William Shakespeare, The Bard of Avon

 High-Priest and Arch Druid of the English Language

 

Like as the waves make toward the pebbled shore

So do our minutes hasten to their end

Each changing place with that which goes before

In sequential toil all forwards do contend

Nativity once in the main of light

Crawls to maturity wherewith being crowned

Crooked eclipses against its glory fight

And Time, that gave the gift, doth now its gift confound

Time doth place the flourish set on youth

Time delves the paralells in Beauty’s brow

Time feeds on the rarities of nature’s truth

And nothing stands but for its scythe to mow

 

 I was in the tenth grade the first time I read a play by William Shakespeare. It was the first quarter of the school year, we read Romeo and Juliet aloud; and watched the film adaptation by Franco Zifirelli, in my English class…I had seen it before.

I stopped attending high school the following quarter of that year, I was fifteen years old and had not been in the habit of participating class unless the subject interested me; most did not, though Shakespeare did.

Rather than concentrating on the same work my classmates were doing, I would sit off to the side and quietly read whatever was on my list, usually science fiction or fantasy literature, though it might be something classical: history, metaphysics or mythology… and then there was Shakespeare.

If Chaucer is the father of the English language, and Boswell the midwife of the modern era, then Shakespeare is the high priest or arch-druid.

In my final quarter of high school English, I took a reading role; my allocution and diction were spot on, and I enjoyed the way the girls looked at me as I read the lines.

Shakespeare had gravitas, I found that by engaging his work, being able to speak to it at a party or any other social setting lent me some gravitas, it was confidence building.

I discovered how the mention of Shakespeare generates a sense of mystery in a conversation; it is like opening a door to another dimension, it is like walking into the Twilight Zone, the dream of nymphs on a midsummer night.

His work touches on every aspect of the human person, he speaks to our faults and foibles, to the ridiculousness of human nature and how it plays itself out on the stage of life. You can fool anyone into believing that you yourself are a serious intellectual if you can quote a bit of Shakespear’s verse, the more you carry on about his life and work, if you can speak to his relationship with Christopher Marlowe, or dare to ask the question of whether The Bard of Avon ever existed at all.

Between the ages of fifteen and twenty-one I read many of his plays; some, like Hamlet and Mac Beth I would read over and over again, committing long tracks of them to memory.

Later in life, after college and after completing my first graduate degree, I steeped myself in his writing again, carefully reading every word he ever wrote, as well as commentaries on his prose and verse, I particularly enjoyed Isaac Asimov’s Complete Guide to his work, which included a thorough exegeses of the philosophies contained therein.

Let me say this about the man, Shakespeare was a profound existentialist. There is more to his greatness than the beauty of his poetry, his compositions set him apart from everyone, both in his day and over time. In his writing we encounter a distillation of the human essence, of grief and longing, the joy of mercy and all of the comedy that attends us as we pursue the satisfaction of our desires.

Shakespeare put into English the undoing of things, the unmaking of fate, he introduced us to the unreal, and that is why we refer to him as The Bard, the arch-druid, the high priest of our pigeon tongue.

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,

Creeps in its petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time.

And all our yesterdays are but lighted fools,

on the way to dusty death.

 

Out…out brief candle,

For life is but a poor player,

Who struts and frets its hour on the stage,

And then is heard no more.

It is a tale told by an idiot,

Full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.