If You Prick Us, Do We Not Develop a Burning Sensation?

Yahoo, by way of HealthDay, reports that some historians feel Shakespeare may have had syphillis. Is there any historical figure that they don't think may have had syphillis? It's the new vogue thing to say about old timey artists, writers and politicians. Did you know some scholars think Jesus may have had syphillis?

No, seriously. He did. That's why he was always hanging around with lepers. Cause it didn't bother them. IT'S IN REVELATIONS, PEOPLE!

But I digress. Basically, the case seems to rest on a few circumstantial observations. Shakespeare stopped writing long before he died. He went bald. His plays often include references to venereal disease. The handwriting in his will indicates he may have suffered from tremors.

Frankly, none of these arguments go a long way towards convincing me. I mean, his plays often reference VD, sure, but couldn't that be because a lot of people in those days had VD, and it was a refernece his audience was sure to get (and find amusing)? I mean, this is probably my third blog entry goofing on someone with STD's, and I don't have any (I hope). And so what if he was bald? So's my grandfather! (Hey, what are you implying?)

The article goes on like this for a while, and then, out of nowhere, there's this really stupid quote. An expert responds to the case that a line in a sonnet referring to "love's fire" indicates Shakespeare had VD:

But Helen Vendler, an expert in Shakespeare's sonnets and professor of English at Harvard University, said the playwright took the "love's fire" line from an Italian poem. "It has nothing to do with disease, it just has to do with being inflamed with love," she said, adding that Shakespeare is "not writing autobiographically in the plays or poems."

This Harvard University English professor claims that Shakespeare is not writing autobiographically? At all? I mean, I'm not saying he was really the Prince of Denmark, but it's quite something to state assuredly in a newspaper that Shakespeare's plays or poems bore no resemblance whatsoever to his actual life. I mean, every great writer borrows from their lives, and Shakespeare's the greatest writer of all time. And there's no way to prove one way or the other that there wasn't some boy or dark lady he was obsessively in love with, or some chick named Viola that inspired a play or two of his. I'm sure she's right about that "love's fire" quote, but this is the kind of shrill, closed-minded argument that kind of turned me off to studying Shakespeare in high school. I didn't end up rediscovering the Bard until nearly the end of my time at UCLA.

And, yes, I know the headline to this article isn't the best. But Yahoo already stole "VD or not VD," which is really the obvious way to go.