The last week or so has shown everyone here at the home office of Jose el Retardo just how enjoyable it can be to shit on the things people love the most—and if it feels good, do it, right? Yesterday we kicked the Beatles around a little; today, it will be the monolithic champion of the literal world; mention his name in certain circles and watch as grown men swoon like school girls: Billy Shakespeare. Here is how most English Lit/Theatre/Art History majors feel about Billy:

In all reality, “The Bard” (I felt gross just typing that) had diarrhea of the pen, and his comedies are simply not funny. In fact, the best thing to happen to Shakespeare in the last four hundred years or so is the Hollywood screenplay. Any dialogue-driven vehicle for storytelling that runs over four hundred freaking pages needs a cold-hearted bastard of a producer to cut shit out, yo. I mean, come on. I’m not crazy, right? Am I crazy? What in the fuck do you elbow-patch wearing, pipe-smoking (all cuddled up in your fisherman’s sweater with your goddamned moccasins on) mother fuckers want from me? And oh, I can hear you now, bemoaning wretchedly the loss of the author’s original intent, the integrity of the voice of history lost to the crass hands of modern man’s impatience. Crap on that. Crap ALL OVER that. The guy was long-winded and needed a good editor. End of story. Here, read this excerpt from Richard III, act 1, scene 2, and tell me why in the world it couldn’t have been said more concisely (seriously, leave it in the comments; rid me of my ignorance, genius):

LADY ANNE

Foul devil, for God’s sake, hence, and trouble us not;
For thou hast made the happy earth thy hell,
Fill’d it with cursing cries and deep exclaims.
If thou delight to view thy heinous deeds,
Behold this pattern of thy butcheries.
O, gentlemen, see, see! dead Henry’s wounds
Open their congeal’d mouths and bleed afresh!
Blush, Blush, thou lump of foul deformity;
For ’tis thy presence that exhales this blood
From cold and empty veins, where no blood dwells;
Thy deed, inhuman and unnatural,
Provokes this deluge most unnatural.
O God, which this blood madest, revenge his death!
O earth, which this blood drink’st revenge his death!
Either heaven with lightning strike the murderer dead,
Or earth, gape open wide and eat him quick,
As thou dost swallow up this good king’s blood
Which his hell-govern’d arm hath butchered!

I think this chick is pissed because some guy killed her husband or something, but who can be sure? It’s so shrouded in “poetry” that a normal person has to sit in a damned classroom with twenty other people and discuss every freaking line for a half hour each in order to discern any meaning. And I can guarantee you this: fill twenty classrooms with twenty students and let them discuss the meaning of one soliloquy for twenty hours. You will end up with twenty different explanations. I promise you will. I swear it.

This being said, I do agree that, with vicious slashing, a Shakespeare drama can be entertaining and even gripping if placed in the right hands; I truly enjoyed Mel Gibson’s Hamlet (I think I just heard a scholarly head explode).

But none of the comedies are funny. None of them. Not one. And the only people who ever laugh at them are people who are afraid of what their academically militant friends will think if they DON’T laugh at this trite, vaudevillian nonsense. Every plot in Shakespeare’s desperate attempt to get people to like him (I bet back then everyone thought he was a HUGE kill-joy) seems to be the same: a girl dresses like a guy in order to achieve some goal women can’t normally attain as a female, falls in love with a guy who doesn’t know she’s a chick, and then some more corny shit happens until the end, when all the characters find out she’s a chick. It’s such a rip off of Just One of the Guys that it makes me shiver.

Here is an example of a “joke” from a Shakespeare play called The Comedy of Errors:

DROMIO OF SYRACUSE
Was there ever any man thus beaten out of season,
When in the why and the wherefore is neither rhyme
nor reason? Well, sir, I thank you.

ANTIPHOLUS OF SYRACUSE
Thank me, sir, for what?

DROMIO OF SYRACUSE
Marry, sir, for this something that you gave me for nothing.

ANTIPHOLUS OF SYRACUSE
I’ll make you amends next, to give you nothing for
something. But say, sir, is it dinner-time?

DROMIO OF SYRACUSE
No, sir; I think the meat wants that I have.

ANTIPHOLUS OF SYRACUSE
In good time, sir; what’s that?

DROMIO OF SYRACUSE
Basting.

ANTIPHOLUS OF SYRACUSE
Well, sir, then ’twill be dry.

DROMIO OF SYRACUSE
If it be, sir, I pray you, eat none of it.

ANTIPHOLUS OF SYRACUSE
Your reason?

DROMIO OF SYRACUSE
Lest it make you choleric and purchase me another
dry basting.

ANTIPHOLUS OF SYRACUSE
Well, sir, learn to jest in good time: there’s a
time for all things.

DROMIO OF SYRACUSE
I durst have denied that, before you were so choleric.

ANTIPHOLUS OF SYRACUSE
By what rule, sir?

DROMIO OF SYRACUSE
Marry, sir, by a rule as plain as the plain bald
pate of father Time himself.

ANTIPHOLUS OF SYRACUSE
Let’s hear it.

DROMIO OF SYRACUSE
There’s no time for a man to recover his hair that
grows bald by nature.

ANTIPHOLUS OF SYRACUSE
May he not do it by fine and recovery?

DROMIO OF SYRACUSE
Yes, to pay a fine for a periwig and recover the
lost hair of another man.

Oh for the love of Christ. Forget it. I give up. I think there was supposed to be a whole slew of jokes in there, but who the fuck knows. It just goes on and on and on until you basically want to KILL SOMEBODY.

Yet the “really smart” and “droll” people of the Western World insist that he is the most brilliant writer of all time, ever. And they struggle like a tar-ridden lung to explain his greatness in words that are even more confusing than the Bard’s (shudder) own. Here is an actual quote from a hopeless asshole’s review of Richard III, pulled from Amazon.com:

Inextricably, although I by no means empathize with him even remotely, Richard somehow, despite his inordinately decadent reprobate ploys, coupled with his twisted soliloquies pleading to the audience his hopeless case, make him one entirely enigmatic, yet entirely captivating, antagonist that makes this play enticingly enjoyable — in a most devilish kind of way.

“O coward conscience, how dost thou afflict me!”

Jesus, dude. You can’t be serious.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 13th, 2008 at 2:44 pm and is filed under The Soapbox. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.