Throwing Shakespeare at the Taj Mahal… again!
Friday, December 25th, 2009
Yesterday, I was talking to a friend in a bar. I like bar talk – if it’s about more than women, football, cars and, these days, of course, also iPhones and Macs. It’s amazing how boring people can be about those things.
Still, when the alcohol starts to ripple (as of yet gently) through the brain, and the conversation flows from the latest Stephen King to the self-portraits of Rembrandt, by way of the Second World War and EU politics and the records of Miles Davis and who was and wasn’t in Casablanca…
… then, to me at least, it’s about the best of times beer & shots money can buy…
… and yes, there is a point to all of that and I’m slowly coming to it.
So, at one random point in the evening my friend mentioned that stolen corpse of the former Cyprus president Tassos Papadopoulos. I reminded him that stealing corpses has always been the favourite pastime of a select few morons & scoundrels and I was quite amazed to learn that my friend did not know about the theft of a way more famous corpse:
“Three months after Chaplin died on Christmas, 1977, his body was stolen in an effort to extort money from his family. Chaplin’s body was recovered 11 weeks later after the grave-robbers were captured. He is now buried under 6 feet of concrete to prevent further theft attempts.”
Anyway, I was reminded of these grave robbing tales when I came upon the following story, a bit earlier today:
“Three mysterious signatures on pages of parchment bound in leather and kept under lock and key may prove the theory that William Shakespeare was a secret Catholic who spent his “lost years” in Italy.”
Talk about digging up famous graves indeed. Still, Shakespeare’s dead body has been fucked with by God knows how many necrophiliacademic chancers, who try to sell us this, that or the other latest theory about him.
So, we get speculations about his portrait, his sexuality and even his gender. We get to read about all the reasons why Shakespeare couldn’t have written what he has written…
… and now we have yet another idiot claiming that Shakespeare was a catholic…
… which, of course, is trivial beyond all other trivial pursuits. It’s like the pursuit of happiness entwined with the quest for the fountain of youth, squared by the search for an honest MP.
The point of Shakespeare is not whether he was catholic, female, black, alien and/or bisexual.
The only point worth making is that the point of Shakespeare is that he is Shakespeare.
All other speculation is as senseless and unwelcome as a plastic replica of the Tower of Pisa, thrown at the Taj Mahal.

















