Coincidance - Principia Discordia

54 COINCIDANCE
our religious progenitor, Jesus) our most influential poet-dramatist, Shakespeare,
was a distinctly oral type. A fairly consistent imagery of interrelated
themes of sucking and chewing runs through all the plays and sonnets and
has helped scholars determine that contrary to more romantic theories they
are all the work of one person. (Examples: "Sucking the honey of his
vows"—Hamlet; "If music be the food of love, play on"—Twelfth Night; "Where
the bee sucks, there suck I"—The Tempest; "What a candy deal of courtesy...
"—Henry IV, Part One.) Oscar Wilde's theory that the bard was homosexual,
or bisexual, is not as well-established as gay liberation writers like to think—
Shakespeare's actual imagery is virtually always heterosexual, as Eric
Partridge demonstrates in Shakespeare's Bawdy by simply listing all the sexual
references in the complete works. But, like Jesus, he had so strong a tender
("feminine") component that people who identify masculinity with brutality
are naturally inclined to think he was queer. The nicknames recorded by his
contemporaries—"Sweet Will" and "Gentle Will"—indicate rather clearly
that this bearded, bald-headed, chronically impoverished, socially unacceptable
and runt-sized son of a small-town butcher was much closer, in type, to
Allen Ginsberg than to Ernest Hemingway. Nevertheless, he adored the
ladies—literally—and it seems more than a few of them adored him in
return. It is apt that Venus is the aggressive seducer of Adonis in his long
poem on that legend; men of this type very often "play the waiting game" (as
Kurt Weill called it in September Song) and allow the woman to make the
advances. (If they are chess players, they will favor the "soft" Reti or
Alekhine openings instead of the aggressive center games.) James Joyce
even argued, on the basis of the sexual imagery in the plays, that Anne
Hathaway had seduced Shakespeare; certainly, theirs was a slightly forced
wedding, the first child being born six months after the marriage ceremony.
The bard's romanticism, which no English or American poet has ever
managed to escape catching to some degree, comes right out of Eleanor's
and Pierre Vidal's Sufi-influenced sexual mysticism, as we have seen.
Another influence, as Francis Yates has argued plausibly in Giordano Bruno
and the Hermetic Tradition, was the arch-heretic Bruno of Nola, burned at the
stake in Rome in 1600. Bruno seems to have been the model for Berowne in
Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost. He was in England around 1583-85 and his
sonnet sequence, De gli eroici furori, published at Oxford in 1585, is a
celebration of sexual love with interspersed prose passages relating these
poems to the mystic quest for Unity (Freud's "oceanic experience").
Berowne's great speech in Love's Labour's Lost—
For valour is not Love a Hercules
Still climbing trees in the Hesperides?
Subtle as Sphinx, as sweet and musical