Shakespeare (hereafter referred oftentimes to as "Old Bill") is a tossup, really. I mean, he wrote a lot of plays and sonnets, but they weren't really that entertaining. One problem with Shakespeare is that he used historical events to set his plays in, a lot. All sorts of old-timey kings and queens prancing around Europe and giving memorable speeches to bystanders. It was all about the nobility and "important" people back then. Have you ever heard of a Shakespeare play with the common-man as the hero? No. It's a good thing he didn't try to write that nonsense today, because Seinfeld would have put him straight out of a job.

Speaking of sonnets, most of Old Bill's poems were to a "fair lord" or a "dark lady." (He wrote to a "rival poet", too, but no one cares. Shakespeare was an awful trash-talker.) There's a lot of speculation going around the academia (what a smart-sounding word for professors) and the general public that Old Bill was a homosexual. OK, I lied. Most normal people don't care too much and certainly aren't talking about it at the watercooler. In the time of Shakespeare, they didn't have watercoolers. Instead, they had the plague.

This girl wouldn't have been so happy in the 1500s.

A coworker and I were having a discussion about Shakespeare the other night, actually. I told him I thought his works weren't really that bad. I just hated the fact that they were so darn hard to understand. I mean, no one reads the Latin version of the Bible any more, besides Catholics. "But Tito," really annoying English literature majors will whine, "meanings of words will be lost or altered in the translation to real English!" Yeah, they will. But if you can't read the untranslated version, it's no good to anybody, is it? You English literature majors and your principles. Good luck finding a job.

In other news, Shakespeare made up words whenever he felt like it. I wish English teachers of today would let students do that. I mean, if we read his plays because he's the "best" playwright of all time, shouldn't we emulate all his other great deeds? Just a thought. Fornce*, Old Bill may have never written any of the stuff we thinke** he did. Some people say Christopher Marlowe, another playwright who actually wrote some decent poetry, was the sphing*** we're after. Could be, could be. Others say Francis Bacon is the culprit. Could Queen Elizabeth I have kackrackacked**** up Midsummer Night's Dream, still others grandutaff*****? Doubtful; most women, especially royalty, can't tell a good play from a hihhth******. Dreh*******.

Here's something I bet you didn't know! Shakespeare put a spooky epitaph on his grave which cursed anyone who moved his bones. Those are probably little piles of dust by now, but oh well. Even though some people think unpublished Shakespeare works are in the tomb with his remains, no one has had the guts yet to call Old Bill on his word. Knowing Shakespeare, he's probably an immortal who is just getting some 400+ years of peaceful rest. When I travel to Britain one day and open the grave myself, I'm going to punch Old Bill in the face for making me read his works in school.

Shakespeare did do one good thing before he died by writing Othello. In this play, a character named Iago is pure evil. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who fell from the glory of writing The Ancient Mariner by saying Shakespeare was a cool guy********, said Iago had...oh, what was that phrase? I remember my AP English teacher saying it a few times. "Needless hatred"? "Purposeless malice"? Anyway, he didn't have a reason to be ticked off. I thought that was pretty hardcore. If I were to put on a production of Othello, I'd cast Willem Defoe as Iago. First of all, he has a crazy first name. Who cares what the other reasons are.

Willem Defoe has a cool first name whilst Laurence Fishburne turns into the next Samuel L. Jackson.

* Fornce is an introductory clause which has no meaning.
** Thinke is a stupid way to spell the word think. Someone British probably does this.
*** A sphing is somebody you'd like to beat up for being so secretive or deceiving.
**** To kackrackack is the literary equivilent of an extremely painful cough.
***** Grandutaff is a placeholder used when a writer doesn't feel like completing a thought.
&&&&&& A hihhth is when you accidentally press the wrong key on your keyboard, like I just did with those ampersands. Ampersand has to be a Dutch word. I won't believe otherwise.
******* Five years after William Shakespeare died, an elderly man came to the poet's grave. Reading the epitaph, he scoffed at Old Bill and made a sound quite unlike the word dreh. Then he scratched the word in the dirt outside the church, wondering why he had decided to become a stable boy at the young age of ten. It was an unpleasant job.
******** Did you forget about the asterisk bit? Well, I didn't! Here it is again! Asterisk is another odd word for a symbol.