From the fair Emily, this, which made me like to split my sides with laughing:
omg, wtfucketh?!? How can Shakespeare write Iago out of the play like that? He doth so merely to spite his fans, the mad fool. Doth he not know that we are his customers, and the customer is always right?!?
Alas, 'tis too true. Ever when one completes a work, on the instant legions of citizens appear to speak of how it might have been better done. All this is part and parcel of the alchymy of story and how it works upon the mind. If it be true gold indeed, the spoken word, enter'd in at the ear of the hearer, doth within become the very thing it figures forth, as a king, a madman, or indeed that humour which makes kings mad, and madmen kings. As I did say once:
"Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them
Printing their proud hoofs i'th'receiving earth;
For 'tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings."
From thence 'tis but a short stride to the figuring forth of new kings in one's thought, or new adventures for old kings. Or belike, hot lusty tales of king-on-king action (alas that mine own The Scholars of Wittenberg: a tragickal Romance of Prince Hamlet and Doctor Faustus is among the lost!)
While I liv'd, there was no law to enclose the common land of the imagination into privy walled garden-plots; a story once told, and in especial once printed, was free for use by any. I was much gall'd by this when it work'd against me, and bastard copies of my works sold without a penny to me. Yet if I saw a piece of work that I could better, it was free for my use: Kyd's Hamlet, Legge's Ricardus Tertius, and scores of others were grist to my mill.
That fertile wit, Oscar Wilde, did speak much to the purpose:
'My dear Robbie, when I see a monstrous tulip with four petals in someone else's garden, I am impelled to grow a monstrous tulip with five wonderful petals, but that is no reason why someone should grow a tulip with only three petals'.
Which is as much as to say: if thou canst better the tale, have at it; but an thou canst not, take care lest it have at thee. A fig for Nahum Tate and all his ilk, say I.
Posted by Shakespeare at April 14, 2004 1:05 AM