First look at strange true history
Uncommonly known, and perhaps not ever told, is the link of the Three Musketeers, the Romance or Love poets and Cyrano de Bergerac. William Shakespeare, thought to be a pen name, had started a rivalry with some of the other poets of the time and a fight broke out. Henry Constable, Michael Drayton, Samuel Daniel, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Campion, Sir Henry Wotton, and John Donne were the group of poets I am talking about during this time. This lead to the pen is mightier than the sword phrase but that was quickly put to the test as swords became involved. The Shakespeare was called out by the other poets into sword battle, the Rapier, being the weapon for dueling. His name alone made them angry as he was shaking his weapon mockingly at them, they had said. They wanted to draw him out of the place where he wrote his poetry. This they claimed was him putting, equivalently, his big nose, in their business. Cyrano de Bergerac has the famous, he being the greatest of all sword fighters or duelists, scene where he voices off in poetic display giving a grand performance and flourish to the point he emerges victorious in the fight striking his opponent dead at the very moment he predicted he would at the onset. He was a very good a sword fighter, the Frenchman, De Bergerac. Shakespeare had died in 1616, three years prior to De Bergerac's recorded birth. De Bergerac, by the way, only lived until age 36. Shakespeare had lived until age 52. De Bergerac had claimed to help a dullard and lesser man gain the affections of a woman he decided he personally loved more instead in his tale, the one written by Edmond Rostand. The other man in Rostand's story had died in a war away from the woman, she had taken her love away from him and placed it with De Bergerac where it rightfully belonged instead because of his words of Romance instead of the good looks of the dullard. It is that De Bergerac followed after Shakespeare that made him the fourth musketeer. This is where Dumas had gotten the idea for the story. Although, much was ripped from the halls of history before him, the adventures of the Musketeers were imagined and fictionalized. I don't believe any of the Musketeer adventures were actually from the real men I am talking about. Shakespeare dueled with a pen, was commonly a playwright but I am sure he was a duelist of swords as well. This was a game they played. They wrote love poems to woo women and each believed he was the best and often sang his own praises in a sort of campaigning for popularity in Elizabethan England. If you read the poems by these men you can see where the turn and escalation into the fight had happened. The fight had begun at the play house, the theatre. Marlowe had finished a successful night of performance of his play and began deriding Shakespeare. Word got back to William Shakespeare that Marlowe was calling him a coward and if he didn't go to him they would hunt him down to kill him so Shakespeare went to the bar to confront him. The entire scene depicted in Cyrano de Bergerac occurred between Shakespeare and Marlowe resulting in Marlowe's death at age twenty nine when Shakespeare slew him. Marlowe known as Shakespeare's rival, killed in the same duel depicted in De Bergerac's story penned by Edmond Rostand. De Bergerac was so romanced by those facts that he sought to recreate those circumstances for legendary standing of his own. Shakespeare and Marlowe were born in the same year. Constable and Daniel were born two years before that, Daniel it is actually not certain about but is believed to be 1562 just like Constable. Drayton was a year later in 1563. Campion '67 Wotton '68 and Donne in '72. Shakespeare and Marlowe were born in 1564 of course. All of them lived into their 50's, some 60's and one his 70's. Other than of course Marlowe. De Bergerac came after and claimed to have been of the same caliber as those men, but he wasn't Shakespeare. Shakespeare was bar none the master and all could not rival him, his poetry is loved and renowned for it's mastery, though he wasn't for a long time. De Bergerac romanticized about the story he had heard and to claim it as his own looked to recreate the same fight in which to attain the same victory. He was of course very like them and he wanted to be. He would have heard the story from Drayton who had a first hand account. Wotton and Donne who lasted into the years of Cyrano's life enough could have known the story also because Wotton was twenty-five at Marlowe's death and Donne was twenty-one. Both were also likely to be at the fight that killed Marlowe. These facts carried their effects into Cyrano's life. He died at thirty six though because he did not understand the powerful forces he was playing with. Dumas of course took the story further and shaped it into The Three Musketeers and since much of the Musketeers adventures were, I guess, imagined, even their names fictionalized, they were even possibly unknown to Dumas to be taken from the real story of the rivalry of Marlowe and Shakespeare and the love poets. Incidentally, we all know an English policeman is a Constable and well, also a Bobby, but that is where the term Constable was created and came into the world. We see the seething anger from Daniel, in his poem "If this be love, to draw a weary breath". Daniel by the way has a famous whiskey here in America from Tennessee. Daniel is mocking all the love poetry saying if this is love, if this is what love is, to draw a weak breath then do I love and draw this weary breath. In this poem Daniel asks is it love to die, to draw a weary breath, am I the one who will draw this weary fading breath but Shakespeare went to confront the conflict head on and killed Marlowe in the sword fight. Drayton though, his poetry was pure bold faced statement of fight as well. The only one saying anything different was Shakespeare. But also the entire debate they were often engaged in has been a polarizing issue for thousands of years and was a millennia and a half old at that time. Shakespeare explains it in dramatic fashion with Macbeth and no one has pointed that out until now. Marlowe was angry that Shakespeare thought himself to be a better writer than he and the ugly fight that could not be turned away from ensued. Marlowe issued far too much of a challenge and the entire affair turned violent to his death and Daniel and Drayton then became the other two Musketeers to Shakespeare after he defeated Marlowe. Drayton grew to love Shakespeare and they were great friends but Daniel never could care for Shakespeare as much and Drayton's fondness of Shakespeare of course intensified Daniel's opposition to a more caring friendliness toward Shakespeare. Because Daniel couldn't quite let things go entirely he finally slew Shakespeare at fifty-two and was, so then, slain after by Drayton at age fifty-seven. Drayton lived until age sixty-eight and would have certainly given the first hand story to Cyrano de Bergerac. Drayton may have even asked in this story who would you be, but probably never told about his own involvement in it letting Cyrano choose the path of his life into manhood for his own, first, before ever revealing it. I think not only out of fairness Drayton would have killed Daniel but he also grew to love Shakespeare as a friend and poet and master of writing. They were perhaps the best friends of the trio. The fact that a French kid admired an Englishmen is something strange, beautiful and intriguing about it as well. In fact all of it is intriguing. All three of the men Cyrano admired were Englishmen but the often disliked Shakespeare was the one he admired. So he wanted him to be his father. He was victorious as well which usually makes people want to be "that one" in any story even though Daniel lived three years after Shakespeare's death, into the year of De Bergerac's birth. Cyrano De Bergerac was Daniel's child and Drayton then raised him. All of the cloak and mirrors regarding it are because of the complexity of it all. So Drayton as the adoptive parent would have checked to see in his surrogate role how Cyrano would feel about the facts that either way his father was English even though he himself was French. He would have stored him away to raise him and over time explained these facts to him. So Cyrano, the birth son of Daniel, an Englishmen who killed Shakespeare, the one most beloved even by Cyrano de Bergerac, and then raised and taught by Drayton, the Englishmen who had killed Cyrano's father, Samuel Daniel. Wotton was the only one who made it three years longer than Drayton to the age of seventy-one. Cyrano and the Shakespeare affair and The Musketeers appear often in popular culture. De Bergerac appears as the little gray savoir faire cousin mouse of Jerry the Mouse from Tom and Jerry, and also appeared as a musketeer mouse ready to fight everything for glory over dishonor which then shaped some more of the story and carried it into the popular culture of cartoon. Also in the eighties the movie Roxanne with Steve Martin gave the tale a modern twist as well. De Bergerac just didn't want to be left out of what he felt romantic about, which was being a sword fighter and writer like those men before him meaning his own father, Samuel Daniel, William Shakespeare and his surrogate father Michael Drayton. It is also because he wanted the power of protecting himself from this vile enemy that stalked him into the unfair life he was born with. I am also certain that the romanticized character, Indigo Montoya from "The Princess Bride", was a true depiction of Cyrano. In De Bergerac's attempts to chase down the hatred that killed his father the confliction was that both the men that he loved in this true story were neither of them, his Father. His father finished in third place to those men in his life and was the one he personally would have chosen to fight to the death. De Bergerac would have, of course, loved Drayton so even if he had ran around fully unaware that Drayton was the one who had killed his father he would be too grateful for all that Drayton had done for him, therefor Cyrano would have felt no real animosity toward Drayton, whom he would have loved more than his own father either way, even if both had lived during his life which would mean no real conflicting emotions were involved in De Bergerac choosing Drayton for a father. There would have been no doubt that Drayton was De Bergerac's father and the man De Bergerac was seeking to kill for Drayton would have been his own actual father Daniel. It is certain Samuel Daniel is Cyrano de Bergerac's real birth father. And there is the entire amazing twist, the son turned by the duty of what is right so much he would have killed the man who brought him into the world instead of avenge his birth father's death. Cyrano, of course, felt he deserved the glory of writer and sword fighter, as well, and wanted to achieve the greatness Shakespeare, Daniel, and Drayton had achieved but obviously more Shakespeare than the other two, even Drayton. He of course did not live as long as Shakespeare or the others excluding Marlowe. De Bergerac was claiming he would have been the victor in that fight just like Shakespeare was, who incidentally might have been the "Mother" of his who had died in 1616 three years before his birth, but he may not have been happy to find out the man he identified most with was in fact an Englishmen and none other than the reviled William Shakespeare, the man his own father had killed. I think De Bergerac would have been learning most of this through letters which would have pulled him back and forth as he tried to figure it out, through all this mystery, trying to figure out who his father was. When of course De Bergerac began "the game", he said he was searching for the man that killed his father. He was simply looking for a fight and finally based injustice on the physical size of his famously known large nose. He though lost 16 years sooner than Shakespeare did even though Shakespeare himself hadn't even intentionally sought a fight. I don't know that Henry Constable, Sir Henry Wotton and Henry King weren't all King Henry's extended bloodline, who perhaps pilfered Shakespeare's works which is why it might be believed to this day some of Shakespeare's works were stolen. Constable and Wotton, may have actually been the same man the constable and then also the knight, or either one may have been Henry King's father and King Henry's bloodline. The reason is Henry would always want it known his belief that he deserved to be king and so would not ever want to lose the distinguishment of it and so kept it as a last name just to never part ways with it. Always of course wanting to hear the sound of that word attached to him so forcing others to call him that. So it is likely that Constable was also Wotton which would have meant as one man he lived until seventy-seven and probably fathered Henry King. King Henry would have loved keeping mythical and mystery alive, rather than proven fact. Calling it a claim by Shakespeare or accusation and letting his tale reach as far as it could go into the future constantly looking to disprove and disrupt the truth. Constable would have utilized the dual egos, sort of split personality to keep the mystery and liked remaining a bit hidden from watchful detection especially all the way back then when it was easier to do. A subtlety of his. The blond man killed in war in Rothstand's Cyrano de Bergerac was likely Shakespeare himself, then looking to elude the fact that Daniel had killed Shakespeare, De Bergerac was born three years later when was killed by the third Musketeer Drayton for the crime he committed in murdering Shakespeare. Cyrano's contrived conflict was the English vs. French thing and the slain father details of his life. French-English rivalry and the father-son relationship and the slain father-surrogate father complex were what all the real conflict is. But the English-French historical details and the father-rival-slain father-surrogate father truth of it all were simply explained so the size of his nose was what made him angry enough to fight and may have been where Rothstand got the actually story he wrote, from something Cyrano wrote about himself while living it out. That is why even the fictionalized and imagined parts in Rothstand's story carry much more fact with probably not much embellishment. From the actual fight that erupted without premeditation ending with Shakespeare killing Marlowe to the tale told and penned by Rothstand about De Bergerac to Alexandre Dumas recounting it forward with The Three Musketeers in explanation of it all and to keep the history of the truth alive throughout the World, however much garbled and strewn about in pieces through history, to be put back together for the entire story to be known. So from my pen to your mind, these are the facts and that is why they say fact is stranger than fiction.
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