The Great Divide

The Great Divide

Trends come, trends go, but how on earth did we get to this point of in-your-face cleavage at every turn? And what does cleavage have to do with Shakespeare?

Ah, you see, Solomon believes there is a connection, and that connection has to do with the proliferation of these so-called Renaissance Faires. Now Solomon has nothing against people wanting to dress up in Elizabethan garb and imitate the Bard’s manner of speaking, but more than being a Shakespearean love fest, these things have become excuses for women to see how much of their comely (hopefully) bosoms they can expose.

In Solomon’s youth, the only women who showed cleavage were those zaftig matrons who had probably nursed a whole brood of kids and had a cleavage up to their chins. Collateral cleavage, so to speak. Occasionally when ladies going to a formal event would wear a gown with a slightly daring décolletage—but the children were in bed when the great divide stepped out.

But are the ladies bigger today than they were when Solomon went to school? He certainly didn’t know any girls who could or would if she could show cleavage. Alas. But today!!! How do the lads keep their minds on their studies?

Solomon attributes this increasing cornucopia, with cups no longer full but overflowing, to things like high fructose corn syrup and sodium fluoride and bottled water and cell phones. Whatever has caused this change in the female form, he can’t help but reflect on his country cousins of years gone by who competed in 4-H and county fairs to produce the “chicken of tomorrow,” chickens with breasts of unparalleled voluptuousness.

Apparently the chicken feed used then has found its way into the food chain for American women, for today America has mammaries the likes of which have never been in history—or at least this man’s history. And I used to read National Geographic!

But more puzzling than the cause of the increase of the size of our earliest sustenance is the increase in the acceptability of showing them off. It is now fully acceptable, perhaps laudable, to put them out there, cinched up, pushed out, quivering, trembling, barely contained, like two straining Rottweilers ready to burst their tethers.

Solomon supposes that we can blame or thank Shakespeare and Elizabethan times (at least the Renaissance Faire interpretation of these things), for ladies have used them as license to unleash their hounds to the very last millimeter of their permissibility and restraint. The understanding seems to be that in those olden days, the bonnie lasses showed the lusty laddies what they could expect with one mere yank of a bustier lace. And surely if this posturing were good enough for the Bard, then it’s good enough for us.

If a lady can give a rough approximation of Shakespearean manner of speaking—being able to recite the Paternoster in the King James style will do--then she is not immodest or provocative if she reveals what Solomon never saw as a youth, even at the beach. Fortunately, it is not necessary to pay admission to a Faire to see the heaving of the twin rotundities. Women who once dressed as if there were such a thing as modesty now come at us as if she has put two state capitals in her top. Solomon suggests assuming that she wants to give you a lesson in classical architecture and you had better pay attention.

Now, Solomon is always a gentleman who knows that it is fun but not at all nice or polite to stare into on-coming headlights. But since knickknack shelves have become continental shelves and since titillation has become advertisement, he says, “Gentlemen, start your engines! Look to your heart’s content. Look as if sharia law is going to be imposed soon.”

And if she takes offense, then tell her, in your best Shakespearean accent, “Methinks the lady doth protest too much.”

The Charmed Pot: Sonnet 76

The Charmèd Pot

Let’s take a look at Sonnet 76, one of those more mysterious gems:

Why is my verse so barren of new pride,
So far from variation or quick change?
Why with the time do I not glance aside
To new-found methods and to compounds strange?
Why write I still all one, ever the same,
And keep invention in a noted weed,
That every word doth almost tell my name,
Showing their birth, and where they did proceed?
O, know, sweet love, I always write of you,
And you and love are still my argument;
So all my best is dressing old words new,
Spending again what is already spent:
For as the sun is daily new and old,
So is my love still telling what is told.

Now, Solomon has always suspected that Shakespeare used some substances to help him with that old imagination factor that his outré language sense required. But Solomon does not think the Bard confined his indulgences to mere alcohol.

You see, Sonnet 76 mentions “a noted weed” that he keeps invention in. What on earth was he referring to? And in Macbeth, the famous ingredients of the witches’ potion are thrown in “the charmed pot,” and then, lo and behold, a hallucinogenic vision emerges.

Now, do we really think this is all just coincidence? That such musings are merely the product of OUR over-active imaginations, perhaps even a projected wish-fulfillment? Solomon thinks not. He thinks that our Bard did indeed indulge himself with smoking or ingesting the loco weed, and Sonnet 76 is his announcement of this fact.

Let’s not forget that an intellect as profound as his was surely capable of disguising the meaning of what he was saying, of inserting sly, overt, but ambiguous references to his peculiar little vices. And he surely would have delighted in parading his sins in front of the entire world with the knowledge that, though his sins could be seen by all, they could be proved by none.

Solomon believes that all geniuses of wit indulge in this perverse game. He is remind of one of Edgar Allan Poe’s famous stories, “The Purloined Letter.” In this old detective story, the police must find a letter that they know is in an apartment, but, after ripping the place apart, they cannot find. It is up to M. Dupin, Poe’s detective, to deduce that sometimes the best way to hide something is to put it right in front of your nose. In this case, the letter is right on the mantle, a place so obvious that it is overlooked.

Solomon believes that Shakespeare hid things—his identity, his sins, his peccadilloes—in plain sight where no one could possibly think to find such things. Surely “compounds strange” are other drugs that he would have had access to but chose not to use, sticking with his “noted weed.”

If disreputable drug use is laid out for us, what else might be sitting right in front of us? What other sins of the master are laid bare for us to see, if only we task ourselves to admit that the possibility that presents itself is really there? Our bard was nothing if not vain, arrogant, and so cocksure of his superior intellect that he could not only walk on the edge of the moral parapet but dance on it and not fall off.