Today is the day traditionally celebrated as William Shakespeare's birthday (we know he was baptized on April 26).
In honor of the day, I'm hoping to have a chance to read a bit in Leon Garfield's Shakespeare Stories II. The sweet girl and I recently studied Cleopatra and Marc Antony, and she was very interested to learn a famous play had been written about them. I've heard Garfield's re-tellings of Shakespeare for children are quite good so I checked this volume (which includes his retelling of Antony and Cleopatra) out of the library. I've just not had time to read any yet, and I'd like to before I attempt it out loud.
Combining birthday celebrations with the ongoing celebration of poetry month, I'm posting what is probably my favorite Shakespearean sonnet, number 116.
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
I love this reflection on the durable nature of real love: its deep, unchanging quality even in the face of change, hardship, danger, decay. "...bears it out even to the edge of doom" is a remarkable phrase that rings so deeply true of all the best love stories, whether those be ones imagined on the page (that fortify us for the journey) or lived out in real life.
Thank you, Will, that you did indeed write. And love too.
2 comments:
This one always makes me think of Sense and Sensibility. :) And certainly a reflection on love that is just as wise all these years later.
That's right, they used this one in the Ang Lee/Emma Thompson version. I loved that. :-)
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