Ok now listen. I’ve been running this site for coming up on fifteen years now, hunting for interesting, educational and amusing things to say about Shakespeare.
Please, for the love of all that is good and holy in this world, can we put an end to every combination of the joke that involves Shakespeare deciding between pencils? Yes, yes, 2B or not 2B. We get it. We’ve heard it, about a million times.
In an attempt to put this one to bed and declare it the oldest known Shakespeare joke, I went googling to see how far back in time I could find it. Anybody know this one?
Said Hamlet to Ophelia, I’ll draw a sketch of thee, What kind of pencil shall I use? 2B or not 2B?
I couldn’t pin down an actual year that was written, but Spike Milligan died in 2002. Assuming he didn’t knock that one out on his death bed, this joke is at least twenty years old. His book Silly Verse For Kids was written in 1959, though, so if it turns out this poem was part of that collection then it’s more like sixty years old.
Please stop telling that joke. It is the least original thing anyone will hear all day.
This week there are stories about both Amelia Bassano and Delia Bacon making the rounds, so I’ve had to spend some time talking authorship with people in my life.
So when I saw this interesting new AI project called TalkToTransformer I had to have some fun with it. You’re supposed to give this thing a writing prompt, and then it will fill in the rest. I prompted, “The works of William Shakespeare were actually written by…” and here’s what I got!
The works of William Shakespeare were actually written by two men; one was English and the other was an American. The English writer William Wordsworth (1710 – 1696), and the American poet John Wilkes Booth (1711 – 1816) were both inspired by Shakespeare, though they were not connected in any way.
William Shakespeare, known as the ‘son of an ironmonger’, wrote much of a tale known as the Merry Wives of Windsor. The story describes a happy couple, a young boy and a young girl – although it’s not clear if the parents are named or the boy is named.
There were many variations of the poem, and it probably wasn’t the last of its kind – perhaps the first. The early versions have been used to create an image of the Victorian age, featuring scenes of women (especially English women) in their prime; and an older man (sometimes male) with a young woman.
The play was first staged during the playwright’s lifetime, in 1819.
Hey, makes about as much sense as every other authorship theory! I like how it made Wordsworth a time traveler. I think one of the Booth family would appreciate being credited as an author, too. When authorship comes up I’m going to start pushing the Wordsworth/Booth theory, because why not?
One of my favorite puns in all of Shakespeare can be found in this exchange between Hamlet and Polonius:
HAMLET
‘Tis well: I’ll have thee speak out the rest soon.
Good my lord, will you see the players well
bestowed? Do you hear, let them be well used; for
they are the abstract and brief chronicles of the
time: after your death you were better have a bad
epitaph than their ill report while you live.
LORD POLONIUS
My lord, I will use them according to their desert.
HAMLET
God’s bodykins, man, much better: use every man
after his desert, and who should ‘scape whipping?
I love it. Hamlet tells Polonius to treat the players well. Polonius responds that he will treat them as well as they deserve. Hamlet says that if he were to do that, no man would escape the whip. But the last line can also be read as a play on “dessert”, making “whipping” a play on whipped cream or some other confectionary treat.
Except that it’s not a pun at all. I have been informed by numerous sources that the term “dessert” did not exist for Shakespeare (first published in 1633 according to the OED). Likewise, “whipping” in reference to confectionary, as in a whipped topping or whipped cream, not until the 1800s.
I really wanted this pun to work. I even did my own research, coming across this recipe for a “dishful of snow”, which is basically whipped egg whites and sugar:
Alas, I have to admit that this is in no way called a dessert, nor does it say to whip anything. Oh well. I was actually informed that if Shakespeare was thinking about what we know as dessert, he was probably thinking of something more in line with, “eel baked in Marchpane or lamprey roasted in a sweetened sauce made of its own blood.” Go ahead and think about putting whipped cream on that!
Anyway, what’s your favorite pun of Shakespeare’s? I’ll leave you with another favorite that nobody has yet spoiled for me. This one from Two Gentlemen of Verona:
LAUNCE
Nay, I’ll show you the manner of it. This
shoe is my father: no, this left shoe is my father:
no, no, this left shoe is my mother: nay, that
cannot be so neither: yes, it is so, it is so, it
hath the worser sole.
I love it when I get more Shakespeare than I expected.
Typically I start my work morning from the company kitchen doing various “sit at the computer” chores, like following up on emails or paying some bills. Today I was finding video of the 2012 London Olympics because they used Caliban’s “Be not afeard” speech in both the opening and closing and I’d told my daughter’s teacher I would send links.
While I am doing this, a couple of coworkers sit down and we start to discuss Shakespeare – led by them asking me questions, not me boring them. The conversation goes something like this:
“I read my share of Shakespeare, but never The Tempest.”
“Yeah, it’s a later play, probably most famous because people think of it as the last thing Shakespeare wrote. But it’s also the one that fits the fairy tale model the best, so it’s what I used to introduce my kids to Shakespeare.”
“Really?”
“Sure. It basically goes once upon a time there was a little girl who lived on an island with her father, a powerful wizard. She learns that she is a long lost princess. One day pirates crash land on the island, and she meets a prince who promises to take her away to live happily ever after.”
“Seriously? That’s the plot of The Tempest?”
“Well, there’s a lot more to it than that. But for a five year old? Sure, that’s about it. That works better than there’s this guy, see? And his uncle killed his dad and slept with his mom. That only works with Lions. And his best friends are a meerkat and a warthog!”
“Rosencrantz and Guildenstern?”
“Exactly. If you hadn’t guessed I’m one of the ones who thinks there’s more *not* Hamlet in Lion King than is Hamlet, but I understand why people think that. Uncle kills the king, son has to reclaim the throne? Fine, done, Hamlet. But that doesn’t mean everything else is automatically a parallel. R & G were spies sent by Claudius to take Hamlet to his execution, they weren’t his best buddies going off on adventures and learning about life. If you want to play that angle, Shakespeareans suggest it has more to do with Henry IV.”
“That’s the one with Falstaff, right?”
“Exactly. One of Shakespeare’s greatest unknown creations. If you haven’t studied Shakespeare, you probably don’t know Falstaff. People know the title characters, your Richard III, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, and so on. But there’s a case to be made that Falstaff is one of Shakespeare’s best.”
<fast forward as I bring up the big finish to Chimes at Midnight, the “I know thee not, old man” scene>
The two I’ve been speaking with agree that this is a very fine bit of acting, and we start wrapping it up to get back to work. Another coworker, who I do not normally have much contact with, has come in for coffee on the tail end of that and makes a curious face, wondering what he missed.
“Oh, just some morning Shakespeare,” I tell him.
“Sorry I missed it,” he replies. He then makes his coffee while rambling about imitating contagious clouds or something. I assume that he is trying to sound Shakespearey. People do that to me sometimes. “Mine coffee thus needeth more sugar!” and what not.
“Cool,” I say when he looks at me for a response. He leaves.
Yet herein will I imitate the sun,
Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
To smother up his beauty from the world,
That, when he please again to be himself,
Being wanted, he may be more wonder’d at,
By breaking through the foul and ugly mists
Of vapours that did seem to strangle him.
He was quoting Henry IV Part 1! I messaged him to confirm that I had to look up his reference, that I had totally missed it. He apologized for getting the quote wrong.
I’ve worked here three years, that’s the first time he’s made a Shakespeare reference. I wonder how many others I’m surrounded by on a daily basis? It’s kind of exciting never knowing when random Shakespeare’s going to come at you unexpectedly.
This month’s posts are sponsored by No Shave November. To help raise cancer prevention awareness, and some money along the way, all proceeds from this month’s advertising, merchandise and book sales are being donated. If you’d like to support the site by supporting the cause, please consider visiting my personal fundraising page linked above, where you can make a direct donation.
I know the search engine optimization (SEO) game is an ongoing battle for Google to stay one step ahead of everybody, but this is getting ridiculous. This story only has a little Shakespeare but I couldn’t pass it up.
I think I’ve mentioned in the past that I have a book channel of sorts at my day job. We have a book club that does the traditional “one book a month that we vote on” type of thing, but because of the amount I read, I have my own channel where I just brain dump book review after book review. Last year I think I read 70 books? Something like that.
Anyway, just this morning I’d finished writing up Perdido Street Station by Chia Miéville, and made a comment about the author’s vocabulary:
I read a review that said “the author writes like he swallowed a thesaurus” and had a laugh because that’s quite true. Some words are just so out of the ordinary that they leap out of the page and yell “Remember when this word was on a vocabulary quiz back in high school!” I haven’t heard “palimpsest” in years, but over the last couple of weeks of reading this one he used it probably 4 or 5 times.
Later that day I was talking to Bardfilm about interpretations of Ophelia (doesn’t everybody do that?) and I learned something, so I had reason to google “olivier’s ophelia” – as in Sir Laurence Olivier’s interpretation of a particular scene with Ophelia. Here’s what google gave back:
Note the third result returned, if you’re not getting it.
TELL ME THAT’S NOT WEIRD.
If it turns out that Google is actually ordering search results based on the fact that I searched “palimpsest” earlier that day (once, to confirm the dictionary definition), then I just give up trying to win the SEO game. That’s crazy.
Somebody else search “olivier’s ophelia” for me and tell me if palimpsest shows up, or it was just for me?
This month’s posts are sponsored by No Shave November. To help raise cancer prevention awareness, and some money along the way, all proceeds from this month’s advertising, merchandise and book sales are being donated. If you’d like to support the site by supporting the cause, please consider visiting my personal fundraising page linked above, where you can make a direct donation.
