*well aware, of course, that we don’t know Shakespeare’s exact date of birth. Today’s as good as any other, I guess.
Subject to the above, Shakespeare would have hit 455 today. Rather more reliably, WordPress tells me that The Boar’s Head is three today, my first post coinciding with the Shakespeare400 celebrations. They seem half a lifetime away – remember them?
A few facts and figures from the blog:
Let there be copious amounts of cakes and ale …
Wishing Will ‘happy birthday‘ today would cause an outcry from people who know me and my pedantic ways … Yes, yes, yes, baptised on 26 April, no real proof of birthday, and all that. Get on with it!
Putting Shakespeare in students’ mouths is often as much fun as feeding a baby – the faces they pull!
A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Act I
Shakespeare’s language lives in the mouth, not the ears or eyes. It needs to be tasted, and one of the advantages of living alone is that I can pace up and down my flat’s lengthy corridor reading tricky lines out loud, or just playing with the inflections of favourites:
I wasted time and now doth time waste me.
I WASTED time and NOW doth time waste me.
I wasted TIME and now doth TIME waste ME.
And so on, like the celebrity skit in the BBC’s Shakespeare400 celebration. You get the picture.
If it needs to be tasted, it also needs, I suppose, to be CHEWED. That’s what we often do in the classroom …
Claiming ‘Shakespeare was this or that’, or worse, ‘Shakespeare did not write the plays’, does NOT entitle you to a mic-drop. It just shows your intellectual bankruptcy …
I’ve written elsewhere about the Rally of Revenge – about my unease that once you abandon all faith in ‘due process‘ or ‘justice‘ (either earthly or divine); once you understand that inequality is endemic, you have nothing left to lose – if you are already losing – so keep raising the stakes until someone has to leave the game. If it’s uncomfortable, perhaps it’s also sometimes necessary, to affect change of a fundamentally broken system. You might not see the benefits yourself. Hey, if you have to leave the game, then so be it: losing can become preferable to playing along, eventually.
There are always other games, other paths, whilst we are still alive – experience has taught me that, even if Shakespeare hasn’t.
And that’s where I find myself, professionally, this weekend. Approaching change, but ready for it, and maybe, in some ways, relieved that an unhappy stasis has broken. There are always other games.
There is a third way – for revenge – I’ve not written about before. The poet George Herbert (1593-1633) suggested that:
Living well is the best revenge.
And I’ll embrace and adapt that, in a ‘standing on the shoulders of giants‘ sense.
Living well equals happiness. LAUGHTER is the best revenge.
Today, I intend to laugh at someone. Long, and hard.
Let’s get moving, shall we?
Continue reading “Shakespeare’s Sister says: ‘YOU’RE HISTORY!’ …”
So. I owe the inspiration for this post – wanting to do something to celebrate the birthday – to ohforamuseofire, who herself got the questions from Folger Shakespeare Library project. I wonder how, if at all, my answers might change over the next few years, as the PonyTail Shakespeare project progresses …
What does Shakespeare mean to you?
Did anyone else watch the BBC’s RSC Live show last night?
I’ve never really engaged with the question of whether or not Shakespeare actually authored the plays attributed to him – until this last week. Sure, I knew there were various claimants, but I shrugged ‘the authorship question’ off as unimportant. That I can no longer do. In fact, ‘a mote it is to trouble the mind’s eye’ …
The run-up to the BIG anniversary has been an eye-opener.
I like an insane conspiracy theory as much as the next person. Ask the class who I recently introduced to the suggestion that the Apollo landings were staged in Area 51. That truly was a lesson that people will remember in years to come: it resulted in conversations – and arguments – at home, debate in other subjects (especially Physics, apparently), and with one pupil being literally dragged away from her research homework to get to bed (as her mum told me in the local shop).
The Boar's Head, Eastcheap 