by William Cobbs

Created on: May 28, 2009   Last Updated: June 06, 2009

SHAKESPEARE is not only relevant but all ways present in the minds of English-speaking and English-using peoples.

It is highly improbable that any human being writing in the world of English will ever get NEAR the genius and songs and language of the great bard. Let's look at a few things about him:

More than one hundred thousand books have picked a quotation from him as the theme and title of their books.

In science, for the period 1560-1616, he was as conversant as Einsteim was of his period in the world.

His insight into the human animal is not yet surpassed.

His humor is such that his (humorous) plays are still played yearly and NOT ONLY IN ENGLISH. (Cite the Andre Gide translatins into French).

As a source of life and history of his and past times, he is the tops.

All of that said, let's look at his home, surroundings, life, and accomplishments.

I was running a private school near Stratford-upon-Avon at the time that the Shakespeare Foundation celebrated his 400th birthday.

(In fact, but not relevant, I was the author of the official poem of the celebration).

SHAKESPEARE was born like millions of us today as a to-be dusty schoolboy in a boring town on the Avon river. But the place had beauty, and he absorbed it. He liked his studies and particularly Latin and Italian as language studies...he later learned French.

At age 16, he became the lover of a 27-year-old Straford miss, Ann Hathaway, and impregnated her. The families got together and decided to legitimize the birth. There was one other birth but no succession was left for Shakespeare. Ann Hathaway never needed his financial help as her family were wealthy "Lucy" people, of higher social status than Will.

Will was stymied and mentally blocked by the village though he had great affection for its environs, the woods, the river, the quaint people.

But he suffocated, and had to get out and DO SOMETHING. He fled to London and got a part time job as stage attendant at the new burgeoning idea of 'theatre" copied after the Greeks and Italians and the same phenomena in France.

He met the current playwrights and in fact was in a bar with a major one when the playwright was stabbed to death.

He became an actor.

He was very good as an actor and because of the fierce mental activity of assuming identities, he became able to WRITE and create the essence of people. He did so.

At this time he made several trips through France to Italy and watched and read and translated some of their plays.

He then based some plays upon those trips.

Interested in science and discovery, he wrote his finest play about the then current exploration of the "Bermudies", THE TEMPEST which containe the most beautiful poetry so far realized in the English language.

In 1958, when the great computer at M. I. T. was completed, WILLIAM LOCKE, genius, doctor of linguistics, and a few helpers like me, wrote a program containing 138 decisive factors that made a play to have been written by Shakespeare. We proved scientifically that all of the plays were his with the possibility that CORIOLANUS and SYRACUSE were translations rather than original work.. We also decided that the poems were his work but were intended as fundraisers among the wealthy and not as lyric poetry.(They were lyric in spite of science! Will could not write a bad line!).

Is all that relevant in the modern world?

YES, a resounding yes, unless we are preparing a world for the middle road of non-intellect, of plodders and military might, of the drab lives that, YES! we're sometimes displayed by William Shakespeare as the types of lives to not be envied , or used as patterns!

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