Warning, this is an academic reaction scribbledeeeeeeeegook. And holy fuck yes, I have Shakespeare this semester.XP

My very first real encounter with Shakespeare was through a website called Shakespearean Insult Kit a couple of years ago. The objective is to combine words from each column to create your own biting wisecrack. The first ten rows include:

Example: My neighbor's sex slave is a droning boil-brained boar-pig.

Right away you can surmise this Shakespeare person was a man of profound vocabulary, can whip his personal neologies out of thin air, and he might have been the greatest smartass who's ever lived.

With the insult kit, you can tell this Shakespeare pompous asswipe person can express one idea with so many words and so many different variations that permuting them would atrophy your brain. He's a bottomless well of novelty, to put. And perhaps this is what makes his works fresh to whatever age and time, making him a transcendental, ageless, and immortal smartass.

Prior to this I've seen his plays Hamlet and A Midsummernight's Dream on stage, and found them all rubbish because I didn't understand a thing. Pop culture turned his Romeo and Juliet and "To be or not to be" into household terms. Beyond these, rumors of his "greatness"--not only in the field of smartassness--came from authority figures, them high school teachers, film directors, critics, writers, scholars, the janitor, etc., who all chewed Shakespeare for us to swallow.

What makes this 16th century smartass so great?

I haven't chewed enough Shakespeare to appreciate his importance, but he must be the most popular person who's ever lived next to Jesus Christ--not that I'm saying Jesus Christ ever did live.

According to the wise guys, them authority figures, the historical Shakespeare was a 16th century simpleton with a simple brain who led a simple life, which would equate to much of the idiots that make up the universe today. This historical Shakespeare (whom I will now refer as the "historical Shakespeare") didn't have a university education or any evidence of intellectual elitism that would otherwise render him an instant wizard in the English language and literature, psychology, philosophy, politics, law, medicine, astronomy, and foreign languages, among other things; and write 38 plays, 154 sonnets, 2 long narrative poems, and several other poems, all of them exceptional, and by exceptional I mean the multiple layers of meaning, the depth of the many characters and situations, the wisdom of the lines, not to mention the rhythm and style--it's bordering on the fantastic he might as well have been divine. In the words of Henry Caldecott, Shakespeare's works are described as:

so stupendous a monument of learning and genius that, as time passes and they are probed and searched and analysed by successive generations of scholars and critics of all nations, they seem to loom higher and grander, and their hidden beauties and treasured wisdom to be more and more inexhaustible; and so people have come to ask themselves not only, 'Is it humanly possible for William Shakespeare, the country lad from Stratford-on-Avon, to have written them?', but whether it was possible for any one man, whoever he may have been, to have done so.

The historical William Shakespeare was far beyond the author William Shakespeare they couldn't have been the same person. Conspiracy theorists argue this historical "William Shakespeare" was just a facade that masked a group of eminent writers at the time. Others say the real author was just using the historical Shakespeare's name to assume a pseudo-identity. Scholars argue it really was Edward de Vere who wrote them, since his intellectual sophistication and biography mirrors those of Shakespeare's plays. Others say it was Sir Francis Bacon, who wrote most of it and lead the collaboration of writers behind Shakespeare in an attempt to erect a philosophic system that would educate men through the medium of the stage. Still, others say it was Christopher Marlowe, who had similar vocabulary and style with Shakespeare. All such speculations just point to Shakespeare as a hoax. But then again, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The evidence wasn't just enough.

Let's just say, right now, I am agnostic of Shakespeare. It is uncertain that he wrote his oeuvre, and it is just as uncertain that somebody else, or a group of people, did. Nevertheless, his name condenses a wide range of knowledge that it's as ponderous and immense as any field of critical study. How I know this, I don't know. It's just an assumption. I have yet to read his works to find it out myself.

(So okay, I am bored stiffstonedshit with the topic. You can very well see the plunge to boredom right at the very middle of this entry. Harhar.XD)

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