A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Fairy divorce court causes everything in the vicinity to go to hell, briefly.
A Comedy of Errors: Don’t give your twins the same name. Seriously don’t.
As You Like It: No one actually likes anything that is occurring. Especially not Jaques.
Twelfth Night: Local pageboy causes everyone to catch Gay Feelings. Also multiple shipwrecks.
Much Ado About Nothing: Random bastard decides to cause problems for literally no reason other than because he is a dick.
Two Gentlemen of Verona: One gentleman is not actually a gentleman, he’s a grade-A turdwaffle.
Love’s Labors Lost: Four friends’ attempts to swear off love go about as well as you would expect
The Merry Wives of Winsor: SO I HEAR U LIKE FALSTAFF??
The Taming of the Shrew: Sometimes the best cure for a mean wife is just straight-up sexism. (Actually no wtf why)
All’s Well That Ends Well: Nothing is well and it ends kinda shittily, too.
The Merchant of Venice: Apparently the entire population of Venice is either dumb, shitty, or Portia. Or Jessica.
Measure for Measure: Undercover Boss: Vienna Edition
Richard II: Local king forced to actually face consequences for his actions. Doesn’t like it much.
Henry IV part 1: TURN DOWN FOR WHAT interluded by existential kingly guilt. Also Hotspur
Henry IV part 2: The boring part because no Hotspur and no TURN DOWN FOR WHAT. Just guilt and guys with stupid names.
Henry V: Fun manly bonding as France gets fucked over
Henry VI part 1: Let’s Screw France Part 2 feat. Joan of Arc
Henry VI part 2: A bunch of murders and Everything Has Gone to Shit Now nice job breaking it, Henry.
Henry VI, part 3: YORK YORK YORK YORK also a bunch of murders, part 2.
Richard III: Once there was a Duke of Gloucester. He was so ugly that everyone died. The End
Henry VIII: You’d think think the betrayal of a queen and befuckening of the church would be really non-boring but you would be wrong
King John: No one knows what’s happening. Not me, not you, certainly not Johnny. I guess an entire king dies or something idk
Romeo and Juliet: Local teenage fling ends in six deaths and a banishment. Authorities are baffled
Macbeth: If you don’t sleep you become a murderer I don’t make the rules also if witches are nearby… you’re fucked.
Hamlet: Danish prince should have just called Ghostbusters
Othello: And you thought your racist coworker was a pain in the ass
King Lear: Local shitty dad amazed that all his kids turned out shitty. How could this happen.
Julius Caesar: Fun male bonding exercise devolves into civil war and multiple accounts of suicide
Antony and Cleopatra: Two-year fling devolves into civil war and multiple accounts of suicide
Coriolanus: Local war devolves into civil war and – just kidding it’s actually about Coriolanus ruining everything by being unable to shut his piehole for two seconds
Timon of Athens: Don’t Have Friends: A Cautionary Tale
Titus Andronicus: Blood, death, murder, death, human sacrifice, rape, death, dismemberment, cannibalism, death, and a partridge in a pear tree
Troilus and Cressida: Title characters are actually the most boring part of the play
Pericles: It’s like a fairy tale except less magic and more nonsense. And brothels I guess idk
Cymbeline: Twenty three different plot lines and none of them go anywhere
The Winter’s Tale: Local asshole king fucks with nature so NATURE FUCKS RIGHT BACK
The Tempest: The heartwarming tale of a wizard, his weird magical bird slave, his daughter, a drunk fish guy, some murderers, and a whole lot of wood gathering
best damn description of ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ I’ve ever seen
some highlights from my students’ romeo and juliet modern interpretation projects:
– someone made a username for friar laurence with 420 at the end – the same kid who put 69 in romeo’s username like i wouldn’t know what either of those things mean – the girl who added ‘clean’ at the end of all the songs on her juliet playlist like lmao girl i know spotify doesn’t have the clean version – the kid who said romeo and juliet killed each other – the weird dichotomy of kids who put love story on their playlist vs the kids who choose bad blood – the kid who wrote ‘get a room’ as tybalt’s comment on romeo’s couple pic – the kid who said ‘romeo is probably one of those douches who follows a ton of people so they follow him back and then he unfollows all of them’ – the one who legitimately used the word ‘alrighty’ do kids say this in their text messages???? i thought i was the one talking like an elderly person but okay – the one who made romeo’s username ‘montagoose’ – the only kid who acknowledged that posting about your secret relationship on instagram was a bad idea – the girl who wrote that romeo would unironically say ‘#blessed’. she’s right. – the one single solitary girl who wrote mercutio as gay as shakespeare did (she’s also the only one who used mercutio at all which is a tragedy but whatever) – the one who wrote romeo’s insta bio as ‘thus with a kiss i die… LOL RIP ME 😂💀’ – the one who made benvolio’s username benvoliYO
If anyone tries to tell you that Shakespeare is stuffy or boring or highbrow, just remember that the word “nothing” was used in Elizabethan era slang as a euphemism for “vagina”.
Shakespeare has a play called “Much Ado About Nothing”, which you could basically read in modern slang as “Freaking Out Over Pussy”. And that’s pretty much exactly what happens in the play.
It’s also a pun with a third meaning. There’s the sex sense of much ado about “nothing”, there’s the obvious sense that people today see, and then there’s the fact that in Shakespeare’s day, “nothing” was pronounced pretty much the same as “noting”, which was a term used for gossip. So, “Flamewar Over Rumors” works as a title interpretation, too.
The reason we call Shakespeare a genius is that he can make a pussy joke in the same exact words he uses to make biting social commentary about letting unverified gossip take over the discourse.
I am 100% convinced that “exit, pursued by a bear” is a reference to some popular 1590s meme that we’ll never be able to understand because that one play is the only surviving example of it.
Seriously, we’ll never figure it out. I’ll wager trying to understand “exit, pursued by a bear” with the text of The Winter’s Tale as our primary source is like trying to understand loss.jpg when all you have access to is a single overcompressed JPEG of a third-generation memetic mutation that mashes it up with YMCA and “gun” – there’s this whole twitching Frankensteinian mass of cultural context we just don’t have any way of getting at.
no, but this is why people do the boring archival work! because we think we do know why “exit, pursued by a bear” exists, now, and we figured it out by looking at ships manifests of the era –
it’s also why there was a revival of the unattributed and at the time probably rather out of fashion mucedorus at the globe in 1610 (the same year as the winter’s tale), and why ben jonson wrote a chariot pulled by bears into his court masque oberon, performed on new year’s day of 1611.
we think the answer is polar bears.
no, seriously! in late 1609 the explorer jonas poole captured two polar bear cubs in greenland and brought them home to england, where they were purchased by the beargarden, the go-to place in elizabethan london for bear-baiting and other ‘animal sports.’ it was at the time run by edward alleyn (yes, the actor) and his father-in-law philip henslowe (him of the admiral’s men and that diary we are all so very grateful for), and would have been very close, if not next to, the globe theatre.
of course, polar bear cubs are too little and adorable for baiting, even to the bloodthirsty tudor audience, aren’t they? so, what to do with the little bundles of fur until they’re too big to be harmless? well, if there’s anything we know about the playwrights and theatre professionals of the time, it’s that they knew how to make money and draw in audiences. and the spectacle of a too-small-to-be-dangerous-yet-but-still-real-live-and-totally-WHITE-bear? what good entertainment businessman is going to turn down that opportunity?
and, voila, we have a death-by-bear for the unfortunate antigonus, thereby freeing up paulina to be coupled off with camillo in the final scene, just as the comedic conventions of the time would expect.
you’re telling me it was an ACTUAL BEAR
every time I think to myself “history can’t possibly get any more bananas” I realize or am made to realize that I am badly mistaken
I read Hamlet back in high school and to this day my absolute favorite thing about it was when Guildenstern was trying to fool Hamlet into doing something or other and Hamlet’s savvy to it but rather than saying “you’re lying and trying to trick me” instead Hamlet outta nowhere whips out this flute and tells Guildenstern to play it.
And Guildenstern is all “I dont know how to play a flute, my lord”
And Hamlet takes a dramatic pause before he absolutely ruins Guildenstern with, “Well thats funny considering you thought you could play me”
this post sounds like im exaggerating but im not it’s straight up canon
I am 100% convinced that “exit, pursued by a bear” is a reference to some popular 1590s meme that we’ll never be able to understand because that one play is the only surviving example of it.
Seriously, we’ll never figure it out. I’ll wager trying to understand “exit, pursued by a bear” with the text of The Winter’s Tale as our primary source is like trying to understand loss.jpg when all you have access to is a single overcompressed JPEG of a third-generation memetic mutation that mashes it up with YMCA and “gun” – there’s this whole twitching Frankensteinian mass of cultural context we just don’t have any way of getting at.
no, but this is why people do the boring archival work! because we think we do know why “exit, pursued by a bear” exists, now, and we figured it out by looking at ships manifests of the era –
it’s also why there was a revival of the unattributed and at the time probably rather out of fashion mucedorus at the globe in 1610 (the same year as the winter’s tale), and why ben jonson wrote a chariot pulled by bears into his court masque oberon, performed on new year’s day of 1611.
we think the answer is polar bears.
no, seriously! in late 1609 the explorer jonas poole captured two polar bear cubs in greenland and brought them home to england, where they were purchased by the beargarden, the go-to place in elizabethan london for bear-baiting and other ‘animal sports.’ it was at the time run by edward alleyn (yes, the actor) and his father-in-law philip henslowe (him of the admiral’s men and that diary we are all so very grateful for), and would have been very close, if not next to, the globe theatre.
of course, polar bear cubs are too little and adorable for baiting, even to the bloodthirsty tudor audience, aren’t they? so, what to do with the little bundles of fur until they’re too big to be harmless? well, if there’s anything we know about the playwrights and theatre professionals of the time, it’s that they knew how to make money and draw in audiences. and the spectacle of a too-small-to-be-dangerous-yet-but-still-real-live-and-totally-WHITE-bear? what good entertainment businessman is going to turn down that opportunity?
and, voila, we have a death-by-bear for the unfortunate antigonus, thereby freeing up paulina to be coupled off with camillo in the final scene, just as the comedic conventions of the time would expect.
you’re telling me it was an ACTUAL BEAR
every time I think to myself “history can’t possibly get any more bananas” I realize or am made to realize that I am badly mistaken
Beltainefaerie's Flights of Fancy 