To Shakespeare and the Things You Got Wrong

William, may I call you William? May I call you Bill?

Bill, you got a lot right. Compared to say, Tennessee Williams or Joan Didon, I can’t deny the depth of your work. Most of us find our thing and run with it. King writes horror fiction. Faulkner steeped in all that south. Langston Hughes, beautiful, necessary, but still no one had the range you did.

But--and we have to be honest here--you got a lot wrong. This is not easy to admit and it’s not meant to overshadow all the truths you revealed, all the heartbreak you endured, all the doubts you suffered to get your work to the public.

I will take issue with only a few:

“A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” I realize that business schools with advanced degrees in marketing did not exist back then, but human nature, combined with language, does prove that a rose, named something else, will not smell as sweet as that which we call “rose.” If a beautiful rose, plump, yellow and sweet, was labeled “city shoe slime,” it would struggle to find its audience. Likewise, we can take something foul-smelling, rename it (preferably in French, say, l’eau des roses rouge) and watch them line up. You have underestimated the power of the mind, the need to believe what we think.

“There are more things in earth and heaven, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” I forgive this one, assuming you didn’t actually know philosophers because if you did, you would know that they can think of so many more things than what exists in all of earth and heaven. And heaven’s heaven. Philosophy, anyone’s philosophy, is born of this world, this earth, but refuses to be confined, takes, as its very purpose, defining and then undefining and redefining. Maybe you knew one or two, but you never went to a cocktail party with several of them. Philosophers with a slight buzz and a constant supply of shrimp are a terrifying fun.

“All the world’s a stage.” An occupational hazard for a playwright, but all the world is not a stage. All the world is mostly backstage. The props thrown about between scenes. Actors smoking to calm their nerves. Everyone is naked and there is no privacy. Chaos. Fights. Infidelities. The stage is polished, rehearsed, mapped and, well-lit. About .25% of the world is a stage. The rest is passing time waiting for our lines.

“‘Tis better to have loved and lost.” Clearly, you never loved. And lost. A baby in your arms. And then you bury him.

“To be or not to be, that is the question.” I quibble here with “the.” “The question.” As if there are no other questions. To survive this pain or not. To live through it or not. To decide, this one day, if a next is worth having? I will grant you it is “a question.” It is not “THE question.” Here are some other questions, which I would argue, are more important than yours: are there people who love me? Whose hands have I touched that when I close my eyes, I can still feel? Bill, when you asked this question, I think you could hear your daughter’s voice saying, “Be. Please. Always be.”