THE LAST ELIZABETHAN

Shakespeare wrote
masterworks of old,
ripe pleasurable follies,
so it has oft’ been told.
Yet, did he really pen
such eloquent fluff?
Or have prospects,
mere folly,
coined a literary bluff?
For speculations beg the inquiry
be made in short,
to chronicle each sly retort.

History is excused
disproving its past,
confirmed resolutions
to each curiosity,
at long last.
And then,
of course,
there are rumored scandals
debated academically as fact,
that Will n’er knew
to witness even a contract.

As such sweet sorrow,
his reputation remains a pox
on etiquette’s sweet persist,
in that Elizabethan time capsule
where his legacies exist.
Perchance to dream,
To be, or not,
The bones of the Bard
continue to rot.

And I, for one,
believed fiction should lay
dormant still,
from those in perennial failings
of that Englishman’s supple quill.
But then, of course, who among us knew,
that the greatest of all literary masters
lived just down the road from view?