Sunday 3 February 2013

manager of mirth or as you like it

The Bard, William Shakespeare, had such a circumspect command of English grammar (and other languages besides) as to be able to depart significantly from convention and intersperse his plays with what is regarded now as natural and essential parts of speech but created or rather committed to paper transformations of verbs in to noun counterparts and vice-versa and coined the antithesis for many words. The action to manage was in common parlance but not so a manager; there was hearten but no dishearten, the same for inaudible—not to mention inventive and intuitive words for the nonce, like swagger and belongings. One convention Shakespeare was unable to buck, however, was the Elizabethan proscription again having women on the stage and all roles were played by male actors. Often in the stage directions, one can find the abbreviation, “Dr.A.G.,” dressed as a girl, in other words, when these characters were cued. It was not until the latter half of the nineteenth century that the term drag (and the counterpart for a cross-dressing female, drab—dressed as a boy) appeared again in print, but maybe the idea can be traced by to the playwright as well.

Tuesday 19 April 2011

bardolatry

In recognition of the upcoming anniversary of the birth (extrapolated, guessed, from his documented baptism) and death some fifty-one years later of William Shakespeare, I would like to point readers to the excellent series of postings, recently concluded, from the Big Think, that not only keep the debate of authorship alive, as well as other aspects of the cult of personality, but go further to explore how prodigy and poetry challenge and strengthen one's own mental capacities and how the timing of the playwright came as the English language was still malleable and under development. These two grammars, Elizabethan and complex, grew together and the body of work culturally crystallized English literary tradition more so than king, country and might. No one wants to entertain that those plays and sonnets germinated as some unsourced leavings and improvisation of the age and the focus on the historical identity of William Shakespeare has never taken away from the genius and richness of his drama, no matter if revised and polished over the years--idealized like the author--or were gifted complete like some religious acheiropoieta, but it strikes me as perfect that Shakespeare identity is really only knowable through his works, just like his characters, who no matter how real or contrived, are fleshed out with just a few lines and stage-directions but each one is much more than some playful but scant vocabulary.