BS or AS

Before or After

Note: For those few who unscribed because of my back street language, or those who will leave when they’ve read this piece. Just know I had a lot of fun writing it.

I’m not for change for the sake of change. Some things earn the right to remain exactly as they are. Others, people included, ought to be left untouched for long stretches of time. And no, I have not included who you’re thinking of.

My quarrel is not with change. It is with worship.

More precisely, with the long, unquestioned, four-hundred-year kneeling before William bloody Shakespeare.

Yes, him. That old, bearded bard whose birthday rolls around each year like a national obligation. I can almost hear the groan echoing from classrooms across the world.

Because it never ends, does it?

The thee’s and thou’s, people solemnly nodding. The careful decoding of sentences that seem determined to resist being understood. Is it me, or is literature less about feeling and more about translation? As if meaning must be earned through fucking suffering.

We are told this is greatness, even necessary.

We are told, quietly, firmly, unapologetically, that if we do not see it greatness, the fault lies with us. (I find this reassuring, as I myself am great, though unrecognized)

And that is where the trouble begins.

Because, let’s face it, the man himself is no longer the issue. He’s been dead these four centuries and more. Whatever he was, whatever he wrote, has long since been buried beneath a mountain of reverence, commentary, and academic incense.

What stands before us now is not a writer.

It’s a bloody institution.

A dividing line. Before him, after him. (BS/AS)

As though the world of words stumbled blindly until he arrived, and everything since has merely been an echo.

Never mind Sophocles or Aristophanes, poor bloody souls in their seaside togas, apparently waiting centuries for instruction. Never mind the messy, living chaos of language that refuses to sit still for anyone, however gifted.

No, we must all pass through the same narrow gate.

We must admire, quote, and show reverence.

We must, at some point in our lives, ask whether to be or not to be, as though the fucking question had never occurred to a human being before it was dressed in better clothes.

And heaven help the one who shrugs.

Because then come the guardians.

The critics. The interpreters. The devoted keepers of the flame. Those who speak of him in tones usually reserved for saints or weather systems. Men like Ben Jonson, who began sensibly enough, “less Greek and little Latin”, before memory, time, or loyalty softened the blow and raised the man into something approaching myth.

Even the detractors could not quite hold the line. Robert Greene took his shot, “an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers”, and died with the words still warm. A fine insult, well aimed. But it did not stick. It never does.

Because the machine had already begun.

It rolled forward through John Milton, through John Dryden, through Samuel Taylor Coleridge with his “oceanic mind” and “thousand souls.” Each adding another brick. Another adjective. Another reason why no one else quite measures up.

Until we arrive where we are now.

A world where a writer is no longer read, but revered. Where the question is not “is this good?” but “how good must this be, since we have already agreed that it is?”

And so the student sits there, staring at the page, translating line by line, wondering privately whether the emperor might, in fact, be underdressed, while publicly nodding along, pencil in hand, careful not to be the one who doesn’t get it.

This is not admiration.

This is inheritance.

And inheritance, like all things passed down too long without question, begins to smell faintly of obligation.

Do I think the man had talent? Of course he did. You do not haunt four centuries by accident.

But must he haunt every bloody room?

Must every writer measure themselves against a ghost?

Must every reader learn to love him before they are allowed to love anything else?

That is tyranny.

Not the man, but the expectation, not the damn many works, but the weight placed upon them.

Because, and listen to me, as someone who has died on the nib for Shakespeare, here is the quiet truth, the one not often spoken aloud: No writer, however brilliant, deserves to be compulsory. And no reader should feel lesser for walking away completely bloody unmoved by the sodding bard.

I’m not saying move him off center stage, let him stand, keep his quotes, his admirers, but for the love of language, let the rest of us breathe a little outside his frilly-necked shadow.

Even if it means, now and then, daring to say, enough!