'Shakespeare’s Unwritten Story'

He wrote thirty-seven plays. He wrote the women who move through them — Rosalind, Viola, Beatrice, Portia — with more intelligence and wit and agency than the men around them. He understood something about women, or suspected it, or intuited it from whoever it was he watched most closely. But he never wrote the play where the woman was simply the protagonist of her own life, unmediated, not in service of a plot or a lesson or a man’s arc. That play remains unwritten.

Purple and white alyssum in its sweet, low intensity. Artemisia with its silver authority. Bluet blooms, those tiny survivors. Gold dust over everything, the way the real story always shimmers just under the official one. Set in a round beaded oval on a green ground — a stage that was always hers.

For the one who is living the play he never got around to writing.