A lost section of “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” a comedy written by William Shakespeare, has been rediscovered, revealing a song mocking the sexual inadequacy of one of the play’s male characters.
The rediscovery of this section did not come from a long-lost manuscript, but rather through the analysis of a mysterious one-word line in the play that has long mystified scholars.
Written in the 1590s, the play was performed before Queen Elizabeth I. In the play, a man named Ferdinand, the King of Navarre (in northern Spain), establishes a law banning men in his court from having sex, or even meeting with a woman, for three years while he and his retainers undertake scholarly studies. Ferdinand believes the studies will be more successful if the people around him abstain from sex. Read more.
Are you fucking kidding me? Like, no, Shakespeare wouldn’t tweet a sonnet cause 140 characters is a bit short for that. Wrong medium. But you know what he would have? A very active twitter FULL OF DICK PUNS AND YOUR MOM JOKES okay. (And probably also a blog for the sonnets and longer works, that cross-posts links to twitter anyway.)
Get out of here with that pretentious anti-technology bullshit.
He’d rock the fuck out of memes. Don’t deny it.
Exit, pursued by a doge.
much run wow
I don’t understand people who try to make Shakespeare into a pretentious thing cause he was basically an uneducated dick-joke making dude for the common masses. His historical plays are straight up fanfiction. There’s a scene in Macbeth where two guards are having a conversation as a dude pees on a wall. Get out of here with your Shakespeare snobbery.
ALL OF THIS
Also, the comment ‘Exit, pursued by a doge’ alone makes this worth reblogging 😀
Heck, the line that’s based on, “Exit, pursued by bear”, only exists because Shakespeare couldn’t think of any other way to get rid of the character, so opted to have him attacked by a bear, which did not exist in the play before that moment.
He literally made a bear appear out of thin air, just to kill off a character, purely due to writer’s block.
“And then the bear gets him”
“…
…
The
The bear?”
“Yes the bear”
“Will
Will there isn’t a bear in this play
Where did the bear come from”
“A PLACE
And he exits the play pursued by it
It’s happening make me a bear costume”
“it’s happening make me a bear costume” lmao
Shakespeare even wrote Yo Mama jokes, like this delight from Titus Andronicus.
CHIRON: Thou has undone our mother. AARON: Villain, I have done thy mother.
On top of the yo mama jokes and random bears, we should also remember that Shakespeare loved crowd-pleasing special effects, and often made use of cutting-edge pyrotechnics to spice up scenes of battle or sorcery, as well as to herald the entrance of important characters. This is, in fact, what led to the ultimate fate of the original Globe Theatre, of which Shakespeare was part-owner. Ol’ Bill had the brilliant idea of using a fucking cannon to announce the King’s entrance in the 1613 premier of Henry VIII. Long story short, the cannon was improperly secured and bucked in its frame when fired, spraying sparks everywhere and setting the Globe’s roof-beams on fire; within the hour, the entire building had burned to the ground.
(Fortunately, no-one was harmed in the evacuation, save for one unfortunate audience member whose trousers were set ablaze by falling embers. He reportedly extinguished the flames with his beer.)
Dick jokes and over the top special effects…Shakespeare was the predecessor to Michael Bay…
Shakespeare also loved over-complicated dialogue, obscure pop culture jokes, minor characters having lengthy conversations about nothing in particular, and self-referential navel-gazing that only massive theatre nerds would have understood even when his plays were contemporary.
(That last one is the the reason why one line of dialogue can require four paragraphs of explanation in modern editions.)
Shakespeare wasn’t his era’s Michael Bay.
He was his era’s Quentin Tarantino.
Except he decided over the top endless gore was boring after running with it for one play (seriously Kit, you need a new gimmick), and put in more dick-jokes and pop-culture references instead.
Our director for Macbeth had given us a list of tasks to do, one of which is come up with an alternate title for the play based on it’s themes. So I have decide on “Cool Motive, Still Murder: The Scottish Play”
So can I just point out that there is an entire scene in Macbeth where a character basically stands alone onstage and tells knock-knock jokes??
And then, for the second half of their scene onstage they tell penis jokes.
I’ve been up for too long I didn’t realize what was wrong with this.
AU where Romeo and Juliet are a bickering writing duo and William Shakespeare is their debut play they’re trying to put on after college. Forsooth, hijinks ensue.
Hamlet is their emo friend who keeps complaining about his stepdad. Othello is their friend who got married too young and had their friend group’s first ugly divorce over supposed infidelity. Macbeth is their politician friend whose ambitious girlfriend pushed him to cheat at a student union election, despite the fact that nobody actually noticed or cared. William Shakespeare is a parody of writers who use their friends as material for amped-up melodramas, and they colloquially refer to their play as Mmm Whatcha Say because their protagonist is obsessed with killing off all his characters.
YAAAAAAASSSSS
Someone write this plz. (Not me I have too much to do.)
Tomorrow is Christmas! And you know what that means… MORE SHAKESPEAREAN CHRISTMAS CAROLS!
If you’re in the mood for more Shakespearean Christmas Carols, check out my first installment and be sure to read the reader-submitted ones in the comments, including two different takes on Carol of the Bells and another jab at King Lear.
Happy holidays to all of you! I will be taking next week off, but will see you back here in 2016. It’s been a busy and exciting year for me, and I am so very thankful to all of you for reading and supporting my work. I am looking forward to another year of sharing Shakespearean silliness with you!
Kimchi and Justice 