Sherry Chandler

Will in the World

Since November, I’ve given up listening to the news. I’ll leave you to infer the reasons. To educate and amuse myself during my daily commute through the dull winter months, I’ve taken up listening to books on tape. I’ve listened to everything from Faulkner’s Go Down Moses to Sharyn McCrumb’s PMS Outlaws. I’ve even found a few poetry tapes. I must say that these books give me more comfort than Morning Edition and All Things Considered, excellent though those programs are.

My latest audio adventure has been Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (Norton), nominated for a National Book Critic’s Circle Award in Biography/Autobiography, along with Bob Dylan’s Chronicles (Simon & Schuster). I’m not sure how much I’m learning about Willie the Shake. Reading the actual plays might serve that purpose better. In fact, one of the highlights of the oral experience is narrator Jay Fernandez’s dramatic readings of the sonnets and snippets from the plays. He is brilliant as Falstaff. But this 11-hour ramble through Elizabethan culture is reminding me what a brutal world Shakespeare lived and wrote in. And hearing descriptions of Catholics in England being hanged, drawn, and quartered (don’t tell the interrogators at Guantanamo) as Protestants before them had been under Bloody Mary — and all because Henry VIII needed a male heir — I am reminded very vividly why our Founding Fathers wanted separation of church and state: not to restrain us from worshipping, but to guarantee that we can worship freely and as we choose.

Book Critics Circle Award Nominees in poetry are:
Brigit Pegeen Kelly, The Orchard (BOA)
D.A. Powell, Cocktails (Graywolf)
Adrienne Rich, The School Among the Ruins (Norton)
James Richardson, Interglacial (Ausable)
Gary Snyder, Danger on Peaks (Shoemaker & Hoard)

I refer you to BookFinder or BookSense to find a local independent bookstore for the purchase of these books.

Definition: To be hanged and cut down before death, drawn or disemboweled while still living and the gut burned, and quartered or cut into pieces.

Possibly related posts:

Singing

Wom-Po’s Letters to the World

From the Crossroads of the World

World Poetry Day

ars poetica

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