Shakespeare, a biography

The next meeting of the Portsmouth Poetry Society is on 'monologues'.

I wasn't sure if I had anything to contribute until realizing that it might be fun to do Stanley Holloway's The Lion and Albert and also perhaps a work by the great C20th poet, Hill. Not Geoffrey, though, Benny. I mean Ernie (The Fastest Milkman in the West).

But then I find that the other night, in an extended state of gin & tonic, I seem to have written this on a subject I cannot help but return to from time to time.

Shakespeare- a biography 

There are many so-called facts that some people believe

About the life of Shakespeare but please don’t be deceived.

They say he died on his birthday, April 23^rd

But that’s not very likely and is just short of absurd. 

Some say he didn’t even write the stuff his name is on.

Who was it, then. Not Marlowe, Oxford or Francis Bacon.

Marlowe was obviously dead by 1593

And so unlikely to have written Hamlet while hiding in Italy. 

It couldn’t have been Oxford. I’ve seen some of his work.

Something as good as Macbeth was well beyond his mark.

And Bacon was so busy as a government bureaucrat

That although nearly clever enough he couldn’t have done that. 

I’m sorry but the doubters are by now out of ideas.

I’m afraid they need to face up to their innermost fears,

That genius comes from anywhere, not just the upper class,

It wasn’t even a miracle, just something that came to pass. 

Some think that he was happily long married to Ann,

Well, technically, he might have been, having fathered Susanne,

But he was out of Stratford as soon he could after that

And not even heterosexual, much, with aristocrats. 

One thing nobody’s noticed, apart from my mate Tim,

Is that the twins attributed were not fathered by him.

Hamnet and Judith’s names commemorated the fact

That they came about due to an extra-marital act.

And Will’s will left to Ann the famous second best bed.

Nobody knows what that meant, it is just what the will said.

It might have meant he didn’t love her or he might have meant he did.

Some people think they’ve solved the puzzle but, Heaven Forbid, 

Is it not best that we don’t know, and not even how he died,

Because many want to explain and many have tried,

Which might or might not have been after drinking with some friends,

But nobody really knows exactly how the story ends.