Gentles, tomorrow is my birthday! Or rather, the day on which 'tis most like I first saw daylight: for deepest scholarship knows it not, and I myself can scarce remember, considering of my extreme youth at the time.
I have years on my back four hundred and forty, and feel but young yet in experience.
Tomorrow, also, as ye may know, is my death-day. Unlike my birth, this is certain, and mayhap tradition has settled upon that same day for the pleasing symmetry thereof. As I did say in my Julius Caesar:
This day I breathed first. Time is come round,
And where I did begin there shall I end;
My life is run his compass.
Which, for a man who knew no magics, is a fair attempt at presaging, is it not? Also, the image of the compass is one I love: that a true circle with a fix'd centre will always end at just that point where it did first begin, an image of completion, recurrence and infinity. On this theme did Jack Donne say much, but chiefly this, of his soul and his love's:
If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two ;
Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if th' other do.
And though it in the centre sit,
Yet, when the other far doth roam,
It leans, and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.
Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like th' other foot, obliquely run ;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.
-- A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning
Is not that fine? Doth not Master Donne give to his beloved most excellent comfort at his going away? The compass-image speaketh of connection between the two lovers, of his debt to her constancy, and is at the same moment both scholarly and physical. Would that I might have writ so!
Thus far my thoughts upon mine own birthday: that, and (I confess me) much wonderment that it is given any remembrance at all, these many years on. I hoped, as all poets do, that some few of my lines might live after me: but I thought never to see such revelry both in Stratford and London. I do feel much mov'd withal, I tell ye.
In the New World, an thou wilt come and revel with me, thou mayst attend in Boston, Atlanta, Washington DC, Staunton, Virginia, Muir Beach, California, and Los Angeles, to name but a few. If I perchance have forgot thine own event, then be not slighted, but a Gods name, proclaim the link in a comment for all to see!
Or an thou wilt not, then only read upon this merry drawing. For upon this day I would have all merry and none sad, if it might be so.
Now, off to the Staggering Seraph (for those who would know, 'tis an inn on the borders of this world and the next, whither the best brewers of strong drink do repair on their death) to drown the years in sack and revel it till the morn. Kit and Ben stay for me there, and belike we shall even draw old Donne in for a glass or two this night, though he died a divine and no friend to players. Here's to thee, gentle reader: if I do live yet in this world, the thanks are thine. And I too thy most faithful servant,
Will Shakespeare
Posted by Shakespeare at April 22, 2004 2:27 AM