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England

Shakespeare was a Woman [by Leopold Bloom]

Shakespeare William Shakespeare did not write the plays attributed to him. Who did? While it is fruitless to speculate or seek an individual who is but a name on a weathered gravestone, I doubt she was Emilia Bassano. Consider the envy of Iago, the female spite that takes over his characater. Or contrarily think of the male initiaive animating  Lady Macbeth:  “Come, you spirits / That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here.”

Moreover, we know that the difference between the sexes is obscured by the very fact that all the players, including the women, are men in the plays that were played when they played them back then.

The play itself was the thing that, in an age devoid of photocopy machines, had only one copy and no one handling it thought to treat it as an archival treasure. Who knew what when, or who among the players wrote in the margin, are open questions, and if the women are often seen reading in the plays or showing off their intelligence as cross-dressing lawyers in stilleto heels, who get to punish the unfortunate but eloquent merchant and exonerate the poor improvident  Venetian loser, that would be dismissed in court as cirumstantial evidence, for justice is blond and the real killer is unmasked only in the fifth act.

Nevertheless, the apotheosis is Cleopatra, top cat of an empire, or failing that, with her name changed to Gertrude, marrying  the king or the brother who succeeds him on the throne, becuase love equals death or the sublime, and murder is just a name for overcoming rthe influence of anxiety.

Shakespeare was a woman. For surely the sublime. And the absence that precedes it, the belatedness of all action, the play having been composed before the chief actor could have come up with a prologue. Well, just imagine Marlon Brando as Hamlet in a production with songs written by Betty Comden and Adolph Green.

The-beast-with-two-backs-william-shakespeare-310397Shakespeare is God, I have long maintained, in the face of resistance from multiculturalists, nudists, feminists, poltically correct imbeciles, undersexed leftwing lunatics, bullshit artists, theorists, Dead-heads, pinball wizards, Marxists, neoconservatives and other non-traditionalists who resent the rich and sublimate their guilt into an identification with people who do what they cannot, such as kitchen patrol in boot camp, and working as a plumber.

You see, we only see what we see as Blake would say not with but through the eyes that reveal the arras behind which the pompous Prufrock is vanquished by the young hero. And the ayes have it. The phenomenon of what I have elsewhere called kenosis, an emptying of the vessel like that of a candidate for higher office. But only a woman could have done it -- inviisibly, of  course, because it had to be a secret. Only a woman could have channeled the fire and air of masculinity into the earth and water of pre-Socratic femininity.

Who was she? We may wonder. For the sublime, which can kill us but disdains to do so, exists as a thrill, which you can feel in Milton and Goethe. But Shakespeare, who hits you with it hard in King Lear, also gave birth to the human, as only a woman can.


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Radio

I left it
on when I
left the house
for the pleasure
of coming back
ten hours later
to the greatness
of Teddy Wilson
"After You've Gone"
on the piano
in the corner
of the bedroom
as I enter
in the dark


from New and Selected Poems by David Lehman

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