As we celebrated last year’s 450th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth, I presented you with a few fun lists. I wasn’t sure I wanted to repeat myself this year; I thought one would be enough, but after reading Shakespeare’s Globe’s 37 Reasons to Celebrate Shakespeare , I was inspired to come up with one more. While many of the Globe’s reason’s are serious, I decided to come up with a list of 37 silly reasons to celebrate Shakespeare; some not as obvious as others. I’d love to see more, so I challenge my fellow Shakespeare bloggers to come up with their own 37 reasons to Celebrate Shakespeare.
Sari’s 37 silly reasons to Celebrate Shakespeare
- We wouldn’t have anything to compare our lovers to.
- He makes us think about the hard questions in life. Does a rose by any other name actually smell as sweet?
- The only western playwright to use the word honorificabilitudinitatibus correctly in a sentence.
- To be or not to be is still the question.
- He gave us countless blathering foolish wits and conversely, some loquacious witty fools.
- He makes shipwrecks seem like a lot of fun.
- He gave us daddy issues way before Freud invented mommy issues.
- He left us with some great names. Let’s be honest; we are all a little disappointed that we left college without making friends with cool last names like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
- He gave Kenneth Branagh a purpose in life.
- He reminds us to always treat a stranger as if he were our brother.
- 400 years later we still don’t have a better sonnet writer.
- 400 years later the only people who know the difference between a poem and a sonnet are poets and Shakespeare fanatics.
- Three words: Gnome & Juliet.
- Best stage direction ever: exit, pursued by a bear.
- He gave us teenage angst, extreme teenage angst.
- We all now know that when presented with three boxes, always take the least desirable looking one.
- He legitimized the breaking of the fourth wall.
- Two words: Folger Library.
- He gave us some of the world’s best female characters and one of the world’s worst male characters (I’m looking at you Iago).
- He gave us the best lines in all of the theater. Oh, we argue over which ones they are, but not who wrote them.
- He taught us that geography doesn’t really matter.
- He taught us never to give our children their inheritance before we die.
- A lot of us wouldn’t know what to do without our Sundays. #ShakespearSunday.
- Without him, errors would not be so comical.
- Quoting Shakespeare will impress your date, even if they don’t know the hell you are talking about.
- Without him would anyone really care about the Ides of March?
- Hamlet didn’t need eyeliner to be Goth.
- Let’s face it, a lot of people went into acting just so they could speak the speech.
- Let’s face it, only real Shakespeare fans will get #29.
- Without him, Harold Bloom would still be wondering who invented the human.
- Without him no amount of explaining would make the skull on your bookshelf any less creepy.
- He gave us much ado about everything.
- He taught us that it’s best to avoid talking to that small group of women we encounter on the road.
- He taught us excessive hand washing might be a sign of more than just OCD.
- College students would be agonizing over Chaucer right now.
- One word; Dogberry.
- He added over 1700 new words to our collective vocabulary and enriched our language. A better speech was never spoke before (Love’s Labour’s Lost).
He would drown the stage with tears
And cleave the general ear with horrid speech;
Make mad the guilty and appal the free,
Confound the ignorant, and amaze indeed
The very faculties of eyes and ears. (Hamlet)
The View From Sari's World 