As I Like It

image borrowed from bing

As I Like It

“A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man

knows himself to be a fool.”--William Shakespeare

I am, perhaps

have forever been

since I was attracted to Bardolatry as George B.

Shaw dubbed 

that free-floating need some of us

developed in the 50’s, trying so very hard

to escape the greasy duck tails, aviator sunglasses,

leather jackets, rolled

jeans cuffs, and those jaunty motorcycle

hats like Elvis and Brando

wore playing at being Wild Ones by desperately

trying to acquire hardcore Stratfordian

“cultural status”, putting out there in that Eisenhower

world the illusion, possibly even misnomer 

that we had full understanding of

iambic pentameter, legends

of antiquity and Shakespeare’s

38 plays, even the bizarre and minor

ones like Troilus & Cressida, 154

sonnets, 2 long narrative and several short

poems all credited to an illiterate drunken second-rate

actor, a patsy, a front-man for some more 

cultured nobleman who actually had a classical

education, whereas young Will could barely

sign his own name, spelling it four

different ways in odd scrawl, when it appeared

at all, was not opposed to crediting several

of the early plays to Anonymous, as was

the custom of the times not wanting to run

afoul of the political mandates against

the “stigma of print”, or certainly I have become

a convert to Oxfordism even though it thrusts

me into the elitist ranks of Gielgud,

Welles, Jacobi, Chaplin, Freud, Whitman, & Twain

as someone willingly accepting the doctrine

of “argumentum exsilentis” because there does not

seem to be a shred of evidence in any extant

document written in Will’s handwriting of his traveling

outside the limits of London or studying

the Classics, that Shakespeare might actually

have been as Ben Johnson described,

that “literary thief Poet Ape” and god damn it,

it should be obvious to any person with one iota

of common sense, as Tom Paine pandered to,

that Shakespeare’s first statue atop his funeral

monument in 1656, dying as he did in 1616, was

a man holding a sack of grain for he was in fact

a farmer & merchant whom we are to believe

somehow found time between harvests and auctions

to write his masterpieces, and it was not until later

that the statue was recast and the man was

holding a quill and paper, so I believe, am comfortable

with the fact that Oxfordian theories, like Darwinism,

are rife with logic and a healthy smattering of dredged

up facts and are certainly not, have never been,

arguments constructed from silence or omission,

that clearly for some, and certainly for me, the true

author of the Shakespearean canon was not

Francis Bacon or Christopher Marlowe, but rather

the 17th Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere, portrayed

recently brilliantly by Rhys Ifans in ANONYMOUS, 

who in actual documented history did bed Young Bess

and did continue to write plays and poetry despite

the consternation it caused the courtiers, and how delicious

it is to rationally consider that Edward might have been

one of the earliest of Elizabeth’s bastard sons himself,

twisting all that passion into poetic irony and Oeudipul 

synchronicity, since she gave up all those boys immediately

after their birth and did not want to know their true

identities and yes, I unequivocally agree as poet

myself as Edward was so very fond of saying,

“All art is political--otherwise

it is just decoration.”

Glenn But--t--kus

October 2012

Posted over on dVerse Poet MTB

Would you like to hear the actual author of this enjambement read it to you?