A Rainy Day Poem/Shakespeare Wrote the Bible

I am wet.
So very wet.
My jeans will never be dry again
And my hair will never untangle.
But, ah!
My books are safe.

* * * * *

I recently found the following quote in Nabokov's "Speak, Memory" and promptly forwarded it to Veronica.

"I have ransacked my oldest dreams for keys and clues--and let
me say at once that I reject completely the vulgar, shabby,
fundamentally medieval world of Freud, with its crankish quest
for sexual symbols (something like searching for Baconian
acrostics in Shakespeare's works) and its bitter little
embryos spying, from their natural nooks, upon the love life
of their parents."

We don't support Baconian acrostics here at Fourth Wall, but here's a Shakespearian word game (in honor of the 443rd anniversary of his baptism yesterday) that my high school English teacher taught me as evidence that Will himself was brought in to make the KJV translation of the bible more elegant.

1) Shakespeare was 46 the year the KJV was published (1611). Find a King James Bible and turn to Psalm 46.

2) Count 46 words down from the beginning of the Psalm.

3) Count 46 words up from the end of the Psalm (inclusive of the "Selah").

4) What word does that make?



(Caveats: I do, in fact, know that the KJV was translated from 1604-1611, so there's no way Will could have known how old he would be when it was published. Furthermore, he actually turned 47 in April 1611, so it would have to have been published early in the year. And if Shakespeare was, as triumphalist rumor has it, Catholic, this entire thing may elide the question of whether or not he thought of the Psalm as number 46 or number 45. But hey, it's a fun--er, nerdy--parlor trick, for those who have parlors outfitted with KJV bibles.)