In the Year of Grace 1564

Maybe, a few months earlier, Mary Arden had seen the shadow of Venus on the snow. Maybe, on that April morning, the sun shone benevolently from a cloudless sky on the sparkling waters of the Avon. Maybe, just maybe, every lark in England alit by a country church in a small village and burst into joyous paean.

And maybe, as is far less poetic but far more likely, it was a muggy day with the rain pouring in sheets and turning Stratford's picturesque lanes into strips of unpleasantly squelchy mud, and those larks who were not going about their business in other parts of Elizabeth's realm were cowering beneath eaves and rafters waiting for the showers to stop.

Whether or not the birds and the sun and the clouds marked that day, the Muses did. The year was one of abundance for them; they had, exactly two months previously, stood over the cradle of the one person since Euripides who could, had he not been rudely interrupted by a rooming-house brawl at the age of 29, have equalled if not exceeded Shakespeare's mastery.

In the years since he lived, volumes have been written about the Bard and his work. He has been reviled, extolled, equated with God and Satan and a host of entities in between, accused of being Bacon/Marlowe/both, and had his work dissected with a 0.001-micrometer scalpel under a 200X microscope. That he manages, despite the weight of his reputation, to enthrall his audience today as surely as he did when that audience consisted of sixteenth-century Londoners, is testimony to his mastery.

By now I daresay I would have been, mentally at least, relegated to the ranks of those who should be marooned on a desert island in the Pacific with only a palm tree for company. Before some civic-minded citizens decide to suit the action to the word, let me only say that performances for the Elizabethan court and gravely intellectual pedagogues who had read more words than they had heard spoken were not the reason for Shakespeare's popularity in his day, and are not the reason for his enduring appeal.

Enough mystery still surrounds him to keep historians occupied for years. In 1612 he wrote Henry VIII, the disputed The Two Noble Kinsmen and the now-lost Cardenio; there, to the best of our knowledge at least, his writings end. It was, perhaps, natural for the playwright to choose to leave London and return to Stratford as his fiftieth year neared; why he chose also to stop writing remains open to speculation. Maybe it was a sudden distaste for the stage. Maybe he wanted a break from writing. Or maybe Shakespeare did write, and the greatest literary find of the century is waiting for some venturesome tourist to fall through a solid wall into a priest hole.

He was a man, take him for all in all,
I shall not look upon his like again.