This is a song contemporary with Shakespeare which is better, I think, than any known song in his plays or published verse except, perchance, ‘O Mistress Mine’ from Twelfth Night or the Dirge from Cymbeline. It still resonates in the Third World today, in Somalia or Ruanda, and could be added seamlessly to the text of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal.
Tom Nashe, its author, two years Shakespeare’s junior, died (of course) of plague at thirty-four.
…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
Adieu, farewell, earth’s bliss;
This world uncertain is;
Fond are life’s lustful joys;
Death proves them all but toys;
None from his darts can fly;
I am sick, I must die.
Lord, have mercy on us!
Rich men, trust not in wealth,
Gold cannot buy you health;
Physic himself must fade.
All things to end are made,
The plague full swift goes by;
I am sick, I must die.
Lord, have mercy on us!
Beauty is but a flower
Which wrinkles will devour;
Brightness falls from the air;
Queens have died young and fair;
Dust hath closed Helen’s eye;
I am sick, I must die.
Lord, have mercy on us!
Strength stoops unto the grave;
Worms feed on Hector brave;
Swords may not fight with fate;
Earth still holds ope her gate;
Come, come, the bells do cry;
I am sick, I must die.
Lord, have mercy on us!
Wit with his wantonness
Tasteth death’s bitterness;
Hell’s executioner
Hath no ears for to hear
What vain art can reply;
I am sick, I must die.
Lord, have mercy on us!
Haste therefore each degree
To welcome destiny.
Heav’n is our heritage,
Earth but a player’s stage;
Mount we unto the sky;
I am sick, I must die.
Lord, have mercy on us!
Name:
Not bad Bob, but two paragraphs does not 37 plays make.
I think history will judge you kindly but its unlikely to give you the kudos that your title to this post suggests.
If you are trying to refute the notion that you are going mad I would advise that its a good idea to stop claiming that you are better than the Bard.
You never know though, they might refer to you as the Bard of Palm Beach in years to come.
Perhaps you could do a rewrite of Othello. Barack Obama could star.
Thomas Nashe wrote those lines. Not Bob.
“Perhaps you could do a rewrite of Othello. Barack Obama could star.”
Oh please do. What role would Julia Gillard play?
Fair point – Obama would make a good Iago.
To Gerry Dorian:
OJ Simpson, with Nicole as Desdemona and Crowe as Iago.
To The White Knight:
God, you’re offensive. It’s six paragraphs, not two, by Nashe, not me. Where have I said I was better than Shakespeare?
Deluded.
What a fool you are.
Be careful how you answer this.
You are on Death Row, awaiting a reprieve.
You changed the post on me you rude bastard. It used to be two paragraphs and there was no reference to Thomas Nashe.
If you are going to pull the moral high ground at least fight fair.
Bob are you changing the rules to suit again?
Can I take this as confirmation that you believe in the maxim of rules for some and rules for others.
You really are a commie arent you Bob?
if you were born again would you reincarnate yourself as a Russian Tzar?
See Napoleon in Animal Farm.
Regards from the West,
The White [K]night.
Please confirm your post address. North Korea dont have a white pages.
There are five lies in your response and I do not print liars.
Banned for life. No appeals.
Fuck you.
Go jump.
North Korea? Me? Really?
Fuck you.
Would Biden be Cassio or Iago you think White Knight? Perhaps it would be more appropriate if Bob rewrote Coriolanus – Rudd could be the tragic figure… determined on a crusade (the greatest moral challenge of our time mind you) before being persuaded not to… and then set upon by the mob…
Regardless they could perform the rewrites (surely to be better received than the originals) down at Palm Beach, possibly in makeshift Globe built at Governor Phillip Park.
Transport could post a problem but I believe they are privatising the buses so that shouldn’t be an issue anymore and Bob recommends the ferry.
The bar should only serve glasses of Mateus and Slow Long Elllis’ (a cocktail – the secret is it is just a schooner of mateus). The proleteriat will love it. Will come from at least as far away as Avalon to attend and watch.
Odd; but I hve one for the Noalition supporters :
“You think you’re so clever and classless and free,
But you’re still fucking peasants as far as I can see”
John Lennon , ‘Working Class Hero’
Suck it up.
One for the ALP DQ
Rudd is a concept
By which we measure our pain.
With apologies to John Lennon’s “God”.
Some echoes from Psalm 119 in Nashe.
And I am reminded of Emerson’s A Nation’s Strength….Not gold but only man can make a nation great and strong….etc
Jim, you have broken bail.
With regrets, I must now ban you for life.
You represent a whole side of life that Bob feels uncomfortable with because of his Seventh Day Adventist background, jim. But I can dig it. I knew a black magic man in Indonesia once. Fascinating guy, not that we spoke the same language, but you wouldn’t want to cross him. He seemed to be able to exercise control over bugs, or at least he did with me.
This guy was accepted as a black magic man by the local Muslims. I don’t know what his purpose was but he lived alone on the far side of a small island. I never thought to find out how he was funded but it wasn’t really that sort of a place. It was very small and things got shared around. He was a cool customer, though, very much his own person. I liked him a lot. There was no question of him being a medicine man in any way. He was just there to do his own slightly dubious thing, whatever it was. He was definitely impressive and had a whole lot of charisma. And he was nice enough. I asked him telepathically to stop with the bugs and voila, they were gone. The moral of the story is you just have to take each black magic man as they come.
I am sorry to hear that jim.
Stay.
And continue to write.
Here’s a poem I like. It’s by Randall Jarrell. Is it better than Shakepeare? I don’t know.
Poetry isn’t the Olympics. There’s no first, second or third.
I’m posting this because I think it deserves to be better known.
THE DEATH OF THE BALL TURRET GUNNER
From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose
Polybius, yours is a most excellent inclusion, and it is quite true what you say; Jarrell is indeed neglected by most.
Aside from his poetry Jarrell made an observation on one of my favourite chaps, Wallace Stevens, that still lingers whenever I turn upon his [Steven's] poems.
Thanks again for the Jarrell poem.
Have always loved this quote from him, about reviewing:
The good and mediocre books come in from week to week, and I put them aside and read them and think of what to say; but the “worthless” books come in day after day, like the cries and truck sounds from the street, and there is nothing that anyone could think of that is good enough for them. In the bad type of thin pamphlets, in hand-set lines on imported paper, people’s hard lives and hopeless ambitions have expressed themselves more directly and heartbreakingly than they have ever expressed in any work of art: it is as if the writers had sent you their ripped-out arms and legs, with “This is a poem” scrawled on them in lipstick. After a while one is embarrassed not so much for them as for poetry, which is for these poor poets one more of the openings against which everyone in the end beats his brains out; and one finds it unbearable that poetry should be so hard to write — a game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey in which there is for most of the players no tail, no donkey, not even a booby prize.
If he died in 1600 aged 34, he was 16 years younger than Edward De Vere, who was of course ‘William Shakespeare’.
De Vere himself died of plague in 1604.
Perhaps Jim; the state of medical science was primitive, and people did not know how disease spread, only that being near sick people was not desirable.
The theatres were closed down often for months at a time when plague broke out.
As an example, the story of London’s sewers was shown on a TV doco recently; many people in the late 1800s still thought that disease had nothing to do with the water, the rats, or insects, but was ‘miasma’ (bad air); malaria even means ‘bad air’.
As for De Vere, he was 54 in 1604, an old man by the standards of the day, and perhaps none too healthy; he had been “lamed” as he put it in a duel in the early 1590s.
The once great nobleman thereafter had plenty of leisure time to rewrite his plays – many of which had been performed at Court over the previous two decades – for public performance.
My theory, anyway.
Give a man a mask and he will tell you the truth.
From Oscar Wilde, I think.
Many playwrights were in and out of prison. It was not a safe occupation, and the authorities had little tolerance for criticism. Today playwrights are merely panned by the critics and attacked for their lifestyles, sexuality etc; then, they were imprisoned, tortured, and sometimes killed.
Add to that that they were seen as disreputable and you have some of De Vere’s reasons for having a pseudonym and a front man.