Shakespeare Insult Kit… If you’re looking for something a bit creative for your insults.

When you're from your mother's womb untimely ripped #classicprank When you're not of woman born #classicprank When all your bowels crumble up to dust #lifehacks When Arthur watches the eye gauging scene from King Lear #sorelatable When everyone misspells your name #shakspbrg #shakxprb #shakspeare #shakespeare etc. When you coincidentally marry the girl you originally wanted to marry even though she's supposed to be dead #classicprank

Cakespeare’s Globe on Redbubble (as a set and individually) and Society6

Procrastinating over essay writing in Verona

Romeo: Starts early, gets distraced, changes topic ten times over, breaks down moaning the injustice of his existence, asks Friar Lawrence for help

Juliet: Makes an outline, collects material, writes it all down, ignores the nurse’s incredibly useful pieces of advice with a smile, coaxes Tybalt into proofreading at 3am the nigth before the deadline same goes for her dad, hands it in with a cute drawing on the folder

Benvolio: Sits down, draws an outline, locks Mercutio out, does his research, writes paper, finishes three days before deadline, corrects it and hands it in.

Tybalt: Gets a topic, makes ridiculously detailed outline, hangs the essay guidelines as poster over his desk, starts actually working three days before the deadline, lives on an unhealthy mixture of coffee and energy drinks till he hands a flawless, but rather boring essay in.

Mercutio: Essay? *stumbles over beer bottle, lands on heap of unwashed laundry*  What essay?

And they say Shakespeare isn’t relatable.

don john, what do you have to say for all the terrible things you did?

I was trying to be sappy – he comes back with this. Pretty sure he’s the one.

is this hamilton

About Shakespeare and Dick Jokes

I’ve seen tons of posts pointing out that it’s wrong to think of Shakespeare as this serious writerly dude, since he constantly made dick jokes. And I completely approve of this trend of seeing Shakespeare as someone fun and silly, I completely approve of discarding this rigid idea of Shakespeare being Prim Serious Untouchable Literature. But at the same time, it kind of bothers me that people see Serious Tragic Shakespeare and Funny Filthy Shakespeare as two mutually exclusive identities.

Because for Shakespeare, dick jokes were Serious Business. Yeah, sometimes he wrote dick jokes for the sake of it, because who doesn’t love dick jokes, but far more often he used dick jokes to say something that was crucial to the play in question. In Shakespeare, characters talk about sex and they joke about sex, it’s a vital part of how they relate to themselves and each other. When a character doesn’t joke about sex, that’s usually an exception, and a deliberate piece of characterization.

I think the idea that sex is somehow separate from serious stuff is a very modern one, and reflecting that back on Shakespeare is also an anachronistic weirdness. Here are a few examples about how sex jokes are fucking vital to Shakespeare’s writing.

The opening scene of Romeo and Juliet is a barrage of dick jokes, and at the same time it’s some of the best scene-setting ever. The audience learns the outline of the play from the prologue, we know that there are two families here who are fighting lots, but then we see two servants appear and make dick jokes while casually commenting about how much the other house sucks and how cool their own house is. That scene shows us the actual reality of the conflict outlined in the prologue, and drops us smack dab in the middle of it.

The title of Much Ado About Nothing is a really freaking complex pun. Much ado about nothing, because people freak out about false rumors. Much ado about ‘noting’ as in noticing, overhearing, because most plot lines are centered on people overhearing stuff. And since ‘nothing’ is slang for ‘vagina’, the title also means ‘Much Ado About Vagina’, which is funny. But it’s also not funny, because the Hero-Claudio plotline IS much ado about a vagina, Hero’s vagina, and Claudio’s toxic temper tantrum about what may or may not have been going on with Hero’s vagina.

Sex jokes can help us understand how a character feels about sex and romance. They can be used to express interest in someone - see Juliet’s monologue on the balcony, where she says that a name ‘is nor hand, nor foot, nor arm, nor face, nor any other part belonging to a man.’ Heh, heh.

Sex jokes can be used to express nuances about a character’s current attitude to their love interest and love in general. One character might talk about sex to avoid talking about love, might be deliberately shallow to distance himself. He might talk about sex to mock another character’s infatuation - see Mercurio to Romeo, Benedict to Claudio, the LLL dudes to each other. When a character who previously made tons of sex jokes suddenly finds them crude and callous, when a character feels like sex is too important and intimate to talk about, that is a sure sign of them falling in love - see MAAD for hilarious examples.

Sex jokes are an important part of Hamlet, too: Hamlet makes increasingly sexual and misogynistic jokes, as a sign that he’s preoccupied by his mother’s love life and that he’s getting more and more unhinged. His rudeness towards Ophelia is part of what drives her to madness, and both mad!Hamlet and mad!Ophelia are prone to, yes, making sex jokes, and expressing their disgust and horror of their situation via sex jokes.

Sex talk in Othello has the same traits as in Hamlet or MAAD: it may be a joke, but it’s not without consequence, it’s a matter of life and death.

The character development between Henry IV and Henry V is partly conveyed by the way the Prince’s speech changes - when he grows up, matures and cuts his former drinking-womanising-joking friends out of his life, he also rejects their way of speaking. When he accepts his responsibility as a king, he drops the puns and the dick jokes, and starts with the lofty monologues in blank verse.

Jacques’ great ‘fool in the forest’ monologue in As You Like It can be interpreted as an abstract thesis about the passage of time and mortality, after all it’s coming from the same same dude who says ‘all the world’s a stage’ and then proceeds to explain how every single stage of human life sucks and then you die. It can also be interpreted as a pun-laden joke about how fucking prostitutes will give you venereal diseases, and then you won’t be able to get it up. But I think it’s best to interpret it as both, because what happens at that point in the play is that a melancholic and depressed dude walks in, laughs like an idiot and explains that he heard a dick joke that was so funny that it made him reevaluate his life. 

Not to get started on the Sonnets, holy shit. I mean they are sort of amazing, they range from ‘you are theoretically very attractive from the point of view of some person you’re going to make lucky some day’ to ‘yay sex’. Sonnet 20 literally says ‘I’d prefer it if you didn’t have a dick, but you’re very hot so I don’t get too hung up on it.’ Also there’s an extremely unsubtle pun on ‘prick’. And that doesn’t stop it from being solemn love poetry.

TL,DR: Shakespeare is filthy and serious, the two things aren’t mutually exclusive.

A Summary of King Henry IV:

Hotspur: i’ll kick anyone’s ass. i’ll kick your ass. i’ll kick your dog’s ass. i’ll kick my own ass

Guide To Shakespearean Tragedies

Romeo and Juliet: For never was a story of more woe/ Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.

Julius Caesar: For never was a story of more blood and guts/ Than this of Rome and her Julius.

Othello: For never was a story with more calling an innocent lady a ho/ Than this of Desdemona and her Othello

Macbeth: For never was a story of more death/ Than this of Lord and Lady Macbeth.

Titus Andronicus: For never was a story more ludicrous/ Than this of Titus Andronicus

Richard III: For never was a story of less chill/ Than this of Richard and those he killed

King Lear: For never was a story more weird/ Than this of three girls and their dad, King Lear

Antony and Cleopatra: For never was a story of dying in more agony/ Than this of Cleopatra and her Antony

Coriolanus: For never was a story of more gayness/ Than this of Aufidius and his Coriolanus

Hamlet: For never was a story more overblown/ Than this of Prince Hamlet and the Danish throne.

My life

act III, scene II

Titus: We really should give Lavinia a hand for staying strong and making it through all this trauma.

Lavinia: [looks into the camera like she’s on The Office]

Indisputable point. Absolutely bullet proof.

I know this is like a big/random question but do you think love (like Romeo and Juliet's) could ever be worth dying for?

I’ll try to be concise: to begin, I’m not really sure if I would epitomize Romeo and Juliet’s love as the “spectacular love” we all strive to find in another person. So: do I think love like Romeo and Juliet’s could ever be worth dying for? In terms of an almost fourteen-year-old girl and a slightly older dude who only just met a few days ago and experienced love at first sight, even if their love was genuine, I’d have to say no. All debates aside, they could have solved their problems in a better way. In terms of the two young head-over-heals-in-love lovers taking their own lives to trounce the “ancient grudge” of their families (if that’s how you want to look at it), I think it’s not absurd to say it was worth dying for. I’m not saying suicide is the answer, but I am saying I see where they’re coming from. Their love was “death-mark’d.” Doomed before it began. 

So, for your answer: If you love someone as much as I believe Horatio loves Hamlet, a much better example of love in the Shakespearian Canon (follow-you-into-the-dark-until-the-end-of-time kind of love) I don’t think think it’s ridiculous to say love isn’t worth dying for. But probably not under Romeo and Juliet’s circumstances. (But I’m certainly not encouraging suicide as an outlet for a rough situation either; I also believe there’s always an alternative.) I hope that answered your question!

I know this might sound like a stupid question, but what is your favorite thing about Shakespeare?

Not a stupid question at all! I think my favorite thing about Shakespeare is how even the seemingly most insignificant pieces or minor characters can reveal SO MUCH about humans and the rest of the play. Take the Captain from Macbeth for example, who only shows up briefly in the second scene of the play. His monologue is in my opinion one of the most powerful monologues in the play, and his character doesn’t even have a name. He mentions “two spent swimmers that do cling together/ And choke their art,” which pretty much predicts the downfall Macbeth and Lady Macbeth experience in the next four and a half acts. They both attempt to save themselves (successful gain power to the throne), and in the process drown each other by tearing one another down. He also mentions how Macbeth as a glorious warrior “fixed [Macdonwald’s] head upon [the] battlements,” mirroring Macbeth’s severed head that we’ll see in the last act of the play. And I got all of that just from a couple lines of the Captain’s speech. I think that is pretty damn cool :)