Congratulations to Brenda White Ellington, the winner of our first giveaway! I’ll be mailing you your prize soon! This has been so much fun that I want to have regular giveaways with prizes like a session with Erik, himself. Any other suggestions for prizes are welcome.

Those of you who have submitted stories of how Erik has pranked or visited you have been so patient. I know that since I reduced posting them to only weekend days has created quite a wait, and I thank you for understanding. Please keep them coming because they give us so much hope and confirmation. Plus I’m sure Erik loves the attention!

Take some time to look at the new top menu bar. It still has kinks but it’s almost finished. One of the most important changes is the addition of a page that allows you to submit your testimonials and praise for Erik or Channeling Erik in general. How has it changed your life? The page is under “About Erik,” but, just like the Erik Encounters submission form, you can access it by clicking on the “Share your praise” button on the right sidebar. You’ll need to scroll down a bit.  Now, enjoy today’s interview with Shakespeare!

Me: Erik, can you bring in William Shakespeare?

(Pause)

Erik: Sure, Mom. He’s already here. He’s been listening.

Me: Oh! Hi, Will—Shak—Billy.

I have no idea how to address the man. I can’t stop thinking about all the boring term papers I had to do because of him.

Robert: Yeah, he’s been sitting here writing on pieces of paper.

Me: Of course. I have a lot of questions for you. Some are from blog members. First, when and why did you start writing?

(Long pause)

Robert: He kind of speaks slowly. He’s sarcastic, too!

Robert chuckles.

Me: Of course he does!

Shakespeare: What a fascinating yet intrusive question.

Yep, that’s sarcasm.

Robert and I laugh.

Me: Sorry! There’s nothing you have to answer. This is all to give insight to other people.

Shakespeare: I understand. I was always drawn to language.

(Pause)

Robert: He’s showing me visuals again. Some spirits like to do that. So he shows himself as a little boy. How old were you?

Shakespeare: Three and a half.

Robert: He’s walking down a street. Someone is holding his hand, and he’s looking at signs. Some of them are carved into wood. Some of them are on pieces of parchment, and he’s enjoying looking at the patterns that the letters create.

Shakespeare: I saw the beauty of the form of the words and the letters creating them. That became the basis for –

(Pause)

Robert (Laughing): I’m not going to speak the way he speaks because it’s hard to talk like him!

Me: No, no!

I’m sure saying things like, “Thou art” and “Ye hath” and not using any contractions must be a bitch.

Robert: I’ll just interpret it my way.

Me: Right.

Shakespeare: What I learned is that the beauty of that form comes from stringing it together in certain ways and patterns in a way that creates a symphony for the tongue. And as they are spoken, they become a symphony for the ears. As the person speaks them and hears them, that translates into a symphony of body movement because people are moving as they listen to the words.

Erik: So it’s like a mosh pit.

Robert laughs. I don’t get it.

Shakespeare (smiling): In a way.

Wow, I didn’t even know he knew what a mosh pit was. Way to keep up, Billy.

Robert: He’s not bald. I thought he was bald!

Me: Yeah, I thought he was bald on top.

Robert: Well, he’s not showing himself as bald now.

Me: Of course he wouldn’t! He uses Afterlife Propecia. How was your childhood? Anything notable?

Shakespeare: It was tenuous.

Robert: I can’t remember what that means.

Me: Barely hanging on.

Robert: Okay.

Shakespeare: Tenuous is the word, but that mostly came from watching everyone else. I won’t sugarcoat it—

Robert: I don’t know the word he used, but I’m saying, “sugarcoat” because that’s what it means in today’s language.

Shakespeare: A great many people of my time, just as they are now, were struggling—various diseases, extreme poverty, people were unkind and took advantage of each other. I wanted to give people a respite from all of that while at the same time feed my ego.

Robert and I chuckle. Shakespeare has a big head, I guess.

Shakespeare: I enjoyed attention. That was a motivation for me: to take care of myself, the self connected to my body, and to take care of humanity. I didn’t write everything I got credit for either.

Me: That was my next question! Did you plagiarize?

Shakespeare: I wouldn’t use the word, “plagiarize.” I would use the word, “borrow.”

Robert and I laugh hard.

Me: Can you give me an example?

Robert: Did he write Macbeth? I just heard the word, “Macbeth.”

Me: Yeah!

Robert: I should remember these things, but please, no offense, I just couldn’t get into your stuff.

Me: Uh oh.

Shakespeare: Macbeth was based on a play by another playwright. In today’s world and even then, one would not call it plagiarism. I simply enhanced it.

Robert (laughing): That sounds so egocentric!

Me: It does! A little euphemistic, too.

Shakespeare: I saw that it had a lot of potential, and I knew I was the one to deliver on that potential so I used that play as the catalyst for my creation of the one you know as Macbeth.

Me: Oh, okay. How did you die?

Robert: I keep hearing that it was some sort of disease.

Me: Was it the plague? I think it was going around.

Robert: Well, this doesn’t mean that it’s what he died from. Sometimes they’ll give me a word and if my brain doesn’t allow that word to come through then I have to use something as a metaphor. Consumption. What is that?

Me: That’s usually what they called tuberculosis, but any wasting disease can be labeled as that.

Robert: It was that or something like that.

Shakespeare: Sometimes what the historians believe as the truth they teach as the truth, then find out later it was something else. I was sick with several things, but it was the consumption that finally took me. It wasn’t very unusual for people of that time period to get sick and die fairly young.

I don’t think he was a spring chicken, but I’ll give him a pass on that one.

Me: What was your favorite piece of work, one of your own creations?

Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet. I am a romantic at heart and a good romance always has an element of tragedy. That helps us connect to and find value in the power of love.

Me: Ah! The power of love. So true. Tragedy can call attention to that.

Shakespeare: It reminds us how important love is. We only feel the hurt because we’re reminded that that love no longer exists in the form we once had and became used to. To some degree, one could argue that the self then falls into regret for not having paid more attention to it before it changed, went away or was taken from us.

Me: Was your mission as a 16^th century playwright to bring a global awareness of some sort and were you channeling it all?

Shakespeare: As a human being, I didn’t see myself as channeling. I saw myself as a genius.

Robert laughs.

Me: Of course you are.

Shakespeare: Now I understand that any act of creation like my works is not just the act of that individual alone. It’s the individual pulling the information to them from everywhere. We are all channels when it comes to the act of creation.

Me: What was your spiritual mission here in this last lifetime as Shakespeare?

Shakespeare: There were others who also had this spiritual mission, but for me, it was to remind humanity that the individual does matter and will be remembered if that’s what’s desire. Your name can live eternally. In my case, this helped my name live on as it has through the words that I chose to write.

Me: Okay.

Shakespeare: And borrow.

Robert and I laugh.

Shakespeare: More succinctly, my lesson was to teach human beings that the individual does matter and that the name applied to that individual matters.

Robert: That’s sweet.

Me: Very sweet.

Robert: It kind of touches me.

Me: Let’s talk about the death of your son, who was a twin, Hamnet. He died when he was 11 years old. Did that affect your life’s work later on?

Shakespeare: I can’t say that it did, not consciously, but unconsciously we carry our grief with us. It’s an intensity that few can compare with.

Me: Oh yeah.

How well I know.

Shakespeare: Instead of thinking about the death of my son, I connected to that feeling of grief that indirectly connected to a story, into words, into woeful sonnets. I wrote about grief and loss in some of my sonnets.

Robert: He’s leading me to believe that he didn’t mention his son’s death, specifically, in any of his writing.

Stay tuned for Part Two tomorrow! Love you guys! Take a moment and submit your praise HERE!