Shakespeare Has Me Bamboozled. In More Ways than Before.

    Most of my life Shakespeare has been a thing. In literature, entertainment, culture, influence, classes, testing, grades, references, confusion, bewilderment of the English language, education, laughs, joys, pains, all the things. Sometimes I thought he was not so big of a thing, but I think he was.

    However, now I have reasons to think that Billy has been just a ruse. Enter Christopher Marlowe. 

    Yeah. Yea, me acquieseth beyond the pail. Whatever that means.

    Translation, please.

    Join the club.

    Harold Bloom died around 2016 or so, eminent scholar of Yale; I checked out around four books by him from the library. I think that I read each one! Not a complete insufferable blow hard like some college professors I have known, even in the flesh, Bloom railed on and on and anon about Shakespeare.

    The pure quintessence of genius! Oh, the beauty and the glory of the Bard!

    Ehhhhh... 

    In my years of Utah, there was always talk of the Shakespeare Festival in Cedar City. A whole festival of that guy of King James, or maybe Queen Elizabeth England. What merriments and delights! Or as my father would pronounce: Macbeth is so bloody.

    That must be good, right? Bloody impressive, it must needs be.

    I watched a modern version of Julius Caesar at the main arts hall at Brigham Young Provo, what was called the DFAC. Like we in the military call a cafeteria, n'est pa? The something arts center, where artists of stage and sound, and even animation, television, and film would unite in long hours of craft and ribaldry. Okay, less of the latter, it is a conservative religious school.

    I saw my fellow students dash with their derring-do of sword play, swashbuckling, and gallantry. Two arms! Oh, Maid Marian, thy brow and breast bequeath such magnanimity! And other such ejaculations of feathery verbiage.

    Alas.

    Shakespeare.

    Aye, the voracity of loquaciousness! I suggested The Comedy of Errors for my student teaching at Brown County High School in Indiana. I had enjoyed it in Provo, therefore its spirit carried on back with me to the Hoosier heartland. And thus it goes in rounds and cycles, circles and pyramidean pernambules. Full of sound and fury, signifying... Nada? No, not Hemingway! Shakespeare. Get hold of your masters, you fool and buffoon. Borderline jackanape.

    Around 2020, during the doldrums or the earth pains of the Corona virus Wuhan flu, I checked out an alleged historically accurate and factual tome all about Shakespeare. The historical context, the peoples, the places, the educations and all the intrigues of the real surroundings of Shakespeare. His world, so massive yet dainty. I almost finished it, but I had to leave the country so I turned it in. The library likes its property back, thank you very much. They forgave me the cost of another book that I lost during that time period.

    So, I was becoming more of a Shakespeare, or shall I say Shakespearean connoiseur. Or something albeit fancier, by the by.

    Or so me thought.

    Then, perhaps and perchance, I stumbled or alighted upon a different tome, a scholarly work, all about Christopher Marlow being the real bard, and old Willy Billy Nilly being nothing but a blooming newt and a dunce, who barely neerly evinced a mere one stanza to his name!

    Blast all the rot, I say! What and wot where and who? Or whom?

    A rose by any other name would stank as much!

    Who are we? Who are these so called scholars writing such anti-elegiac diatribes?

    Who can guess what that all means?

    Not I, sez I.

    Go figger.

    Are you feeling my dilemma here? Is this mysterious puzzled enigma wrapped in an indelicate smorgasbord pupusa-like falafelly enchilada baked half-broiled scone anything to be apprehended?

    Where does this leave us?

    Where are we now?

    Are the heavens and the gases of the ether spheres still the same?

    What, or what, have we become?

    Madder than an hatter, I cannot reconcile both letters and history. What is it to be?

    The jury is hung, the jury is out, the jury be hanged, let the jury decide once and for all, in all the times and epochs, for nothing at all.

    Sure, it does not bother me.

    Not. One. Bit. Not even a farthing. Or a doublet. Nor a shilling, e'en three pence.

    Give me your quid, right fast, I am running out of ole United Kingdome coins and currencies, blight me down and starch my everlasting hide for a buggy down pollywomp!

    But, well, where must I end this?

    At least we have huge money endowments at over-endowed elitespheres like the Ivy League and Oxford and Cambridge.

    Long live the polemic and its life draining and energy eviscerating polemicness! 

    Long live the queen, the (I mean a) real life Williams Shakespeare once preached to me in the folds of theatre and art back in 1994. 

    A real English gent, he was. He grew up there, at least maybe he should know.

    Goo night, my beloved and wretched audiences.

    Alas, New York, or York, Pennsylvania, I hardly knew thee well.