Accentuate The Positve

My last blog was rather low and nasty and I have been tempted to delete it as unworthy of me. But on reflection I'm afraid it is worthy of me. It also captured exactly the mood I encountered last Monday when I passed a spare hour in the library re-reading the passge in The History Man in which Kirk humiliates the hapless Carmody. You will gather that this struck a chord. It still does.

But today is a day of celebration and regret. I have just finished my final group seminar as an undergraduate in the School of English. David Roberts (I know it's confusing - see earlier blogs) promised us that Shakespeare Studies in our final term meant saving the best to last. That is a strong claim to make. He was spot on. Twelve plays and some poetry down the road I can assert that this has been the best of the best. England's greatest writer at the culmination of an English degree. And David Roberts would never be mistaken for Howard Kirk.

Not that Shakespeare could care less but here are the Roberts Bardolatry Awards: Best Play - Macbeth; Biggest Surprise - this is shared by Titus Andronicus (bloody fantastic or bloody and fantastic if you prefer) and The Tempest, which thanks to a deathly combination of shoddy teaching at school and my own arrogant inattention was a play I thought I did not like; Most Misunderstood Roman - Coriolanus; Best Bloke - Enobarbus; Part I would like to play - Aaron. Not much prospect of that I hear you say and you would be right.

Here is a brilliant passage on Anti-Stratfordianism from David Mamet which makes a nice final word for today's blog on the matchless playwright,

The anti-Stratfordians hold that Shakespeare didn't write Shakespeare's plays ... The assignment of authorship to Bacon, et cetera, is like the sop of management to Lazy Labor - it is on the order of awarding 'Best Employee of the Week' in which the true status rests not with the recipient but with the donor, and his or her power to patronize ... The anti-Stratfordian, like the flat-earther and the creationist, elects himself God - possessed of the power to supervene the natural order - and the most deeply hidden but pervasive fantasy of the above is the ultimate delusion of godhead: 'I made the world.'

Quite.