Dear Mr. William Shakespeare,
I know you haven’t had the pleasure of making my acquaintance and thankfully so (Err… for me that is) but I do have a certain kind of appreciation towards your work and of course an opinion (Okay fine… a lot of opinions) about it too. Before I go on with my usual rambling, I would like to tell you that I immensely enjoyed The Merchant of Venice and Julius Caesar (the list ends there).
So here goes…
I have read many of your creations and lived to tell the tale (Aah! Irony…), I will give you a feedback but first… Just because you are English, and both these countries (Great Britain & Italy… just in case you were wondering) were majorly (understatement) involved in the Second World War (and Britain won… in an alliance BTW… you surely couldn’t have predicted this), you can’t use Italy and Italian names as scapegoats in most of your plays. That’s plain racist!
Anyhow… moving on…
The Tempest — I think that you should have given the “rightful” king Prospero some balls (What?… YOU try to find a better word!) instead of magical powers… How does he just get thrown out along with his 3 year old daughter Miranda (She has grown up to be a fine woman BTW, no thanks to you or Prospero, but she goes by the surname Kerr now) from the kingdom? Then there is Ariel ofcourse from the cartoon series The Little Mermaid (Who obviously underwent an orientation change in your play!)… And the rest of the story is a sly rip off of The Beauty and The Beast. Seriously? You copied Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve? There is a reason why people speculate that you died after writing The Tempest. No surprise there!
Romeo and Juliet — It starts out all gooey and mushy and romantic and what not… then you go ahead and kill both of them… In a very confusing manner if I might add (And you don’t even get jailed for it!) and we are supposed to swoon! Do you have any idea how big a mess that rich-girl-poor-boy fantasy of yours got the 21st century into?
Antony and Cleopatra — Now I don’t know how you got to know about Mills and Boon but I definitely liked this one. But then again you go ahead and kill both of them! Sheesh! What is it with you? I don’t know about Juliet but Cleopatra was definitely sexy!
The Mid Summer Night’s Dream — This one was totally uncalled for! You got Theseus, the king of Athens, married to someone with the name Hippolyta… Seriously? Not just that… how on Earth did you expect us to remember the names of 23 characters… especially if they have names like “Nick Bottom” (Thank God you used ‘N’ instead of ‘L’), “Philostrate” (I think you meant Prostrate), “Egeus” (What?????), “Robin Woodfellow” (None of the Robins are going to be pleased) and “Mustardseed” (I bet you just wrote whatever you saw inside your own head… didn’t you?) I almost failed English Literature because of your weird imagination you dim wit!
Much Ado About Nothing — This is an absolute piece of art. Do you know why? Because the title describes the end result of the plays mentioned above most accurately.
Yours truly,
The unfortunate soul who read all these plays.
PS: Consider using Google the next time you need names / plots / references / anything.
