On this day in 1616 died a businessman, a broker, a grain hoarder and sharp dealer in it during a time of shortage, a moneylender who would sue people and risk destroying them over a petty sum owed a man who owned, among other things, fractional interest in two theaters and who was, also, a demonstrably lousy husband. And not a single person who knew him seems to have known him as anything but that because not a single person noted his passing as anything but a provincial businessman whose will mentions no books, by anyone, including him, mentions no plays or poems or manuscripts. His will which was written by a lawyer or clerk or scribe was signed with three very shaky, variously spelled spellings of his name, not one of them or any of the others spelled or likely pronounced as its universally spelled and pronounced today. Those three signatures and three others, all on business papers having nothing, whatsoever to do with literature, are the only examples of his ever having taken up a pen which has ever been found.
As Mark Twain and others have pointed out, for seven years no one seems to have found the death of the Stratford businessman or his life's work to have been worth remarking on. There were no grief struck poetic cenotaphs published on his passing, no regrets that the greatest writer in the English language had passed from among them, nothing until the publication of the First Folio which is, in fact, the only association of literary works with the Stratford businessman to have appeared anywhere up to that time. After that the poems about the Sweet Swan of Avon etc. start to flow but not before. I will point out, again, that the First Folio seems to have been largely motivated by Ben Jonson, who had previously produced his work in a folio, and that at the time the First Folio was assembled and put together that Jonson was working for the most learned Englishman of his time, Francis Bacon, as Bacon had been removed from high office and disgraced by some formidable and dangerous political enemies who would certainly have used an association with theater works or anything else to further persecute him. Jonson was working with Bacon on the publication of his life's work in anticipation of his death. And, as has been pointed out, Ben Jonson could be one of the most sarcastic poets in the language, much of what he wrote had to be taken with that in mind.
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In light of the Startford lender's record of vindictively pursuing debts owed to him, it's curious to consider the record of his lawsuits in light of the advocacy of Portia in The Merchant of Venice. Not to mention the character of the learned Portia in relation to the Stratford man's relationship with his wife and daughters, who he had abandonned for long periods, apparently leaving them in financial distress as his wife had to borrow money at one point. Money which the, then rich Stratford businessman refused to repay. And you should also consider the scholarly Helen in All's Well That Ends Well, Miranda in The Tempest, the scheming amoral but clearly literate Lady MacBeth the many literate and erudite women in the plays with his attitude toward his wife and the fact that his two daughter were not educated. One daughter, like his parents, signed documents with a mark, a squiggle, his more accomplished daughter, Susanna, signed her name in a painfully drawn series of letters, hardly made uniformly and who by the only first-hand evidence we have was unable to distinguish her own husband's, Dr, John Hall's, handwriting from that of another man. Apparently we are supposed to imagine that a man who left his wife and two daughters in a state of illiteracy invented many well educated, even intellectually brilliant women characters in plays.
I will point out that Francis Bacon's mother, Ann Cooke Bacon, was a brilliant classical scholar who could write in Latin and Greek at a high enough level that it impressed some of the great scholars of her day. Of course she could write in English. Perhaps also relevant to the topic of this post, she knew Italian and French. She could also write learnedly on theology and to translate works. The Stratford man's mother, like his father, his wife and one of his daughter had to sign things with a mark instead of even drawn letters. I strongly suspect that whatever learning by way of using a pen Susanna Shakspere Hall had was under the guidance of her obviously literate and learned husband and not her so often absentee father. From his signatures, it's clear he could hardly hold a pen himself. I've looked at a lot of old signatures written with the kinds of pens used at the time have have not seen any by an author which was as incompetently drawn and inconsistently spelled as his.
So, on today, millions around the world will commemorate the death of the Stratford businessman in a way that no one in his day who actually knew the guy ever did, they do it because in the centuries after his death he was turned from a businessman holding a sack into a plaster figure, a new now pen-holding, improved and beautified monument, a - well, Mark Twain, as so often, said it best
The bust, too--there in the Stratford Church. The precious bust, the priceless bust, the calm bust, the serene bust, the emotionless bust, with the dandy moustache, and the putty face, unseamed of care--that face which has looked passionlessly down upon the awed pilgrim for a hundred and fifty years and will still look down upon the awed pilgrim three hundred more, with the deep, deep, deep, subtle, subtle, subtle, expression of a bladder.
There, I think that's enough to get the old goat going.
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