Happy Saturday, good friends! I hope you are all in good health and spirits, and excited for the inevitable return of Shakespeare-a-palooza. You may have noticed my complete absence from last week’s posts… My campers infected me with their little kid germs and I came down with a flu that would NOT go away. Now I’m rested, healthy, and back in control of my senses – in the nick of time, too, Shakes-a-palooza is important y’all.
Before we begin the main event, however, (set your clocks – Shakespeare-a-palooza officially starts on Monday) I’m just gonna drop a strikingly hilarious bit of satire for everyone to enjoy.
As you well know, C and I are firm believers that William Shakespeare wrote his own plays. We actually wrote our own play in which he laments not writing his name at the top of everything he ever wrote, but I digress… We hold a strong, immovable opinion on the subject, and do have a tendency to get particularly catty with those that call into question Shakespeare’s lack of education. It’s nonsense, I tell you! The man was talented, learned (and, to be fair, stole) from the best, and was, more than anything, a great observer of the human condition. His plays have lasted this long because he was able to grasp all the major themes, ideas, and emotions that humanity has experienced from the dawn of our existence.
Shakespeare’s approach to story and character is human itself – not reliant on, or enslaved by, what some critic or great master had preordained as “art”. His words are not those of some fancy, learned duke attempting to make pretty, flowery sentences. It just sounds like it now, because we don’t speak like that anymore, guys… No, Shakespeare, in all his “lowliness”, wrote his own shit – and where his lack of education presented an obstacle he made up his own damn words. He made up so many words, you guys. He wrote words that felt good in the mouth as they were spoken (trippingly on the tongue, if you will). Words that just made good sense, describing some thing or some feeling that everyone could get on board with and go “hey, yeah, I do sleep in a bedroom”. I mean, c’mon, it’s not like the guy some homeless miscreant that crawled out of a sewer one day claiming to have learned to read and write from rats. His parents were respectable, middle class people and he had a grammar school education which, at that time, would have covered subjects such as Latin, Greek, and classical history.
Anyhoo, I know this became a little tangent-y and I promised you satire so without further ado… Please enjoy this little article which actually elicited a bark of sardonic laughter as I read it. That, my friends, is exactly what satire should do.
See you Monday!
–A
Nerd Cactus 