No, seriously.  I’m talking about the 1980’s sitcom, Cheers, set in Boston’s Bull & Finch Pub. When I’m bored and need sound in the background I’ll often turn on Netflix to stream old sitcoms like this, and earlier today we heard the Cheers theme song on the radio.

Anyway, I’m watching the pilot when Diane (eventually the love interest) comes in with her current fiance, Professor Sumner Sloan, and they are discussing how they got engaged.  Sumner paraphrases whatever he might have said and Diane corrects him, saying, “Actually, what he said was ‘Come with me and be my love, and we will some new pleasure prove.'”

“Ooo!  Shakespeare!”  said I.

“Donne,” said Diane.

“WTF?” quoth I.

“I kinda figured you were done when you stopped talking,” says Sam the bartender (or some other pun on the word Donne, I stopped paying attention after the Shakespeare drive-by).

I wondered for a moment if they said Donne just for the joke.  I know this is Shakespeare, I have a CD ( When Love Speaks
) with Annie Lennox singing it. To the Google!

Oh look, we’re both right.

The line definitely appears in The Passionate Shepherd To His Love, which is credited to Marlowe. And it’s most definitely in John Donne’s The Bait   (both available at the link above). Slight textual variation, Donne’s line is in fact “some pleasure” while Marlowe went with “all the pleasures”. Marlowe actually came first, but Diane is quoting Donne’s version.

But what of Shakespeare?

This line comes from the fifth verse of Sonnets to Sundry Notes of Music, most of which (such as this entry) are incorrectly attributed to Shakespeare.

Ok, this probably doesn’t deserve a blog post of its own but I think it’s hysterical, it wouldn’t fit on Twitter, and I block Facebook when I’m trying to get work done (even if, as now, that work is Shakespeare research).

The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust is hitting the road! In celebration of Shakespeare’s 450th birthday they’ve come over to the United States with plans to sit in on 14 different Shakespeare festivals over the summer.

In my neck of the woods they’ll be coming to Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Mass on August 17.  Of course I’ve already got plans that weekend :(. Why can’t I learn about these things months in advance?  And why can’t they come into Boston instead? I’m 20 minutes from Boston, I’m over 2 hours from Lenox!

I’m a big fan of Netflix’s original series, both House of Cards and Orange is the new Black. Kevin Spacey, star of the former, has been on all the talk shows saying how it is basically Richard III. Well, more to the point how he based his character on R3.

So when I saw this piece on why you need to read Shakespeare to understand Orange Is The New Black (or OITNB for short) new (second) season, I was all over it.  The idea put forth (using Macbeth as an example) is that in Shakespeare’s world, there is a natural order to things. When something comes in to disrupt that natural order, there is chaos while the world attempts to correct itself and restore order.  That is season 2 in a nutshell, and I agree completely with the article’s argument.

WARNING – that article is 100% spoilers. You’d better finish season 2 before you read it.