Shakespeare-centric universe

[truepenny]

So I dreamed last night that I met a time traveler from the future (in a restaurant with the Worst Service In The World, but that's not the point), who said that he had trouble with the way we spoke English. He found it "rustic" and "quaint."

I said, "Oh, you mean like we think of Shakespeare?"

He was puzzled. "What do you mean?"

I quoted Sonnet 18: "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? / Thou art more lovely and more temperate."

"I don't understand that," he said. "Who is Shakespeare?"

"Shakespeare, comma, William," I said. "English playwright of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The greatest playwright of the English Renaissance. Probably the greatest playwright in the English language. Maybe the greatest playwright in the history of mankind, but put three English majors and a classicist in a room together, and you'd get a pretty good argument out of it."

"Oh," he said. "I've heard of him. He's about half lost to us."

Which I found almost unbearably sad.

---

I'd be the first to admit my subconscious is a freak.

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

That feels like a historian's dream: the fear and awareness of the lacunae in our knowledge of the past. All those lost manuscripts... (I'm an early mediaevalist. I have a list of what is valuable and necessary and lost.)

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Ovid's Medea is my number one example. And, of course, the second book of Aristotle's Poetics (*g*).The time-travel story that matociquala and I wrote, "The Ile of Dogges," is completely and totally the wish-fulfillment fix for this grief.

The concern in the dream was less about literal lacunae and more with emotional distance, with indifference and neglect. Shakespeare was being lost because no one cared about him. A little like, come to think of it, Peter Carey's short story about cartographers, which I have forgotten the title of.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

I want something called The Mercian Register, which is a lost chronicle of the British Midlands.
I know that sense of emotional distancing. It's happening with a lot of the history of both England and Wales these days, due to bad school curriculum choices. We're losing our historical depth because so little before the 20th century is taught.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Being a later medievalist, I want Chrétien de Troyes' Del roi Marc et d'Yseut la Blonde.

My dreams are never so coherent.

[clhollandwriter]

This is exactly why I refused to take history at GCSE (a long time ago now!). It was all WWII and the Russian Revolution, and I just thought "where's the rest?"