Source:- Google.com.pk
The movie Shakespeare in Love has been hauling in the audiences and the ticket sales just as its subject, the play Romeo and Juliet, did so long ago, and still does, whenever it is played. This movie is delightful, but as everyone knows, it is not the truth. It is a good story, but it is not the true story of Shakespeare in love.
You see, if we're to see a movie about Shakespeare in love, it has to be a fantasy, it cannot be the truth, because the man that everyone has thought for four hundred years was Shakespeare the great playwright, was not a playwright. This man had very little to do with the theater but pull down a small pension for the use of his name. He has left no story worth telling, while the man who really did write the plays has a marvelous story, a story which until recently, has remained untold.
Should it surprise us that the true story, like the movie, does involve the writing of Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare's most romantic play? What follows is what may well be the true story, about half fact, half best guess, pieced together from contemporary documents, the works of historians, of literary historians and commentators, of Shakespeare experts, some orthodox, some necessarily radical, and the plays themselves. And if we add some spice in the telling, who's to say us nay? Certainly not Shakespeare.
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This is the story of a lonely teenager; an ordinary boy in many ways, much like Romeo in fact, a boy with the same goals, desires, hopes and fears of all youth; but this boy was also extraordinary; in fact, he was far more extraordinary than he was ordinary. This boy was born with a gift so powerful that in many ways it would prove to be a curse, a gift of language, of memory, of intellectual and imaginative power, a gift that would place him on the level of few individuals over the course of history, individuals such as Alexander the Great, Jesus Christ, Leonardo da Vinci, Sir Isaac Newton, Mozart, Bach, Benjamin Franklin, and Albert Einstein; individuals who molded history, who created culture with their insights, discoveries and creations.
Not only was he brilliant, he was handsome, with the red gold hair so prized by his race and class, and although he was on the small side, he had as well the strength and physique of an athlete, a tennis player and a fencer. He was also born into the highest levels of the English nobility, the heir to the second oldest Earldom in the nation. Had he been born in Italy he would have been regarded as a Prince, for there, unlike England, the nobility still retained complete control over their medieval demesnes, which we call principalities. His rank, although in some respects a marvelous gift, was also a curse, for although it gave him a great deal more economic freedom than most men of his age, it also tied him to a prescribed and highly restrictive role in the life of his community, a role he could escape only in the theatre or in the pages of a book; ultimately it demanded the sacrifice of his identity as a writer.
Because of his social position the boy was educated by the greatest scholars of his day. For several years between the ages of eight and twelve he remained under the tutelage of one of the most respected Greek scholars in the nation, who held the chair at Cambridge University in Civil Law and wrote the book that most strongly influenced government officials in determining policy. From age twelve to thirteen or fourteen he was tutored by one of the greatest antiquarians of the time, an Anglican prelate whose name can be found penned on the back of the oldest literary document claimed by England, perhaps the most famous document in our literary heritage, that of the Old English epic, Beowulf, together with the date "1562, " a year when it is known that the boy was with him.
As you can see, a tremendous amount of love and hope rested on this boy. Yet despite this loving care, he was a lonely child right from the start. He had no brothers, and although he had a sister close to his own age, it is doubtful they ever actually lived together, even in their infancy and childhood. It is likely that he received a great deal of love from his nursemaid in childhood, and probably from all the retainers on his fathers estate, but if he was like most children of the nobility, as it seems that he was, his parents would have been too busy with affairs of State and their own social lives to see him except at holidays like Michaelmass and Shrovetide, when the Court community gathered at one of the great palaces or houses of the nobility for Christmas or May games, the only time he was able to play with other children like himself. The rest of the time he spent with his tutors or hanging about with servants, from whom he absorbed the rich oral culture of folklore, the tales and superstitions, the holiday rituals and folk remedies, still alive and flourishing among the unlettered servants and rural folk of 16th-century England.
The lonely lad kept himself company with books, at first the adventure stories that were so popular, King Arthur and his knights of the Roundtable, in French or Italian, languages he picked up easily as he had been reading Latin since he was five or six. His first tutor intoduced him to the Greek classics, and his second tutor to the Saxon languages. His brilliant mind swept aside the difficulties of each new language in its eager pursuit of stories, sure that like the bean in the holiday pudding, some important message about the meaning of life could be found in each new plot, each variation on an ending.
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His life changed suddenly in his twelfth summer with the death of his father; overnight all previous plans for his future were rendered null and void. As an underage peer of the realm he became a ward of the Crown and was sent to London to live with the man that was probably the most important figure in England, equal to if not surpassing the brilliant Queen herself, her Principle Secretary, William Cecil, not yet forty, and with some way yet to go before he reached the apex of his career as the Lord Treasurer, a post he would hold for the rest of his long life.
The boy was lonely at Cecil House, but then he was used to being lonely, and there at least there was a great library of books to explore, an immense garden filled with every sort of plant, while around the dinner table was heard the conversation of the most influential people of the time, foreign ambassadors and agents, lawyers with important cases to discuss, the good, the bad, the brilliant, the beautiful, speaking French, Italian, Spanish, German, Polish, Russian; all fascinating. The following year his cousin, the young Earl of Rutland, only a year older than himself and also ward of the Crown, joined him at Cecil House. For the first time he knew what it meant to have the close companionship of a boy his own age. They went to all the great Court and holiday functions together.
Other boys joined them at Cecil House from time to time, boys of high rank whose parents saw the value in having their sons spend time in the Lord Treasurer's household where they formed a little academy. We must set aside our class prejudices about such a group, and not regard it as we might today, as nothing more than a sort of junior country club for upper class twits. Class division was part and parcel of the life of the times; these boys were looked to to bear the burden of governing the State in their mature years; for them, privilege was more than balanced by the pressures of grave responsibility.
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His mother had married again, to the man who had been Captain of his father's Horse. Although she continued to be referred to as the Dowager Countess, as she had no claim to nobility other than her marriage to his father, she was now as far beneath him in the social scale as she had been above him as a child, lost to him forever across a great divide of class and rank. He saw her occasionally at those Court functions where everyone was welcome. Still only in her early thirties, still beautiful, how was he to treat this woman, at once so central to his being and yet so distant? It was always hard for him to speak when his heart was overcome with feeling. He would assume a cool expression, speaking abruptly to hide the loneliness and confusion that any thought or sight of her provoked and to conquer the tears that never failed to rise at any thoughts of bygone days. When he felt secure enough to look for her again, she was gone.
Only Rutland knew his sensitivity; all others found him either brilliant and witty or sullen and silent; but his heart he hid from all but his friend, and even he never knew it all. Nurtured on the French romances that were the boyhood reading of his day, he dreamed of attaining the love that he had yearned for in secret since he was pryed screaming from his nurse's arms at the age of five, and set to learning Latin with a pious young uncle. He spent his quiet hours dreaming of a romance of the sort he read about in the tales of Sir Lancelot and Prince Orlando, fated, overwhelming. She would be beautiful, graceful, a good dancer. They would make love. His imagination, always powerful, and now coupled with a teenage boy's libido, made it as real as though it had already happened. Well, almost as real.
He and Rutland attended the wedding of the Earl of Warwick as pages. Either there or at another similar Court function he fell in love with one of the Queen's young Maids of Honor, a beauty two or three years older than himelf. Despite his attractive looks he was still only a child in her eyes. She was far too interested in the young men that surrounded her.
Although it was clear she wasn't interested, the poor kid couldn't get her out of his mind. To his surprise this love he had read so much about was no fun at all! Actually it was torture! He tried to ease his heart by writing poems in the popular Petrarchan style. Reams of juvenile poems, the ink all splattered with tears, failed to bring him relief. What use was it to write her poems when she wouldn't even speak to him?! Unable to hide his misery, or his poetry, his heartless friends teased him mercilessly. The following Christmas, her presence at the holiday masques offered them rich opportunities for his humiliation. Loving her, hating her, hating them, he did his best to conquer his heart, to suffer in silence. If this was what love was all about, he wished never to experience it again!
Then he met another girl. Her name was Mary Browne. She was 13-years-old, newly arrived at Court to serve as Maid of Honor. She was everything he had dreamed of, beautiful, sweet, and also, and this he had not expected, intelligent and witty! She was not only good to look at, she was fun to talk to. He forgot the other girl and dreamed only of Mary. Did she love him also? We'll probably never know for sure, although it seems fair to guess that she did, although perhaps a kiss or two, some romantic whispers, some burning poems and a cartload of melting glances were probably the only contact they ever had.
In any case, the romance of his dreams was not to be, for Mary's family were Catholic, and she was pledged to a Catholic peer, the second Earl of Southampton. Mary was only thirteen while Southampton was an aged twenty-one! The boy was outraged, miserable. It wasn't fair. Yet he knew, of course, that as long as his life was controlled by the Lord Treasurer, a leader of the Protestant faction at Court and in Parliament, he would never be allowed to marry a Catholic, which left out at least eighty percent of the girls in his traditional social circle. He hated Southampton and wanted to kill him. He hated his guardian for his attitude towards Catholics. His terrible lifelong loneliness and the normal physical desires of a teenage boy combined with hatred for those who stood between himself and the beautiful Mary.
All of his life, one of his greatest problems would be the tempestuous emotions that threatened to swamp him at important junctures. Finally, desperate to escape his own thoughts and feelings, he sought escape in his ancient refuge, a French anthology of romance tales. One of the stories reminded him of his present dilemma. It was the tale of two teenaged lovers, separated by cruel Fate. The plot was good, but the story was unsatisfying as it was told. It was way too short, for one thing. A good story demanded a full, well-dramatised telling. He shared his opinion with Rutland.
Grateful that his miserable friend, whom he despaired of ever seeing smile again, had finally taken him back into his confidence, Rutland urged him to use his poetic talents to make it into a better story. Hardly had the words entered his mind but lines began forming in the jog-trot meter of the day:
Shakespeare sad love quotes
Shakespeare sad love quotes
Shakespeare sad love quotes
Shakespeare sad love quotes
Shakespeare sad love quotes
Shakespeare sad love quotes
Shakespeare sad love quotes
Shakespeare sad love quotes
Shakespeare sad love quotes
Shakespeare sad love quotes
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