Dance our ringlets to the whistling wind

"...since the middle summer's spring,
Met we on hill, in dale, forest or mead,
By paved fountain or by rushy brook,
Or in the beached margent of the sea,
To dance our ringlets to the whistling wind."

"I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine:
There sleeps Titania sometime of the night,
Lull'd in these flowers with dances and delight."

- extracts from A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare

It's Midsummer's Day, the Summer Solstice.

Nights start drawing in from this point on, dear reader.

Sob.

Sing, heigh-ho!

Blow, blow, thou winter wind
by William Shakespeare

Blow, blow, thou winter wind,
Thou art not so unkind
As man’s ingratitude;
Thy tooth is not so keen,
Because thou art not seen,
Although thy breath be rude.

Heigh-ho! sing, heigh-ho! unto the green holly:
Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly:
Then, heigh-ho, the holly!
This life is most jolly.

Freeze, freeze, thou bitter sky,
That does not bite so nigh
As benefits forgot:
Though thou the waters warp,
Thy sting is not so sharp
As friend remembered not.

Heigh-ho! sing, heigh-ho! unto the green holly:
Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly:
Then, heigh-ho, the holly!
This life is most jolly.

It is Midwinter's Day; the Winter solstice; the longest night.

It all gets better from here. Spring is just around the corner...

Brave day sunk in hideous night

From Sonnet 12 by William Shakespeare:

When I do count the clock that tells the time,
And see the brave day sunk in hideous night;
When I behold the violet past prime,
And sable curls all silvered o'er with white;
When lofty trees I see barren of leaves
Which erst from heat did canopy the herd,
And summer's green all girded up in sheaves

British Summer Time is officially over for another year...

Counting no old thing old, thou mine, I thine

Four hundred years on from the Bard of Avon's untimely death at the age of 52, the debate continues about the Great Man's true nature - and the mystery of to whom he dedicated his greatest works - not least the subject of whether he was "one of us".

From Don Paterson's analysis of Shakespeare's Sonnets in The Guardian:

...the question: "was Shakespeare gay?" strikes me as so daft as to be barely worth answering. Of course he was. Arguably he was bisexual, of sorts, but his heart was never on his straight side. Now is not the time to rehearse them all, but the arguments against his homosexuality are complex and sophistical, and often take convenient and homophobic advantage of the sonnets' built-in interpretative slippage – which Shakespeare himself would have needed for what we would now call "plausible deniability", should anyone have felt inclined to cry sodomy.

The argument in favour is simple. First, falling in love with other men is often a good indication of homosexuality; and second, as much as I love some of my male friends, I'm never going to write 126 poems for them, even the dead ones. Third, read the poems, then tell me these are "pure expressions of love for a male friend" and keep a straight face. This is a crazy, all-consuming, feverish and sweaty love; love, in all its uncut, full-strength intensity; an adolescent love. The reader's thrill lies in hearing this adolescent love articulated by a hyper-literate thirty-something. Usually these kids can't speak.

The effect is extraordinary...

Indeed it is, as these three, from a collection that by Will's death amounted to 154 poems, attest.

Sonnet 108:

What’s in the brain that ink may character
Which hath not figured to thee my true spirit?
What’s new to speak, what now to register,
That may express my love or my dear merit?
Nothing, sweet boy; but yet like prayers divine
I must each day say o’er the very same,
Counting no old thing old, thou mine, I thine,
Even as when first I hallowed thy fair name.
So that eternal love in love’s fresh case
Weighs not the dust and injury of age,
Nor gives to necessary wrinkles place,
But makes antiquity for aye his page,
Finding the first conceit of love there bred
Where time and outward form would show it dead.

Sonnet 20:

A woman’s face with Nature’s own hand painted
Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion;
A woman’s gentle heart, but not acquainted
With shifting change, as is false women’s fashion;
An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling,
Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth;
A man in hue, all “hues” in his controlling,
Which steals men’s eyes and women’s souls amazeth.
And for a woman wert thou first created;
Till Nature, as she wrought thee, fell a-doting,
And by addition me of thee defeated,
By adding one thing to my purpose nothing.
But since she prick’d thee out for women’s pleasure,
Mine be thy love and thy love’s use their treasure.

...and one of my absolute favourites - Sonnet 116:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no; it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests, and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

No-one knows for certain who the Young Man, the object of these sonnets, really was - but academic conjecture has focused upon one of two individuals, both Shakespeare's patrons; either Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton:



...or William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke:



Lusty fellows, both, you will agree...

Whoever the recipient of these outpourings of passion may have been, he certainly was a lucky man. I can only dream of anyone writing 126 love-poems in praise of my beauty.

Happy birthday William Shakespeare (26th April 1564 (baptised) – 23rd April 1616)

Full of wise saws and modern instances

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.

At first, the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.

Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school.

And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress' eyebrow.

Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon's mouth.

And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part.

The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slippered pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound.

Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

One of the most inciteful and influential pieces of writing by history's greatest ever poet and dramatist William Shakespeare, the "Seven Ages of Man" was also an apposite binding theme for an evening dedicated entirely to The Bard, performed solo by one of our finest thespians Simon Callow, that we went to see on Monday.

As Alice Barker says on The Upcoming online magazine:

"Shakespeare with a difference. How could one possibly do Shakespeare with a difference? Many have done Shakespeare with a modern twist and often done so with so-called funny anecdotes and modernisation of his work. But this was a celebration of the life of the greatest writer to have ever lived."

And such a celebration! Weaving the factual life history of Mr Shakespeare with a multitude of well-chosen - and brilliantly performed (as one might expect) - examples of his work to illustrate and illuminate his "many parts", Mr Callow had us transfixed.

From the mysteries of the real-life Forest of Arden that must have impressed the infant William (interwoven with the "sprites and goblins" tales of young Mamillius from Winter's Tale), through his schooldays learning grammar and little else, to work and success, to his death at the premature age of 52 (thus escaping the fate of the senile King Lear: "Pray, do not mock me. I am a very foolish fond old man, fourscore and upward, not an hour more nor less. And to deal plainly I fear I am not in my perfect mind. Methinks I should know you, and know this man."), we were treated to the full "seven ages" journey, his ups and his downs, his triumphs and his disappointments, his losses and his gains.

And his loves. There were two in William's life - the main one being of course Anne Hathaway, the older woman who taught him so much about (ahem!) passion (she was pregnant with their first child when they wed), and for whom it is presumed he wrote his greatest romances including Romeo and Juliet.

However, his other lover (to whom there was more work dedicated even than to Anne) was the "Fair Lord" - probably the extremely beautiful Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, who was William's loyal patron. For him, Shakespeare wrote the most wonderful piece of poetry in the English language, Sonnet 18:

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date;
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Simply beautiful.

And with the mellifluous voice of Mr Callow reading it, even more so.

Here's a taster of the show:

Simon Callow - Being Shakespeare trailer

Simon Callow: Being Shakespeare is only at the Harold Pinter Theatre until 15th March 2014 - so be quick!