This came up in the comments on the “Isn’t Will Ironic?” thread, and I thought it might make for interesting conversation. Polonius’ famous advice to his son.  Neither a borrower nor a lender be, to thine own self be true, we all know the speech.  Right? How ironic is that speech? I’ve heard people argue, “Anybody who quotes Polonius like it’s words of wisdom to live by are completely missing the irony.”  But I don’t understand what it means. Either it’s good advice that is simply being given by a character who himself is not following any of it – in which case, they are still good words to live by.  Or else it’s advice that Polonius doesn’t really mean, and what he’s saying to his son is that if you put a good and proper face on, then you can get away with murder?  Sort of do the whole think with a wink and a nudge? Or is there something totally deeper at work, that I’m missing completely?

A fool, a fool! I met a fool i’ the forest,
A motley fool; a miserable world!
As I do live by food, I met a fool
Who laid him down and bask’d him in the sun,
And rail’d on Lady Fortune in good terms,
In good set terms and yet a motley fool.
‘Good morrow, fool,’ quoth I. ‘No, sir,’ quoth he,
‘Call me not fool till heaven hath sent me fortune:’
And then he drew a dial from his poke,
And, looking on it with lack-lustre eye,
Says very wisely, ‘It is ten o’clock:
Thus we may see,’ quoth he, ‘how the world wags:
‘Tis but an hour ago since it was nine,
And after one hour more ’twill be eleven;
And so, from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe,
And then, from hour to hour, we rot and rot;
And thereby hangs a tale.’ When I did hear
The motley fool thus moral on the time,
My lungs began to crow like chanticleer,
That fools should be so deep-contemplative,
And I did laugh sans intermission
An hour by his dial. O noble fool!
A worthy fool! Motley’s the only wear.

I’m just sayin.  Be careful out there, the Net’s a silly place some days.

Ummm….holy cow?! Could this note to the Earl of Southampton be the first thing we have from Shakespeare in his own actual handwriting?

Doe notte esteeme me a sluggarde nor tardye for thus havyinge delayed to answerre or rather toe thank you for youre greate Bountye. Gratitude is alle I have toe utter and that is tooe greate ande tooe sublyme a feeling for poore mortalls toe expresse O my Lord itte is a Budde which Bllossommes Bllooms butte never dyes.

What’s up with all the double consonants? That’s weird.  The details are still coming in, but apparently a whole trunk of the stuff has turned up, including references to “Anna Hatherrewaye” and even apparently pieces of King Lear!!? I’m bouncing off the walls over here.  I hate when this stuff happens while I’m at the day job :(! Nobody seems to have any pictures yet, but I’m looking!!! Has Stratford Dig Uncovered Unknown Shakespeare Papers?

So, there’s this person (group? bot?) on Twitter called OMGFacts that sends out random bits of trivia like, “A single human blood cell takes only 60 seconds to make a complete circuit of the body.” I don’t follow, but it shows up on my feeds all the time because they talk about Shakespeare often.  Sometimes it’s something weird like, “Shakespeare alone wrote as many as 1/10th of the most quotable quotations ever written or spoken in English.” I mean, what? How do you prove that? I count at least five different issues I have with that sentence.

But then yesterday they came up with this one: “Shakespeare was the first to use insults about people’s mothers. (yo momma, mother******, etc.)” and my Twitter streams just asploded – I was getting that sucker rebroadcast several times a minute.

And I thought, “Wait, that can’t be right.”  So I went looking. Hunted around Wikipedia, which is very likely where they got their information, and all I got was “It’s as old as Shakespeare”, so that was no help.

I  hunted around some more, looking for references to ancient Greek literature, but while I found some papers that have been written on the origin of jokes and how far back you can find references to things like people getting hit in the crotch (America’s Funniest Videos has been on HOW long?), I found no counter-evidence to the “Shakespeare invented the Momma joke” argument.

Anybody got some evidence to shoot this one down, or is it actually true?

1) People understand that your tights are a costume.

2) You think Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are silly names? Try drawing heat with a name like The Gobbledy Gooker.

3) Children won’t cry and parents won’t get pissed if they see Romeo having lunch with Tybalt after the show.

4) The audience doesn’t scream “WHAT?” every time Hamlet pauses during a soliloquoy.  “To be…” WHAT?! “..or not to be.” WHAT?!

5) That blood on Julius Caesar is fake.  The blood on Ric Flair, not so much.

6) Helena and Hermia can play their fight scene the same way every night.  In WWE it’d be jello one week, then a hot tub, then a pillow fight … with less and less clothing each time.

7) Shakespeare never wrote a comedy sketch about necrophilia and honestly expected an actor to make it work.

8) Nobody chants “You screwed Falstaff!” when King Henry tries to speak.

9) When Hamlet leaps into the grave to fight with Laertes, he doesn’t have to do it off a 10ft ladder. Through a table.  Backwards.

10) In both cases there’s a script, nobody really hates the other guy, nobody dies and nobody’s really trying to beat anybody unconscious.  So how come when people find out you’re a Shakespeare fan nobody ever says, “You actually watch that stuff?  You know it’s all fake, right?”