Studying this week’s prompt, a few lines from Shakespeare’s “As You Like It” came back to me.
“It was a lover and his lass,
With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino,
Between the acres of the rye,
With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino
These pretty country folk would lie.
“This carol they began that hour,
With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino,
How that a life was but a flower
And therefore take the present time.
With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino.”
So the young country folk went out into the fields and – took the present time. What is so striking about the poem, and is suggested by Van Gogh’s painting, is that this seems to be the kind of field where the teenager named Shakespeare had carnival knowledge of his girl friend Anne Hathaway. :-)
But the light-hearted lines about young folk fooling around out in the fields signified something serious: Anne became pregnant and Will had to marry the girl.
So, a few years later, still a young man barely out of his teens, William Shakespeare found himself to be a solid pere-de-famille, a married man with three kids.
Had it been a forced wedding? Probably. The young lady would have been for it, but whether he liked the idea or not marriage was about the only option open to a decent young man of that time.
He may have been against getting hitched but, as James Joyce wrote:
“Shakespeare hath a Will,
But Anne Hathaway.”
:-)
