Shakespeare Sucks

A tragedy is when bad things happen to good people. Equivalently, when someone is trying to be good, but isn't quite good enough to manage it and their just punishment destroys much of value. Romeo & Juliet is not a tragedy because they're both shitbags. 

Romeo is a criminal, incompetent, and multiply perverted; he uses honour as an excuse to murder the winner of a duel because he's butthurt. Juliet is the most basic of basic bitches. Fun fact: marrying without posting the banns is not a legitimate marriage. A "secret" marriage is like a secret press release or a circle with corners.  Hoes gonna ho, I guess. At the time of the Globe posting the banns were centuries old and the audiences should have known her plan was pure wrong.

Both of their families are better off without them. The only tragedy is the fact they weren't stillborn.

"Shakespeare’s principal source for the plot was The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet (1562), a long narrative poem by the English poet Arthur Brooke, who had based his poem on a French translation of a tale by the Italian Matteo Bandello."

Courtly love is neither courtly nor loving. It's early feminist Sophistry. "Romance" is sterile.

P.S. sounds like peasant behaviour to me. "What would the peons do if they had fancy jackets and the habit of wearing swords? First, being unable to distinguish seemings from beings, they would develop an overinflated opinion of themselves..." Globe audiences ate up Shakespeare because they identified with the characters; the characters were not noble. That and lack of competition.

The moral of R&J: don't let cads near your daughter if she's too vapid to know better. Also, don't raise a cad because he's apt to come to a sticky end as a result of his bad education and the weird schemes his latest fun hole devises because she's bored. 

Let's do Hamlet.

"Hmm, I think my uncle is a fratricidal traitor."

Broke: investigate.
Woke: pretend to be crazy.

"Wait, what do you mean pretend?" Is this inbreeding?

Literally Elizabethan soap opera. Elizabethan Jerry Springer. Elizabethan Always Sunny.

In reality kings had food tasters or other measures and if they died of poison it was iatrogenic. Poison as a weapon is largely a modern phenomenon. Ancient folk remember political poisonings precisely because they're rare and non-representative, the same way a news event makes the news precisely because it's so rare you can ignore it. (E.g. stranger kidnappings.) A king dumb enough to die to poison? Deserved it. The only tragedy in Hamlet is that Hamlet's mutant dad was ever king in the first place. 

Hamlet is proof that the most important trait a work needs to become popular is to be popular. A work has to be absolute trash before it can't be saved by a perception of popularity. 

P.P.S. The name 'Globe' is itself suspiciously humanist. What did you name it after, Shakespeare? 

P.P.P.S. Don't forget Galileo is promoted exactly because he was a terrible scientist. Either as a flex or sabotage. "Haha! We made you take Galileo seriously!" "Be like Galileo (because he is no threat)."

P.P.P.P.S. Turns out having a Queen really is kind of a bad idea. England had Kings again later..or did it? Was already too late by that point. Centuries of LARPing? They venerated Shakespeare, so...