Time Is...

 The story of the brazen head has nagged at me all my adult life. It crops up in various versions, but the one that nailed it down occurs in a funny-peculiar little comedy by the Elizabethan dramatist Robert Greene called Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. How odd, given my fascination with the story, that it's taken me till now to read it. Greene ain't Shakespeare. No, he's much easier, and his verse is pleasant and colourful and his play has all the depth of a Christmas pantomime. Mainly it's about love across the class divide- and it's silly and sappy and wholly unrealistic. The thread of plot concerning Friar Bacon adds a spice of weirdness....

Friar Bacon is the best magician in Europe. He has laboured for thirty years to make a brass head which- when activated- will reveal mysteries and work miracles. Unfortunately he falls asleep on the night of revelation- and his clownish apprentice fails to wake him. The brass head speaks three sentences and then implodes.

 (Why are magician's apprentices in folklore always so goddam useless?) 

Oh, but it hurts. All that labour for nothing. The secrets of the universe within reach of mortal man then snatched away.

 And all we're left to puzzle over are the three cryptic sentences...

Time is.

Time was.

Time is past......

Writing Because I Can

 It's cold. it's damp, there's a muscly wind blowing. It's February.

I might read some more Elizabethan/Jacobean drama. It's good stuff.  The theatres were roaring like furnaces and a whole tribe of ambitious, clever young men were feeding the flames.  This happens in the arts every so often: all the talent gets funneled into one pariicular art form. For the Jacobethans it was drama. In 17th century Holland it was painting. In the mid 20th century across the English speaking world it was rock music. Always there's one name that stands out from the welter- Shakespeare, Rembrandt, the Beatles.

Actually I've already started reading other Shakespeare-era stuff. I've got the White Devil on the go...

I nearly got into Cambridge. I think I flunked the interviews. I remember one interview in particular. This high-powered don asked me about my Eng Lit favourites. And I said "Jacobean Drama". What I should have said is "I adore the Duchess of Malfi". So the inevitable happened and he asked me a question about the Revenger's Tragedy. I had read the Revenger's Tragedy but i wasn't that enthralled by it- so I floundered.

The Duchess of Malfi is so bloody good. Very different from Shakespeare. Very studied.  And Webster is one of our greatest poets. It's odd how little we know about him. We don't even have his dates of birth and death. Most of his output is hackwork, collaboration- and then- apparently back to back- he produced two great plays.

I didn't really mind not going to Cambridge. As it happens I went there later- as a theological student. It wasn't the cheeriest experience of my life....

Scribble, Scribble, Scribble...