The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 16.1589 Thursday, 22 September 2005
From: David Basch <
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Date: Wednesday, 21 Sep 2005 11:24:42 -0400
Subject: 16.1559 Syphilis
Comment: Re: SHK 16.1559 Syphilis
Seeing Sonnets 153 and 154 as being a suggestion of Shakespeare's own
bout with syphilis is an illustration of the fallacy of overlaying
external preoccupations of commentators onto what the poet's intent is
in these poems.
The two sonnets are like the original Greek epigram they are drawn from
in highlighting the role of the passion of love in the nature of man but
they differ slightly in emphasis from this and are also subtly different
from one another. This subtle difference in emphasis is something that
Shakespeare's codes effectively point to, on which I have expounded on
in my book, The Shakespeare Codes.
While William Friedman and his wife Elizabeth rightly exposed as frauds
the alleged cipher codes in Shakespeare's work that they investigated in
their 1957 book, they were ignorant of additional sets of codes and
cryptographic devices that were only discovered years later. (While the
Friedmans did make a few mistakes in taking on faith things that they
were no doubt told on highest authority, such as the false fact that the
symphony of the word counts of 46 that were found in Psalm 46 fully
occurred in earlier translations of the Bible, they did a great job in
bringing enlightenment to this subject.) If only today we had
disinterested reviewers of the caliber of the Friedmans to comment on
the newly observed codes since their time! Unlike some commentators of
today, who a priori wave away any taint of the possibility of the
existence of cryptographic material in Shakespeare's work without
investigating it or misuse and misapply the techniques of the Friedmans
which they obviously don't understand, I think the Friedmans, were they
around, would have done a good job in teaching these modern ostriches a
thing or two.
The last two sonnets of the poet's collection are clearly allegories and
some commentators have regarded them as mere appendages to the rest of
the sonnets, which are deemed to have dealt with real day to day events
in the life of the poet. However, another way to look at these two
sonnets is to see them as calling to attention the fact of the
allegorical nature of the total of the 154 sonnets. This allegory deals
with the nature of man and his higher and lower passions in the context
of the Divine plan for man.
Note Sonnet 147 which gives an earlier taste of the subject of the two
last sonnets, identifying the nature of the poet's "disease" as the
natural fact of the force of the passion of love itself:
[1] |\/| Y loue is as a feauer longing still,
[2] | | For that which longer nurseth the disease,
[3] Feeding on that which doth preserue the ill,
[4] Th'vncertaine sicklie appetite to please:
The concluding line of the Sonnets sums it all up:
Loues fire heates water,water cooles not loue.
As Stephen Booth observed in his book closely analyzing the words of the
Sonnets, Shakespeare's line above is drawn from the Song of Songs 8:7:
Many waters cannot quench love,
neither can the floods drown it:
This again is another indication that Shakespeare regarded the source of
this "disease" as originating in the Divine plan for man, a natural
propensity that man must come to terms with in a manner worthy of its
heavenly pedigree.
David Basch
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