TWO YOUNG, CONTEMPORARY ELIZABETHAN SCHOLARS MIX LOVE, POETRY AND IMAGINING SHAKESPEARE’S LIFE
‘If all the world and love were young.’
“His range within the storytelling was incomparable, like in Henry Four Part One, with Falstaff’s sharp-witted, but base ranting one minute and Hotspur’s lofty poetry the next.”
After they dressed, Mark walked to the window and peered out. “We’re on the right path. Will sure as hell didn’t hang around Stratford helping his father, living the married life and suddenly show up in London in fifteen-ninety-one, or whenever, and start writing masterpieces. I guess I already said that. I read somewhere, maybe Malcolm Gladwell, that it takes most people, even the experts, ten-thousand hours of practice to become fully proficient at something.”
“That argues for Will to have been writing most of his life, and very good material in his teen years to accomplish what he did in his twenties. The tutoring job, where he really learns life and culture from sophisticated patrons is key. We’ll get him married, and in a few years off with the Queen’s Men. Churchill said, ‘History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.’ Maybe our story won’t be Churchillian, but we’re writing it.”
“Hey, let’s go to your place and get your stuff. ‘Come live with me and be my love.’ ”
“Oh, oh, ‘A honey tongue, a heart of gall, is fancy’s spring, but sorrow’s fall.’ I’ll pay half the rent. Anyway, thank you for offering to rescue me from the student hostel; and I like your closet space.”
“To avoid the sorrows, be sure to leave me at least two feet. The closet was the bait.”
“Raleigh was clever, but speaking of bait wasn’t Donne’s reply to the shepherd brilliant? ‘And there the enamored fish will stay,’ ”
“And, ‘Will amorously to thee swim.’ What a great metaphorical satirist.”
“Maybe the best line was, ‘That fish that is not catched thereby, Alas, wiser far than I.’ Are we always going to be throwing quotes back and forth. I like it, but.”
“After six-seven years of poetry saturation to the brim, no wonder we’re doing it. With other people it would be showing off. It’s fun with you, friendly competition.”
“Don’t you get discouraged when I always win?”
“Dream on, freshy” and he tried to grab her; but she eluded him, darted to the other side of the bed, stood with a catch-me-if-you-can grin, and another kind of game was on.”
The next day Mark showed Kate pages he had written about Shakespeare working for his father and the town lawyer, plus a few scenes from a summer tutoring job at a Lord’s house. “You anticipated my suggestion, and I like it. I like this very much, Shakespeare at seventeen, under sophisticated guidance, maturing, emerging and becoming a literary man. I’m working on his interaction with the Lord’s children.”
(This brief vignettte was excerpted from a longer scene from an original work of fiction, “Discovering Will’s Lost Years and the Marlowe-Shakespeare Lost Play: Uncovering 16th and 21st-Century Mystery Treachery and Obsession.”
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