A Fresh Look at Creativity

This story begins with a young man, quite an ordinary, unremarkable man. And it’s all true.

Brought up in a large family, the eldest of five.

The most interesting thing about him is that his father has an interest in local politics.

He grew up in the same town as me – a small market town and again quite unremarkable.

Here it is – this is where he spent all of his early years.

Not much else to do growing up here.

He even went to the same school as me …… although not in the same year.

Unlike me, he crawled into school like a snail, reluctantly carrying his satchel which weighed him down – And he left with no qualifications.

Whilst still a teenager, he pursued a woman almost ten years older than him until she caught him. Quite literally.

But there was good reason. His wife was carrying his first child and this was very much the shotgun wedding.

The marriage had been rushed forward and there were rumours he’d actually proposed to another woman around the same time.

So six months after he exchanged rings with his wife, along comes Susanna.

No qualifications, married reluctantly to a woman much older than him and now a father. Life wasn’t easy.

He scraped by as a farm hand, often surviving on the charity of his in-laws farm a few miles away. How embarrassing.

Stone broke, so what do you do. You have two more children over the next three years.
And it wasn’t just hard for him. His Father is declared bankrupt and narrowly avoids a prison term.

It’s around now that he fell in with the wrong crowd.

And when I mean the wrong crowd, we’re not just talking about shoplifting and petty thefts. A few years later this lot were caught attempting to bomb the capital.

Our man was eventually caught stealing from one of the big houses in the area,

It was around this time he went missing. Nobody had seen him for about a decade, enough time for the heat to have died down.

What happened during this time is still a mystery. Some say he hid out in Lancashire, others say he went abroad.

But, Just like Dick Whittington, he turns up in London as a bit part actor – as far away from the West End as you could imagine.

He banded together with some friends and they created their own theatre company.

Performing in a theatre which backed onto a street full of brothels.

A good start so far isn’t it – but this is where he started to invent.

Being a young man and jobbing actor near the pubs and bordellos of London, he can seriously lay claim to having invented addiction in his evenings, followed by arousal and, finally, puking by the end of the night.


But he did invent some real things – the Blanket - imagine bedtime without one.

Most people have eyes, and half the population have balls – but this man put them together and invented Eyeballs,

And he even invented the alligator – imagine how you’d say see you later without them?

These creations have led him to developing one of Britain’s biggest industries, worth a cool £1bn a year.

That’s the same amount as the snow damage caused to the UK in December

The equivilant to the “grey” economy in Wales, or over 400 Valley Parade Stadia.

His inventions have inspired thousands of others including writers, dramatists, composers and choreographers.


Here are just some of the people he inspired –some you might not want to have him inspired but inspire them he did.

Yet he’s commonly described as a crow, a fraud, a plagiarist, an upstart
Often seen as irrelevant, inaccessible boring and stayed. There was even a pamphlet questioning his sexuality.

Some people claim his work was never created by him.

The person is William Shakespeare, possibly the most influential person in the Western World.

The terrorists were part of the gunpowder plot and he didn’t abandon his family, making regular trips back from the capital.

But why this subject –I wanted you to take a fresh look at him and his achievement.

We often get lost in the language and forget he was a real man.

He brought common language to the arts – or as he called them, household words.

It is not the plays, but the words, the rhythm, the vocabulary and emotion. It’s not always easy but it is almost 500 years old.

Take Anthony and Cleopatra – two of the great leaders – yet Shakespeare makes them talk like an old married couple.

And look at his start in life – he wasn’t the high achiever and while he wasn’t the poorest in society, it was still a meteoric rise.

Take a fresh look at the young people in your life and see how you can inspire them to achieve greatness.

A recent survey in Wakefield found it wasn’t attitude and laziness of teenagers that created youth unemployment, but the stifling of creativity by parents, friends and relatives.

And for those who ask why it’s relevant today, in Bradford, I can only thank the RSC.

His Birthday is celebrated on the nearest Saturday to the 23rd of April – only this year, due to commercial reasons, they’ve shifted it to the 30th.

And the Rosemary? The herb of remembrance mentioned in Hamlet by Ophelia.

To finish, some other inventions of Shakespeare’s we couldn’t do without.

What would Science Fiction be like without Wormholes – time travel from the 15th century.


What would Britain’s Got Talent be like without Buzzers? Breakfast without Skimm’d Milk Or Mary Poppins without the Chimney Pot.

Even my own Blog, Set the World at Nought, is inspired by Shakespeare, although he stole the line from a prayer by St Thomas More.

So remember to wear your sprig of rosemary, like the townsfolk of Stratford will be, on Saturday.

Is the web destroying our language?

Ben Kingsley seems to think so.

At The People Speak event, he suggested digital distractions in “the cyber planet we’re now living in” has resulted in ever decreasing attention spans. He blamed the internet for stopping many people being able to “think and speak in paragraphs”.
He said: “I’m here to share the power of the spoken word and the resilience and beauty of the English language. I’m concerned about the disintegration of our sublimely beautiful language, which is the spine of our culture and has produced the greatest dramatists ever. You set that diamond against the trash that it’s becoming – it’s shocking. We have a language that’s like sprung steel and we’re turning it into chewing gum.”

My initial reaction to his comments was anger that someone so linked to the arts was denigrating the development of language and those who use digital platforms. Coming back to the statement, I thought I’d investigate several of the many points Ben throws up.

The rise and fall of the Attention Span

There is one point that looks credible. Attention spans are decreasing. There is certainly some evidence for this but looking closely at the studies, I’m not completely convinced by these arguments.

Many of the reports are by interested parties – a PR related study by Lloyds TSB Insurance for example; studies that compare now with the nineteenth century. The most recent study from the University of Iowa compared children who spent less than two hours in front of a screen with children who spent more than two hours.

When you add in computer time at school and a couple of TV programmes, I’d be hard pressed to find enough children who spend less than 2 hours of screen time.

The inference from this is that screen time is bad. It prevents you from doing something worthy like reading a book which will enrich your intelligence more. This in itself is a flawed concept. Reading Tolstoy or Dickens might be rewarding, but what if you read Mills and Boon? Is watching the latest documentary on natural history less valuable? Is viewing science or law blogs mind numbing and watching a play enriching?

The communications stream

What has changed is choice of entertainment. When I was growing up in the 80s and early 90s, music came from a limited number of radio stations or from tapes and then CDs. The internet was sparse and very slow. Mobile phones had the capacity to show a two colour screen and cost the earth. TV was restricted to 3 or 4 channels. Communications were more concentrated.

What the bombast of Kingsley ignores is that communication has become broader meaning we have more choice to select what we want to hear. A diet of X-factor, Coronation Street and Facebook isn’t going to enrich me as much as watching the latest dramatic production on TV, reading the Jack of Kent blog and reading Dickens on a kindle (surely that’s screen time too).

There is a level of competition in the communications channels that means we can scan certain documents or programmes, but I was taught at University that whilst certain text should be read in full, others should be sped read to absorb the basic principles, so this approach is hardly un-academic.

A chewing gum language

Another implication is that language is being eroded by this digitisation. I disagree. Let’s go back to the 80s when many children spent a huge amount of time playing manic miner and watching the limited TV. Is this more likely to produce good language skills than the teenager of today, able to discover interesting content online in seconds?

We often assume people sink to the lowest denominator, but that isn’t a correct assumption. Equally we all enjoy a guilty pleasure from time to time and I’m sure there is something extremely low brow which Kingsley enjoys.

One thing that marks the best wordsmiths out is a strong vocabulary. A written vocabulary isn’t the same as a spoken vocabulary but being surrounded by a rich environment of language is important. Churchill used a vast number of different words.

Using social media and engaging in dialogue is different from being a passive observer. Responding to twitter users means we have to develop our own language skills.

A simple hashtag game might not be to everyone’s liking, but to play you do need mental dexterity a good vocabulary and an understanding of culture. On message boards, I’ve come across a lot of pedantry when it comes to language and it also teaches you a lot about argument, even if you’re discussing football. A clear, concise argument using good grammar will be more persuasive than a poorly worded answer. It will also prevent a quick putdown purely based on the poor grammar.

Equally, if I’m putting together an argument, I can search for pithy quotes in seconds.

The evolution of language

I doubt Ben Kingsley tends to speak in iambic pentameter all the time. Even Shakespeare understood that you could change mood, impart meaning and change the dynamic of a play by breaking structure. Just look at a play like Anthony and Cleopatra where grand speeches use rhyming couplets while private conversations use coarse and common language. Equally Shakespeare would not have recognised the words or spoken like Chaucer.

We no longer speak like those in the 1940s, but neither did the Victorians. That’s the genius in the Armstrong and Miller Airmen sketches. They use the homophonic similarities of the 1940s and youth speech to juxtapose the difference in attitudes. If you look at American English, it is rooted in the past and actually has an older form of English at its heart. Which is more correct? Whatever you say, I’ll never say the word ‘gotten’.

Equally, language evolves through fashion, the need for terminology and use. Watch the Monkees TV programme of the 60s and see if the fashionable language there is still in use. I remember a cartoon called Rude Dog and the Dweebs- who uses those terms now (NB Dog referred to a canine and isn’t the same as calling someone a ‘Dwag’).

Shakespeare is one of the great innovators in language and you can’t critise the modern generation for changing the language and praise the dramatic greats in the same breath. You might tar computer users with the LOL generation of talking by writing GR8 rather than great, but even that language is functional. Although there are certainly people who will write in that way, many use the longer forms in tweets or text because they prefer to, reducing only when they see little option.

To sum up

There are issues with the use of technology and the written and spoken language. Some of these are related to schooling. But to denounce technology is to deny the future and ignore their potential. Ben Kingsley’s comments come across as cheap and from someone who does not engage with technology in way that many now do. The last five years have seen massive advancements in communication technology and to consign these changes as not important doesn’t help his own cause. It makes his argument weak, high brow and non-exclusive. To win, he needs to make people listen by engaging with the very people he feels aren’t living up to his expectations.

Image curteousy of www.freedigitalphotos.net.