Some Deleted Scenes from the Oxford Dictionary

“I’m guessing that, say, Shakespeare, in the heat of composition, discovered something that affects us deeply (his words, the way he says something) and might make us feel what he never did. What he wrote somehow just showed up, came from his labors of trying to write a play. He just found himself writing “discandy” or “spanieled.” I’d go so far to say that when Shakespeare wrote his great soliloquies, he had no idea, nothing specific, of what he was going to say. He’d write, compose, work hard, and figure that in the struggle to put words on the paper the beautiful words, those beautiful juxtapositions, he’d just find them. I am almost prepared to say that anything Shakespeare felt deeply and tried to express would not measure up to what he wrote when he was merely working. Of course Shakespeare uses form, but creates from that which has already been created.” – Bruce Floyd

I imagine the Earl slumming in East London public theatres

Finding there some distance in its Shoreditch motley scapegrace

From the relentless logic of the court, its arts of fair skullduggery,

What he needed to perceive the truth of how he fell so far,

The way he’d been abandoned down the line to deadly lords

And careless ladies. At Fisher’s Folly in Portsoken Ward

Behind the Blue Boar Inn, he could reconstruct the scenes

For traveling entertainments, make a mecca for lewd friends,

The dissolute Lyly, Peele, Munday, Nashe, Kyd, Marlowe, Greene,

The lowest form of vermin, known as poets. A place for guilt

To fester, for his wife, his debts, his rage, the blood set on revenge

Against as his only satisfaction, what fuels the artist is

What’s never satisfied, for it’s always pure for others.

Or I see him as an outcast on the rocky Isle of Man

Older than the scofflaws and tax dodgers,

Holding court with shipwrecked sailors and would-be players,

Revising as his last Bermuda freight in “common shipwreck” sank,

Trying to buy some time once more for all

Those oceans of unending patience and practice

That it takes to channel the muses,

To create unconsciously, without that ruthless voice to mediate

All soundings from the deep.

There is nothing that he wants to leave behind him

But the art—all else has burned in its fire:

His forests, his falcons, his theatres,

The Scottish wars, Aegean coast,

His erudition, his reputation and his family,

All vaporized to words that betrayed all

But some invisible seeker of the true.

He was a man so hopelessly out of place,

A noble from the longest, most prestigious line in England

Stuck in this tortured artist’s body

In a most unpromising time and ridiculous place.

Even his title was a joke: 17th Earl of Oxenford,

Lorde Greate Chamberleyne of Englande,

Viscount Bulbecke, and Lorde of Badlesmere and Scales.

He was trained from birth to execute betrayals,

Make despicable deals as haughtily as he would

Tear a pomegranate open, practice misdirection on a scale

Unimaginable to normal men, lightly wave his fingers

In the air as if some matter has been settled

When the horror had just begun.

Yet it was so easy for a prince to write like a fool,

For a failure at every art of war to voice the orders of generals,

For an unrepentant courtier to sweat the obsequies mere mortals

Must swear to survive. For the man who could have been king

To throw play thrones away in shame of love, for he knew

What he had given up, in fealty to no crown.

His every figure was perfectly drawn from life,

It was as easy as taking dictation,

But he was ill-equipped

To fathom they’d recoil like that,

At his hypnosis to be stopped

Or pushed back into the pewter kegs

Of his grand but shameful theatres,

Where the truth came line by line.

He had lost with every word

The thing that made him human among humans,

Compassion was all that was left inside,

The smallest and most bitter dreg.

Online Biography of Edward de Vere