Shakespeare the hedgehog
I think a lot of people would change their minds about Shakespeare if you explain some of the dirty jokes to them.
That is my one GenX/Millenial complaint. We used to have a common literary background up until just into 2000, at least in the US. We all read Shakespeare and Chaucer. Beowulf, The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men, The Diary of Anne Frank, The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird. We all had a similar base to start from.
Then I saw a short on YouTube where a 40 something man said to his wife “No, sir. I do not bite my thumb at you, sir, but I bite my thumb, sir.” So many comments of people being totally lost as his statement seemed out of nowhere and when people read explanations they still didn’t get it. It perfectly fit the situation AND it was not scripted as the wife was trying to show him being an ass (in a teasing way).
Do you know what a Catch-22 is? If not then you are missing common phrases you would have learned in english class had you attended up to the year 2000.
I work with a 35 year old woman who keeps saying “catch one two” instead of “catch twenty two” despite numerous corrections from multiple people. 😞
To be fair, overhyped bawdy plays from hundreds of years ago are boring AF nowadays.
No they aren’t. They’re the baseline for a superabundance of modern cinema and theater.
Romeo x Juliet is the cornerstone of a thousand romance novels and heist thrillers. Hamlet is the backbone of modern horror. Julius Caeser is every political drama. The Tempest, every disaster movie. Comic books draw on them. Musically draw on them.
Every graduate of Julliard has performed in a dozen Shakespeare plays. Every British comedian can recite a few works by heart. The periodic remake still consistently fills theaters.
Shakespeare is the most playgerized man in history.
Its not like those are all original ideas though. Romeo and Juliet is the poem “The tragical history of Romeus and Juliet” just tweaked into a play.
Sure. Half of Shakespeare’s work is adoption or embellishments on Greek myth and British folklore.
But we get a blockbuster every year or three that’s just King Lear with the serial numbers filed off
Wait, this is about physical appearance?
Shakespeare comes from a time before cameras, obviously. But, not only that, there were no portraits of him painted in his lifetime. And to add to the confusion, there were no physical descriptions made of him during his lifetime. The only information we have on what he looked like come from about a decade after his death. One is an engraving, the other is a (IMO) low quality bust from his funerary monument. In addition, Shakespeare is such a generic-looking guy of his time that there are portraits of other people that were misidentified as being portraits of Shakespeare because they feature slim white guys with goatees in a ruffle collar.
Compare that to Sonic. He’s a character that was designed to stand out visually, and one where the company that makes Sonic games is still, to this day, generating new media with photos and videos of him.
So, if an actual portrait of Shakespeare were discovered and shown to Shakespeare experts, I think even then there’s a decent chance they’d more easily recognize Sonic. After all, a “Shakespeare expert” isn’t an expert on what he looked like. They’re an expert on his writing.
And Baby Boomers are more likely to recognize Big Bird. These are colorful anthropomorphic animals that were ubiquitous during our childhood, while Shakespeare is just some balding dude with a thin mustache and a big collar.
They believe Big Bird is a domestic terrorist. Of course they recognize him.
They are also less likely to recognise Julius Caesar. And guess what - they both dead and not exactly on the top of the news.
There have been like 110 billions humans ever, and only a single blue anthropomorphic hedgehog.
They could read one play and solve both of those issues!
Sonic is designed to be highly recognisable and interacting with Sonic media necessary means you see Sonic a whole lot, even seeing just a few adverts for the franchise is already enough to make you remember it. Shakespeare’s looks are known only on the basis of a couple of portraits, most of which are probably not even based on Shakespeare’s looks directly, and they’re all completely irrelevant for interacting with Shakespeare’s work.
And considering there has been debate for years if Shakespeare was real…
Not amongst serious people though. Shakespeare’s life is well documented but rather dull. He just happened to be a terrific observer of human behaviour
Maybe Shakespeare was…
Tbh if anything that debate probably contributed to Shakespeare’s (and his images’) prominence in popular culture rather than reduced it.
Is it common to remember faces of long dead people?
And they all had a wig back then anyway.
My high school English class room had a large poster of him on the wall. I will never forget.
Getting a time machine so I can catch Shakespeare up on 35 years of Sonic lore so he can write 16 different kinds of fire ass plays of varying genres.
Looking forward to Shadow soliloquies
This isn’t even about Shakspear’s plays, it’s about his physical appearance.
Not exactly a useful metric.
Romeo: O, let us hence; I gotta go fast.
Shakespeare doesn’t even recognize a Sega Genesis, even though it does what Nintendon’t!
Needs must I hie with great haste!
Gotta go fast
Which is more recognizable 🤔
considering that shakespear’s plays were written in early modern English- which is basically an entirely different language than we speak today… the vast majoriity of people alive today would never actually recognize one.
A translation of one, sure. but nope. they probably wouldn’t even understand it.
Nah fam, you just ain’t had it done right: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6CLdCl9TB0
That’s my point.
That’s not Early Modern English. Confusingly, Earky Modern is a precursor to the language we speak today.
It’s close enough a language that we can kinda muddle through it, we can translate it and most will never realize they did more than change some spelling, but most people have still never see it performed in the original- mostly because we would be muddling through missing things
Saw him do this live and he was predictably incredible
Wow. That was… really good. I’m glad you shared it!
I was lucky long ago in high school. Our lit teacher forbid us to read Shakespeare outside the classroom. Instead, we read along as we listened to the RSC’s recordings of the play at the same time.
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