PRESIDENT'S CORNER - April 22, 2016
Shakespeare Edition!
Tomorrow, April 23, is the 400th anniversary of the death, at age 52, of England’s greatest and most often produced dramatist, William Shakespeare (1564-1616) . Ironically, the great Miguel Cervantes (1547-1616), author of Don Quixote de la Mancha, died the day before—today—also in 1616. So, as I used to delight in telling my theater students, if Shakespeare had never lived, it would still have been a golden age of drama in England (Jonson, Marlowe, Beaumont, Fletcher, Kyd, Middleton) and Spain (de Vega, Calderon, de Rueda, Encino, Molina).
Did you know about the fiercely debated controversy over WHO really wrote Shakespeare’s plays? Scholars are divided between those known as Stratfordians, people who accept that it was Willy himself, and the Oxfordians, those who swear that this glove maker’s son from Stratford, with his grade school education, could not possibly have written all those plays about kings, political intrigue, etc. Edward de Vere, 17th earl of Oxford, is the most likely candidate, according to the Oxfordians. He was educated, a member of the queen’s court with access to all that higher English society had to offer. There is not a shred of real evidence one way or another! It’s a great mystery.
Spring Term is under way…
I see lots of people enjoying classes. You might still be able to sign up! Not much else to report to you today, so let’s just move right on to some poetry of the Bard…
SONNET 18
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st;
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
Sonnet 73
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire
Consumed with that which it was nourish’d by.
This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.
SONNET 116
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no; it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests, and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
[Poems by William Shakespeare]
Scribblings by Jim Held, President