Tag: Shakespeare

khalmemrbenzedrine:

let-a-hundred-flowers-bloom:

myimmortalseries:

well-thats-life:

Imagine My Immortal but written in the style of Shakespeare.

SCENE 1. A MAGIC SCHOOL CALLED HOGWARTS IN ENGLAND

Enter ENOBY

ENOBY

For truth, that which the gods have christened me
Has many parts, like these locks, flow’n from my crown.
That hellish sound, which forms mine name, sprung from
The dusky shades of these roots, so like the stone
But broken, rent, mottled; for, like the flames
That hie from Hades, the dusk is split with peals
Of cold violet, the shade of icy fangs
Met with military scarlet; coils not
But hangs; not ragged, but lustrous, set off
Like a precious jewel made more pure by the
Barren winds of silent winter deserts,
So are not these jewels of mine own self-crown
Brought forth in splendour so close to these eyes
Frozen, as glaciers, forged by an artist
Who, bereft of artisan tools, gives himself
And sculpts his godly business with that
Which the muses draw blindly from his vision.
Thus sorrow, reflected twice in these mirrors,
Casting mine eyes as icy limpid tears.

Imagine Shakespeare but written in the style of My Immortal

Hi my name is Hamlet and I have long blond hair that reaches my mid-back and icy blue eyes like limpid tears and a lot of people tell me I look like the sun god Apollo (AN: if u don’t know who he is get da hell out of here!). I’m not related to him but I wish I was because he’s a major fucking hottie. My mother married my uncle after my father died. I have pale white skin. I’m also a student, and I went to a school called Wittenberg in Germany but I just graduated. I’m a prince (in case you couldn’t tell) but I wear mostly black bc I’m in mourning. I For example today I was wearing a black doublet with matching lace around it and a black tights, white undershirt and black boots. I was with my mother and Horatio. We were standing inside Elsinore. It was snowing and raining so there was no sun, which I was very happy about. My uncle Claudius stared at me. I put up my middle finger at him.

vieillesoul:

penfairy:

The reason I hate the “Shakespeare didn’t actually write Shakespeare” theories so much is they seem to be inherently rooted in taking his works away from ordinary people. “The son of a glovemaker could never have written these plays! Surely only an Aristocratic Intellectual, like the Earl of Oxford, could be responsible!“ 

Honestly fuck off. Shakespeare was one of us. His plays were written for the masses. He was an ordinary man who captured the voice of the people and the depths of their emotions. We credit Shakespeare with making up words and phrases, but who’s to say he wasn’t writing down what he heard on the streets? "But something as complex as Hamlet could never have been written by Shakespeare! It must have been the work of a nobleman!” Well guess what, not only did he write it, but he wrote it because that’s what his audience liked. The hordes of ordinary people consumed his deeply philosophical play about a young man musing over life and death and sin and they LOVED it. 

Shakespeare was a crowd-pleaser and an entertainer, and reason his work is so beautiful and poetic and philosophical (as well as bloody and sexual!) is because he was responding to popular demand. Most people attending the theatre were illiterate; they consumed literature by listening, and this is one of the reasons why playwrights utilised iambic pentameter and rhyming schemes. Their dialogue is poetry, and it’s beautiful to listen to. The first time Romeo and Juliet meet, their shared dialogue creates a sonnet. Imagine a commoner sitting in the crowd listening to that, and it hits him like an arrow, wow, listen to the way these characters speak, this is love at first sight. 

Shakespeare was an ordinary man, and the beauty and complexity of his works were fuelled largely by the appetite of ordinary people. Although plays could be written and performed for the aristocracy, it was the hordes at the theatres that one had to keep happy. This modern obsession with putting him on a pedestal and trying to make him high culture or inaccessible to ordinary people is just gross. This upstart crow will always be one of us, and his work will always be for us.

Just to add on a bit, I was an English major, and I remember once in college, my linguist professor was discussing Shakespeare, and how he created new words. She said that linguists have studied the languages of the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries, and they’ve basically come to the conclusion that Shakespeare didn’t invent these new words, at all. They theorize that he actually picked up these words from young women who would use them, as slang speech. Slang speech in these centuries can be found in letters young women wrote to each other, with the slang coming from them shortening words, in order to write faster. Of course, women’s ways of talking have constantly been looked down upon throughout society, but here’s an article from Smithsonian, discussing the fact that young women throughout history have shaped language, and continue to do so. They say that what holds men back (men trail by about a generation) is the fact that they make fun of the way in which women talk.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/teenage-girls-have-been-revolutionizing-language-16th-century-180956216/

whoopsrobots:

My favourite highschool thing ever was in our english lit class reading of Hamlet and we all had to play different characters and partway through everybody started reading it like a porno with breathy moaning voices and the dude playing the queen spoke in a drunken alabama accent and the teacher told us we were awful and that shakespeare would have wanted it that way