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I'm publishing an additional posting this week in order to respond to some of the comments I have received recently. I should warn you now, only one of these comments has anything to do with Shakespeare. But hey, when the people who regularly follow your work are few enough to fit inside a VW Bug without any sort of clown school training whatsoever, it is wise to nourish your fan base in every way possible. Plus I'm pretty sure, despite the pseudonym, that I am closely related to one of the comment writers. Never leave your relatives hanging when all they seek from you a straightforward answer, I say. Think of all the trouble this would have saved King Lear and Cordelia.

Comment #1:
"There [is] no need to be defensive. And those that criticize because you do not bow down and worship before the holy altar of a [deified Shakespeare] are clearly trying to cover up their own literary inadequacies. Shakespeare may have been one of the greatest literary figures of the english language, but he was still human (or multiple humans if you subscribe to that particular theory). He had great works, good works, average works, and even poor works (lets not forget Timon of Athens). The Tempest is hardly viewed as one of his great works. Whether it is good, average, or merely poor is open to some debate. A quick question though...you call The Tempest his last work...but I thought it was written in 1611 whereas Henry VIII was in 1613. Do I have this wrong?"

~ Touchstone

Me:
I'd hoped not to come off as defensive in my previous posting. Drat this slippery, sublime English language of ours (at least in the hands of yours truly). I don't feel like my opinions are under attack, or even give two-hoots if they are. (One hoot, maybe. We all have our insecurities.) However, given some of the responses I received, I did feel it was necessary to clarify why I was not an unqualified Tempest fanatic, as some readers seemed to have missed my point. As well as the point of my overall effort. That's all.

Regarding the chronology of Shakespeare's last plays, my lackadaiscal research indicates that the whole thing is just a big mess. The Tempest was likely first performed in 1611 or 1612, and Henry VIII was likely first performed in 1612 or 1613. However, some scholarship indicates that Henry VIII was written entirely - or, more likely begun - before The Tempest. But many disagree. Some believe it was a collaboration between Shakespeare and a playwright named John Fletcher. But many disagree. Others think Fletcher finished it. Many disagree with this, too. And let's not even get into The Two Noble Kinsmen, which was probably performed after both of the other two. Any way you look at it, though, it seems certain that Henry was first performed several months after The Tempest, so The Tempest is likely not Shakespeare's last play, ceteris paribus and all that. The Tempest is considered by many to be Shakespeare's farewell play, (although I question this interpretation), and in that mindset I slipped and referred to it as his last play. Given the confusion around when what was written by whom, I might have been right by accident, but probably not. My bad.

Comment #2:
Didn't [Samuel Taylor] Coleridge have a serious opium problem?

~ Bakir

Me:

Hell yes! In fact, all of the Romantic poets (except Wordsworth) are known to have used opium. And personally, I'm not too sure about Wordsworth. I mean, have you read Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood? You don't even need to read it; just check out the name. Clearly, only a person doped up on some sort of smack would ever think that was a good title. ('Hmmm.... maybe I'll just add a fourth prepositional phrase here and... Hey! Far out! Perfectomundo!')

Basically, anyone who could afford any medical attention at all in the 1800s took opium. Doctors seemed to prescribe it for everything; a panacea whose chief allure was that nobody had any @#$%ing clue what it did. At all. This seemed to be a trend in medicine for centuries. I just finished reading The Pope's Ceiling, about Michelangelo, Pope Julius II and the painting of the Sistine Chapel, by Ross King. It's a pretty good read, and includes some darn interesting facts. Like, for example, Pope Julius II fell ill several times during his papal reign, and only survived by steadfastly refusing to follow doctors' orders. He lucked out a bit; known as il papa terribile, his staff and medicos were too terrified of him to overrule his insistence on wine, fruit and fresh meats instead of the prescribed water, stale bread and deadly metals. He recovered from 'deadly' diseases four or five times; he rallied a bit during his final illness, until in a weak moment he accepted a drink from his doctors containing the 'miracle cure-all' we know as powdered gold. He died the next morning.

I don't know what turned things around for the Western World, diagnostically speaking, but I'm going to go ahead and give some of the props Antoine Lavoisier for no real reason other than I think he's cool.

ANYWAY, Coleridge used opium only occasionally and almost always for health reasons - for 'neuralgic and rheumatic pains', whatever those are - from 1791 to 1800. After 1800, he had a serious and prolonged illness while visiting Britain's Lake District, which led to an increased dependence on the drug. By the time he delivered his critiques of Shakespeare, he was completely addicted. Contrary to much opinion, Coleridge hated his addiction, once he realized he had one, and fought it with everything he had. He consulted tons of physicians, who weren't prepared to help him since they couldn't very well prescribe opium to cure an opium addiction, and that was about all they kept in their trusty medical bags. Our boy Sammy T. almost killed himself several times trying to go cold turkey. At the end of his life he was able to wean himself a bit and control his cravings better, although he could never stopped taking entirely.

Coleridge devoted himself in part to preventing others from falling into the same quack-medical trap. "If I entirely recover", he wrote in 1808, "I shall deem it a sacred Duty to publish my Case, tho' without my name -- for the practice of taking Opium is dreadfully spread. -- Throughout Lancashire & Yorkshire it is the common Dram of the lower orders of People -- in the small Town of Thorpe the Druggist informed me, that he commonly sold on market days two or three Pound of Opium, & a Gallon of Laudanum [the simple alcoholic tincture of opium] -- all among the labouring Classes. Surely, this demands legislative Interference . . . . "

You can find out a ton more about it by clicking here:
"Opium and the 'Dream' of Kubla Khan, by John Spencer Hill

For those scratching their heads, wondering why anyone commented here on Coleridge at all, I mentioned his critique of The Tempest in my last entry. I don't know what his opium habit has to do with what he said about The Tempest, but hey, never let it be said I don't respond to readers' questions.

In closing, Just Say No, Kids. Skip the destruction of body and soul. Read Kubla Khan instead.

An interesting thought I will probably never follow up on: Did the perception of opium as a panacea continue to persist in 1844, the year (I think) in which Karl Marx mentioned it in association with religion and the masses? And if so, how should this change our understanding of his aphorism? In a quick Google search, I found at least one person who thinks poor Marx is misunderstood: "Jesus Challenging Marx for soul of China" by G. York in the Feb. 21, 2004 edition of The Globe and Mail

Right. Back to Shakespeare.

Comment #3

what kind of bull**** comment system do you have you arrogant *****? I'm just trying to download a url and am using your site and what do you know? Pretentious BS master doesn't have HTML tags enabled. Eat a ****, you'll always be poor.
~ (No name provided)

Me:

I include this comment only for one reason. To apologize to the world that I can't delete or edit it. Apparently the guy is right, I do use a bull**** comment system, or at least a cheap (free) one. It gives me no control over the content of comments, so I'm sorry I have to leave this up. If anyone knows of a cheap (free) comment system that does let me delete obscene comments, please leave me a comment about it on my current bull**** cheap (free) comment system, and I will switch.

I don't know what the commenter was trying to download for sure, but if I have any control over HTML labels, they are not enabled because of trouble I've been having with formatting on the blog. Very sorry to inconvenience any and all e-miscreants.

This comment has also generated some speculation about my net worth ("you'll always be poor". And from other comments "...Is it because you're poor?" "I heard you are poor, that's tough"). In response to this all I have to say is, umm, yeah, sure - I am poor. SOOOOO poor. Positively destitute. Haven't I told you I'm an out of work writer, for goodness sake? If you are reading this, you are obviously a patron of the arts, so shouldn't you be sending me some of your hard earned luchre, so you can support this effort to beautify the web for all humanity? (Soupy Sales, wherever you are, God Bless you.)

Don't Delay! Patronize My Art! To Save a Poor, Starving Writer, Click Here!

Many thanks in advance for all your generous donations. On Behalf of The Cat, The Spouse, The Bard, and myself, I salute you. If you're generous I'll work to make sure you go down in history as the internet's Lorenzo 'the Magnificent' de Medici. If you're VERY generous, perhaps I'll leave you my second-best bed, just like Will left to his questionably-beloved wife, Anne. Deal?