The reason for the composition of The Merry Wives of Windsor is a fascinating thing to consider. Among several competing theories, it seems that the most likely is that it was written for a feast in celebration of an installation ceremony of (among others) George Carey, the second Baron Hunsden, and most importantly, the Lord Chamberlain (and thus the patron of Shakespeare's company), into the Order of the Garter on April 23, 1597. In the Oxford edition the editor T.W. Craik explains that Carey's commissioning of the play is a more probable reason for its existence than the legendary story of Queen Elizabeth requesting a play that showed Falstaff in love, which although charming, is not supported by any evidence. The play itself, however, contains references to both Elizabeth and the Order during the masque-like final scene (5.5). First, Pistol, disguised as Hobgoblin, refers to "our radiant queen" when giving directives to the town children (dressed as fairies) to make sure that the town chimneys have been kept clean. Then, Mistress Quickly, disguised as the Fairy Queen, gives them the following instructions almost in the form of an incantation:

About, about;

Search Windsor Castle, elves, within and out:

Strew good luck, ouphes, on every sacred room:

That it may stand till the perpetual doom,

In state as wholesome as in state 'tis fit,

Worthy the owner, and the owner it.

The several chairs of order look you scour

With juice of balm and every precious flower:

Each fair instalment, coat, and several crest,

With loyal blazon, evermore be blest!

And nightly, meadow-fairies, look you sing,

Like to the Garter's compass, in a ring:

The expressure that it bears, green let it be,

More fertile-fresh than all the field to see;

And 'Honi soit qui mal y pense' write

In emerald tufts, flowers purple, blue and white;

Let sapphire, pearl and rich embroidery,

Buckled below fair knighthood's bending knee:

Fairies use flowers for their charactery.

Unfortunately, these wonderful lines are often cut from the play, and when this is done, so are its ties to its history.

One of the most dangerous things that can happen in a classroom is ideological indoctrination, and it happens a lot, and at every level. It's dangerous because it doesn't lead to creative thinking, only to intellectual submission, no matter how "good" are the perceived intentions of the instructor. Educators should keep in mind that their goal should be a search for truth, for both their students and themselves, and that even-handed consideration of every available viewpoint is the way to achieve it. Andre Gide once said it best, "Believe those who seek the truth. Doubt those who find it". All of this is another reason for keeping the study of Shakespeare central in education, because as literature, it never loses sight of these concepts. It raises all sorts of philosophical and moral questions without answering them. And what educators of experience, from Socrates to today, usually find is that raising them is all that is necessary. The student, or audience member, will do the rest.

Further to yesterday's post on Shakespeare's reported lack of revision during the writing process, I was reminded of an observation made by a very great music teacher I once had. Essentially, he compared music to tissue, in which every part is dependent on every other part. Therefore, in the composition process, every move resounds with implications for the rest of the piece, and any change made early in a piece will require others to be made later. So it's in a composer's best interest to have thorough comprehension of all matters connected to form, both small-scale and large, before any decisions are made. This, evidently, is exactly what Shakespeare had as a dramatist. His plays are the proof of it; they are, for most commentators and readers, the most unified works of art in literature. And this brings me back to my summation yesterday: The primary concern in the study of Shakespeare should be the attempt to understand, as precisely as possible, what that knowledge entailed.

"The players often mention it as an honour to Shakespeare that in his writing; whatsoever he penned, he never blotted out a line. My answer hath been, 'Would he had blotted a thousand.'"

Thus spake Ben Jonson on the subject of Shakespeare's use of (or lack of) revision during his writing process, which remains, for the most part, a mystery to this all-ending day. (I wonder if there's a more important area of study in regard to Shakespeare than the attempt to understand his methods of working. I can't think of one, to be honest.) And if it's true that Shakespeare didn't revise much, if at all, then we must consider the implications of the fact. Perhaps one way of considering it is to compare his process to that of a jazz musician, who must spend many years of study (on his or her instrument, harmony and rhythm, the history of music, and much more), in order to be able to improvise, or as it's sometimes called, "compose in the moment". In this style, no editing is possible. It seems likely that Shakespeare prepared himself for his work in a comparable way, and with the deadlines and responsibilities of a theatre professional always in the background, it may well have been a necessity.

By the way, I don't know what mood (or "humour") Jonson was in when he wrote the above, but I prefer to think of the following (http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/jonson/benshake.htm) as a more accurate representation of his views on Shakespeare.

I'm not sure that there is an artist in any field that can compare with Shakespeare in terms of the depiction and understanding of time. Technically, his plays are largely the result of his treatment of it, and to get to know them from the point of view of craft, it's a vital area of study. I've mentioned it before in another context, but one of the many changes that Shakespeare made to his source material for Romeo and Juliet, Arthur Brooke's The Tragicall History of Romeus and Juliet (1562), was to telescope a four-month period into one of four days, while still allowing breathing room for characters such as the Nurse and Mercutio, and maintaining the audience's belief throughout. In terms of theme, time is central to many, perhaps most, of the plays, but some, such as Macbeth, are almost entirely absorbed by it: The play is perhaps best approached as a dramatic example of how people can destroy the present by obsession with the future. And in Henry IV, part Two, the king (i.e. Bolingbroke), nearing the end of his life, which was filled with civil wars, rebellions, illness, has these lines, as powerful as any in Shakespeare, about the entangled natures of life and time:

O God! that one might read the book of fate,

And see the revolution of the times

Make mountains level, and the continent,

Weary of solid firmness, melt itself

Into the sea; and other times to see

The beachy girdle of the ocean

Too wide for Neptune's hips; how chances mock,

And changes fill the cup of alteration

With divers liquors! O, if this were seen,

The happiest youth, viewing his progress through,

What perils past, what crosses to ensue,

Would shut the book and sit him down and die.

In yesterday's post, I mentioned that a very important aspect of Shakespeare is the fact that the work has been both inspirational and educational to other writers. Not only the plays, but also the careers that allowed them to be written (by which I mean those of Shakespeare and his colleagues) are now touchstones for anyone involved with literature. Sometimes, it takes only a few well-chosen words to conjure up images of the Globe, the actors, the audience, which continue to symbolize human aspiration for truth, art and betterment of thinking. Here's an example from Auden's 1949 poem, "Memorial for the City":

Saints tamed, poets acclaimed the raging Herod of the will;

The groundlings wept as on a secular stage

The grand and the bad went to ruin in thundering verse;

Sundered by reason and treason the City

Found invisible ground for concord in measured sound,

While wood and stone learned the shameless

Games of man, to flatter, to show off, be pompous, to romp...

I wish I could find a link to the poem in its entirety; it's as powerful as this excerpt would suggest.

One of the things that I like the most about Shakespeare is the creativity that his work inspires in others. In fact, in the 400 years since, Shakespeare has probably taken on an importance at least equal to virtually any other body of literature, and knowledge of it is a necessity for anyone wanting to either get a comprehensive background in literature, or to participate in it as a creative agent. I'd go even further: for a young person with an interest in literature, there isn't a better place to start. A poem that argues all of this, in a subtle way, is John Milton's "An Epitaph on the Admirable Dramatic Poet W. Shakespeare", which makes the interesting point that Shakespeare's true legacy (and lasting monument) is in the contributions that he made to the minds of other people. Have a look:

What needs my Shakespeare for his honoured bones

The labour of an age in piled stones?

Or that his hallowed relics should be hid

Under a star-y-pointing pyramid?

Dear son of memory, great heir of fame,

What need'st thou such weak witness of thy name?

Thou in our wonder and astonishment

Hast built thyself a live-long monument.

For whilst to th' shame of slow-endeavouring art

Thy easy numbers flow, and that each heart

Hath from the leaves of thy unvalued book

Those Delphic lines with deep impression took,

Then thou our fancy of itself bereaving,

Dodt make us marble with too much conceiving;

And so sepulchred in such pomp dost lie,

That kings for such a tomb would wish to die.