All Hail Edward de Vere
This is the year to read some of Shakespeare. What set me off was a book that insisted Shakespeare was some one else - namely Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, doomed to anonymity by the exigencies of his time, and mainly the Elizabethan era. He was a member of the court and was unloading on his kind. Unthinkable. Hence the invention of Shakespeare, the most unlikely of great writers seeing that he was a very good merchant but unlettered. While Shakespeare- Shakespeare knows it all.
I am reading from an old quarto publication, handsomely illustrated, that spells the playwrights name Shakspeare. It has a lovely feel to it and the drawings make it a pleasure ride. In school Shakespeare was made a chore. No-one liked the plays- they were something to be endured. You learnt them off by heart and regurgitated them in exams. He was out of date and the images were convoluted. Who cared if the plays were soap operas of the time?
Strangely, for me, knowing that Shakespeare could well have been someone else- some one who wasn't a hick from the sticks - has opened his work to me. I see them with a new eye. Admittedly, I am 50 years older than I was a school, but its more than that. Somehow the plays seem much more likely.
So it was with Troilus and Cressida, the first I read in this new light. I read it just after George Johnstone's "Clean Straw For Nothing", where Meredith's unfaithful wife is called Cressida. I see now why.
The story is derived, as much of Shakespeare's, from other sources- in this case, Chaucer. In the interstices of Troy, Troilus and Cressida are lovers. Here a transaction the like of which is still practised today, the Trojans swap Cressida for Antenor, a captured Trojan commander. Vowing fidelity, over she goes, only to prove herself unfaithful. So it goes.
It's a nice story, beautifully told, far beyond the reach of an untutored merchant. The playwright's words are so precise, to my mind he reads better on page than on stage. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful- a love affair intermingled with war, the characters revealed by their words.
Like Troilus, bemoaning the fact their being in love, he has lost the stomach for war: "I am weaker than a woman's tear" he says to Cressida's uncle Pandarus (see panderer)declaiming at the end: "O world! world! world! thus is the poor agent despied.
Wonderful. lovely stuff. All hail Edward de
I am reading from an old quarto publication, handsomely illustrated, that spells the playwrights name Shakspeare. It has a lovely feel to it and the drawings make it a pleasure ride. In school Shakespeare was made a chore. No-one liked the plays- they were something to be endured. You learnt them off by heart and regurgitated them in exams. He was out of date and the images were convoluted. Who cared if the plays were soap operas of the time?
Strangely, for me, knowing that Shakespeare could well have been someone else- some one who wasn't a hick from the sticks - has opened his work to me. I see them with a new eye. Admittedly, I am 50 years older than I was a school, but its more than that. Somehow the plays seem much more likely.
So it was with Troilus and Cressida, the first I read in this new light. I read it just after George Johnstone's "Clean Straw For Nothing", where Meredith's unfaithful wife is called Cressida. I see now why.
The story is derived, as much of Shakespeare's, from other sources- in this case, Chaucer. In the interstices of Troy, Troilus and Cressida are lovers. Here a transaction the like of which is still practised today, the Trojans swap Cressida for Antenor, a captured Trojan commander. Vowing fidelity, over she goes, only to prove herself unfaithful. So it goes.
It's a nice story, beautifully told, far beyond the reach of an untutored merchant. The playwright's words are so precise, to my mind he reads better on page than on stage. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful- a love affair intermingled with war, the characters revealed by their words.
Like Troilus, bemoaning the fact their being in love, he has lost the stomach for war: "I am weaker than a woman's tear" he says to Cressida's uncle Pandarus (see panderer)declaiming at the end: "O world! world! world! thus is the poor agent despied.
Wonderful. lovely stuff. All hail Edward de
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