A mind map is a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks, or other items linked to and arranged radially around a central key word or idea. Mind maps are used to generate, visualize, structure, and classify ideas, and as an aid in study, organization, problem solving, decision making, and writing.

Mind map—Wikipedia

Tony Buzan, a British writer, has created a standard set of guidelines for making successful mind maps (see 7 Steps to Making a Mind Map on Tony’s mind maps page). Although mind maps don’t contain as much detailed information as a page of text, they do use evocative imagery and trigger-words to inspire new thoughts and connections in your brain more rapidly than any paragraph of words ever could. Some do a better job of this than others, but after glancing at a few mind maps it becomes clear that there’s something valuable about the format’s ability to convey relationships between ideas with such ease.

Included in the selection of reader-submitted mind maps is a Shakespeare mind map. Visually, it leaves something to be desired (it doesn’t follow a couple of Tony’s best practices for mind maps, namely using lots of colors and images throughout the map) but a perusal of the branches does begin to cause my brain to buzz; I begin to think about the plays in the context of their meaning, purpose, audience, and venue. All of the emotions Shakespeare’s works have ever aroused in me come flooding back into my memory. Just the experience of revisiting collected memories and having the opportunity to create fresh associations between them makes reading mind maps an invaluable exercise. Especially since it takes so little time.

But reading mind maps isn’t the only way to create fresh associations in your brain. Especially when it comes to the works of William Shakespeare. As someone who abhors routine and cannot maintain a predicable schedule, I tend not to be able to choose how and when I will absorb Shakespearean media. Sometimes it’s audio, in my car, sometimes it’s by reading the plays on a quiet weekend morning in my kitchen, sometimes it’s reading articles and other Shakespeare blogs on my computer at lunch, and sometimes it’s by watching performances on my television or at some venue in Boston or Cambridge. I’ve found that, while each choice offers experiences the others lack, it is in the combining of these multiple strategies that gets my brain making valuable connections. Just being a Shakespeare playgoer, or just being a Shakespearean actor, or just reading books by Shakespearean scholars isn’t enough if you want to learn something new. You should mix your poisons, so to speak, and beyond that try and connect other things you do back to William Shakespeare and see what your brain comes up with in response.

What on earth are you supposed to talk about in a Shakespeare essay? You know what happens in the story, but short of re-writing it in your own words you’re stuffed—right?

Wrong! There is an easy way of making sure you’ve talked about everything you need to (and possibly sounded intelligent about it too!):

It’s called the CLASI system, which stands for:

• Character
• Language
• Action
• Structure
• Ideas

It works like this:

• Whatever your question, you need to consider the relationships between characters. It might help you to draw a diagram (scribbled or otherwise) linking all the characters so you have this clear in your head before you start. Quite often with Shakespeare plays, it is often important which characters know what, so you might want to add that to your diagram.
• Shakespeare’s language is very different from ours today, so it is important to note the differences. What Shakespeare thought was an insult may seem silly to us.
  Also, the characters had different ways of speaking in different situations. As a guide, look for prose (ordinary speaking) amongst common characters and people who are looking down on others, look for blank verse in “well-to-do” characters speaking to each other (lines with 10 syllables but no rhymes) and sonnets when people are talking to their superiors or loved ones (sections of speech with rhymes)
• The actions section is where you talk about motives—why are the characters doing what they are? What do they do when faced with a situation? Your diagram about characters might help here.
• You need to mention the structure of the play as a whole to explain how a theme is treated or why a particular problem occurs in the plot. Most GCSE essays on Shakespeare ask you to look at a little bit of the play, but it is important to fit that little bit into the bigger picture of the play. Don’t waffle away describing the whole play, but do talk about how the characters ended up at that point and what the consequences of their actions will be.
• Finally, ideas are the core of any story or play. What are the themes of the play and how do you see those in the section you are studying? What is Shakespeare trying to say to you as the audience? In many plays there are themes of violence, love, family feuds and other familiar ideas. Why do these themes still appeal today? You could mention modern film versions of any Shakespeare plays that you might have seen and why people still want to see them.Make sure you order your points so that you actually answer the question you are being asked with a logical argument and put quotes to support each point. If you can jot down notes under each of the CLASI headings, then you should have enough material to fill out your essay.

Wikipedia reproduces a snippet from one of Dowland’s songs, Flow my Tears:

Flow, my teares, fall from youre springs,

Exiled for ever, let mee mourn

Where night’s black bird hir sad infamy sings,

There let mee live forlorn.

Without citing examples, I’m going to take a chance and say Shakespeare didn’t take courtly love very seriously in his plays. Most of the examples of courtly love I can remember happened in Shakespeare’s comedies like Merry Wives of Windsor where the practice was rather mocked. But when it comes to his sonnets, my goodness! They’re all positively packed with melodramatic, bittersweet yearning and restrained desire. Here, I’ll flip to a random page in my book o’ sonnets and you’ll see…

Sonnet 75

So are you to my thoughts as food to life,
Or as sweet seasoned showers are to the ground;
And for the peace of you I hold such strife
As ‘twixt a miser and his wealth is found:
Now proud as an enjoyer, and anon
Doubting the filching age will steal his treasure;
Now counting best to be with you alone,
Then bettered that the world may see my pleasure:
Sometime all full with feasting on your sight,
And by and by clean starvèd for a look;
Possessing or pursuing no delight
Save what is had or must from you be took.
Thus do I pine and surfeit day by day,
Or gluttoning on all, or all away.

…it makes me want to gag myself. I seriously just randomly flipped to that sonnet and the last two lines of it happen to more or less define courtly love.

I think the sonnets were like Shakespeare’s little diary that he kept hidden in his top drawer. You know, the one bound in pink with the little space for you to write your name (”This is the secret diary of _______… keep OUT!”) and the little lock on the side that your younger brother breaks open to get at your private thoughts. And there are little hearts doodled on the page margins.

Yeah.

I, for one, am glad that Will didn’t often make courtly love a dominant element of his major works (besides the obvious like Romeo and Juliet or Love’s Labour’s Lost, but I hesitate to call that love courtly, either, per se).

When I shop for music CD’s* at Newbury Comics I make my purchase based on 3 things:

1. Personal recommendations or previous listens. Or, in the absence of either of those…
2. Cool cover art, and most importantly
3. Non-love-themed track titles.

I always, always check to make sure the songs aren’t all called Hey baby or I want you, baby or Be my baby, baby, etc., because I want something more creative than your typical love song. I want music that’s got a few good ideas, and while love songs can have amazing ideas the bulk of them are just chanting the same mantras of desire, lust, and heartbreak that you can find in 100 other places.

Yes, Will Shakespeare included a love story in almost every single one of his plays. But when you think of Titus Andronichus or Richard III or Macbeth or even The Winter’s Tale, do you think of a love story? I don’t. Each has its own emotions and motivations and messages that use love as a tool but don’t exist solely for the telling of the love story. And I think that’s good. People who live their whole lives for love miss out on some of the most exciting thoughts, endeavors, and personal journeys that exist outside of romance. There’s more to life than wooing and procreation. Those drive us, but other things steer us. Don’t be content with going in a straight line, focusing all your energy on the game of love.

That being said, try not to go entirely without love, either. I’m okay if the CD I buy at Newbury Comics has one or two love songs on it.

My point is, Shakespeare seemed to treat love in two distinct ways when he wrote, depending on whether he was writing a play or writing a sonnet. Sonnet Will is definitely Dowlandesque. And even though I seem to have an unhealthy aversion to love songs, I’ll give John Dowland a listen anyhow.

____________________

*I intentionally put that apostrophe in “CD’s.” Writing “CDs” looks weird to me. It’s like writing “I got all As on my report card” or “I grew up in the 1950s.” It just seems wrong without the apostrophe, even though you’re writing plurals and not possessives. “I got A’s.” “I’m from the 90’s.” Much better.

Audiences are just people, but they’re a particular mix of people, living in a particular time and place. Their reactions to the story being told to them may vary depending not only on the day of the week and hour of the performance, but also the much larger social and historical contexts of their lives. Also, their reactions depend heavily on the quality of the story’s authorship and its storytellers.

You already know all this. But it provides a context for the observation that Shakespeare’s humorous moments aren’t necessarily funny to a modern audience. “Yes, duh,” you mutter as your mouse drifts to the Close button on your browser. But wait! This is important: it’s not just that we read a Shakespearean joke and judge it to be either 1) funny or 2) not funny. Rather, there are several layers of humor that, as they go deeper, become more and more invisible to us but, if understood, could lead you to a much deeper understanding of Will’s world and his plays (mind you, I’m not implying here that I have anything beyond a shallow understanding of these things–I am also a student, not an expert, of Shakespeare’s works, so let’s learn together!).

Before I list the layers, I feel it’s appropriate to quote Donald Rumsfeld:

“Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are “known knowns”; there are things we know we know. We also know there are “known unknowns”; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also “unknown unknowns” — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”
(Thanks, ‘Pedia.)

People laughed at this quote because the word “know” is repeated 14 times in some form or another, but they shouldn’t have laughed. Its message is important and relevant to understanding almost anything. To illustrate, I will now (finally) make up, I mean explain the four layers of humor in Will’s plays:

1. Humor we get
2. Humor we know we don’t get (for instance, when you don’t know what “maidenhead” means, you can’t quite get the pun @ Rom.I.1.39, even though it’s probably obvious to you that a pun takes place at that spot)
3. Humor we know is probably humor but is going over our heads (for instance, you naturally assume that everything Falstaff says in Henry IV is supposed to be funny but you’re not quite able to tell why)
4. Humor we didn’t even know was supposed to be humor

It’s layer #4 that I came across while reading The Merry Wives of Windsor, inspiring me to write this post. An insult, delivered by Pistol, labels Falstaff as a “Base Phrygian Turk” (Wiv.I.3.86). If I hadn’t glanced at the Pelican’s footnotes, I never, ever would have recognized this as a funny thing to say. In fact, I had to go back to the ‘Pedia and do research to figure out why this is funny. It turns out that although Phrygia does, in fact, exist in Turkey, it would have been remembered by Elizabethans as a mostly mythological region in ancient Turkey that acted as an ally to Troy in the fabled Trojan War. So calling Falstaff a “Base (low) Turk” would have been one thing, but calling him a “Base Phrygian Turk” makes no sense, crisscrossing times and places, and demonstrates the ill-educated nature of Pistol’s wit.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

I know. It’s not all that funny. And I didn’t even know it was supposed to be funny to begin with! But that illustrates my point: Pistol says a lot of things similar to this, and in order to fully appreciate his character you have to educate yourself to recognize jokes an Elizabethan would get but a modern reader/observer would miss. Otherwise, you’ll think Pistol’s a complete waste of space, and he’s not; he’s a strong comic presence.

Try a handful of simple things:

1. Look up words you don’t know. Sometimes this will lead you recognize humor you didn’t know was there.
2. Pay attention to the presence of misspellings and homophones.
3. When a line seems to come from nowhere, investigate. There’s probably a reason for its existence, and it may be humorous. To your inner-Elizabethan.
4. Read annotated versions of the plays (it’s actually hard to find non-annotated versions of the plays) and pay attention to the notes. After a while you’ll start to pick up on patterns yourself.
5. Go watch good Shakespearean actors perform the plays. If they really are doing their job, they’ll somehow let you know when humor is afoot. Then you can investigate afterwards if you like. (Kenneth Branagh in Much Ado comes to mind: when Benedick is talking about “hanging his bugle in an invisible baldrick” (Ado.I.1.230) Ken delivers the line whimsically even though most of us have no freaking idea what he’s talking about.)

The world premiere of Panoply went smashingly well, I think, and both the actors and the audience were pleased with the way it turned out. But I was still shocked by the points at which the audience responded with laughter versus the points at which they responded with silence. I suppose audiences are all unique, just like the stories that are told to them, and we can’t always see all the layers of humor, emotion, and social context at play before them.

They’re both much cheaper than a drug habit.

Anyway, I picked Iron Man: Director of S.H.I.E.L.D. as my continuing series of choice. A writer of the series discusses it on CBR.com here. (This is where you’re saying to yourself, Uh, I thought this was a blog about Shakespeare. I’m getting to that.) I remember Iron Man from my youth, and the Iron Man I’m finding in this series is very different. He’s an executive, emotionally distraught, hard-nosed-politician Iron Man who makes tough leadership calls, manages budgets, investigates internal affairs, and negotiates national security policy. The Iron Man I remember as a kid used to blow stuff up with lasers. But I love this new Tony Stark.

Why is Iron Man doing this now? What is it that makes putting a well-known character in a brand new position that delights us so much? And what makes it work? If you created a television series about James Bond’s new position as a hot-shot lawyer in Los Angeles after he retires from MI6… would it fly? Or would we rather keep seeing Bond doing traditional Bond things?

Turns out this practice of reinventing recurring characters in the media is pretty old. (Here we go: the Shakespeare part of the post is upon us!) Queen Elizabeth asked Will to bring Falstaff back to the stage after Henry IV parts 1 and 2 were produced. So Will wrote The Merry Wives of Windsor. How did it turn out…? Rather than give my own personal opinion, I’ll let Wikipedia tell us how stodgy Shakespeare critics the world over have received the work:

Most critics consider Merry Wives to be one of Shakespeare’s weaker plays, and the Falstaff of Merry Wives to be much inferior to the Falstaff of the two Henry IV plays. That Shakespeare would so stumble with one of his greatest creations is puzzling, and a satisfactory reason for this remains to be found. The likeliest explanation, if the Garter Feast theory is accepted, is that the play was written hastily, to order for a special occasion, within severe time restraints.

That’s too bad. If I were to speculate (and may I point out that speculations compose a good 97% of what I write in this blog), I’d say the problem isn’t that Falstaff isn’t a reinventable character. Rather, his application to a romantic comedy simply didn’t fit his character.

Any well-written character should be at least two-dimensional. Sometimes we can hope for three. Let’s take the idea of dimensions literally for a moment, and not just as an analogy for how filled-out an idea can be. Let’s imagine for a moment that well-forged characters actually have two or three identifiable qualities, or dimensions, that justify their behaviors in the context of a story. Apparently Iron Man possessed not only an I-heroically-destroy-evil-with-lasers dimension, but also a confident-leadership dimension and, as Christos Gage mentions in the CBR.com article, an emotionally-troubled dimension. While the first, heroic dimension was prominent in the comics of my youth, those other sub-characteristics of Tony Stark allowed him to be placed in this new role of a troubled executive and have it work. Falstaff, however, probably didn’t have the right sub-dimensions to fit into The Merry Wives of Windsor. In Henry IV, his dimensions seemed to be:

• Primary: Coward.
• Secondary: Carefree lover-of-life.

But he was never really clever or ambitious enough to hatch the plan he hatched in Merry Wives, nor could he ever be capable of wooing well-to-do ladies of society. Perhaps his cowardice came into play in Merry Wives, but since cowardice was his primary dimension in Henry IV we’re left with a modification of an existing Falstaff rather than a reinvention of his role in the universe. Had Shakespeare chosen to take advantage of Falstaff’s carefree dimension and make him into a wanderer-thief running from the law, that might have worked.

Who knows.

What other role might you be able to play? Which of your three dimensions are you using most of the time now, and which of the other two could you put to use if you decided to reinvent your role in this world? What other things could you be doing with your life right now?

Photo by InfoMofo.

Four Quartets

V

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

The Tempest was one of the last plays Will wrote. It’s the story of a deposed king and his daughter, isolated on an island upon which the king’s usurpers become shipwrecked one day. Rather than taking his revenge on those who betrayed him, he leads them through a magical ordeal on the strange island and then forgives them all. (That’s a very simplified summary.) The story’s themes of isolation, forgiveness for things past, the triviality of human conspiracy, as well as the main character being a learned man who works magic with words and has straightened out his priorities in life remind me very much of Eliot’s poem. I can easily imagine Will writing it in his personal journal.

The writer/director, Brian Tuttle, did some exercises with the actors last week to try and unify our understanding of the world in which the play takes place. One of those exercises was to rank the “power” of each character, based on their actions in the story, from “most powerful” to “least powerful” on a sheet of paper.

When each character in a story has a totally unique objective from all the others, it becomes difficult to define what “power” means. Is power success in completing a personal objective? Is power a derivative of wealth? Does it depend on your job title? Is it how powerful each character perceives themselves? Can you be powerful even if you’ve died in the story?

As our group debated the order of the list, I realized we were defining “power” as “most able to manipulate the world of the story to achieve an end.” At the top of the list were characters whose deliberate actions drove the story forward and characters who fully achieved their personal goals.

By doing this exercise with the group, I learned a lot about everybody’s character and the world they live in. Now I’m going to try this exercise with The Winter’s Tale. Let’s stick to talking about these characters (appearing here in the play’s given order):

LEONTES, somewhat bipolar and mistrustful King of Sicilia
MAMILLIUS, disturbingly delicate Prince of Sicilia, who dies of a broken heart
CAMILLO, a lord of Sicilia
ANTIGONUS, a lord of Sicilia who gets EATEN BY A BEAR
POLIXENES, King of Bohemia
FLORIZEL, Prince of Bohemia
AUTOLYCUS, a rogue (with +3d6 sneak attack)
HERMIONE, Queen to Leontes and smartest kid in Hogwarts
PERDITA, daughter to Leontes and Hermione
PAULINA, unforgiving woman in desperate need of a chill pill, wife to Antigonus, and friend to Hermione

Let’s start with the obvious candidates for “most powerful:” the kings and queens of the story, Leontes, Polixenes, and Hermione. Let’s ask ourselves, which of them makes a play and gets what they want? Or deliberately steers the events of the story?

• Leontes grows suspicious of his wife and Polixenes and asks Camillo to kill Polixenes. If Camillo had done this, it would have demonstrated great power on the part of Leontes for commanding such loyalty from the other characters. But… no. Camillo does more or less the opposite and warns Polixenes. What else? He does imprison Hermione and then banish her (and his) child from Sicily, though he immediately regrets doing all of this after Hermione and Mamillius die of heart attacks. I would feel pretty rotten, too. In my book, Leontes gets maybe 1 power point. Pretty lame for a king.
• Polixenes is so weak-willed that he can’t even make himself go back to his own nation after nine months of being absent. He doesn’t find out about the plot to murder him but rather is told by Camillo, who also comes up with the escape plan for leaving Sicily. Sixteen years later, Polixenes can’t stop his own son from marrying a shepherd girl and fleeing the nation with her.
• Hermione gets scorned and imprisoned before she faints and makes Leontes think she’s dead–but not by design. Then Hermione may or may not have come up with the plan to hide herself in Paulina’s house for sixteen years, waiting for the off-chance that her banished daughter will reappear in Sicily. But I’m pretty sure that was Paulina’s idea, since she was the one who was so spiteful toward Leontes. And if I had been Hermione, I would have spent those sixteen years LOOKING FOR MY DAUGHTER.

Strange, isn’t it, to think that the characters with the most apparent power in the world of The Winter’s Tale have almost no control over what happens in the story?

Here’s my personal power list, ordered from most to least powerful:

1. Camillo. He makes the decision to flee with Polixenes, then makes the decision to help Florizel and Perdita elope. He’s making decisions left and right–plus, he always seems to end up in everyone’s good graces. Without Camillo, this story would not happen.
2. Autolycus. While more or less inconsequential to the overall story, Autolycus always seems to get what he wants: he steals money from a shepherd, lies his way out of getting in trouble, then aids Florizel and Perdita with Camillo. Autolycus has a lot of personal power; he thrives in his element.
3. Paulina. She acts as the conscience of Leontes both before and after his repentance for apparently killing his family. She spends SIXTEEN YEARS HOUNDING HIM ABOUT THE ONE TIME HE GOT JEALOUS. She keeps Hermione safe, hidden in her house. She’s a very potent presence in the play, even if her functional role is minimal.
4. Antigonus. He persuades Leontes not to kill the baby Perdita but rather to banish her instead. Then he successfully delivers her to safety in Bohemia. If it hadn’t been for that bear, he might have kept on doing stuff. But alas.
5. Leontes. At least he banished somebody.
6. Polixenes.
7. Perdita. She makes for a pretty good shepherd, plus it’s her reappearance in Bohemia that saves the soul of Leontes. Her power is circumstantial at best.
8. Hermione.
9. Florizel.
10. Mamillius. Nobody ever seemed to care.

So there you have it. A rogue got second place and a prince got last place. In the story of The Winter’s Tale, it’s not royalty making the decisions. We assume that Leontes is doing other powerful things in Sicily, like maintaining national security and averting state budget crises, but as far as this story of love, loss, and heartbreak is concerned, he’s a mediocre player because he didn’t–or couldn’t, or didn’t know how to–change his fortune.

This is the part where I tell you that you can apply this lesson to your life. And you can. Try thinking of a certain aspect of your life, like your job. Rank your power among your coworkers. Ignore salaries and corner offices. How much power do you really have? More than your boss, maybe? Are you really the one that knows the customers and the employees and can make them come through in times of need? What about if you’re part of a team or other organization, like a sports team or a board of trustees in your hometown. How much power do you have there? What about that time in high school when there was all the drama and feuding between your friends after so-and-so cheated on so-and-so? Were you a player or a bystander? How did you handle it? Did you ha
ve power over the situation? Did you wish you had? Who did? Who didn’t?

And why?

Why do we keep factoring William Shakespeare into our speculations about historical authorships? Why does he always appear in the list of possible engineers of unattributed works? As someone who writes adjacent to the subject of William Shakespeare, I think I have an answer.

People–and their worldly accomplishments–are interesting and worth discussing, no doubt. But when limited to a particular individual, scholars seem to realize quickly that their field of study is very small. There’s only so much you can write about the life of William Shakespeare: where he grew up; who his family members were; how he made his living; what his best accomplishments were; how he died; how he is remembered. Books and books and books can come out of this subject. But it isn’t very long before anyone delving into this subject can feel the walls closing in. What to do when the freshness of the subject is exhausted?

1. Question his authorship.
2. Expand his authorship.
3. Question his sexuality and make a scandal.

And that’s what you see next to all the plays in the Shakespeare section at Barnes & Noble: books on the three subjects above. Over and over again. That’s why Will is on the list of potential contributers to Sir Thomas More when there is little or no evidence to suggest his slightest involvement.

I said that I write about a subject adjacent to William Shakespeare, and that’s correct. To me, the life of the man is secondary to the power of his works. Whether Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare or a hamster wrote Shakespeare, his plays will continue to be performed and modified and reinvented and loved by actors, artists, and audiences everywhere for the foreseeable future of humanity. And that’s something you can keep writing about forever. When will A Midsummer Night’s Dream stop hitting the proverbial streets delighting fresh audiences with new interpretations of a timeless story? Never. And we can all keep talking about it and wondering what it means to our lives, in perpetuity. This is a magazine subscription that will never run out.

So don’t worry whether Will was Hand D. Just thank Hand D for a job well done if you enjoyed reading Sir Thomas More.

[P.S. There is one book in the Shakespeare section that may actually address my field of study: Becoming Shakespeare by Jack Lynch. It purports to explore Will's posthumous journey from being a playwright among many playwrights to being the playwright of Western culture. This isn't about the man, but rather the legacy of his works and the entire genre that they became.]

Sonnet 71

No longer mourn for me when I am dead
Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell
Give warning to the world that I am fled
From this vile world with vildest worms to dwell;
Nay, if you read this line, remember not
The hand that writ it, for I love you so
That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot,
If thinking on me then should make you woe.
O if (I say) you look upon this verse,
When I (perhaps) compounded am with clay,
Do not so much as my poor name rehearse,
But let your love even with my life decay,
Lest the wise world should look into your moan,
And mock you with me after I am gone.

This one might even work as a consolation speech during a breakup. I dunno. Someone give it a try and let me know how it went.

P.S. I couldn’t help but look up vildest in the etymology dictionary… and it wasn’t there! But this site says it’s just a “variant form” of vilest.

Photo by ChaTox.