A Traveller in Time?
Have you ever realised that Shakespeare must have been a Blake's 7 fan? Surprising? Perhaps, but prithee friends do but consider the evidence.
For one thing, did you think Blake ever uttered that absurd lie:
'For what it is worth, I have always trusted you,' to Avon at Star One?
No, of course not. His real words were that stirring speech, falsely accredited to Henry V:
'Once more unto the breech, dear friends, once more or close the gap with our rebel dead.'
Much more typical of Blake as I'm sure you'll all agree. And surely Blake's sentiments just before this could hardly have been better expressed than by:
'To do a great right, do a little wrong.'
Then again, Jenna's thoughts as she watched the injured Blake being put into a life capsule are surely mirrored by:
'He is a man, I shall not look upon his like again.'
And of whom but Blake could it have been said:
'This was the noblest rebel of them all.'
Ah, if only he had heeded the warning,
'Beware the Gaudes of Prime.'
Too rightly Avon feared when he said of Blake:
'Yet do I fear thy nature, it's too full o' the milk of human kindness.'
And what better epitaph for Blake than
'If you have tears prepare to shed them now.'
So many of us did in that last tragic episode when Blake lay dead at Avon's feet. And yet perhaps the lines:
'When he shall die, take him and cut him out in little stars, and he will make the face of heaven so fine that all the worlds will be in love with night' might be even more fitting.
Not only Blake and his crew are mentioned, there are others too.
Keillor - 'He was a man of an unbridled stomach.'
'Yon Travis hath a lean and hungry look, he hates too much, such men are dangerous.'
Of Dorian - 'By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes.'
Of whom but Servalan could it be said - 'The glass of fashion and the mould of form.'
(I utterly deny that it was Avon who was meant here, in spite of Shakespeare's suspected inclinations.)
'Like Niobe, all tears,' describes the lady perfectly as she appears in 'Sand'.
'I must be cruel to be kind,' could have come from no other lips.
And another perfect description;
'A tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide.'
Can there be any doubt that she is the 'dark lady' of the sonnets? Alas, poor Will!
Moving back to the Liberator:
'Alas, poor Orac, I knew him on radio.' The reference to radio is rather startling, but the explanation no doubt lies in the fact that W.S. in company with a great many other historical personages, was well acquainted with a certain time travelling doctor. Then again no doubt it was of Orac that Avon spoke when he said:
'An ill-favoured thing, sir, but mine own.' (No, I'm SURE he didn't mean his face. Fie, fie!)
It is not certain that the Bard had Tarrant had mind when he said:
'His face is the worst thing about him,' but 'I know a bunk where wild times blow....there sleeps Del Tarrant this time o' the night, wrapp'd round about Dayna in a trance of delight,' leaves no room for doubt.
'A pair of star-crossed lovers.' refers naturally to his affair with Zeeona, and doubtless:
'Then you must speak of one who loved no wisely but too well,' refers to his feelings for Piri.
The great dramatist also seems well acquainted with fan writings also. Surely he had it in his thoughts, the great controversy over whether given or surnames come first, when he wrote those well known lines:
'What's in a name?'
Admittedly, 'O, it is excellent to have a giant's strength,' seems to be the only mention of Gan, and 'Mislike me not for my complexion, the shadow'd livery of the burnish'd sun,' the only reference to Dayna.
But I'm sure that it was Vila who first said of Soolin, 'Chaste as the icicle that's curdled by the frost from purest snow,' 'Come, let me clutch thee.' And he must have thought in 'City at the Edge of the World':
'Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows,' and again, 'O brave new world that has such people in it.' While 'What's your is mine,' and 'The better part of valour is discretion' carry the authentic ring of Vila's personal philosophy.
And so to Avon. Was it not he who said to Vila in 'Orbit':
'Out damned spot! Out, I say!' And would he himself not have admitted:
'I am nothing, if not critical.' Then again Shakespeare speaks truly of him: 'That he is mad, 'tis true,' and 'A man whose blood is very snow broth, one who never feels.' Like other writers, W.S. seems somewhat obsessed with Avon's smile.
'Seldom he smiles, and smiles in such a sort as if he mock'd himself,' he says, and again:
'Oh villain, villain, smiling damned villain! That one may smile, and smile and be a villain!' Memorable words indeed, perhaps this is why he, and not Sue Bursztynski, who well deserves the title, is known as THE BARD OF AVON.
I rest my case. The rest is silence.