A
Shakespearean hapax legomenon, drawn presumably from the Lancastrian
‘catholic university’ of his ‘lost years’. It bodies forth from my January
reading on the pointless authorship dispute, colour word for flesh made flesh
by blood. If you prick us, do we not bleed? Hark it heralds the intimacy of
incarnation, being derived from Latin incarnato. Shakespeare even turns
his original colour into an active verb: ‘…this my hand will rather the
multitudinous seas incarnadine, making the green one red.’ Can we imagine
Bacon, Oxford, Marlowe coining ‘incarnadine’? With deadly irony? With profound
distaste? With artful shading? With individual negative capability?
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