There are more things in heaven and earth.
William Shakespeare on Philosophy. (The Commonplace Book Project)
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“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” — William Shakespeare, Hamlet
I put Shakespeare in Love on while I was writing this post.
There’s a scene, at the end of the first act, when Shakespeare who has finally broken his writer’s block, goes into a frenzy of work.
What he had to go through just to write a few pages was a mix of funny and awe-inspiring.
He had to strip some kind of giant feather to make a quill, sharpen it, fit it with a nib, dip it in ink to make a few messy, drippy marks, and then dip again. Then sand the whole thing to make sure the ink doesn’t smear. For each sentence or so.
I’ve often been grateful that I don’t have to write on a manual typewriter. It’s hard to even imagine writing with a feather and a jar of ink.
Shakespeare in Love takes a very fictional look at how Romeo and Juliet came to be. Romeo and Juliet, of course, has been told over and over in the last five hundred years or so. Shakespeare in Love is a retelling of Romeo and Juliet.
But I’ve always thought it started with Shakespeare.
I’ve always thought there are no brand new stories, because people like Shakespeare told them all.
But it turns out that he wasn’t the first. Not even close.
Both Pyramus and Thisbe, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, first published in the time of Jesus and The Ephesiaca of Xenophon of Ephesus, published in the third century, are about lovers with families who hate each other, who commit suicide at the end, each thinking the other is dead.
And even the play, Romeo and Juliet, was an adaptation of a narrative poem The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet by Arthur Brooke.
I’m probably embarrassing myself by admitting that I didn’t know any of that — and that I really thought that Shakespeare really was the first to write Romeo and Juliet.
Today’s Poem
Sonnet V by William Shakespeare
Those hours, that with gentle work did frame The lovely gaze where every eye doth dwell, Will play the tyrants to the very same And that unfair which fairly doth excel: For never-resting time leads summer on To hideous winter and confounds him there; Sap cheque’d with frost and lusty leaves quite gone, Beauty o’ersnow’d and bareness every where: Then, were not summer’s distillation left, A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass, Beauty’s effect with beauty were bereft, Nor it nor no remembrance what it was: But flowers distill’d though they with winter meet, Leese but their show; their substance still lives sweet.
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Shaunta Grimes is a writer and teacher. She is an out-of-place Nevadan living in Northwestern PA with her husband, three superstar kids, two dementia patients, a good friend, Alfred the cat, and a yellow rescue dog named Maybelline Scout. She’s on Twitter @shauntagrimes and is the author of Viral Nation and Rebel Nation and the upcoming novel The Astonishing Maybe. She is the original Ninja Writer.
