Letter to Shakespeare

Dear Will, You've been dead four hundred years and teenagers still have to read you on Monday mornings under fluorescent lights, which is either the greatest compliment or the cruellest punishment depending on the teenager. I need to tell you: they changed the language. Nobody says "wherefore" anymore—and by the way, it never meant "where." It meant "why." Even we get that wrong. Four centuries and we still can't read you properly. You'd love that. Your insults aged better than your sonnets— "Thou art a boil, a plague sore" still works at a bar on a Saturday night. You wrote about kings but you understood waiters and drunks and fools. Especially fools. The fools always told the truth in your plays— the kings just thought they did. I think you'd like the internet. Millions of people performing for strangers, confusing attention for affection— that's half your tragedies right there. Someone told me you might not have written the plays. That maybe it was Bacon or Marlowe or some earl with too much time. I don't care. Whoever wrote Hamlet understood what it's like to think so much you forget to live, and that's enough authorship for me. So thank you, Will. For the words we still steal. For "break the ice" and "wild goose chase" and "love is blind." You built so much of English that we forgot it was built. We think these phrases were always here— like weather, like gravity. That's immortality. Not the statue. Not the folio. But the language walking around in seven billion mouths that don't know it belongs to you. Yours, A fellow writer (much less talented, much more alive)