Forensic revisionism: Or, Finding a room the right size

[larryhammer]

The first draft is dated Sep 1994; I no longer have that text, only an incomplete revision from Aug 2001. I believe, though cannot prove, that edits focused on craft -- trying to regularlize rhymes and iron out awkward syntax and rhythm -- while keeping the argument entire. Withall, they are still 44 very rough lines in what should be a smooth, craft-spot-on work, given the style. The title may or may not be a deliberate misspelling.

Yesterday, I revised it into a sonnet: 14 sometimes deliberately rough lines (why yes, I have been reading a lot of Browning lately). For your possible amusement, for Pixel-Stained Techno-Shakespeare's Birthday, I give both versions, plus my a post-mortem -- behind courtesy cuts.

Guilded Monuments

—for Gregory Feeley

Since as we know, Greg, art's not life -- except
As polished and refractory small shards
  Chipped off of someone's glimpse of it,
    Some of which stay sharp --

Why do so many people spend such time
And learned energy amid the dust
  Of munimental rooms to find
    Who Will's Dark Lady was?

Is it in hopes of riding at the head
Of a scholar's triumph marching through
  The textbooks future students read?
    To have your paper used

In all the bibliographies must be
An academic's dream, Vespucci's form
  Of grasping immortality,
    Out-weathering time's storm.

For some, though, this exploratory daring
Seems mixed with feelings gossipers delight
  In -- watching neighbors have affairs,
    Discovering someone's bi, --

Else why so many biographic tales,
Both literary and quite lurid, telling
  Of Byron's incest and affairs,
    Most of them best-selling?

It's sometimes said that at the minimum
The work on this and other Bardic tasks
  Has saved the records of his time
    That otherwise were lost,

Yet surely, Greg, it were a greater good
To work at making popular again
  Selected sermons Donne once read
    Or Poly-Olbion.

But without details to hang a portrait on,
Biographers still paint despite the nail
  Fantastic faces, doted on,
    Or worse a squirted tale

Of ink purporting a key to Bacon's hand, --
All these, clouds fond and fake, obscure our sight,
  Making a true Shapespeare the Man
    A quest for Arthur's knights;

And even if this Grail was found we'd learn
No more inside the cup of Shakespeare's self
  Than we already can discern
    Within the works themselves.

- = -

Since as we know, art is not life -- except
As polished and refractory small shards
Chipped from a mirror -- why have scholars kept
Sifting through dusty muniment discards
For Will's Dark Lady? Immortality,
Perhaps? -- the hope of a footnote's triumph winding
Through future textbooks? Or a gossipy
Delight at exposing others, at finding
Out secrets? As it is, their ink clouds our sight,
Leaving, squidlike, Shakespeare the Man obscured,
A life quest for some errant Arthur's knight --
And even with that Grail, her name, we'd learn
No truth that we cannot already discern
Within the silver cup of Will's own word.

A useful but not, I think, entirely successful experiment: 44 lines is going too long, even discursively, for what little I tried to say, but 14 is too small a room. It'd help if I were willing to give up the shards image, but that sets up the both the opening and closing arguments and plays off the running imagery. Or what should be the running image: the old documents need a palpable dust cloud, which can transform into ink, both obscuring. And possibly the gossiper's attempt to peer through the gloom. But there's no space for that bell-ring-change, at least in this version.

Also -- ending? Too pat.

OTOH, there's some lines I'm pleased with. Oh, and speaking of possibly deliberate misspellings, I ponder replacing errant with arrant and/or Arthur's with Author's. Except, then, I think no one would get it.

---L.