Of course, tradition marks the birthday on April 23rd to fall in with St. George's Day and the date of his death but while he certainly died on his birthday, he probably wasn't born on it (an observation I never miss a chance of making). The documentary evidence we have is a record of his baptism on 26th and so you knock a few days off of that to arrive at whichever date of birth you prefer.Discussion on the wireless yesterday evening asked if his reputation was deserved, if he is as good as is suggested. Surely nobody could be quite as good as this reputation. Some pertinent points were made.
As can be seen to happen in cases like this, we take our model from a paragon example and then should not be surprised to find that the paragon example fits our criteria of excellence the best. Bach and The Beatles seem almost unassailable in their genres in the same way that Shakespeare is 'the greatest writer ever'. Shakespeare represents something human, expressive and rambling compared to Classical models of discipline, order and convention and with Western culture showing no sign of recovering from its infatuation with Romanticism and individuality, his position looks safe for a long time yet. But such things can be surprisingly fluid and so you never can tell.
It was also suggested that Shakespeare has ceased to be a centre of light and creativity from which all things emerge and become a black hole into which everyone throws themselves. Each generation, each branch of thought, tries to claim Shakespeare as their own and Shakespeare swallows them up. But perhaps we no longer take the view that Shakespeare has something to teach. He seems to be astonishingly neutral on many issues and certainly should not, for example, be taken as a patriot just because some of his characters speak in patriotic terms. He was a poet and we don't necessarily expect poets, or the process of poetry, to have opinions these days.
He was accused of many things including being a capitalist. A number of eminent names who found fault can be lined up - Tolstoy, Shaw, Wittgenstein. But, heaven knows, give the man a break. It is very difficult to see his work as it would have been seen 400 years ago. See how absurd some popular music of the 1960's and 70's sounds to us already but I remember Tonto's Expanding Head Band being considered state of the art.
The answer to whether he was any good is surely implicit in the fact that 450 years after he was born, the subject is still worthy of discussion. It is not his fault that once the work has left his desk, been performed, published and gone into the world, there is no more the author can do to save it.
For me, anybody who wrote,
Light thickens; and the crow
Makes wing to the rooky wood:
is a poet worthy of the name and the fact that he did equally good things time and again enhances his standing each time. But perhaps the most telling tribute is how he withstands generation after generation of academics coming to scrutinize every aspect yet again and he remains as fresh as ever.
Happy Birthday to him. By moving it to April 21st, his 450th can be marked on the same day as other great English icons like Charlotte Bronte (198) and Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II (88). What a coincidence.
