Since nothing sucks seed like success, advertisers promise everything short of a blow job to elevate the real sucker's money out of his pocket. Once the job of lightening the jeans of the mark's seed money is accomplished, the john is just another apostle of the gospel of consumption. Hero today, Ghandi tomorrow. By some quirk of historical sentimentality, literary scholars have imagined, or at least have taught their students, that those anonymous patrons contributed to the output of the Bard purely out of a love of the arts and culture. It is, like the legend of Daniel Boone or Paul Bunyan, too tall a tale to take seriously.
All words are the beginning of orthodoxy.
We can not speak together without coming apart from ourselves. We can not sell our words without coming apart from our souls. To be sure, words that are paid for can turn out artistic. They can not turn out true to the heart of the author. Every culture has its defining epic, an embodiment in language of the facts, sentiments, attitudes, morality and values that will be built upon for the age in which the culture thrives.