I.
“What are Shakespeare’s themes? Melancholia, despair, distrust, sexual disgust, love versus duty, the mixture of the angel and the beast in man.” – Delmore Schwartz, November 17, 1946, in his journal
“It will be helpful if, while recalling as vividly as possible everything you have experienced of Shakespeare's work, you can put out of mind all that you have hitherto known of his character and life. You may know, for example, that Shakespeare was uneducated, his parents illiterate, that he matured very late after a long period in regard to which one guess is as good as another about what he was doing, that he commenced playwright by rewriting other men's plays, that Marlowe was his master, that he followed literary and theatrical fashions, that he did not deal with contemporary events, that he was indifferent to the fate of his work. These are fancies. Some may be true fancies, some false; I think most are false; but all are troublesome because they interfere with the reception of an image which has to be created slowly. At thirty men think reluctantly back over their lives, and we must try how far we can follow him.” – John Berryman, "Shakespeare at 30," 1953
“You often feel about something in Shakespeare that nobody ever said such a thing, but it's just the sort of thing people would say if they could is more real, in some sense, than what people do say. If you have given your imagination free rein, let things go as far as they want to go, the world they made for themselves while you watched can have, for you and later watchers, a spontaneous finality.” – Randall Jarrell, "On Preparing to Read Kipling," 1961
II.
Yes Shake-speare can be any kind of father figure you want, but what is lost by not attending to who he was and the concurrent “themes” he wrote about? Regicide, identity mistaken and otherwise, nobility vs. aristocracy, the abandonment of self in the passions of love, the interrelatedness of disparate strata of phenomena, the descent into madness as the old sureties collapse, the ability of the intellect to free itself from the physical world.
III.
The poets who would be doomed,
Picked for eminence in their youth,
Foolishly thought because they had lost their fathers
They had suffered enough.
It only made them sitting ducks
For fake patriarchs,
The vampires, who needed them
More than they needed …
Their imprimatur, their histories,
Their power in the ruthless arena
To protect their meek
As if they were holy
And worthy of the kingship
That was their legacy
When their own fathers
Chose to flee
-- They did not know Norfolk
To protect them from the fathers
And show them that they are
Alone!
They failed to learn
The times were dark,
That it wasn’t they who were
The black ones,
But something that could be transformed
By living within the hole,
Feeling all the ways
It would beat against one’s being,
And all the ways the mind
Can transmigrate
The fallen sphere
Through creation;
It is not a bulwark
Against the darkness,
But its radiant child
Rising on its own
Despite an empty stage,
A soliloquy kept to oneself,
The varieties of failure and alienation
One must cultivate
To be among
The elect,
The one’s we’d want
To live.
