I love thee, I love but thee
With a love that shall not die
Till the sun grows cold
And the stars grow old.

This quote is perhaps my favorite “not by Shakespeare” of them all.  And by that, I mean I very much wish it were Shakespeare because I love the quote.  I love the simplicity of “I love but thee.” I texted it to my wife once and left her speechless.  Then, being the geek I am, I had to explain that it’s not Shakespeare, lest she think it was.

The quote comes from Bayard Taylor’s Bedouin Song, some 200 years after Shakespeare:

ROM the Desert I come to thee

On a stallion shod with fire;

And the winds are left behind

In the speed of my desire.

Under thy window I stand,

And the midnight hears my cry:

I love thee, I love but thee,

With a love that shall not die

Till the sun grows cold,

And the stars are old,

And the leaves of the Judgment Book Unfold!

UPDATED! After I posted this, Professor Stanley Wells (of The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust) suggested that perhaps a particular quote may have been at least in part inspired by Shakespeare.  Can you guess which play and which quote?

How about Hamlet? In Act 2, Scene 2, Hamlet writes a love letter to Ophelia, expressing the depth of his love. He suggests that while one might doubt fundamental truths like the nature of stars or celestial movement, his passion remains absolute and unquestionable. The quote symbolizes unwavering devotion and the intensity of Hamlet’s emotions during a period of personal turmoil and political intrigue.

“Doubt thou the stars are fire, Doubt that the sun doth move, doubt truth to be a liar, but never doubt I love …”

Today, the quote remains poetically profound, resonating with those seeking to express profound, unconditional love.

I love but thee, my loyal readers. Explore more posts in the Not by Shakespeare category.

Which play do you wish you knew more about?   That doesn’t necessarily mean least staged, or least popular.  You may not care in the least about Timon of Athens, for instance.  I mean for you, personally, which play do you wish you knew more about? For me, at least at the top of the list, is Richard III.  I just have very little experience with it.  I’ve read it once upon a time, like I read all the others.  But I’ve never seen a production, live or on film, and I think that if I went about plugging the many gaps in my Shakespeare experience, that’s probably the biggest one.

So I get a call last week from a big movie studio.  They’ve got a new DVD release coming up next week and wanted to know if I’d like a review copy. I said that I would not be able to do the review (for reasons I will unveil later), but since I love you people so much I immediately asked for, and got,  giveaway copies. The only catch is I can’t tell you what it is until next week. So … watch this space!

Continuing our discussion on the nature of quality, what do you think about the idea of quality over time? Specifically is Shakespeare “better” now, 400 years after the fact, than when he first wrote it? We know what would happen if a person from today jumped into a time machine and went back to watch an original.  He’d come into it with all sorts of preconceptions about the inherent genius of the work.  But what about the other way?  What if someone only familiar with Shakespeare’s original jumped in a time machine, and basically skipped those centuries we’ve had to build him up in our minds?  Then what? How much of the quality lies in the source material itself, and how much do we bring to it?  Is it at all possible to guess at a ratio? Which direction does it swing?

Here’s an idea that just hit me over in the bad Shakespeare thread:

All Shakespeare performance is cover songs.  Discuss.

Think about it.  Somebody writes the lyrics to a song, and the music.  Somebody else comes along later and performs their version of it.  Maybe they change it up, maybe they try and stay true to the original as best they can.  Maybe it’s worse than the original, maybe it’s even better.  Maybe it’s just … different.  But there’s no doubt that everybody listening understands, “Ok, wait, is he actually doing Britney Spears’ Hit Me Baby One More Time?”  Whether you like the original or not, and whether you like this version or not, are entirely subjective.

Isn’t Shakespeare in the exact same situation, save one important caveat?  He gave us the words, and if you know how to read them, he gave us the “music”, for lack of a better term.  Then it’s up to who comes along later to decide how true they’ll stay to the original, what they’ll keep and what they’ll change, how they’ll “make it their own” to steal an American Idolism. The caveat? Surely somebody knows what I’m going to say.  For any given cover song, chances are almost perfect that we have an original.  That is simply not true with Shakespeare.  Nobody today gets to see what it looked like originally.  Even the best recreations only get half way there, because we didn’t live when Shakespeare did. It’s like trying to listen to songs from the 1960’s today, if you weren’t there.  You can research history all you like, but Neil Young’s “Four dead in Ohio” song just can’t possibly be the same if you weren’t alive to wake up the next morning and read that in the papers. This, in turn, makes me think of another post on the subject of quality, that maybe I’ll have time for later today, I’m not sure.  I think we’re getting pretty metaphysical here.