly is in the ability to externalise this fountain, allow the gases to escape, and explode into searing verse.

I've definitely got it covered on the 'shaken up and kicked around' front. That feels like the theme of my life at the moment, which is what inevitably leads to the heinously self-indulgent practise of a writer writing about writing (so 1st yr Uni!).

But I'm not so strong in the "pour words onto the page" area at the moment... Slash ever.

I can dribble to my hearts content when the point is meaningless (cue the drivel you're saturated with on this blog!), but as soon as I am striving to get a serious message across in a way that will be evaluated and judged by others... Eek!! You can't see me for the dust!

Maybe Wills developed a serious case of medieval writer's block when asked to confront the political or social issues of his day. Maybe the idea of moving from comedy to politics was a leetle scary for him as well... Or maybe not! Maybe he'd been biding his time, manoeuvring into a perfect position from which to honour some rulers and blast others...

One lesson I have learned well from Billy boy though is, "say it slant". You want to address the hot-bed of Elizabethan politics in one of the most influential cities of Western civilisation? Write a play about a long-dead hunchback with a a thirst for blood. Or the one about a bunch of Scottish lords who get drunk and stab each other.

Slide your message into the periphery while you're entertaining them in the bullseye.

I did finally make the big leap forward a few months ago in my book project when I realised I should just say it slant. The form I was trying to speak in was strangling me even further than my already debilitated sense of self had done the job, and I was too mentally suffocated to accomplish anything.

So I sat down and wrote it all as letters to my sister instead, and that seemed to work.

Now if only I could get to sleep so that someday soon I can get to work!!