What if the events of Macbeth had taken place in 2020, and the witches were forced to hold their fateful meeting online? It just might look a little something like this:

Hello, Mr. President. It’s me, again.

You may remember that I wrote to you about single-payer healthcare. I never heard back from you, so I assume you’re still working on it. But this time I’m not writing about what you can do for me. I’m writing to give you some advice that may be helpful to you. I know you’re going through some troubling times, and I think you should do the one thing that nobody is expecting you to do. You should resign. But you won’t be resigning in disgrace; you’ve done nothing wrong! You are resigning in protest of the very, very unfair way you’ve been treated. That would show everyone. That would show them all!

The Democrats would be horrified by this very smart move. They were counting on a long drawn-out impeachment process that would drag your name through the mud between now and the election. You can rob them of that. Instead, they get President Mike Pence, who would be his own nightmare for them, injecting religion into politics in a way they never had to worry about from you. The Republicans love you, and rightfully so, because you give them the tax cuts and judges they so badly desire. So where are they now? Instead of keeping silent, they should be out vigorously defending you. No, they will not truly appreciate you until you’re gone. They will beg you to come back, and then you can remind them of their disloyalty.

Let’s face it: there’s a recession coming. Your decision to start an unprovoked trade war with China was absolutely brilliant, sir. Unfortunately, a lack of domestic support gave the Chinese too much confidence in their position because our threats weren’t credible. The Dems may never fully appreciate how much damage they caused. So why should you get the blame for the subsequent recession? If you resign now, the burden will fall on Mike Pence who, let’s be honest, was never really a team player. All of the charts will show a healthy economy under President Trump, with the dip coming later. What’s more, your resignation will trigger a market crash (your leadership was the only thing keeping it afloat) and your legacy will be even more secured. Then, they’ll all be sorry. Believe me.

Resignation will also make all of your legal troubles go away. It was all fake news anyway, driven by the partisan political agenda of the Dems. So once you’re out of power, there won’t be any reason for anyone to prosecute you for their made-up accusations of tax fraud, treason, or crimes against humanity. You can go back to your old wonderful life, maybe even retire to upstate New York. I hear Ossining is nice.

This country never appreciated you and never deserved you. You did them a favor by running and how did they repay you? You have a chance to set the terms of your departure. Sure, you’d have won in 2020, and now nobody will ever be able to say otherwise. It’s time to go, sir. And once you do, they won’t have Donald Trump to kick around anymore.

It’s hard to meet people these days. You may have even seen some online lists of pick-up lines, quick conversation starters for approaching women in bars.

But what if the object of your affection is a Shakespeare fan? Below you will find a list of sure-fire Shakespeare-themed pick-up lines that are guaranteed to breed love’s settled passions in her heart.

Note: This is a parody. Always treat others with respect, and never actually use any of these rude pick-up lines on a real woman in a bar*.

• Excuse me, but are you Joan of Arc? Because you are smoking hot.
• Hi, you can call me King Lear. Because I’m mad about you.
• Do I remind you of Richard III? Because I have a good hunch about us.
• Are you the Dauphin? Because thou hast turned my balls to gunstones.
• Are you Nick Bottom? Because you are the finest piece of ass I’ve ever seen.
• Right now, I feel like young Arthur from King John. Because I just fell for you.
• If I told you I was Hamlet, would you let me Ophelia?
• Are you Shylock? Because I want to give you a pound of flesh.
• You and I are like Kate and Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew. Because at the end, I bet I can get you to come.

Good luck, and have fun!

—

*I have actually used all of these lines on a real woman in a bar.

Happy 455th Birthday to Shakespeare!

In honor of the occasion, I present… Shakespeare Memes!

In honor of Shakespeare’s birthday, I am pleased to share with you an out-take from one of his most popular histories, King Richard III. Historians remember that Richard had a press secretary named Sean Spicer. This is no coincidence – he was a distant ancestor of the current White House Press Secretary! And all of this is well-recorded in the history books.

But what you probably don’t know is that an early Quarto version of Shakespeare’s play includes a scene with the famous spokesman.

Enjoy!

SPICER: And this is how we know that King Richard had the most attended coronation in English history. Period. Now, I’ll take a few questions before we go.

PRESS: Sean, how does the King respond to allegations that he had his brother Clarence murdered in the Tower?

SPICER: Well, I would remind you that this was something that happened under the previous administration. It was King Edward who ordered Clarence’s execution, and these were the orders that were carried out. Nobody was more upset to hear the news than King Richard. Nobody.

PRESS: The Earl of Richmond is reportedly claiming today that the entire York line is illegitimate and the throne was usurped from the House of Lancaster. Any comment?

SPICER: You have to remember that these were horrible, horrible people. I mean, if you look at what happened with Rutland, with the Duke of York… they killed their own people. You didn’t even see that in the Spanish Inquisition.

PRESS: They didn’t kill their own people in the Spanish Inquisition?

SPICER: No, only the Jews. I, of course, do realize that many Jews were… were invited in for conversion interviews, and all the stuff that was going on. But it’s nothing like the behavior we saw with the Lannisters.

PRESS: The Lancasters?

SPICER: Yes.

PRESS: But if the York line is legitimate, wouldn’t King Edward’s son, young Prince Edward, be next in line, and not Richard?

SPICER: You say that Edward is King Edward’s son:
So say we too, but not by Edward’s wife;
For first was he contract to Lady Lucy,
The Duchess lives a witness to his vow,
And afterward by substitute betroth’d
To Bona, sister to the King of France.
These both put by, a poor petitioner,
A care-craz’d mother to a many sons,
A beauty-waning and distressed widow,
Even in the afternoon of her best days,
Made prize and purchase of his wanton eye,
Seduc’d the pitch and height of his degree
To base declension and loath’d bigamy:
By her, in his unlawful bed, he got
This Edward, whom our manners call the prince.
All these are facts and you can look them up.

PRESS: What?

SPICER: No more questions.

The scene ultimately had to be cut from the play, not because of historical accuracy, but because the Master of the Revels had objected to the character of Sean Spicer being played by a woman.

However, we still have the scene as it exists in the Quarto, and it’s amazing how it still feels relevant to our world today!

How far should we go to get people to read Shakespeare? I say we do whatever it takes.

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My teenage daughter and her friends think that posts like this can’t go viral. Please help me teach them an important lesson by sharing this on Facebook and Twitter.

In As You Like It, Le Beau gives some friendly advice to Orlando:

Good sir, I do in friendship counsel you
To leave this place. Albeit you have deserv’d
High commendation, true applause and love,
Yet such is now the duke’s condition
That he misconstrues all that you have done.
The duke is humorous: what he is indeed,
More suits you to conceive than I to speak of.

The duke is humorous? He doesn’t sound very humorous to me. Can we get a Shakespeare Follow-Up?

The “humours” referred to four bodily fluids that were believed to affect one’s mood and personality: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. This was a theory that traced back as far as the ancient Greeks, and it was widely accepted in Shakespeare’s time. An imbalance of any one of these fluids in a person would have a particular effect. So, the duke is moody, not funny. And this use of the word is fairly consistent across the canon. So when Antipholus of Syracuse says he is not in a “sportive humour,” or Benedick says “a college of witcrackers cannot flout me out of my humour,” or Petruchio says “I’ll curb her mad and headstrong humour,” none of them are talking about the funny.

It’s clearly a retrochronism, but understanding a little bit about the humors can actually shed some light on quite a few lines in Shakespeare, so let’s review.

An excess of blood was thought to make you sanguine, and the cheerfully happy word actually comes from the Latin for bloody. So when Sir Toby Belch asks “Am not I consanguineous? am I not of her blood?,” he is using the term to describe a blood relationship.

Phlegm leads to quiet rationality. Kant actually thought it was the absence of temperament. Mistress Quickly therefore misapplies the term in The Merry Wives of Windsor when she beseeches Doctor Caius to “be not so phlegmatic.” She is trying to calm his anger down. She should have said “choleric.”

Choler stems from yellow bile (from the Greek “chole” for bile), and the word appears frequently in Shakespeare to describe anger or bellicosity. The black (“melan-“) variety of bile (“chole”) was also a frequently used theme. I’ve already written about melancholy in Shakespeare in an earlier post, so I don’t need to repeat it all here. The important thing to remember is that Shakespeare and his audience would have believed that these moods were caused by an imbalance of fluids. This is why bloodletting was such a popular medical practice; they believed they could remove the excess humours by drawing blood or applying leeches.

A poetic reference to bloodletting appears in King Richard II, as Richard attempts to sooth the conflict between Bolingbroke and Mowbray:

Wrath-kindled gentlemen, be rul’d by me;
Let’s purge this choler without letting blood:
This we prescribe, though no physician;
Deep malice makes too deep incision:
Forget, forgive; conclude and be agreed,
Our doctors say this is no month to bleed.

The complainants are seeking a duel, another way to purge choler by letting blood. Richard reframes their grievances as merely an imbalance of yellow bile, and uses the bloodletting metaphor to advocate a more peaceful solution. (It doesn’t work.)

In the 19th century, humours and bloodletting fell out of fashion as medical science developed a better understanding of human biochemistry. Apparently, though, the idea of the four humors survives today as a popular screenwriting technique.

On a somewhat-unrelated final note, do you know why the “funny bone” got its name? Because it’s the humerus! And I hope you find that humorous.

This is the last in a series of 40 pop-music parodies for Shakespeare fans.

So far, we’ve had one parody for each of Shakespeare’s 38 plays and one for the sonnets. We finish the Shakespeare Top 40 with a tribute to all of the plays, one last time.

Enjoy!

We Love the Plays of Shakespeare
sung to the tune of “We Didn’t Start the Fire” by Billy Joel

(With appreciation to everyone who has followed along on the journey…)

Harry, Suffolk, Somerset,
Richard Plantagenet;
Warwick, Edward, Margaret, Rutland,
Younger Lord Clifford;
Lord John Talbot, Tony Woodeville,
Duke of Bedford, Joan La Pucelle;
Duke of Clarence, Tower Princes,
Richard the Third…

Antipholus, Dromio,
Balthazar, Angelo;
Titus gets Tamora by
Baking her kids in a pie;
Tranio, Petruchio,
Katharina, Widow;
Proteus and Valentine have
Bid Verona goodbye…

We love the plays of Shakespeare,
Jumping off the pages,
Burning up the stages.
We love the plays of Shakespeare.
First, we learned to read them.
Now, we go to see them.

Don Armado, French Princess,
Costard and Holofernes;
Romeo’s Apothecary,
Juliet’s Nurse;
Gaunt John, he passed on,
Henry’s back and Dick’s gone;
Quince, Flute, Snout, Snug,
Bottom’s got a curse…

King John, Pope, France,
Bastard’s got a second chance;
Shylock and Antonio,
Portia and Bassanio;
Bardolph, Boar’s Head,
Prince Hal, Hotspur dead;
Tavern Hostess, Lord Chief Justice,
Henry on his deathbed…

We love the plays of Shakespeare,
Jumping off the pages,
Burning up the stages.
We love the plays of Shakespeare.
First, we learned to read them.
Now, we go to see them.

Benedick, Beatrice,
Dogberry and Verges;
Cambridge, Scroop and Grey,
Fight on St. Crispin’s Day;
Cassius, Cicero,
Julius Caesar, Cato;
Duke Senior, Jacques,
Poems posted on the trees…

O, O, O…

Olivia, Antonio,
Toby Belch, Malvolio;
Ophelia, Claudius,
Hamlet kills Polonius;
Falstaff once adored
Mistress Page and Mistress Ford;
Agamemnon, Pandarus,
Cressida and Troilus…

We love the plays of Shakespeare,
Jumping off the pages,
Burning up the stages.
We love the plays of Shakespeare.
First, we learned to read them.
Now, we go to see them.

Helena for Bertram fell,
All’s Well that Ends Well;
Angelo, Claudio,
“Friar” Duke Vincentio;
Desdemona, Othello,
Duke, Iago, Cassio;
Kent’s stand, Lear’s Fool,
Edmund’s death, Edgar’s rule;
Three Witches, two Macbeths,
Scottish spirits come unsex;
Antony, Cleo P.,
Who else would you want to see?

We love the plays of Shakespeare,
Jumping off the pages,
Burning up the stages.
We love the plays of Shakespeare.
First, we learned to read them.
Now, we go to see them.

Marcius, Cominius,
Volumnia, Aufidius;
Cupid, Lucius,
Timon, Flavius;
Gower, Thaliard, Pericles,
Antiochus, Simonides;
Posthumous is shipped to Rome,
Iachimo’s gone to his home…

Autolycus, Leontes,
Perdita, Polixenes;
Stephano, Trinculo,
Ship, wreck, Prospero;
Henry starts a second life,
Anne Boleyn’s his second wife;
Kinsmen our guy partnered for;
May have helped with Thomas More…

We love the plays of Shakespeare,
Jumping off the pages,
Burning up the stages.
We love the plays of Shakespeare.
And where we have gone,
The play will start anon,
Anon, anon, anon, anon, anon, anon, anon…

We love the plays of Shakespeare,
Jumping off the pages,
Burning up the stages.
We love the plays of Shakespeare.
First, we learned to read them.
Now, we go to see them.

We love the plays of Shakespeare!

Hat tip to Shakespeare Online for the chronology.

You can click to read all 40 song parodies here.

This is the 39th in a series of 40 pop-music parodies for Shakespeare fans.

Enjoy!

I Have Won
sung to the tune of “We Are Young”

(With apologies to Fun and Janelle Monáe)

Give me a second, I
I need to get my vengeance straight:
The steward and the fool have
Drunk more wine than they have body weight,
My brother he is washed ashore
With others just as bad,
The kid is being led by Ariel
Singing about his dad, and
I know they all betrayed me years ago.
I can forgive but not forget.
So I made a storm and food transform
With magical technologies, you know,
It’s not so hard to pay them back.
But by six in the evening
When the sun is going down,
I’ll let it all go.

This fight
I have won,
For the crime that was my brother’s,
And for the others;
What they’ve done!

This fight
I have won,
For the crime that was my brother’s,
And for the others;
What they’ve done!

Now, don’t tell me you’d not
Deserve more than you got.
I guess that I, I just thought
Maybe I could show you how to have a heart.
Though I paid you back,
I showed mercy most,
And now it’s time to let it all go.

This fight
I have won,
For the crime that was my brother’s,
And for the others;
What they’ve done!

This fight
I have won,
For the crime that was my brother’s,
And for the others;
What they’ve done!

But by six in the evening
When the sun is going down,
I’ll let it all go: this fight.

This is the 38th in a series of 40 pop-music parodies for Shakespeare fans.

Enjoy!

Blood Lines
sung to the tune of “Blurred Lines”

(With apologies to Robin Thicke, T.I., and Pharrell)

Come hither, Harry…

Hey, hey, hey!
Hey, hey, hey!
Hey, hey, hey!

You took that crown
Before it was your time,
But you will find that
It was a minor crime.
In just a half an hour,
You’ll have that regal power,
Because I’m going to die.

Okay, that Jack Falstaff
Tried to contaminate you,
But you’re of royal blood.
It isn’t in your nature.

Just let me educate you (hey, hey, hey).
You don’t owe him favors (hey, hey, hey).
That man is not your greater (hey, hey, hey),
And that’s because your claim is…

Rightful.
You know you’ve got it.
You know you’ve got it.
You know you’ve got it.
Your claim is rightful.
You want details.
You’re the Prince of Wales,
And that here prevails.

You’ve got the blood lines.
You know you’ve got it.
You know you’ve got it.
You know you’ve got it.
Your claim is rightful.
I was King Harry;
Now you’re King Harry.
That name you’ll carry.

When you’re there aberrant,
It can scare a parent
Of the heir apparent;
You’re the next in line for the throne!
Your friend is poison (hey, hey, hey).
You can’t be loyal (hey, hey, hey).
What rhymes with loyal (hey, hey, hey)?

Okay, that Jack Falstaff
Tried to contaminate you,
But you’re of royal blood.
It isn’t in your nature.

Just let me educate you (hey, hey, hey).
You don’t owe him favors (hey, hey, hey).
That man is not your greater (hey, hey, hey),
And that’s because your claim is,,,

Rightful.
You know you’ve got it.
You know you’ve got it.
You know you’ve got it.
Your claim is rightful.
You want details.
You’re the Prince of Wales,
And that here prevails.

You’ve got the blood lines.
You know you’ve got it.
You know you’ve got it.
You know you’ve got it.
Your claim is rightful.
I was King Harry;
Now you’re King Harry.
That name you’ll carry.

One thing I ask of you:
That my final counsel you listen to,
From a dying king to his offspring.
I stole this crown, but here’s the thing:
I have to say as I pass it down,
My son, uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.
With you, it will descend more quiet.
I mean, it’s still not easy, you try it.
Then, you must make my friends your friends.
Be it thy course to busy giddy minds
With foreign quarrels, that action hence bourne
Out, may waste the memory of the former days.
More would I, but my lungs are wasted so.
O, the Holy Land!
I won’t be going there as I had planned.
But this room is named Jerusalem, where I’ll meet my end.

Change the king, from Fourth to Fifth.
Do it quite forthwith, quite forthwith.
Now you’ll create a myth, hey!

Harry, can you lead?
I know that this is sudden.
You’re now the crowned monarch,
From Manchester to London, uh huh.
No more schooling (hey, hey, hey),
‘Cause now you’re ruling (hey, hey, hey),
And that’s no fooling (hey, hey, hey).

You know your claim is rightful.
You know you’ve got it.
You know you’ve got it.
You know you’ve got it.
Your claim is rightful.
You want details.
You’re the Prince of Wales,
And that here prevails.

You’ve got the blood lines.
You know you’ve got it.
You know you’ve got it.
You know you’ve got it.
Your claim is rightful.
I was King Harry;
Now you’re King Harry.
That name you’ll carry.

Now here I lie,
And here I die.
Hey, hey, hey!
Hey, hey, hey!
Hey, hey, hey!