Brothers and Sisters of The Shakespeare Code…
On 15th August, 2011, The Code received its 5,000th View!
The Agents of The Code would like to thank you for your continued interest from all over the world and present to you the customary bouquet of Southampton roses…
We know (from information passed on to us from Google) that there are at least TWENTY-TWO participating nations.
SINGAPORE…
…..joined The Shakespeare Code on 16th August, 2011.
See: ‘The Shakespeare Code’ salutes the Nations’. If the flag of your nation is not amongst those listed, please let us know…
WE WOULD BE PROUD TO FLY IT FOR YOU!
To celebrate this event, a great poet and editor, EDDIE LINDEN, has been gracious enough to accept a Fellowship – the highest accolade The Code can offer.
Here is the photograph of Mr. Linden which hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London:
And here is a less formal photograph of Mr. Linden extracted from The Code’s confidential files:
Mr. Linden now has the inalienable right to use the designated letters F. S. C. (Fellow of the Shakespeare Code) after his name.
As a Fellow, his name will also be automatically inscribed in The Code’s coveted ‘Roll of Honour’.
He is also responsible for covering the Sonnets and Poems of Shakespeare.
On accepting his Fellowship he said:
I’m overwhelmed. I come from the working classes, so I am very proud to be given this honour by Stewart. He’s been a great friend and influence on me for many years now – and comes from the same sort of background as myself…I’m really looking forward to the Fellowship Dinners….
On being asked which of his poems he would like The Code to print in honour of his Fellowship, Eddie unhesitatingly chose a poem first published in the celebrated British newspaper, The Guardian on Saturday, in 2009.
It was inspired by a mining disaster that happened in 1950 in the Scottish village where Eddie grew up…
THE NEST
The echo of the burn as it runs yellow
And the dark blue slag on the pit surface
Reminded him of his past.
The wheel of life sounded its
Message of time.
The blast of death
Rang its bells in the hearts of the homes.
The grim face in the mirror
Faded with time into the slag heaps
From where he came.
The moon revealed its ugly village casa.
A dog howled its death-like sound,
A baby cried from the cold of the night,
A father knelt in
the bowels of the earth, waiting for light
In the darkest hell, where he never saw.
Only winter remained.
And nothing returned to the nest
In the tree, but the snow that covered
The world of his past
But perhaps Eddie’s most celebrated achievement is his uncompromising poem about Glasgow, anthologised the world over and translated into French, German and Spanish…
CITY OF RAZORS.
Cobbled streets, littered with broken milk bottles,Reeking chimneys and dirty tenement buildings,Walls scrawled with FUCK THE POPE and blue-letteredwords GOD BLESS THE RANGERS.Old woman at the corner, arms folded, babe in pram,a drunk man’s voice from the other pavement,
And out come the Catholics from evening confessional;A woman roars from an upper window‘They’re at it again, Maggie!Five stitches in our Tommie’s face, Lizzie!Eddie’s in The Royal wi’ a sword in his stomach
and the razor’s floating in the River Clyde.’There is roaring in Hope Street,They’re killing in the Carlton,There’s an ambulance in Bridgeton,And a laddie in the Royal.
THE TRIXIE INTERVIEW
Brothers and Sisters, I can tell you I was all ‘claws and paws’ waiting to interview Eddie. Not only is he the greatest poet in the world, but everyone tells me he is:
‘THE WILDEST MAN IN THE WORLD’!
Eddie has been barred every pub in London’s Soho – even the notorious French House who will take ANYBODY’S MONEY!
Our Chief Agent, Stewart, first met Eddie forty years ago at a poetry reading at the Edinburgh Festival. Eddie was in the audience and shouted out that the poetry was ‘f……g crap’. He was hurled down a staircase and Stewart immediately ran to his aid – not out of compassion but out of literary discrimination.
The poetry WAS ‘f…..g crap’.
The two became great friends as a result and often ‘banged about’ about with the the late, great, D. A. N. Jones, who, like Stewart, worked for the B.B.C. magazine, The Listener.
There are certain things, though, a man will not tell his friends…
But he’ll sometimes tell a cat…
The moment Eddie stepped into Head Office, I knew all would be well.
GONE was the old wildness – now there was only sweetness and light. The strongest thing Eddie now drinks is coffee – and even that was too strong for him.
I had to give him some more milk from my saucer.
He opened up to me COMPLETELY as he sipped his coffee and I sat purring in his wise old lap…
It was all to do with his childhood. He’d been born a bastard in Ireland and smuggled, as a package of shame, into Scotland. He was adopted by a foster mother who died when he was ten and his second foster mother wanted nothing to do with him. So he was sent away to an orphanage..
in a big black car….
So no wonder Eddie drank! Denied ‘the milk of human kindness’, he sought it, as anyone would, in the bottle…
But two things saved him: Karl Marx….
…..and Literature
Eddie, like Stewart, discovered the work of the passionate Scottish socialist, A. J. Cronin, when he was a teenager. Cronin, like Eddie, was illegitimate and grew up in Greenock, a ship-building town on the Clyde.
This was the town where Stewart’s father was born and brought up…
Scottish Communists took Eddie’s education in hand – and this led to a violent, spiritual struggle for Eddie’s soul. Eddie was a cradle Catholic and priests wielded over-whelmingly power in working class Scotland.
They even sent him to a Catholic Working Men’s College in Oxford – but he escaped from everyone’s hands (and jobs in steelmills) when he moved to London…
There he discovered even more literature and even more life….
He was taken up by the great poet, and ravishing beauty, Elizabeth (‘By Grand Central Staion I sat down and wept‘) Smart…
…and started to give poetry readings with the blind, retro-Augustan poet, John Heath Stubbs….
….at John Dryden’s old hostelry, The Lamb and Flag…
It saved my life….
The Shakespeare Code welcomes Eddie Linden, F. S. C. to the hallowed ranks of the Fellows….
Ode to LindenHail the Code
Poet Fellows
Ed and Will
Eddie Linden, F. S. C.
Karen Gledhill, F. S. C.
Janet St. John-Austen, F. S. C.
Michael Hentges
Martin Green
Alan Samson
Lord Bragg of Wigton
Sir Nicholas Hytner
Jane Howell
Greg Doran
Maggie Ollerenshaw
Simon Callow
Prof. David Womersely (Thomas Wharton Professor of English at Oxford University)
Prof. Jonathan Bate (Professor of Shakespeare and Renaissance Studies at Warwick University)
Dr. James Kelly (Senior Tutor at Queen’s College, Cambridge)
China Miéville
Martin Jarvis
‘IN VINCULIS, INVICTUS’
good fur eddie
ah’ve got a fond memory of eddie
at a poetry society A.G.M
we were all sitting on the floor together
bored
it was summer and hot
(eddie was still drinking in those days)
someone was giving a report
i forget what(well it was 1972)
eddiie stuck his hand up
and cried out
“chairman,he’s a fuckin liar!”
we were no longer bored.
🙂
bruce cheyne