Happy Birthday, Will

Happy Birthday to the Baird born this day in 1564. Shakespeare was considered “low brow” in his time and would be surprised at his high position in literary culture today. Various conspiracy theories seek to prove that Shakespeare was not written by Shakespeare but by Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe or Edward de Vere the Earl of Oxford.

VI

Then let not winter's ragged hand deface,
In thee thy summer, ere thou be distilled:
Make sweet some vial; treasure thou some place
With beauty's treasure ere it be self-killed.
That use is not forbidden usury,
Which happies those that pay the willing loan;
That's for thy self to breed another thee,
Or ten times happier, be it ten for one;
Ten times thy self were happier than thou art,
If ten of thine ten times refigured thee:
Then what could death do if thou shouldst depart,
Leaving thee living in posterity?
Be not self-willed, for thou art much too fair
To be death's conquest and make worms thine heir.

Sonnet 6 is an early sonnet written to Shakespeare’s male patron Henry Wriothesley the Earl of Southampton. Yes, the early sonnets were written to a man. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

CXXVII

In the old age black was not counted fair,
Or if it were, it bore not beauty's name;
But now is black beauty's successive heir,
And beauty slandered with a bastard shame:
For since each hand hath put on Nature's power,
Fairing the foul with Art's false borrowed face,
Sweet beauty hath no name, no holy bower,
But is profaned, if not lives in disgrace.
Therefore my mistress' eyes are raven black,
Her eyes so suited, and they mourners seem
At such who, not born fair, no beauty lack,
Sland'ring creation with a false esteem:
Yet so they mourn becoming of their woe,
That every tongue says beauty should look so.

This is the first of the “Dark Lady” sonnets in which a mystery woman comes between Shakespeare and the Earl. Below is an expert of To The Virtuous Reader by Amelia Lanyer, a Renaissance feminist who compared the oppression of women to the persecution of Christ and wrote a piece defending Eve and explaining why Adam, not Eve, was to be blamed for eating the apple. It has been suggested by one scholar that Lanyer was Shakespeare’s Dark Lady, but this suggestion has been almost universally rejected.

…to be practised by evill dispo-
sed men, who forgetting they were borne of women, nourished (20)
of women, and that if it were not by the means of women, they
would be quite extinguished out of the world: and a finall ende
of them all, doe like Vipers deface the wombes wherein they
were bred, only to give way and utterance to their want of
discretion and goodnesse. Such as these, were they that disho- (25)
noured Christ his Apostles and Prophets, putting them to
shamefull deaths…

http://www.ic.arizona.edu/ic/mcbride/lanyer/lanyer.htm

In support of Shakespeare as the author of Shakespeare:
http://shakespeareauthorship.com/

For more on the conspiracy and proposed authors of Shakespeare:
http://www.bardweb.net/debates.html

Shakespeare’s sonnets:
http://www.shakespeares-sonnets.com/

Read all 154 of Shakespeare’s sonnet one per day
http://www.sonnetaday.com/

Shakespeare’s Last Will and Testament in which the old romantic leaves his second best bed to his wife:

http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/museum/item.asp?item_id=21