I never writ

We don’t know exactly when William Shakespeare was born, in 1564, but he was baptized on 26 April, and baptisms were typically done back then within a couple of days of birth, in case the infant didn’t survive. So it’s possible that today is the 454^th anniversary of his birth. It is the 402^nd anniversary of his death. And since it’s not possible to get through National Poetry Month without something from the heavy artillery of English letters, today’s a good day for Will.

As is my custom, I’m giving you something from one of his plays, as well as a sonnet.

I realized that in the 11 years I’ve been marking NPM, I’ve never given you Antony’s eulogy for Caesar, so I’m fixing that here.

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones;
So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar was ambitious:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Caesar answer’d it.
Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest–
For Brutus is an honourable man;
So are they all, all honourable men–
Come I to speak in Caesar’s funeral.
He was my friend, faithful and just to me:
But Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.
He hath brought many captives home to Rome
Whose ransoms did the general coffers fill:
Did this in Caesar seem ambitious?
When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept:
Ambition should be made of sterner stuff:
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.
You all did see that on the Lupercal
I thrice presented him a kingly crown,
Which he did thrice refuse: was this ambition?
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And, sure, he is an honourable man.
I speak not to disprove what Brutus spoke,
But here I am to speak what I do know.
You all did love him once, not without cause:
What cause withholds you then, to mourn for him?
O judgment! thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason. Bear with me;
My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar,
And I must pause till it come back to me.

As a treat, I’m also giving you Alun Armstrong as Brian Lane reciting that speech in his New Tricks working-class Northern accent:

And now for the sonnet—Number 118, which Alan Rickman read as one of the highlights of Sense and Sensibility, although I sadly do not have a suitable video of that. You’ll have to use your imagination.

Sonnet 118

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me prov'd,
I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd.