Just as the gardener clears away the weeds
So that his precious flowers may survive
And show the fullest promise of their seeds,
Just so does Schoenbaum help Shakespeare to thrive.

But rarely does the gardener have to deal
With seeds mischievously planted in his yard.
Yet mischief done to Shakespeare is quite real,
And Schoenbaum is the Guardian of the Bard.

The gardener toils so much because his care
For Nature’s Beauty is intense and sure.
I sense that Schoenbaum and the gardener share
A zeal which keeps their love for Nature pure.

The poet John Keats said Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty.
For Schoenbaum and the gardener, Truth informs their duty.

Copyright (2006) by Arnold Cantor.
All rights reserved.

[Written this day, April 1, 2004. I am not half way through reading Schoenbaum’s book, but I was struck by quotes from letters of Keats concerning Shakespeare -- so novel and insightful that I thought they were worth including. These were:

(1) (1819) “A Man’s life of any worth is a continual allegory, and very few eyes can see the Mystery of his life -- a life like the scriptures, figurative -- which such people can no more make out than they can the hebrew Bible. Lord Byron cut a figure -- but he is not figurative -- Shakespeare led a life of Allegory; his works are the comments on it --”. (Schoenbaum interprets that by saying: “For Keats, the playwright has the imaginative faculty to understand and translate into poetry the random and petty circumstances of daily existence”).

(2) (1819) “The middle age of Shakespeare was all clouded over; his days were not more happy than Hamlet’s who is perhaps more like Shakespeare himself in his common every day Life than any of his other Characters.”

(3) (1817) On a walk with some friends, returning from a Christmas pantomime, he suddenly thought of the idea that a poet has to “annihilate his self”, to deny his “egotistical sublime”, in order to make his mind a “thoroughfare for all thoughts” and “to feel truth as beauty”. In a letter written soon after, he said that Shakespeare posessed in great measure the quality of “Negative Capability, that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason”. He then contrasted the “lesser poet”, who cannot be satisfied with half-knowledge, with the “great poet” for whom “the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration”.]

[Note: the word ‘inform’ means, in this context, ‘to animate or inspire with a particular quality or character; to imbue’, according to my American Heritage Dictionary of 1973. I included this note because I am often confused by it and suspect that others are too.]