The exhibition in Somerset House, By me William Shakespeare provided us with as long as we wanted to scrutinize some original documents with hardly anybody else in the way. One imagines that a timed ticket means that the organizers are expecting a rush and I had been concerned that we might be part of a crowd, shoving and elbowing each other in front of such titanic documents in the Shakespeare biography industry as the will and calling out things like, Yes, I definitely caught sight of some of it then.There was no such worry. If there had been an influx of scholarly interest when the exhibition opened, it has apparently abated. This wasn't a play, a film or even a talk. It is a small but quite choice selection of documents relating to the theatre, legal papers but mainly the much debated last will and testament. And this is the advantage of having such esoteric interests. You may struggle for the privilege to pay a small fortune to watch Chelsea, or any other random selection of talented mercenaries, play football if you feel the need to but gazing at a few pieces of 400 year old paper is not a problem.
The famous insertion where he leaves his second best bed to Ann is, like the Queen, much smaller in real life than you thought. Those, tiny, tiny words squeezed in, for whatever reason, by the scribe are legible enough, though, if you already know what they say. But what they can be made to mean, not just what they mean, is another matter.
Of course, every Shakespeare biographer is sure of their own interpretation, many of them with a zeal that puts to shame any claim they make to being scholars, a term that one might hope would bring with it qualities like objectivity, a balanced and considered approach and a disinclination to declare war on anybody who disagrees.
My friend and colleague in this endeavour are not like that, of course. We differ from the others in the two most important respects, that we have arrived at the right answers and, apart from those ideas already shared with the world (elsewhere here, for example), that we're not in any hurry to make our case. But you'll see.
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Time does go by far too quickly in the right company and although it was Friday that we went, I'm still digesting all the things we talked about. One thing sparks the next idea and, before you know it, there's little Caitlin Moran, for once not pulling a funny face, noticing us noticing her going into the National Gallery and the great thing is- she doesn't know who were are.
But something sent me off down The Strand wondering just how magnificent an age we live in, and possibly not very. Are we by now so knowing, so postmodern and so chic that nothing's any good any more. Who will be the names from 2016 that will be remembered in 100, 200, 300 or 400 years' time. There are those who seem to advocate the idea that everything's of worth and there is no 'canon', that we are now so liberal (some of us), so au fait and confident that we've gone beyond that. I don't know if that is 'relativism' but I can't believe that future historians will look back and say that everything from hip-hop to graffiti and soap operas to Robbie Savage dancing were worthy of representing the best we could do.
I have another, non-literary, friend who sometimes asks why the Booker Prize is never given to an author like Ben Elton but always to something more highbrow. Well, I recently decided how to explain that and as a mark of respect to Keith Emerson, now's a good time to share it. My friend likes pop music such as Yes, ELP and Wishbone Ash which is fine but, to my mind, pop music that took itself quite seriously. But he perhaps doesn't regard Sugar, Sugar by The Archies, or such artists as David Cassidy, Cliff Richard or perhaps even T.Rex as in the same league whereas I think they are better. He wouldn't envisage putting any David Cassidy record above one by Yes. So, there you are. Quod Erat Demonstrandum, that's what the Booker Prize is like.
But -sorry, got sidelined there, you can see what it gets like - what was it like 100, 200, 300 and 400 years ago compared to now in, say, British poetry (it's hard to extend into other languages in poetry), Western music and painting.
In 1916, there was T.S.Eliot; Sibelius (Symphony no.5, no less, revised after a first performance in 1915); Picasso.
In 1816, Keats; Beethoven; J.M.W. Turner was 31.
In 1716, Alexander Pope was 28; J.S. Bach; the timeline I've just looked at gives me Hogarth, he'll do.
And in 1616, Shakespeare was still alive, for a bit of it; Monteverdi, for heaven's sake; Rembrandt was only 10 and so had his best work ahead of him but there was Rubens and Frans Hals.
2016 is unlucky to have been recently deprived of Seamus Heaney; John Tavener, Gorecki; Lucien Freud.
What we are left with is, I don't know- Tony Harrison; Philip Glass; David Hockney, all of them the same age as my parents and I'm not young. And some will be quick to point out that I've not mentioned any women there. Well, I'm ready when you are.
The early C21st will surely have its names to represent it. They may not be those we think of as pre-eminent now. Telemann was apparently a much more celebrated composer in his day than Bach. There might be some poet, largely unregarded in their lifetime, whose work is rediscovered but, no, don't look at me when I say that.
It feels as if art has out-thought itself and arrived at an impasse but I'm sure it hasn't. Every age seems to think of itself as a crisis point but, so far, so good, things have continued somehow.
I hope they'll be playing David Bowie in 400 years' time but the point of it might be lost on them.
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I could have said Handel rather than Bach for 1716. Very little comes between me and honouring both of them on this side idolatry as much as any. I know and often say that all books are made from other books, all music made from other music, etc. I didn't have the opportunity to say it first if Eliot said it in Tradition and the Individual Talent 40 years before I was born. But there's a sense in which you can take from what went before without purloining the whole thing and then putting your name to it.
I know, from having read as much, that Handel would recycle an aria from an old oratorio whenever he was desperate for a new one. I've even heard of a case where an academic was accused of plagiarism from themselves. But not very long ago I heard an Oboe Concerto by Albinoni - in D minor, op. 9, no. 2 - in which the Adagio reminded me more than somewhat of Zadok the Priest. And, as far as I can tell, the Albinoni was published in about 1715 and Zadok was written in 1727.
But this morning, I hear this concerto from Telemann's Tafelmusik, from 1733, when Handel's Solomon, that includes an interlude called The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba, was written in 1748.
I think if the Marvin Gaye estate can get litigious about Blurred Lines, the copyright lawyers of the C18th were missing a point.
None of which makes Handel any less glorious than he's always been. The Tour de France went through any amount of cheating controversy, and professional sport in general continues to do so, but nobody seems to be concerned enough to give it a miss.
