Shakespeare Cancelled

The Bard of Avon burns affixed in our firmament, in colonies hither and those thither. Hark! How the law singles him out by name, as if he alone holds the key to our common tongue, leaving other scribes scrambling in his shade. O Poets, O Scribes, wherefore art thou? Thou art more plentiful in heaven and earth. To be the canon, or not to be, whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer the imperial focus, that is the question; more cankered than a budding rose, thick with the clamor of those plucking at their silken ruffs, pronouncing the wellspring of our letters to be fouled by the heavy soot of custom.

Rarely has the world’s stage unsheathed a wit so nimble, so noble in reason, so infinite in faculty. For he is Janus, and Janus is him, a grinning mask in one hand and Yorick’s skull in the other. Our tongue is his debtor. Yet though his glory be a monument of brass, let it not become vast and trunkless legs of stone. Uneasy is the head that wears the crown, like a clogged water-mill that churns the same soiled waters.

Ere the stripling of Groton hath donned a scholar’s gown, they shall have wept o’er the star-crossed pair, tasted the vaulting ambition that brings men to dust, and fished with the worm that hath eaten of a king.

Though each tale is a different tune on the lyre, they are of the same underlying melody. When the historical mask is stripped, and the tongue is mastered, what's done is done. A twice-told tale vexes the ear of a gentle reader. There is no poverty of spirit in the world’s great library. What good is a ship in a harbor? If not to sail the unsailed seas? Narrowness doth make cowards of us all.

Shakespeare’s wit may be perennial, but his language is most certainly not. Do you go around calling your comrades “eggs”? And, quite more pressingly, are your friends saddled with names as burdensome and impractical as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern? We spend our days not interrogating meaning, but ghost-hunting and digging through the silt of his syntax like fatigued miners, quite like my English teacher rifling through my scrolls after I swore to use no art at all.

Oh, how the modern scholar of our drossy age plays a knave. How they mindlessly consult the gilded summaries of Sparknotes and invoke the artifices of Claudius, to whisper meaning into their ear. How they vomit the most fanned and winnowed of opinions. Verily, we do mock the original parchment when a machine must be the mind’s interpreter.

Does a farmer repeatedly plough the same parcel of land? Even the most fertile soil grows weary. Does a shepherd herd his cattle on the same pasture? It grows grey and squalid with overuse. A youthful soul must graze upon a thousand pastures. Give us the map of the world. Let the grey-beards of the academy encumber themselves in his brilliance.

Seek not the sun that blinds the traveling eye When lavish stars have to crown the sky