Lord Buckley's Hipster Edition of Marc Antony's Funeral Oration

We here at the Smart Aleck's Guide normally try to refrain from re-writing Shakespeare into modern slang - it's usually a cheap trick to "bring The Bard down to your level" and demeans us both. And, anyway, our attempts at "modern" slang usually just make things sound like you're reading the instructional manual to a skateboard-themed video game from 1990 (we were very gnarly in 1990).

But sometimes someone DOES rewrite Shakespeare just for laughs, and the results are fantastic. Case in point: Lord Buckley, his royal hipness, rewriting Marc Antony's speech from Caesar. "Hipsters, flipsters, and finger-poppin' daddies: knock me your lobes. I come to lay Caesar out, not to hip you to him..."

A Muppet Julius Caesar

In each of our Shakespeare guides, we take a break midway through analyzing each scene to speculate about what a Muppet version of the play would be like. Here's an excerpt from Julius Caesar guide:



   This is a question that comes up every time we work on a new play: who would play which role in a Muppet version?

   This is especially tricky for this play - it doesn’t have much comic relief (except for right at the beginning, with the cobbler, which, being right at the start, isn’t really comic relief so much as a comic    intro). Also, nearly every character is a dignified Roman statesman. Sam the Eagle is the only logical choice for pretty much every character except for the soothsayer (Gonzo, Fozzie and Bunsen Honeydew could all work here). Maybe they could have Wade and Wanda, the old-school singers from season one of The Muppet Show, as Caesar and Calpurnia. Piggy as Portia seems obvious, but it would sure work - she has the same mix of strength and apparent mental instability as Portia. 

   If we were hired to write the script for A Muppet Julius Caesar, we wouldn’t have much of the actual play in it. We’d do a big backstage story in which Sam the Eagle is trying to mount a very serious production of this immortal play, and, for some reason, thought that Fozzie could be trusted to play the role of Brutus with all due gravity (he’ll try his hardest, but fail). Kermit will work hard to be a good Mark Antony, but Gonzo, who is to be Caesar (Romans thought a big, hooked nose was a sign of esteem), feels that the play is missing something and rewrites it to include a lot more special effects, dancing chickens, spectacular stunts.

    As Caeser, he’ll miraculously survive being stabbed twenty-three times (while whistling a medley of hits from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum) (ta-da!), and the play would go downhill from there, presumably ending with a big song and dance number (we suggest Billy Joel’s “When in Rome”) that includes enough pyrotechnics to blow up the theatre. Hail Caesar!

Smart Aleck's Guide to Shakespeare: Julius Caesar

The Smart Aleck's Guide to Shakespeare: Julius Caesar   Just 2.99 on Kindle or Nook (epub) Don't have one of those?  Read it on a free Kindle app  for your pc, mac, iPad or phone.  Or  a free NOOK app  for pc, mac, iPad, or phone 14.99 in print

Finally - a study guide that doesn't assume you're an idiot! The team that brought you the acclaimed SMART ALECK'S GUIDE TO AMERICAN HISTORY is back with a fantastic new series of "study guides for the smart kids" about Shakespeare - including all the stuff your school board would probably rather you didn't find out about. There's something here for everyone, from middle schoolers trying to get through English class to grad students who've read every play a million times, all WITHOUT resorting to re-writing the plays to include the word "dude." Each illustrated Shakespeare guide contains: - Complete text of the play, plus detailed summaries and analysis of every scene, with an active Table of Contents and internal links for easy navigation. - All the info you need about Shakespeare's life, times and language (30k words!), including sections on Elizabethan slang, cheat sheets on how money and nobility worked, the history Shakespeare expected his audience to know, tips on how to survive if you get beamed back to 1593, and a useful essay on the roles of sex, violence, and poop in Elizabethan life and literature - like an Elizabethan version of of What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew. - Guides to movie versions of the play, the sources Shakespeare used in creating the works, a history of the individual play, guides to controversies about each play that make scholars throw folding chairs at one another, and more. - Numerous illustrations, many of which contain hilarious mustaches and stupid hats. - Tangents about the Muppets, Star Wars, or whatever else the staff feels like (we don't let the Texas School Board tell US what to do!) - A general lack of worksheets, vocabulary words, sentence diagrams, and other stuff that would suck all the life out of the plays.  - A section on Shakespeare's "Lost" plays (with several chances to earn $5). And a whole lot more. Twice as informative, and ten times as entertaining, as the next leading brand of study guides - Smart Aleck's Guides have the courtesy to assume that their readers are not complete morons to start with. The Smart Aleck Staff is confident that they can help you understand and enjoy Shakespeare without resorting to any cheap tricks to "bring him down to your level." They don't really care if you get a good grade or not, but with one guide, you could end up knowing more about Shakespeare than your teacher! The CAESAR guide contains all of this, plus sections on Rome 101, Latin Words to Know, a script for a peer pressure skit starring Brutus (you could talk that guy into anything if you used the word "noble" enough), Lupercalia (party naked!), ancient Roman graffiti, and more!

Romeo's Stupid Hats

When one goes combing through historical photos and paintings, one runs into a lot of stupid hats. We found enough while researching the history book to make it a running gag - and we found just about as many in depictions of Romeo and Juliet. Here are a couple:

A fez tops this illustration of Romeo in which he looks like a goth Ronald McDonald. We'd LOVE to see a version of this play with Ronald as Romeo and Birdy the Early Bird as Juliet. Mayor McCheese can be the prince. Mack Tonight can be brought back to be Mercutio, and that "professor" guy could be the friar. 

German painter Karl Becker showed Romeo in a feathered hat - most stupid Romeo hats involve feathers. Romeo here is a dead ringer for a young "Weird Al" Yankovic. Al can pull off a poodle hat - but can he handle this one?

Get the full guide for more Stupid Romeo Hats!

Swearing in Romeo and Juliet

You know how sometimes people act like Shakespeare was a wild, crazy, sleazy guy in order to make kids think he's hip? We here at the Smart Aleck's Guide remember a time when a guy came into our high school to promote Shakespeare and told us that the works were originally full of swear words that editors just left out.

The guy struck as a little desperate. Attempts to "bring Shakespeare down to your level" are generally about as lame as attempts to "make history come alive." If you really want to understand Romeo and Juliet, shouldn't you have your teacher organize a big sword fight in the middle of your local downtown? (If you don't have one of those, use Wal Mart).

Some of the details of Shakespeare's life can be pieced together, but what kind of guy he was is sort of in dispute. You can argue that he was "Wild Bill" Shakespeare, who partied hard, carried on affairs with people of both genders, and got in a lot of fights. He was a theatre person, after all, and just about ever reliable "personal anecdote" we have about him is about him being a smart aleck. But you can also, from the same evidence, argue that he was a good, upstanding man who took care of his family, and was about as sober as anyone was in those days (when weak ale was safer to drink than water). He never went to jail, after all, and never killed anyone, so far as we know (unlike a couple of his fellow playwrights).

Still, WERE there swear words in his plays?

We can think of at least a couple of examples. There're some awfully naughty sex puns hidden between the lines (ask your teacher to explain the "thus she makes her great Ps" joke in Twelfth Night at your own risk), but Shakespeare didn't really use the dreaded S word or the word turd, so far as we know (unlike Ben Jonson).

There were SOME words changed, though - in some cases, when we have more than one early versions of the text, the various versions are greatly different. Some say that this represents Shakespeare's own revisions, and some say it was the printers either screwing things up or cleaning them up. In most cases, you could make an argument either way (though suggesting that Shakespeare ever revised anything himself is the kind of thing that will still get some academics to bean you with a folding chair).

And Romeo and Juliet features one clear example of a swear word that got cleaned up. In Act 2, Scene 1, Mercutio gives a talk about Romeo and Rosaline, Romeo's previous crush, whom he thinks Romeo is out looking for.
This is how it appears in the first quarto, as well as in most modern text:



                   If love be blind, love cannot hit the mark.
    Now will he sit under a medlar tree,
    And wish his mistress were that kind of fruit
    As maids call medlars, when they laugh alone.
    Romeo, that she were, O, that she were
    An open et cetera, thou a poperin pear!


The word here is in the last line, where the text says "O, that she were an open et cetera, thou a poperin pear."  It's the "et cetera" that seems to be wrong - based on the meter, there are a couple of extra syllables in that last line. 


Anyway, there are three texts of Romeo and Juliet - two "quarto" versions (copies about the size of a modern paperback that were sold in Shakespeare's lifetime) and the one in First Folio, the "boxed set" of Shakespeare's plays that came out a few years after he died. The first quarto says "open et cetera." The second quarto and the folio say "Open or," which fits the meter, but doesn't make any sense.


No scholar dared to say it until well into the 20th century, but the "real" word here is clearly "arse," the British version of the dreaded a-word. It's fairly obvious, given that Mercutio was just talking about medlars, a kind of fruit that was commonly known in Shakespeare's day as an "open arse" because, well, it sort of looked like an open butt. See?

It's always interesting to see how various productions will do this line. An early 80s BBC version actually has Mercutio say "et cetera," but he pauses before saying it and indicates his nether regions, so you know he's using it as a euphemism (the best part of that version is a young Alan Rickman as Tybalt...it's amusing to imagine him adding "Potter!" to the end of lines, as in "Peace? I hate the word, as I hate hell, all Montagues, and thee...POTTER!"). The 1996 version with Claire Danes and Leonardo DiCaprio had Mercutio go ahead and say the a-word. Most versions we've seen just leave this whole part altogether.


This is the kind of stuff we talk about in our Shakespeare guides. The first one, a guide to Romeo and Juliet, is out now: