Messages 2007
Shakespeare - his method of creation.
August 20, 2007
Santa Cruz, California
Received by FAB
I am here, William Shakespeare.
I said in my channeling of January 24, 2003, “There were many key players in my life. Some of these friends were indirectly models for the characters in my plays.”
In Chapter 44 of Mr. Ackroyd’s book, you read how my creative imagination was fertile and spontaneous, and how I drew on literary texts. This is true.
As I look back on my method of creation, I realize that it was a blending of pure poetic fantasy, absorption of literary texts, and life experience. I do not think it would have been possible for me to create the flesh-and-blood characters I did had I not observed human nature in the friends and people around me.
The key word in that channeled sentence is “indirectly.” The characters in my plays were creations of Art, not biographical sketches, and did not correspond exactly to the personalities I observed.
You as a poet know that you can quite properly consider yourself as the source for your poems, and so it was with me and my creations. Yes, I did draw from myself. I had a universal inner life, but it was fed by what I observed around me, and by my experiences.
The people I interacted with provided that matrix, which in time fed my inner life, so that as a result, dramatic characters sprang to life because of this fusion of my own imagination, the imagination of other writers, and the life around me.
As an artist, I drew on my poetic imagination as well as borrowings from other writers, but what gave my characters that real-life substance is precisely what this channeled sentence states - as the old cliche goes, experience is the great teacher. So take heart - you did channel me correctly.