In The Beginning Was The Word

      I always pity the poor bastards that deal with such matters. As someone who has been teaching Shakespeare for the past few years (though I by no means consider myself a genuine "authority" on him), I still find it hard to believe Shakie one of the King James translators. I have a number of reasons-- Shakie's relative disinterest in religious matters, his frustration with translation, his general disobedience and extroversion, his tendency toward stylistic roughness, these things all give me cause to doubt Shakie's involvement-- but it remains a mystery what writers were involved in the project, and Shakespeare's 'retirement' from drama leaves all of us with pause to consider that perhaps the Bard did have something to do with it after all. I have to say, though, that the acrostic and riddling dimensions mentioned in this article (and often invoked in other arguments about Shakie) seem to me what Huck Finn used to call "stretchers." I can see other authors of the time being interested in this sort of thing, but I have a hard time seeing the Bard as giving a good god damn about such tricksterism. The question remains, though: who could have provided the poetry? I can see Shakie perhaps having a hand in The Book of Job or the Psalms. Ecclesiastes and Daniel strike me as more specious. I'm willing to bet Donne and Herbert were involved. But Shakespeare? Meh. A shame it seems we'll never know.