On April 23, 2564 William Shakespeare was baptized in Stratford-upon-Avon, three days before their was an outbreak of plague recorded by their local paper the Parish Register. Because his birth occurred during the old Julian Calender, April 23 was actually May 3.

Shakespeare’s father John was a leather worker who became a high bailiff, which was at the time, the highest elected office in Stratford. During that time he was prosecuted, and/or threatened prosecution four times for lending money and trading wool illegally. He married Anne Whatelely which historians now believe (her name) was a scribal error and it was actually Anne Hathawy on November 39, 1582. She was pregnant at the time.

William Shakespeare

Between 1585 and 1592, as productive as Shakespeare was at the time, there is no record of anything he did. Many scholars believe it could have been writers block and he went into seclusion. Though he is known today as playwright, he listed himself on documents, now known as resumes as “an actor”, taking bit roles in plays, such as the ghost in Hamlet, giving him time for writing plays.

The first definite reference to Shakespeare as a playwright is in a pamphlet by Robert Greene, who wrote, “There is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tiger’s heart wrapped in a Player’s hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes fac totum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country.” “Tiger’s heart wrapped in a Player’s hide” is an allusion to a line from Henry VI, Part 3. Although Shakespeare is usually considered an Elizabethan playwright, much of his greatest work was produced after James I took the throne. Thus, Shakespeare could be more accurately considered Jacobean.

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Most of Shakespeare’s plays are based on his diaries and poems which was commonplace during that period. During his time, theaters did not use curtains and had nothing but a bare stage. The playwright’s responsibility was to “set up the scenery through the actor’s script by describing what the setting should be. Ticket-buyers to Elizabethan plays, including Shakespeare’s were allowed to buy and eat pears and apples during the show. If they were not satisfied with the performance, they more often than not threw them at the actors.

Shakespeare leased a theater for 31 years, The Globe, which burned to the ground on June 29, 1613, set fire by a cannon shot during a performance of Shakespeare’s Henry VIII.d In 1603, Shakespeare’s company became the official player for King James I and renamed the troupe The King’s Men.  Shakespeare felt puns were the “highest form of humor” and used them often in his plays and writings.

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In 1608, The King’s Men opened the Blackfriar’s Theater, the template on which all later indoor theaters are based.

On May 20, 1609, Thomas Thorpe published Shakespeare’s sonnets in a quarto volume, apparently without the poet’s permission. It was one of the first known copyright violations. Almost nothing is known about when the 154 sonnets were written, to whom they were addressed, or whether they are assembled in the correct order. Sonnets are typically love poems, but Shakespeare’s are often self- loathing, bitter, and even homo-erotic.

Depending on the person or religious scholar, Confucianism is referred to as a philosophy and by others a religion. Most comprehend it as a form of humanism that is all-encompassing that neither denies nor tries to prove there is (or is not) a heaven.

In any case it has had an influence on the political and spiritual arena of China and has also spread to countries such as Japan, Vietnam, and Korea. The percentage of East Asians who identify themselves as Taoists, Buddhists, Muslim, Christian, or Shintoists, never leave their Confucian roots, and consider themselves to be of both faiths.

The religion was founded sometime between the fifth to sixth century BC in China. Confucius lived from 551 to 479 BC. About 5.5 million people practice this religion (or philosophy) whichever one wishes to translate it to be.

Confucianism is not an Asian word. It actually originated in the 1700′s and is Latin.

Confucius was born into a poor home whose family were part of the aristocracy of the feudal state of Lu in what is now the Shantung Province of China. He became a dedicated learner in his teens with the support of his mother so that he could become a scholar in his later years. His father died before he turned four years old.

Though it is not known where or how Confucius became educated, history has shown us that he mastered six arts; math, charioteering, calligraphy, archery, music, and ritual in his twenties. He began a peerless teaching career in his early thirties. By that time though he had not mastered, he became very familiar with poetry and history; well enough to teach both as well.

Over the years of his teachings he had a goal of putting into practice his learnings and transfer them into politics. This became a problem due to his loyalty to the king, which isolated him from the power-holders during his adulthood, the well-known Chi families. His moral rectitude was not settling to the king’s inner circle.

In his mid-50′s, he realized these dynamics and left China hoping he could find another government who would accept his vision of politics mixed with education. He couldn’t but even through years of frustration of over a decade, he managed to become a teacher-in-exile and developed an amazing reputation of a man of unique vision and his reputation spread throughout the world.

Twelve years later he returned to China to teach and try to make public his evolved yet classical traditions by writing. He lived another eight years and died at age seventy three in 479 BC.

In the Analects (2:4) he summarizes his life in just a few sentences:

At 15 I set my heart on learning; at 30 I firmly took my stand; at 40 I had no delusions; at 50 I knew the Mandate of Heaven; at 60 my ear was attuned; at 70 I followed my heart’s desire without overstepping the boundaries of right.

Also in the Analects, Confucius assists a student who was having difficulty describing him:

Why did you not simply say something to this effect: he is the sort of man who forgets to eat when he engages himself in vigorous pursuit of learning, who is so full of joy that he forgets his worries, and who does not notice that old age is coming on? (7:18)

Confucianism actually did not begin with Confucius. Confucius was not even the founder of the religion; just as Jesus dis not found Christianity, nor did many other religious leaders found religions founded later in their honor, but Buddha did create Buddhism.

“A transmitter to consciously tried to retrieve the meaning of the past by breathing vitality into seemingly outmoded rituals”, was how Confucius considered himself. Confucius’ love of antiquity was motivated by his strong desire to understand why certain rituals, such as the ancestral cult, reverence for Heaven, and mourning ceremonies, had survived for centuries. He had faith in the cumulative power of culture. Confucius’ sense of history was so strong that he saw himself as a conservationist responsible for the continuity of the cultural values and the social norms that had worked so well for the civilization of the Chou dynasty.

Though Taoism and Buddhism had very strong influences in China, they paled by comparison to the ethics of Confucian. A revival of Confucian thought in the 11th century produced Neo-Confucianism, a major influence in Korea during the Choson dynasty and in Japan during the Tokugawa period.

In 1530 AD, a Ming emperor reformed the Confucian cult to focus more on Confucius’ teachings than the sage himself (e.g. images of Confucius were replaced with inscribed tablets). The cult of Confucius declined after the founding of the Chinese Republic in 1912, but the influence of Confucianism continues.

Confucianism is characterized by a highly optimistic view of human nature. The faith in the possibility of ordinary human beings to become awe-inspiring sages and worthies is deeply rooted in the Confucian heritage (Confucius himself lived a rather ordinary life), and the insistence that human beings are teachable, improvable, and perfectible through personal and communal endeavor is typically Confucian.

Confucius regarded Heaven (T’ien) as a positive and personal force in the universe; he was not, as many have suggested an agnostic or a skeptical of a universal higher power.

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Rick London is a freelance writer, cartoonist, and fashion designer. He founded the world’s only shoes with famous love quotations known as Shoes That Amuse. They showcase a graphic of famous philosophers, poets and others on the top panel and on the side panel one of their most famous quotes about love. From Emerson to Shakespeare, Shoes That Amuse has a huge inventory of over 500 pairs of shoes and matching bags including a page of Confucius items.

By Rick London C2010                               

Though most of us know of Helen Keller from our studies in school as being a magnificently bright woman who happened to be blind and deaf, and a very prolific writer, mainly about those two issues in her life. Though they are indeed true, that is not what she considered her “finest writings”.

Keller was born on June 27, 1880, in a small Alabama town called Tuscumbia. She was daughter of Confederate Army soldier Captain Arthur H. Keller and her mother was Kate Adams Keller, whose cousin was Confederate General Robert E. Lee.

Doctors said she was not going to live past the age of two due to her illnesses that were thought to be scarlet fever and meningitis. She was not born blind nor deaf but the sickness eventually caused it at about 19 months old.

What she considered her biggest claim to fame, were not her writings about her disabilities, which she obviously did not let get in her way of achievement, but her relentless campaigning for woman’s suffrage, equal rights, anti-war, socialism, and other progressive causes. Many documentaries and books were written about her but the most famous film of all was “The Miracle Worker”.

Keller’s parents were proud and inspired by their child as, there was still much stigma attached to any type of disability, and blindness and deafness were no exception. Helen went with her father who sought out the best eye, ear, nose and throat specialist in the country, located in Baltimore for advice on Helen’s future. Chisolm put them in touch with Alexander Graham Bell who happened to be working with deaf children. Bell suggested Perkins School For the Blind where Helen met an instructor (and former student there) named Anne Sullivan. Their friendship lasted 49 years. Sullivan eventually became governess and later companion of Helen Keller.

Anne Sullivan arrived at the Keller home in 1887 and taught Helen to communicate by spelling words with her hand. Her first word was doll, as she had brought it as a present for Helen. Later Helen was nearby when Sullivan was washing her hands, felt the motions of the palm of her hand and felt the cool water running her own hand and said “water”. After that, she nearly drove Sullivan to exhaustion wanting to know the word for every single thing that existed in her environment.

Her admirer, Mark Twain, had introduced her to Standard Oil magnate Henry H. Rogers who, with his wife, paid for her education. In 1904, at the age of 24, Keller graduated from Radcliffe, becoming the first deaf blind person to earn a B.A. degree.

Keller wrote a total of 12 published books and several articles, and is credited for bringing the Akita dog to the U.S from Japan, a dog she loved and admired for its loyalty and gentleness.

In 1965 she was elected to the National Women’s Hall Of Fame at the New York World’s Fair.

Keller devoted much of her later life to raising funds for the American Foundation for the Blind (AFB). She died in her sleep on June 1, 1968 at her home, Arcan Ridge, which was in Westport, Connecticut. . A service was held in her honor at Washington D.C.’s National Cathedral and and her ashes were placed there next to her constant companions, Anne Sullivan and Polly Thompson.

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Author Rick London is a freelance writer, cartoonist, designer, and founder of Shoes That Amuse, the world’s only famous love quote shoes. Each pair, manufactured by U.S. Keds and designed by London has the graphic or photo of a famous writer, philosopher, poet, or politician on the top panel and one of their most famous love quotations on either side panel. The Rick London Collection includes Helen Keller.