'It Lingers in Memory Forever'

“But in what qualities is his greatness especially to be sought? Chiefly in two. In the first place, he was the most marvelous master of words that ever set pen to paper, and in the second place he was the most prodigal creator of living, upstanding characters that ever peopled a dream world with his fancies.” 

This is H.L. Mencken in a rare appreciative mood, writing, for once, of a fellow writer without kneejerk iconoclasm. His subject is Shakespeare and his manner is almost humble – toward the playwright if not toward generations of Bardic idolaters. He writes of their schoolmarm fetishism:

 

“Time was, and not so long ago, when the poet was set upon a pedestal so high and his worshipers adored him so vociferously that the voice of common sense could not be heard. It was accepted as an axiom that every line in his plays was beyond criticism, that his art was perfect in the smallest things as well as in the largest, that he rose above all ordinary human limitations and wrote with the inspiration of divine prophet.”

 

That’s how Shakespeare was first fed to me, in seventh-grade English class – Julius Caesar as holy writ. Of course, I already knew the play, or at least one soliloquy, thanks to the Little Rascals. Shakespeare should not be read solemnly, anymore than life should be lived solemnly. Mencken is writing in the Baltimore Evening Sun on this date, April 23, in 1910 – the traditional day for observing Shakespeare’s birthday. As Mencken notes, all we know for certain is that he was baptized three days later.

 

Christopher Logue, not the most reverent of readers, silently alludes to a dozen or more English poets in War Music (2016), his mutation of The Iliad. If you listen closely, you’ll hear Chaucer, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Byron and Kipling, among others. While reading his Homer again I hear no one so often as Shakespeare, often in unexpected contexts. In the section originally published as All Day Permanent Red (2003), Logue writes:

 

“—The Uzi shuddering warm against your hip

Happy in danger in a dangerous place

Yourself another self you found at Troy

Squeeze nickel through that rush of Greekoid scum!

Oh wonderful and then again more wonderful

A bond no word or lack of words can break . . .”

 

Logue is rephrasing Celia’s words in Act III, Scene 2 of As You Like It:

  

“O wonderful, wonderful, and most wonderful

wonderful! and yet again wonderful, and after that,

out of all hooping!”

 

In the final words of the section titled Cold Calls (2005), Logue slightly alters the words of Philip the Bastard in Act I, Scene 2 of King John:

 

“Lord, I was never so bethumped with words

Since I first called my father Dad.”

Shakespeare actually writes: “I was never so bethump’d with words / Since I first call’d my brother's father Dad.”

 

In his 2002 biography of Mencken, the late Terry Teachout reminds us that the journalist only once tried to write a novel – “it never got off the ground” -- and it was based on the life of Shakespeare. Like Logue, Mencken loved exuberant language, and no writer is so exuberant as Shakespeare. Mencken writes:

 

“No other language save the English has ever known so subtle a master. The German of Goethe, the Spanish of Calderon and Cervantes, the French of Corneille and Hugo and the Greek of Homer must ever delight the connoisseur of verbal magic, but Shakespeare’s English stands above them all. In more than one place the thing that he says is scarcely worth hearing, but he always says it with such inimitable art that it lingers in memory forever.”