got hooked on Shakespeare when I was fourteen years old, after seeing Richard Burton play Hamlet. That play has been a lifelong obsession, Ive seen countless productions, and directed my own adaptation in 1991 at Suffolk University in Boston. Some were good, some were not, but the play survived most of its mishandlings, at least until the 21st Century, when both the Royal Shakespeare Company and Englands National Theatre started incorporating the worst tendencies of North American stagecraft. For the last several years I have watched Shakespeare go down the toilet until now, after enduring the ultimate insult of the Benedict Cumberbatch Hamlet, I must admit we are in danger of yielding Shakespeares stage to the plebians of modern theatre. I was going to write an essay on Shakespeares final hour, but what would be the use? The only people who would read it would want to start a fight about it. So I wrote a song instead, believing that people who listen to popular music are smarter than those who believe there is still life in the remnants of genius that are being cut to ribbons and sold in the market like the robe of Jesus Christ.
The greatest literary scholar of our time, Professor Harold Bloom of Yale University, has fought for the last 50 years to maintain the sanctity of Shakespeare, Dante, and the rest of the classical canon of Western Literature in the ever downspiraling curriculum of North American Universities. I had the plleasure once of seeing him walk off the stage of Cambridges ART during a debate with Carol Gilligan over Hedda Gabler. He could not abide an audience that preferred her warped point of view over his classically trained mind. So for all the work he, and his protege Camile Paglia, have done to defend the geniuses of antiquity against the mediocre minds of 20st Century and 21st Centry Academia, I have prefaced and epilogued this song which will conclude this group of songs written for my new album Lovestreams, with a few words from Professor Bloom.
lyrics
Ive seen 10,000 actors play him
but a million could not contain him
The Universal graces him
Even his author chases him
Ophelia, hurry
Bring the flowers
This is Shakespeares final hour
Into the birth of consioucness we delve
Through him we came to know ourselves
Prince Hamlet now lies on the floor
Horatio comes in through the door
They speak of ghosts
And soldiers bold
While listening to Nat King Cole
Friends and Romans lend me your ears
What has become of old King Lear?
This father, stricken deep with woe,
Has now become a CEO
Alas. our children
Shall never see
A pure, untrammeled tragedy
The light, the light, turn on the light
Tis not the king who walks tonight
Tonights the night the theatre dies
Tonight the ghost of Shakespeare cries
500 years
He reigns supreme
Twas but a dream within a dream
Pretenders desecrate the space
Wash off their sily make up, put masks over their face
Thes are not the children of the gods
They shit on genius and piss on the bard
Bubble bubble
Toil and trouble
The witches watch the theatres crumble
Ophelia hurry
Bring the flowers
This is Shakespeares final hour
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