On the Birthday of Henry David Thoreau

Reproduction of Thoreau's cabin at Walden Pond & statue of him

It's July 12 and this is the birthday of Henry David Thoreau. He was actually born David Henry Thoreau in Concord, Massachusetts in 1817. The family pronounced their name "thorough" but everyone today seems to say "the-row." 

He spent a lot of time out in nature as a child and his mother encouraged him to learn as much as he could from nature. He went to Harvard but it wasn't an experience he enjoyed. He didn't leave with a diploma because that cost an additional five dollars. 

His father had a pencil factory and he worked there for some time. He also tried working as a public school teacher, but he was opposed to corporal punishment.

He became friends with Ralph Waldo Emerson and in 1841 he was invited to live with them and work as a handyman, gardener and do some childcare. His time with the children was less of a tutor and more about nature walks and stories. He stayed with them for 2 years and met many of the Transcendentalists in Emerson's circle. It was a community of writers and thinkers that included the Alcotts and Nathaniel Hawthorne. 

A well-known abolitionist, Henry David Thoreau not only wrote on the terrors of slavery but also opened his home in Concord as a safe haven spot on the Underground Railroad for escaped slaves making their way to Canada.

In 1844 Emerson bought land on the shore of Walden Pond and he allowed Henry to build a small cabin in the woods beside this pristine, 61-acre pond. I have visited there and read Walden and much of Thoreau's writing. 

The myth of Thoreau and Walden that seems to have appeared in the latter part of the 20th century is that he was a kind of hermit isolated in the woods. The cabin was less than two miles from the village of Concord and he regularly had dinners with friends, still worked sometimes for the Emersons, visited his mother for tea and cookies, and had frequent visitors.

One of his famous essays is "Civil Disobedience" which he wrote after being jailed for one night due to failure to pay a poll tax. He was not an anarchist but he wrote about a non-violent approach to the opposition of traditional law and order. He felt that many Americans blindly follow these laws and behaviors throughout their lives.

He didn't go to the woods to write a book about the experience. The book he was intent on working on there became A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. That was about a trip he had taken with his brother. 

Henry lost his brother John to lockjaw in 1842. John had been sharpening a razor when he cut his finger. Tetanus quickly set in and he died a painful death from it in his brother's arms days later.

Henry did finish the book and published it himself, but it sold fewer than 300 copies.

The book is about an 1839 boat trip Thoreau took with his brother to and from Concord, Massachusetts, and Concord, New Hampshire. It is his first book and being that he was writing it at Walden Pond we can see many of the things that motivated him to go to the woods and that will appear later in the Walden book. He writes about poetry, literature, philosophy, Native American and Puritan histories of New England, friendship, sacred Eastern writings, and Christianity.

He also kept a Walden Pond journal and after he left in 1846 he worked it into the manuscript that we know as Walden, or a Life in the Woods. It was not published until 1854 and made his reputation and has become a classic of nature writing and memoir.

In the book he states his intention in the experiment at Walden this way: "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." 

Today The Thoreau Society is probably gathering at Walden Pond in celebration of his life and work. The Thoreau Society was founded in 1941 and is the oldest and largest society devoted to an American author. 

I have visited Walden and the other authors' homes in Concord and tried to imagine the community that was there in Thoreau's time. In the third chapter of Walden, "Reading," Thoreau describes how he derives enlightenment from reading Homer and other great writers, men who spoke of the truth when most of society is not content to strive after such truths and instead wastes their time reading popular fiction and newspapers. He believed that we should instead be dedicated to improving the intellectual culture. He believed the village of Concord could become a different kind of "university."

His experiment was not an anti-social, got-to-get-away-from-society one. Many of his readers or those who have just heard about what he did have built or found their own cabin in the woods hoping to learn or write something similar. There was much that Thoreau learned in those two years, but in the book he says, "I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours."

The Mysteries of William Shakespeare

Fletcher

Shakespeare

The English playwright John Fletcher (born in 1579) wrote for the King’s Men who were the acting troupe that produced most of William Shakespeare’s plays. We know that Fletcher collaborated with Shakespeare on Henry VIII andThe Two Noble Kinsmen. Fletcher also wrote plays on his own but collaborated with other playwrights frequently.

There is a "lost" play titled Cardenio that is attributed to Shakespeare and Fletcher, at least it is listed that way in the Stationers' Register entry of 1653. It is another one of several mysteries about Shakespeare.

As much as has been written about him, we still don't know much about Shakespeare's life. He left no letters and no handwritten manuscripts. There are only a few contemporary accounts of him though he appears to have been quite well known. Only six signatures by him are known and all are spelled differently.

Of course, the big mystery has been around since the late 1700s. There were those who believed - and some still today - that an undereducated man from Stratford could not have been the author of all the plays attributed to William Shakespeare.

This seems to have started with Reverend James Wilmot, a clergyman who lived near Stratford who rather weakly claimed that because he could not find a single book belonging to Shakespeare in any private library within a fifty-mile radius of Stratford and no authentic anecdotes about Shakespeare the writer, that he couldn't have written all those plays.

It was decades after Shakespeare's death that people proposed that the plays were written by Fletcher or Sir Francis Bacon or Edward De Vere or Christopher Marlowe or even Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke.

My favorite mystery of William Shakespeare is one that I thought would make a great novel or movie. I actually started writing it at the end of my undergraduate days. That is the mystery of his "lost years." William Shakespeare seems to vanish from the records for more than seven years.

At 21 years old, he was married with three children and living in the small town of Stratford in England. He had some formal schooling, but certainly no university. His father was a glover (made gloves, which were an upper-class purchase and not a bad job) and held some local government offices. William gets married when he gets a girl pregnant. We know he got in trouble for poaching some game from some private land and may have been jailed for it.

Seven years later, he is known to be living in London and is a resident playwright and part-owner of a theater company. What happened to him between 21 and 28?

There is much speculation. He traveled. He studied. Somewhere. But nobody knows just what Shakespeare was doing for all those years in between. Somehow he becomes an actor and a known writer.

I thought a modern writer would have pretty free reign to describe those lost years without much fear of being told it was untrue. Unproven, yes, but no one knows what really happened.

A 2016-17 American dramatic television series called Will about Shakespeare in his early twenties covers some of my unfinished script. It portrays Will as a struggling playwright who tires of making gloves in Stratford and so goes to London and sell a play he had been working on called Edward III to a troupe at a theatre owned by James Burbage.

He quickly falls in love with Burbage's daughter, Alice, who is also interested in writing and acting. The series had a lot about Will's Catholicism, which was forbidden and which he had to keep secret. The series probably was an expensive production and only lasted one season.

The lost play, Cardenio, was a topic I chose for one of my honors Shakespeare papers in college. It seemed a more manageable mystery to tackle in a few pages than the other topic which certainly is book-length.

The plot of Cardenio is not known, but from what I found the best guess is that it was taken from an episode in Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote. It is not a major section or character in Cervantes' book. It is a story recounted to Don Quixote about Cardenio, a young man who has been driven mad by love. His story has many of the elements of other Shakespeare plays including a duke, marriage forced and thwarted, a woman disguised as a man, a hidden letter, a possible lover's suicide that didn't happen and an escape into the forest.

A translation of the First Part of Don Quixote which contains Cardenio's story was published in 1612 and would have been available to Fletcher and Shakespeare. Playwrights of the day were known to have borrowed basic plots from other authors and reshaped them to the tastes of their audience.

There are records of the play having been performed, but no accounts of the performances or plot. Some scholars suggest that because of Shakespeare's popularity his name may have been attached to the play for promotional purposes and he may have had little or no involvement in the writing. I suggested in my college paper that he may have been the equivalent of today's film "executive producer." Fletcher based several of his later plays on works by Cervantes, so perhaps he read the book and suggested using some of the plot to Shakespeare.

The way that Don Quixote and Sancho discover Cardenio sounds like something the playwrights could use. They find a bag of gold coins and some papers including a sonnet about the poet's tragic romance. The pair searches for the bag's owner and find Cardenio, who is described as a strange bare-footed madman character who leaps about from rock to rock like a mountain goat and whose clothes are in shreds. Cardenio delivers a mad rant about Don Fernando and his own love for beautiful Luscinda.

The story continues after this meeting because Luscinda runs away from her new husband, the Duke and "all's well that ends well" because Don Fernando repents and apologizes to a forgiving Cardenio who is reunited with Luscinda.

Fletcher collaborated with Shakespeare on Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen. He wrote on his own The Woman's Prize or the Tamer Tamed, which is a sequel to Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew.

After Shakespeare's death, Fletcher appears to have slipped into the exclusive arrangement with the King's Men that Shakespeare had maintained, writing only for that company. But Fletcher only lived nine years after the death of Shakespeare. He was one of many victims of the plague epidemic. By then, he had achieved a similar level of fame to Shakespeare, but his name and fame faded and by the 18th century. Fletcher and most of his contemporary playwrights' fame was then eclipsed by Shakespeare.