Cowboys are witches and horses are their familiars

guns are their wands and they only know one spell (bullet)

Rootin’, tootin’, toil n’ shootin’

Fire burn and cowboy bootin’

Eye of newt and spicy beans,

Toe of frog and denim jeans,

Whiskey, grits, n’ demon spittle

tossed into my iron griddle

With the tannin’ of our hides,

Somethin’ wicked this way rides

Not that anyone asked for this but

everyone asked for it they just didn’t know they did

if theres anything i love more than macbeth its cowboys AND macbeth

just wanted everyone to know that there’s a Romeo and Juliet film where Mercutio does this at the beginning act 3, scene 1 (i.e his death scene) for no discernible reason

YEP

“Sir... your father has been killed.” “Oh cool who did it”

One of my students turned in a paper arguing that Hamlet and Macbeth both view death as a solution to their problems and the only difference is that Hamlet wants to kill himself and Macbeth would rather kill everybody else and I honestly treasure this insight.

This is it.

This is the best one.

me at 20 years old watching stranger things’ romance plots between middle schoolers

me at 17 years old watching stranger things’ romance plots between middle schoolers

the most heartbreaking part of hamlet really is the whole “goodnight sweet prince” part because when horatio says “and angels sing thee to thy rest” he is using the intimate form of thou, and it’s the first time he ever does it. hamlet consistently uses the intimate form of thou for horatio (only when they’re in private though, which – if shakespeare intentionally wanted to give their relationship homoerotic subtext, which he totally did – shows that hamlet wants to keep his romantic love for horatio a secret to the greater public) but horatio, being the respectful person he is and also given the fact that if he were to use the intimate form of thou it would pretty much be a romantic confession, never ever uses thou. except when after hamlet dies. when it’s too late. 

here hamlet is, dying in horatio’s arms, asking horatio if he ever held him in his heart. and horatio doesn’t get a chance to reply. hamlet dies. only then does horatio realize his mistake of not confessing sooner

Doing the good work for the people and translating Shakespeare as it should be done👍

Part 2

Part 3

This is wonderful

I do not need to do this murder right away, right? I can finish it last minute. Definitely.

I saw this and didn’t read the url and so sort of looked at it in vague confusion, thinking only, “this is like, the plot of Hamlet”

Shakespeare Plays as Brooklyn Nine-Nine Gifs

Hamlet:

Romeo and Juliet:

A Midsummer Night’s Dream:

Macbeth:

Much Ado About Nothing:

Julius Caesar:

Richard III:

Twelfth Night:

The Tempest:

Doing a little Shakespearean insult drawing this week.

I am 100% convinced that “exit, pursued by a bear” is a reference to some popular 1590s meme that we’ll never be able to understand because that one play is the only surviving example of it.

Seriously, we’ll never figure it out. I’ll wager trying to understand “exit, pursued by a bear” with the text of The Winter’s Tale as our primary source is like trying to understand loss.jpg when all you have access to is a single overcompressed JPEG of a third-generation memetic mutation that mashes it up with YMCA and “gun” - there’s this whole twitching Frankensteinian mass of cultural context we just don’t have any way of getting at.

no, but this is why people do the boring archival work! because we think we do know why “exit, pursued by a bear” exists, now, and we figured it out by looking at ships manifests of the era -

it’s also why there was a revival of the unattributed and at the time probably rather out of fashion mucedorus at the globe in 1610 (the same year as the winter’s tale), and why ben jonson wrote a chariot pulled by bears into his court masque oberon, performed on new year’s day of 1611.

we think the answer is polar bears.

no, seriously!  in late 1609 the explorer jonas poole captured two polar bear cubs in greenland and brought them home to england, where they were purchased by the beargarden, the go-to place in elizabethan london for bear-baiting and other ‘animal sports.’  it was at the time run by edward alleyn (yes, the actor) and his father-in-law philip henslowe (him of the admiral’s men and that diary we are all so very grateful for), and would have been very close, if not next to, the globe theatre.

of course, polar bear cubs are too little and adorable for baiting, even to the bloodthirsty tudor audience, aren’t they?  so, what to do with the little bundles of fur until they’re too big to be harmless?  well, if there’s anything we know about the playwrights and theatre professionals of the time, it’s that they knew how to make money and draw in audiences.  and the spectacle of a too-small-to-be-dangerous-yet-but-still-real-live-and-totally-WHITE-bear?  what good entertainment businessman is going to turn down that opportunity? 

and, voila, we have a death-by-bear for the unfortunate antigonus, thereby freeing up paulina to be coupled off with camillo in the final scene, just as the comedic conventions of the time would expect.

you’re telling me it was an ACTUAL BEAR

every time I think to myself “history can’t possibly get any more bananas” I realize or am made to realize that I am badly mistaken

Not just an actual bear. A polar bear cub.

Imagine a fully grown man running offstage to be “killed” by a baby polar bear.

o my gosh

On all levels except physical, I am the son of a wealthy noble born in 1768 and my father sent me to the lycée in Paris for my education where I begin to read political philosophy and mingle with other like-minded rebellious youth and then I get elected to the National Assembly because my father bribed a noble to let me take his place and I begin to plan for the future I so desperately want but unlike my small minded compatriots I am interested in the political AND social revolution but none of my fellow bourgeoisie want to discuss the plight of the masses because it’s 1793 not 1848 so I get guillotined age 25

#SorryNotSorry 😂

Not 100% sure on this but isn’t it just a Shakespeare-ized version of “do you even lift”