in grade 12 we were reading romeo and juliet and we were at the romantic-ass balcony scene and this hot girl in the class volunteered to read juliet’s parts and i put up my hand to volunteer for another part and the teacher goes ‘oh do you want to be the nurse, amanda?’ and i was like ‘no i wanna be romeo’ and the hot girl swiveled around in her seat to give me a Look™
she and i later ended up making out at a bunch of parties in university lmfao
in retrospect this moment was absolutely pivotal to my butch awakening but it was also just a lesbian power move
I too got a girlfriend over this play. In grade 10, I was reading the balcony scene to study with two other people (one guy and one beautiful girl) and I insisted point blank I had to read as romeo, because he had the most lines and I’m a dramatic little shit.
So the other two in my group are used to my antics by now. We’re all friends, so the pair of them decide that the one guy in our group gets to be the nurse. Now, my Juliet and I have been friends for a couple months by this point, so I decide to be a little more dramatic.
We put Juliet on a spinny chair, and pump it up as tall as it goes, and my baby, closeted lesbian ass crouches on the floor, ready to be as melodramatic as possible. Like, I’m about to do a rendition that makes William himself walk into the class and tell me to take it back a notch or twelve.
And then I look up.
And holy shit.
There she is, Juliet, haloed in the worst fluorescent light known to mortals across the globe. Light just streaming down around her, that weird off-green colour that it always is. And she’s the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen. My little gay soul is barely holding on as the words barely leave my lips, breathlessly. “But soft… what light from yonder window breaks?”
And Juliet was the sun. Romeo was not exaggerating that line at all.
Juliet and I have also been together for more than 4 years now. She’s every bit as spectacular as she was when I was a lovestruck teenage Romeo, kneeling on the yellowed linoleum floor of second block english.
yknow if romeo had just Cried on juliets corpse for a couple hours instead of drinking poison Right Then they would have been Fine
The moral of the story is: always take time to cry for a few hours before making important decisions.
So I’m more or less being facetious here, but this is actually a thing.
Hamlet is genre savvy. Hamlet knows how Tragedies work, and he’s not going to rush in and get stabby without making absolutely certain he’s got all the facts.
Except once he thinks he has all the facts – once he’s certain that it really is the ghost of his father and Claudius really did kill him, he rushes in and stabs the wrong guy, which starts a domino line of deaths and gets Laertes embroiled in his own revenge tragedy and ultimately results in the deaths of nearly every character other than Horatio.
That’s the irony and the tragedy of the story. Hamlet knows his tropes and actively tries to avoid them, and the tropes get him anyway. It’s inevitable, the tropes are hungry.
I want a sticker that says the tropes are hungry so I can put it on my laptop
i met a scholar once who said that tragedies aren’t about a silly “flaw” or anything, it’s about having a hero who’s just in the wrong goddamn story
if hamlet swapped places with othello he wouldn’t be duped by any of iago’s shit, he’d sit down & have a good think & actually examine the facts before taking action. meanwhile in denmark, othello would have killed claudius before act 2 could even start. but instead nope, they’re both in situations where their greatest strengths are totally useless and now we’ve got all these bodies to bury.
The tropes are hungry and the hero is in the wrong goddamn story.
my favorite part of hamlet is at the beginning when they see the ghost of hamlet sr for the first time
and the guards are like “Horatio, you go talk to it! You went to college!”
and Horatio is like “Yeah! I did go to college! I will go talk to the ghost!”
like. where did horatio go to college. did he go to ghost college
YES, ACTUALLYYES HE FUCKING DIDBC
(a) EVERY COLLEGE THEN WAS GHOST COLLEGE bc ghosts were widely believed to be Real™ n thus scholars learnt abt them. moreover, as everybody knows, ghosts only communicate in Latin; Latin, which also happens to be the scholastic language. Horatio is a scholar; he both knows about ghosts and knows Latin; as such his university education patently DOES make him best suited to ask this one what’s up (as obviously sth must be up for it 2b wandering around, why else wld it b here, i mean gawd)
(B) WITTENBERG WHERE HORATIO STUDIES WAS LIKE. THE MOST SPOOPYOF GHOST COLLEGES bc they were alllllll about theology n the supernatural n shit so SUPPOSING HORATIO WILL KNO HIS SHIT ABT GHOSTS IS IN FACT A THOROUGHLY SENSIBLE ASSUMPTION
this has been said before but i am fucking adding it again bc it HACKS ME TF OFF when ppl reblog the post w/o commentary as if OP jsut fucking checkmated Shakespeare when in fact all they managed to do was fail at the most basic historical contextualisation lmao
In my small town, oklahoma school, ou english teacher GAVE N O SH I T S about this subject, we read the play in class (HAHA BITCHES I WAS MERCUTIO) AND B O Y LEMME TELL YA, IF U HAVE NOT READ ROMEO AND JULIET IT IS G A Y. He was so fun to act like while reading, i shed a tear when he died (spoiler alert). Anyway, she said “next week we are watching the movie.”
I shit you not, 98% of the class groaned cuz they hated the book so whats so great about the movie ((our english teacher is the drama teacher aswell)) B U T THE MoMMENT SHE SAID THAT, ME AND MY 2 DRAMA FRIENDS WERE FUCKING LOSING IT.
next week arrived, we all sat down. Y’all know what fuckin movie we watched
Leonardo De-fuckin-Caprio walks into screen veiw and THE CROWD GOES WILD YALL, B U T
Mercutio walks out and speaks, and everyones faces turn into a mixture of “what?” “The??” “F U C K?” And it was beautiful. Our teacher was sitting on her chair and had the biggest fuckin evil grin cuz jesus christ the kids were W I R E D MAN.
whether or not romeo & juliet’s marriage would have worked out is not the point. rather, the point is that love cannot flourish in a world filled with hatred and an unwillingness to change, which is the main reason why modern adaptations would benefit from being about a gay couple. in this essay, i will
i can’t stop fucking thinking about my english prof talking about the queer historical significance of the word “sweet” as a deliberate indicator of homosexual love and how that relates to both edward ii and gaveston, as well as hamlet and horatio. so, because shakespeare was likely totally knowledgeable about codes that queer men were using (cos like duh obvs), the inclusion of “sweet prince” at the end of hamlet is in all likelihood a completely deliberate indication that hamlet and horatio were in love
i’m???? so gay for literature and history lmao
my good sweet honey lord????
I WROTE A WHOLE PAPER ON THIS SHIT IN DOCTOR FAUSTUS HIT ME UP LITERALLY ANY TIME YO.
If anyone tries to tell you that Shakespeare is stuffy or boring or highbrow, just remember that the word “nothing” was used in Elizabethan era slang as a euphemism for “vagina”.
Shakespeare has a play called “Much Ado About Nothing”, which you could basically read in modern slang as “Freaking Out Over Pussy”. And that’s pretty much exactly what happens in the play.
William Shakespeare was a bisexual kid from a town a hundred miles outside London with the equivalent of a high school education who knocked up a 26-year-old out of wedlock when he was 18 and he wrote 37 plays and 154 sonnets that changed the English language and the nature of Western drama and theater and if that isn’t an argument against elitism and a culture of constant perfectionism I don’t know what is
probably why people spend so much time trying to prove he didnt write his own plays
Because I can’t help being pedantically insufferable the bit about Shakespeare’s education is somewhat misleading, because the early modern equivalent of “high school” meant learning Greek and Latin and all kinds of things that aren’t par for the course in a 21st-century high school curriculum, but basically yes: Shakespeare was a middle-class human disaster who became the most significant playwright and possibly most influential writer in the western world. Dream big.
Mathee's Blog 