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Will Shakespeare I Am Shocked, Sickened And Shocked, I Tell You! I Just Might Throw Up!
Will Shakespeare, I am shocked . . . sickened and shocked, I tell you! I just might throw up, so disturbing are these facts that I, like some freshman in a college library, have uncovered. I can scarcely bring myself to state this:
They tell me you published thirty-eight (38) plays during your career.
They tell me (and here my stomach churns and rolls, and the taste of bile ascends into my throat) that four (4!) were original compositions. All the thirty-four (34) others have been traced to sources from which you derived characters, plots, and scenes.
Quick! Get me a sick-bag, I am about to barf!
The first poet of whom I ever read (in 1965, after I had just turned seven years old), A. E., the Irish poet whose mundane name was George Russell, wrote a long poem, in blank verse, about the Dark Lady who appears in your sonnets. Having been recently enlightened by a credentialed literary expert on the subject of originality, I was about to post a poem castigating A. E., lot of good that it would do, for borrowing the Dark Lady rather than looking to his own experience of life for some dramatic "Woebeme." And then, today I learn---today I sustain this enormously disturbing existential and philosophic SHOCK arising from---the fact that you, Will Shakespeare, attributed author of my favorite vixen, the vivacious Juliet, and my favorite villian, the fabulously vexed Richard III, borrowed these, and others, from all sorts of sources that you encountered during your literary preparation for playwrighting.
And here is a sad, but deliciously, sad irony. During my sophomore year in high school, in the last term (or quarter, as they called it), I was enrolled in a class entitled "Research And Writing," taught by Mr. M---, a formidable scholar. In this class, we were taught the fundamentals and fine points of citation---footnotes, bibliographies, Latin abbreviations; and were expected to write final papers (50% of the grade) with a certain number of footnotes to a certain number of texts (I forget the exact requirement). I wrote my paper on the sources of your play, Richard III, which I loved---although the scholars whose work I research had long ago proved that the play is propogandist slander based upon Tudor propoganda cobbled together by Siir Thomas More (who was deprived of his head by Henry the Eighth) and Polydore Vergil, in order to prop up the unstable claims of Henry Tudor, who ruled as Henry the Seventh, after murdering Richard the Third on Bosworth Field: claims which Henry's own legal experts, including some judges he himself had appointed, had declared tenuous at best and patently false at worst. I knew, just weeks before I turned sixteen (and already hot with adolescent desires, but that's another story), that at least one of your plays had been sourced not from your own life experience (oh, woebeme) or your own creative impulses, but from political propoganda.
Oh my Gawd. Oh my dear Gawd.
Four (4) out of thirty-eight (38)? That means ten and a half percent of your plays were original creations. Eighty-nine and a half percent of them are borrowings---unoriginated compositions that are just too damned intertextual.
A E I O U a real apology. (And yes, the first part of that phrase is---gasp! choke!---borrowed from Jim Joyce's novel, the great and inimitable Ulysses (a title, a concept, and a plot structure that he borrowed . . . I might add . . . from Homer through Vergil; oh Gawd, there they go again).
Starward
