A Little to Do About Something

     I have been writing a piece about my recent trip back home to Virginia, more specifically about visiting the family home place.  Suffice to say that it is much longer than I had intended and seeing that I am already behind on my blog posting, I will need to save it for a later post.

    Last night I attended Bare Theatre’s production of  William Shakespeare’s play “Much Ado About Nothing”.  Let me say once again how much enjoyed that production and what a wonderful job cast and crew had done.  I do not profess to be a Shakespeare expert by any means.  I can only seem to remember a paltry few of the great quotes, I have to used online resources to decipher about 30% of the language when I read the text, and usually have to read over the text several time just to catch the basic themes.  Having said that, there is nothing quite like a well performed Shakespeare play.  I admit that he used the same formula in quite a number of his plays, the same characters seem to appear in a lot of the plays with different names, and the Elizabethan english and be cumbersome at times, but then you hit those moments, those magical lyrical laden lines, then you realize why he is referred to as the greatest playwright in the history of Western civilization.  No other writer have ever been so successful in blending poetry and prose.  No other writer captures the human condition, good and bad, and shines such a magnificent light even in the darkest corners of our collective soul.  

    There is a new movie coming out about Shakespeare called “Anonymous” which focus on the school of thought that there was no “William Shakespeare” in respect to that the common uneducated man from Stratford-upon-Avon, did not write the plays, but someone else did.  (I don’t know who the movie focuses on, but I believe such candidates to be Edmund deVere, Philip Sydney, and Sir Henry Neville to name a few).  I do not subscribe to this school of thought, and when I see the question “How could this    person who was not a gentlemen and who did not have any collegiate schooling write such amazing plays and sonnets?” I simply think he was just who he was supposed to be.  His talent transcended his station, just like a child musical prodigy can perform pieces of music that a person with a lesser degree of talent, yet years ahead  in training cannot.  Outside of the Bible, I do not know of any collected works which like a prism, breaks the single beam of the human condition and breaks out the spectrum of all it’s parts.  

     It is late, I need to hit the hay.  I am sure I will give more of my opinions concerning Shakespeare in future posts.