9 June 2004. One of my hobbies, which I don't think I've mentioned here before, is debating the question of who wrote the plays of Shakespeare at two websites devoted to the subject. Considering how untraditional my poetry is (on the surface), it may strike some as odd that I am a died-in-the-wool traditionalist (to use a cliche I don't think I've ever used before!) Hence, I often am prodded into having to make the point that Shakespeare needn't have been the demigod anti-Stratfordians tend to take him as to have produced his oeuvre, not all of which is that hot, and none of which is by any means perfect. When I said something like that the other day at the Shakespeare Fellowship, main Internet home of the Oxfordian Heresy, the Fellowship leader, Bassanio, asked which plays of Shakespeare's I thought flawed. Today, I responded with a very rough overview of how I feel about Shakespeare's plays. Since he was a poet, and since it's late and I haven't written an entry for this blog of mine, I'm repeating my thoughts here.

Shakespeare is my favorite playwright in the English language, but not by any great margin. I think The Importance of Being Earnest is funnier and better constructed than anything Shakespeare ever wrote, and The Lady's Not For Burning superior as a romantic verse comedy to any of Shakespeare's romantic verse comedies. I think A Man for All Seasons a much better history play than any of Shakespeare's, as are quite a few other modern history plays. I consider Volpone and The Alchemist better constructed comedies than any of Shakespeare's and better plotted, as well as superior as satirical comedies.

I don't like any of Shakespeare's histories, which seem stilted to me, though some have admirable speeches in them, and I love Falstaff. In particular, the three plays about Henry VI are very poor. We have no juvenilia of Shakespeare's, but that's no surprise since we have none from any other professional playwright of his time, either, that I know of. We certainly have a lot of Shakespeare's apprenticework, of which the plays about Henry VI, John and others are examples.

I'm not a big fan of tragedy, so don't like Shakespeare's tragedies much, although I greatly admire the poetry in some of them. I think Timon of Athens his worst play, and wouldn't be surprised if it was a first draft never performed. I accept that the four major tragedies are great plays but find all of them flawed--by things like Gertrude's preposterous behavior when Ophelia drowned, and Macbeth's thinking he was invulnerable because "no man of woman born" could harm him. (If the idiotic belief that a child born by Caesarian surgery was not of woman born really was held by the people of Shakespeare's time, Macbeth would have had to have been almost as stupid as Lavinia and Titus (who didn't know about nodding yes or no to questions) not to have worked out that there might be other ways of getting into the world besides being born of woman, and thus not caught by surprise by Not-Of-Woman-Born MacDuff.

Hamlet is a fascinating play despite its many flaws; Macbeth may have the most inspired poetry of any play ever; and Lear is certainly a brilliant play. I'm biased against Othello because I have trouble with its main character's pathology, but--given that there are men like him--I have to go along with the standard opinion of the play.

The problem plays are not my kind of plays, but I can't say they're poor plays. My favorite play of Shakespeare's is Twelfth Night. It's probably my favorite play by anyone. I also like A Midsummer Night's Dream a great deal although I think it badly constructed, because of the very funny but anti-climactic fifth act. Two Gentlemen of Verona has a lot of good stuff but is another apprentice work. I like A Comedy of Errors but feel it diminished by the lack of poetry Shakespeare managed to get into his later work. Titus Andronicus is pure crap, but funny. I rate The Merry Wives of Windsor higher than most people do. I disliked it the first time I read it because Falstaff was some much less in it than he is in the other plays he's in, but the play around him is first-rate, and if he'd been give a name different from "Falstaff," I doubt that many would have faulted his delineation. Much Ado About Nothing is okay. Ditto As You Like It. Loves Labours Lost is, for me, another apprenticework, with some good bits later added, and several hilarious characters that were break-outs for Shakespeare, I think. I found Antony and Cleopatra boring. I much like A Winter's Tale in spite of its sloppy construction. A Tempest is in my top ten of Shakespeare's plays. When I said I didn't like his histories, I forgot Julius Caesar, which I think his best history, and quite good. I like Cymbeline and Troilus and Cressida.

Enough, though I'm sure I've left out some of the plays. One, I just realized, is Romeo and Juliet, which I consider a masterpiece even though I don't much like it. Great poetry of language and plotting, but about impulsive teen-agers, who aren't my favorite kind of characters.

These are all pretty much unsupported opinions. To each his own and all that. I doubt that I'd want to argue about anything I've said. Oh, to add perspective, I'd say that there are a fair number of writers I've become sufficiently interested in to read much or all of their work and devour biographies about them. Wilde and Shaw were the first, then Keats. Shakespeare soon after. Twenty or thirty others, I would guess. I am a low-grade hero-worshipper. Of all kinds of other artists besides poets, and of scientists, as well. But not politicians. (Except a few who were much more than politicians like Franklin and Jefferson.)

Oh, a confession that will explain much (as well as showing how wonderfully honest about myself I am): I would say that Shakespeare (as portrayed by the Establishment) was my first and most important role model. Unless Shaw was. But Shakespeare was more important. I refused to go on to college after getting out of high school, in part because (my) Shakespeare and Shaw hadn't needed it. And I started writing plays, much more influenced by Shakespeare than by Shaw. I was going to outdo Shaw by being a great dramatic poet, and outdo Shakespeare by dealing directly with ideas at the level that Shaw did, and I will never accept that Shakespeare did. I never had a play accepted for production, anywhere, except at college, when I finally did go, and took a course in play-direction that required one to put on a one-act. One could choose the play, so I directed Barbaric Bart, an obscene, politically-incorrect Western in blank verse which resulted in the college theatre arts' department's making a rule that a person taking the directing course I had could not direct a play he himself had written.

I started writing poetry mainly in hopes that it'd get me a reputation I could use to persuade someone to give one of my plays a shot. It hasn't worked . . . SO FAR!