> Dear All,
>
> Doug wrote:
>
>
>I really like Neil Gaiman's version of all this, in The Sandman, myself...
>
> Doug
>
>
>Me too. I loved his Midsummer Night's Dream.
>
For sure
but it all begins earlier when Dream watches the young Shakspeare talking
to Marlowe & wishing he had the talent to write good stuff, & decides to
give him the dreams he needs to write...
There's also a terrific story by Connie Willis, 'Winter's Tale,' that
suggestively tells the Marlowe version from the wife's point of view.... &
another crazy one by Williams Sanders, 'The Undiscovered,' in which Willie
is shanghied, nearly drowned off the coast of America, eventually made a
slave to a tribe which likes acting. so he gives them Hamlet, which they
find howlingly funny; ... & 'Heart of Whiteness' by Howard Waldrop, in
which Marlowe as, well, the later detective Marlowe, during that long
winter we remember from Orlando, seeks out a certain Dr Faustus in Oxford,
who might be a spy (the opening lines, 'Down these mean cobbles lanes a man
must go, methinks, especially when out before larkrise, if larks there
still be within a thousand mile of the bone-breaking cold.' gives a taste
of what's to follow...).
They all recognize that it's fiction rather than fact, always, that makes
the story keep going...
Doug
Douglas Barbour
Department of English
University of Alberta
Edmonton Alberta Canada T6G 2E5
(h) [780] 436 3320 (b) [780] 492 0521
http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/dbhome.htm
A bottle thrown
by loggers out of a wagon
past midnight
explodes against rock.
This green fragment has behind it
the _booomm_ when glass
tears free of its smoothness
Michael Ondaatje
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