shakespeare is not pretentious. fans of shakespeare are pretentious. shakespeare is twelve hundred dirty jokes strung together by increasingly ridiculous plotlines and increasingly homosexual characters. don’t let the archaic language fool you
I had a college professor who took this exact tack. In class we were required to refer to him not as Shakespeare but as “Willy Shakes” and instructed to view him as the bastard love child of Jay-Z and Tim Burton. Meme culture wasn’t a thing quite yet (this was 2009), but in today’s parlance you would say we were encouraged to treat him as a meme. One kid in the class did an “introduction to Shakespeare” for a presentation and called it “The Fresh Prince of Stratford” and did a songfilk of “The Fresh Prince of Bel Aire” (in which “fresh prince” was used as a pun with “fresh prints” at least twice). Somebody else took to calling him Weezy. I got to hear stuff like the plotline of Macbeth being described as “so Macbeth was promised to be king by these witches but he was actually a pretty nice guy, and then Lady Macbeth went ‘just murder the king, don’t be a pussy’ and then he just went all Saw on everybody.” (Which is actually….not a bad summary of Macbeth.) I got to introduce the whole class to my theory that Hamlet is actually a black comedy, not a tragedy, and for the first time ever GOT A PROFESSOR TO AGREE WITH ME. There was a set of YouTube videos at the time called Sassy Gay Friend that took a crack at Shakespeare, and someone brought them in AND WE WATCHED THEM. AND GOT QUIZZED ON THEM.
And I walked out of that class with a far greater understanding and appreciation of Shakespeare than when I went in. Putting him on par with modern-day celebrities and artists somehow made him come alive in a way I’d never seen before—even though we were reading the original texts with all the thees and thous.
