Six Signatures (William Shakespeare)

Lyrics

[Verse 1]
We have six signatures in your hand —
six pieces of paper
where you spelled your name differently each time —
and thirty-seven plays
and one hundred fifty-four sonnets
and a handful of records:
your birth, your marriage,
your children, your will —
and the will bequeathed your wife
the second-best bed
which is either the most tender
or the most cutting sentence
a man ever wrote
on an instrument he did not know
would be read for four hundred years

[Verse 2]
You coined or first recorded
seventeen hundred words
the English language had not yet authorized:
eyeball, bedroom, bloodstained, lonely,
dwindle, swagger, gossip,
assassination, bump, critic —
and the Broca's area that produced them
was not inventing from nothing
it was listening
to the words the language
was about to produce
and producing them first
and the producing
was the kind of listening
that shows up in the auditory cortex
before it shows up in the dictionary

[Chorus]
You were a glove-maker's son
in a town in the midlands
and the childhood smelled like lanolin and tanning acid
and the warmth of a workshop
where an animal's skin becomes the body's second skin —
and you went to London
and acted in your own plays
and the Globe smelled like thatch and tar
and the sweat of two thousand people
who had paid a penny to stand close enough
to feel the performance —
and the voices you wrote parts for
carried them to every English-speaking body
for four hundred years

[Outro]
Four hundred years after you died
the plays are still running —
on every continent, in every language,
in translations you did not authorize
and theaters that did not exist —
and the six signatures did not survive
into the biography the way
the two and a half million words did —
and the asymmetry is the achievement:
the man is gone
and the voice the century used
to explain itself to itself
is entirely what the words kept
about who he was