Sign up to save your podcasts
Or
Share Bisexual Shakespeare | Episode 01
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Or
Bisexual Shakespeare | Episode 01
PODCAST #1: BISEXUAL SHAKESPEARE | be the scripture you sing
My Talk Show Verse Interview with the Narrator of the Sonnets
by Martin Bidney
As “be-loving imaginer,” I like to dialogue with poets by building a bridge that starts where my chosen mentor-poet lives. I do this by entering the poetic form the mentor-friend loves best. Naturally I con-verse with the fictive narrator of Shakespeare’s sonnets (14-line poems) in the beautiful stanza form he can teach me, and I try to emulate my teacher in a gentle rivalry. Shakespeare, like prophets of older times, left us a life-testament, an imagined bio-scripture or life-bible embodying lasting values. My motto, “Be the scripture you sing,” means this: while you emulate the word-songs of your chosen master, think about applying to your own mentality the values that his work embodies. I play the role of a talk-show host in 154 exchanges of sonnets with my “guest” to learn about love and art.
The theme of Shakespeare’s book is love. It offers an adventurously inclusive outlook, a generously welcoming approach to love which is emphatically bisexual. In dialogue 1, we discuss the readiness of the fictive narrator to describe his boyfriend as “beauty’s rose,” a metaphor traditionally used for women. In this opening poem, as in the 38 poems that follow, the speaker will beg his beauteous boyfriend to get married and have children, so as to pay forward his attractive gifts. In dialogue 4 we clarify what the narrator means by imploring the boyfriend not to “traffic with thyself alone.” In dialogue 6 I playfully respond to the speaker’s hope that the friend will have at least ten children by suggesting that, in the broad sense of “progeny,” I might apply this philoprogenitive attitude to the books I hope to write. In dialogue 9, I deal head-on with the obsessive quality of the somewhat hectoring requests: if the boyfriend gets happy and excited by falling in love with a woman, and if the speaker identifies with him, won’t the speaker get equally happy and excited, maybe even more so, with a double love?
In dialogue 18, noting that the boyfriend is lovelier than a summer’s day, I liken the speaker’s amorous attitude to that of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, who in writing “In Memoriam” to memorialize his own boyfriend who died at sea, noted that “’Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all.”
The climax of my talk is dialogue 20, where the speaker tells us that Nature, while creating the boyfriend initially to be a woman, fell “a-doting” and gave the creature, along with a “woman’s face,” a male organ in addition, thus fitting him to be not only “prick’d out” for women’s pleasure but also perfectly designed to be “master-mistress” of the enamored bisexual contemplator. Finally, in conversation 109, we return to the original rose metaphor, with all its boundary-defying implications: “For nothing this wide universe I call / Save thou, my rose; in it thou art my all.”
View all episodes
By Martin Bidney
5
11 ratings
PODCAST #1: BISEXUAL SHAKESPEARE | be the scripture you sing
My Talk Show Verse Interview with the Narrator of the Sonnets
by Martin Bidney
As “be-loving imaginer,” I like to dialogue with poets by building a bridge that starts where my chosen mentor-poet lives. I do this by entering the poetic form the mentor-friend loves best. Naturally I con-verse with the fictive narrator of Shakespeare’s sonnets (14-line poems) in the beautiful stanza form he can teach me, and I try to emulate my teacher in a gentle rivalry. Shakespeare, like prophets of older times, left us a life-testament, an imagined bio-scripture or life-bible embodying lasting values. My motto, “Be the scripture you sing,” means this: while you emulate the word-songs of your chosen master, think about applying to your own mentality the values that his work embodies. I play the role of a talk-show host in 154 exchanges of sonnets with my “guest” to learn about love and art.
The theme of Shakespeare’s book is love. It offers an adventurously inclusive outlook, a generously welcoming approach to love which is emphatically bisexual. In dialogue 1, we discuss the readiness of the fictive narrator to describe his boyfriend as “beauty’s rose,” a metaphor traditionally used for women. In this opening poem, as in the 38 poems that follow, the speaker will beg his beauteous boyfriend to get married and have children, so as to pay forward his attractive gifts. In dialogue 4 we clarify what the narrator means by imploring the boyfriend not to “traffic with thyself alone.” In dialogue 6 I playfully respond to the speaker’s hope that the friend will have at least ten children by suggesting that, in the broad sense of “progeny,” I might apply this philoprogenitive attitude to the books I hope to write. In dialogue 9, I deal head-on with the obsessive quality of the somewhat hectoring requests: if the boyfriend gets happy and excited by falling in love with a woman, and if the speaker identifies with him, won’t the speaker get equally happy and excited, maybe even more so, with a double love?
In dialogue 18, noting that the boyfriend is lovelier than a summer’s day, I liken the speaker’s amorous attitude to that of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, who in writing “In Memoriam” to memorialize his own boyfriend who died at sea, noted that “’Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all.”
The climax of my talk is dialogue 20, where the speaker tells us that Nature, while creating the boyfriend initially to be a woman, fell “a-doting” and gave the creature, along with a “woman’s face,” a male organ in addition, thus fitting him to be not only “prick’d out” for women’s pleasure but also perfectly designed to be “master-mistress” of the enamored bisexual contemplator. Finally, in conversation 109, we return to the original rose metaphor, with all its boundary-defying implications: “For nothing this wide universe I call / Save thou, my rose; in it thou art my all.”