BRUSHING UP MY SHAKESPEARE

It is said that one of the cultural calamities of the Ancient World was the destruction by fire of the great Library of Alexandria. Some blame Julius Caesar, others the emperor Aurelian, while guilt is also apportioned to the Theodosian Decrees (which outlawed paganism) and later the Muslim conquest of Egypt. Since these periods stretch from 48 BC to 642 AD, there must have been several different fires, but in any event priceless and unique papyri were lost for ever and who knows what philosophy, history or poetry we would have savoured had they survived.

The Destruction of the Library in Alexandria

A neglected corner of the tumultuous City of London is the site of St Mary Aldermanbury, a medieval and then a Wren church blitzed in 1940.  Two parishioners of the medieval church were John Heminge and Henry Condell, London actors and editors who achieved immortality by producing the First Folio in 1623, containing 36 of Shakespeare’s plays. The great man had died in 1616 and only 18 of his plays had ever been published, in quarto format, a flimsy and perishable medium. The First Folio saw the publication, and in a robust format, of all the Bard’s plays including for the first time The Tempest, As You like It, Twelfth Night, Coriolanus, Macbeth, Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra. So Jacobean England was spared the fate meted out to the Alexandrian Library and we are able to enjoy Shakespeare in all his glory.

William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

Maybe the Bard can help me face today’s world:

There is a tide in the affairs of men.
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;

I have taken the big decision to rent out our summer home on the lovely island of Samos:

The isle is full of noises,

Sounds, and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.

Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments

Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices

That, if I then had waked after long sleep,

Will make me sleep again.

Certainly Samos is full of noises (unsilenced motor cycles the main culprit), but it is beautiful, not unlike another famous island:  

This precious stone set in the silver sea, 

My eldest son visited us and unexpectedly announced his engagement to a Russian lady. Whatever my reservations,

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments.

On the contrary,

And when Love speaks, the voice of all the gods
Makes heaven drowsy with the harmony.

I can only proffer the classic sage advice;

This above all: to thine ownself be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.

Leaving Samos will be a wrench:

Parting is such sweet sorrow.

Soon I will return to tempest-tossed Britain fighting hard for Brexit:

Then imitate the action of the tiger;

Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood

That great battle won, I will revert to my doddery decrepitude

The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slippered pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound.

Shakespeare’s range of insight and emotion far surpassed my halting narrative – he has wit and wisdom for every man.

How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,

That has such people in ’t!

 I revert finally to the tidy garden site of St Mary Aldermanbury – the church itself was removed stone by stone to the campus of Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri, in an imaginative project in the 1960s but that is another story. The garden site still contains a monument to Heminge and Condell. Never was an honour so well earned.

The Monument to Heminge and Condell

 

SMD

14.09.17

Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2017