William Shakespeare

April 23 marks the 400th anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare. The world will celebrate him as the greatest writer in the history of the English language. But his lasting fame wasn’t inevitable. It almost did not happen.

He was born in 1564 and died in 1616 on his 52nd birthday. A celebrated writer and actor who had performed for Queen Elizabeth and King James, he wrote approximately 39 plays and composed five long poems and 154 sonnets. By the time of his death, he had retired and was considered past his prime.

By the 1620s, his plays were no longer being performed in theaters. On the day he died, no one — not even Shakespeare himself — believed that his works would last, that he was a genius or that future generations would hail his writings.

He hadn’t even published his plays — during his lifetime they were considered ephemeral amusements, not serious literature. Half of them had never been published in any form and the rest had appeared only in unauthorized, pirated versions that corrupted his original language.

Enter John Heminges and Henry Condell, two of Shakespeare’s friends, fellow actors and shareholders in the King’s Men theatrical company. In his will he left them money to buy gold memorial rings to remember him. By about 1620, they conceived a better way to honor him — one that would make them the two most unsung heroes in the history of English literature. They would do what Shakespeare had never done for himself — publish a complete, definitive collection of his plays.

It’s not racist when they do it!

After eviscerating SJW with vim and vigor: example:

See/ Star Trek was all about white Kirk humping alien babes! This shows a basic lack of comprehension for the show and an attempt to excoriate something she obviously has never had any interest in other than as a well-pummeled punching bag for her ideological hatred of the white patriarchy.

(worth a read) but it's not racist or sexist when they do it:

Oh my god, I can’t even read male scifi writers, it’s always such boring, boring sexist drivel. I stopped reading male scifi writers recently though and I actually like the genre again!

Based on your writing, you might as well have stopped at “I can’t read.”

But to agree, I did a think last year where I only read female SF/F writers for like six months, and it honestly was one of my best reading decisions ever.

But that’s not sexist or anything. Hell, K. Tempest Bradford RAGE QUIT reading works by white, male authors, but she’s not racist or sexist either.

Women and other minorities in SFF are doing such cool shit right now, there’s no reason to read anyone else …

No, of course not! Why read for quality? Just choose your authors based on race. But that’s not racist.

It’s not racist when they do it!

Because SHUT UP, RACIST!

Makes you understand modern books

No comment needed.

Ace: But I guess it's okay to embrace an expressly racist agenda if that racist agenda is "Punching Up."

At the Reformation II

Science fiction or the foreseeable future?

The triumph of the Recovery was marked most clearly by the burning of the Episcopal bishop of Maine.

She was not a particularly bad bishop. She was in fact typical of Episcopal bishops of the first quarter of the 21st century: agnostic, compulsively political and radical, and given to placing a small idol of Isis on the altar when she said the Communion service. By 2055, when she was tried for heresy, convicted, and burned, she had outlived her era. By that time only a handful of Episcopalians still recognized female clergy, it would have been easy enough to let the old fool rant out her final years in obscurity.

The fact that the easy road was not taken, that Episcopalians turned to their difficult duty of trying and convicting, and the state upheld its unpleasant responsibility of setting torch to faggots, was what marked this as an act of Recovery. I well remember the crowd that gathered for the execution, solemn but not sad, relieved rather that at last, after so many years of humiliation, of having to swallow every absurdity and pretend we liked it, the majority had taken back the culture. No more apologies for the truth. No more “Yes, buts” on upholding standards. Civilization had recovered its nerve. The flames that soared above the lawn before the Maine State House were, as the bishopess herself might have said, liberating.

She could have saved herself, of course, right up until the torch was applied. All she had to do was announce she wasn’t a bishop, or a priest, since Christian tradition forbids a woman to be either. Or she could have confessed she wasn’t a Christian, in which case she could be bishopess, priestess, popess, whatever, in the service of her chosen demons. That would have just gotten her tossed over the border.

But the Prince of This World whom she served gives his devotees neither an easy nor a dignified exit. She bawled, she babbled, she shrieked in Hellish tongues, she pissed and pooped herself. The pyre was lit at 12:01 PM on a cool, cloudless August 18th, St. Helen’s day. The flames climbed fast; after all, they’d been waiting for her for a long time.

When it was over, none of us felt good about it. But we’d long since learned feelings were a poor guide. We’d done the right thing.

Who never said it?

"Whoever is not a socialist when he is 20 has no heart; whoever is not a conservative when he is 30 has no brain."

Everyone has heard that comment which is supposed to be something said by Winston Churchill. And if you look puzzled because you have no idea who Churchill was, you're a recent graduate of academia. But it turn out that there is no evidence that Churchill never said it.

There are lots of things that are attributed to famous men that they never said, but the attribution is an appeal to authority. If Churchill said it, or Jefferson or Washington it must be profound, right? Well, no.

The Wrongly Attributed Statement is a phenomenon I've experienced all too often. I first encountered it in 2000, when I was writing an article for the magazine Lingua Franca and trying to find the source for Churchill's quip, "Whoever is not a socialist when he is 20 has no heart; whoever is not a conservative when he is 30 has no brain." But every citation I found led me only to another citation. A would cite B. I'd follow up with B only to discover that B cited C, which cited D, which cited A. Books of quotations referred to other books of quotations. I posted queries online, but scholars either didn't know or claimed that someone else had said it. (Briand and Clemenceau were favorite candidates, but when I pursued them, I found myself tumbling down the same rabbit hole of citations.) Finally, in frustration, I called the editor of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations; I think it was Justin Kaplan. He said it couldn't have been Churchill. And that was enough for me. What choice did I have?

The WAS is not just a thing, you see, it's an experience. A quote floats in your head for years, resting in cloistered obscurity. One day you decide to use it in a book or an article. You look it up to get the exact wording and to cite the original source. But you find multiple wordings and no credible source. You keep looking, only to find that no one ever said it (at least not that anyone knows of). You keep looking, if for no other reason than to redeem the time you've already wasted. If you're lucky, you'll finally find someone—often someone you've never heard of—saying it. More often you find that no one said it at all.

Read the whole thing.