Why I Hate Shakespeare (standard:Editorials, 1222 words)
Author: DAVID TUMUSIIME	Added: May 27 2003	Views/Reads: 7248/2963	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
I know there are going to be some furious fans but this message has to get out. The title says it all.

Click here to read the first 75 lines of the story

down for his plays these fresh springs of genius the Mermaid beer was 
unloosing. 

Good old no nonsense dictionary writing Samuel Jonson tried to correct
all the silly babbling about the upstart's plays by showing how it 
should be truly done by rewriting some of them. Doctor or not, try as 
he might, no resuscitation could bring his own dead plays to life. 

He did the cause bad, good old gouty Sam John. A whole lexicologist
could not do it? Given a doctorate and all? 

Henceforth the cause was more or less lost among the writers.
Uninterrupted since has flowed in disgusting detailing why he is 
supposed to be great. It is not in contention, as far as many of these 
sell outs are concerned, whether he actually deserves all the soaps and 
pubs and roads and many little kids named after him. The competition is 
who can be the flowerily adjectival in sucking up to him. 

John Milton, author of Paradise Lost, groveling about how Shakespeare
had built himself a living monument. But this was Milton, he probably 
was more thinking of himself. Built them he did all right, very dead 
and antique ones for himself. Only his titles survive. And those only 
harassed poor students remember and as soon as they can forget them 
with relief. 

John Dryden came along, wooden and crafty trying to hang his star there.
Check Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the Romantic poet. Coleridge supposed to 
be a rebel and revolutionary. Listen to him trip over himself. Always 
the Ancient Mariner, he borrowed from his little masterpiece to crown 
Shakespeare with an “oceanic mind.” In his own opium frenzies seeing 
double where there was one, he decided Shakespeare must be too 
“thousand souled.” 

Well all that over advertising finally got him, at last. There is now
your two minutes quotable Shakespeare for everyone. Yeah, now everyone 
can ask when faced with a tough choice, “The question is to be or not 
to be.”  Newspaper columnists and hacks strapped for a beginning can 
always meanderingly start, “A rose by any other name...” 

But there are still the resistors. The proud and valiant pockets of
resistance who are not taken in by the masquerade that struts before us 
like a semi nude model in fishnets. These hold out and cry “down with 
the tyrannical evil Shakespearean regime!” 

Bloody hell, can't you tell by now? Even if I live 20 times over to
toothless bone shaking ninety, I never will be even a quart of how 
fabulous this damned fellow is. 

The truest spoken words on him were by a fellow straggler who had to
keep his name a secret. You know assaulting this crook is regarded as a 
terrorist act. Bombs away if you are known. I'm not even allowed to 
mention word for word. But it was divine anyway. The gist is that of 
all the people in the world dead, Shakespeare is the one person I would 
like to dig up and throw stones at. 


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