*
“I was called in by the parish priest,” the
customer in the chair to my left said to the barber. The Monsignor
wanted to know why the man and his wife had only one child. In their
present financial condition, the man explained, they could not afford
to have any more children.
“But the Good Lord will provide,” contended the
priest.
“Meanwhile, Father, I'm the
Good Lord.”
*
Having to wait my
turn, I rooted among the magazines on the coffee table to find
something enlightening to read. And I did: the April 1973 issue of
Playboy magazine, in
which I discovered a lengthy interview with Tennessee Williams. (I
did not realize that I was supposed to examine the lady with the
staple in her navel.) The one fact from that interview that I carried
away with me--and referred to often in my Shakespeare classes--was
that we have on record, as confessed by the playwright himself, the
occasion of Williams' first orgasm.
So, here's how things stand:
we know when the man who is possibly America's greatest playwright
(argue about it amongst yourselves later, folks) had his first
orgasm—but we don't know for certain the exact date of birth of the
greatest playwright in the English language. Oh, the calendars that
bother at all will mark April 23 as the date of his birth (we do know
for certain that he died on an April 23), but that birth date is
merely a supposition, working backwards from the date of his baptism,
which was recorded (April 26).
It is one of the great
intellectual fallacies that people are prone to: believing that as
things are now, so were they then. If we know almost every tidbit
about the lives of modern authors, shouldn't we know everything (or a
hell of a lot) about the lives of earlier great authors? But there
was no 16th/17th
Century People
magazine or “Tonight” show (or equivalents of other outposts of
modern celebrity culture). (“Well, Johnny or Jay or whoever, I'm
thinking about adapting this old Italian play about two lovers who
have problems with their families.”) And since nature abhors a
vacuum (thank you, Aristotle) lots of determined (i.e., deluded)
people have rushed in over the next four centuries to fill in the
“facts” of Shakespeare's life.*
*
July 1973. A small
black-and-white television set was tuned into the Senate Watergate
hearings. The new witness was an aide to H.R. Haldeman,
President Nixon's Chief of Staff, by the name of Gordon C.
Strachan,** who was just about to celebrate his thirtieth birthday.
Suddenly, the barber to my right pointed to the screen and exclaimed,
“He has long hair!” While Strachan's locks were hardly
Beatlesque, they were in the context of the Nixon White House (his
boss, Haldeman, was noted for his severe crew cut) flowing.
It seemed to me to be perfectly right that the first
thing a barber would notice--even in the turmoil of a Constitutional
crisis--is a witness' hair. This feeling of mine was
substantiated many years later when I was engaged in conversation
with a department store saleslady. She told me that what she paid
attention to while recently waiting for her daughter's arrival at the airport
was the luggage of the passengers. We were conversing, of course, in the
luggage department.
***
*S. Schoenbaum's book
Shakespeare's Lives is
a brilliant historical survey of both the reasonable suggestions and
the irrational flights of fancy that have been offered as
biographical possibilities (or, in many fanciful cases, "certitudes").
(For what it's worth, this post was not written by the Earl of
Oxford.)
**Not to be confused
with Gordon (“Wee Gordie”) Strachan, the manager of Scotland's
national football team. (See
http://drnormalvision.blogspot.com/2010/08/velocity.html)
"Wee Gordie" Gordon C. Strachan
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