Today we celebrate the Immortal Bard, William Shakespeare of Avon, yet to be posthumously knighted. Although born three days earlier, 26 April 1564 is the date of his official baptismal certificate. The Bard of Avon followed, and soon eclipsed, the greatest playwright of that era, Christopher Marlowe. Under a backdrop of intense de-Catholicization and rising Puritanism, Shakespeare’s genius was his ability to unoffensively discuss current affairs affecting Londoners by synthesizing them with historic events. Hence, he successfully navigated the Scylla and Charybdis of his time, the royal Privy Council and the theater-detesting elders of the City of London. And all the while he earned the loyalty of Queen Elizabeth who enjoyed his works.
Some of his contemporaries did not have “Gentle Will’s” ability to avoid the hazards and pitfalls of Elizabethan England, such as violence, poverty, or censorship. Arch-Protestant Christopher Marlowe was killed either over an unpaid debt, the results of a drunken melee, or by a Catholic assassin; brilliant wordsmith Ben Jonson (and zealous English soldier) was imprisoned twice; once for manslaughter and another for a play which offended Queen Elizabeth’s so-called interrogator.
Another of Shakespeare’s great talents was his word-smithing, inventing new words and names to suit the play euphonically or metaphorically. As Clio2 recently pointed out in her excellent 23 April diary, the Bard of Avon invented approximately 1,700 words, as well as introducing new names into the English language.
Shakespeare had no higher education, unlike Christopher Marlowe who graduated Cambridge University. There is no historical evidence that Shakespeare travelled any farther than Wales (possibly once) or north towards the English-Scottish border. He may have never even stepped aboard a maritime vessel. Yet he successfully wrote captivating plays taking place all over the world like The Merchant of Venice and Othello. His secret? In addition to having mastered the Greek classics, “Gentle Will” learned from the globe-trotting English sailors and soldiers frequenting London. He listened to them. Shakespeare also absorbed everything his senses could allow whenever his troupe performed at the royal palaces, carefully examining the exotic exhibitions and visual oddities from Africa, India, the Middle East, Russia, and Asia, all gifted to the monarchy and serving as a museum to him.
His “Swan song” was The Tempest (written 1610-11) which returned his audience to the classical Greek-style play whereby all of the events occur in one day. Happily, there is neither violence nor death in The Tempest, unlike earlier works such as Titus Andronicus or Coriolanus, where Londoners enjoyed well-choreographed battles or executions replete with gory amputations, hacked limbs, and fake blood squirting through the air.
Retired, he described himself as in "perfect health" when he drafted his will. But the Bard of Avon would journey to "the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns" just one month later on 23 April 1616 at the age of 52, cause undetermined.
As we return to the 21st century, let us now address an elderly orange-hued individual who, as the Immortal Bard might say, blights our eyes and befouls the air. #45 is a bizarre melange of at least seven Shakespearean characters, to wit: he is power-mad like the regicidal MacBeth; wrathful like Coriolanus (but without the valorous battle scars, just bone spurs); possessed of the overall grotesqueness of Caliban; thoroughly imbued with the vileness of Richard III and lust of Iago; and carrying the girth and cowardice of gluttonous Falstaff while being mortally afflicted with the senility of King Lear.
Sources:
Shakespeare of London, Marchette Chute
1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, James Shapiro
Ben Jonson: Five Plays, edited by G.A. Wilkes
The Genius of the Early English Theater, edited by Sylvan Burnet, Morton Berman, William Burto
Shakespeare After All, Marjorie Garber