Hank Whittemore's Shakespeare Blog

“Experience,” said that great American author Norman Mailer, “when it cannot be communicated to another, must wither within and be worse than lost.”

Norman Mailer
(1923-2007)

I wonder how many people feel that way and how many become writers because of that feeling.  I believe it was profoundly true of Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, who lived so much of his life in the shadows offstage, so to speak.  Writing, along with the act of publishing or putting on a play, was a way of stepping forth from the wings.

“Once in a while,” Mailer later wrote, “your hand will write out a sentence that seems true and yet you do not know where it came from.  Ten or twenty words seem able to live in balance with your experience.  It may be one’s nicest reward as a writer.  You feel you have come near the truth.”

This is one reason “Shakespeare” speaks to a universal audience.  Take a look at Oxford’s life and then think about so many plays that must have come from his need to communicate his experience.  Quite often, more than we may realize, he was communicating that personal experience to Queen Elizabeth.  It seems that if something happened in his life and made him have certain thoughts and/or feelings, it didn’t exist unless he shared it with her … through poetry, and mostly through characters on the stage of the royal court, before they were brought alive in the public playhouse.

If the Queen did not know about his joys and pains, they began to wither within and become worse than lost … the proverbial sound of a tree falling in the forest, a sound whose vibrations have no ear to receive them, no one to hear.