by Ben Elton
Saucy prancings – weird courtly dances often depicted on TV, which it is impossible to imagine anyone actually enjoying.
Stranger with the purple helm – slang for penis.
Summer snottage – hay fever.
Tarting slap – woman of presumed easy virtue.
Tufting muffle or tufted lady grotto – slang for vagina.
Up the duffington – with child.
Wankington – A foolish fellow or one who is in the habit of personally pleasuring his cod-dangle.
Whoreslap – woman of presumed easy virtue.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ben Elton’s multi-award-winning career as both performer and writer encompasses some of the most memorable and incisive comedy of the past thirty-five years. In addition to his hugely influential work as a stand-up comic, he was co-writer of TV hits The Young Ones and Blackadder and sole creator of The Thin Blue Line and Upstart Crow. He has written fifteen major bestsellers, including Stark, Popcorn, Inconceivable, Dead Famous, High Society, Two Brothers and Time and Time Again, three West End plays and three musicals, including global phenomenon We Will Rock You. He has written and directed two feature films, Maybe Baby and Three Summers.
He is married and has three children.
Also by Ben Elton
Stark
Gridlock
This Other Eden
Popcorn
Blast from the Past
Inconceivable
Blackadder: The Whole Damn Dynasty
Dead Famous
High Society
Past Mortem
The First Casualty
Chart Throb
Blind Faith
Meltdown
Two Brothers
Time and Time Again
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First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Bantam Press an imprint of Transworld Publishers
Copyright © Ben Elton 2018
Cover: Image of David Mitchell © BBC Photo Archive
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Episode 1: Star-crossed Lovers
fn1 A fascinating insight into Elizabethan stagecraft. Offering convincing if not conclusive evidence that it might have been a bit crap.
fn2 Scholars generally believed that the sleep-inducing effect of Shakespeare’s plays developed in subsequent centuries, but it is fascinating to note that being suicidally bored was a common reaction even in the Bard’s own day.
fn3 Mary Shakespeare was indeed a ‘posh bird’. She was born into the famous Arden family while John Shakespeare was her father’s tenant and a deeply dodgy geezer.
fn4 Anne Hathaway was eight or nine years older than Shakespeare and he barely an adolescent when they conceived Susanna. This has led some scholars to conclude that Shakespeare was a randy little bugger.
fn5 Shakespeare started his working life as an actor. It is thought, however, that he continued to give himself occasional parts and scholars believe he cast himself as Hamlet’s father’s ghost. It therefore seems likely that other actors in the company thought him a self-indulgent arse.
fn6 Generations have presumed that when Juliet says ‘wherefore art thou’ she means ‘where are you’. Scholars have forgiven Shakespeare this obvious mistake presuming that people would have understood the correct meaning at the time. The folio offers evidence that they didn’t.
fn7 Anne was wrong. No scholar has ever sought fit to point out this obvious howler.
fn8 This appears to be a reference to the opening scene of Romeo and Juliet, which is in fact spectacularly unfunny. A group of serving men bang on about ‘Biting their thumbs’ at each other in a very boring way. The dullness of the scene is compounded by the fact that the serving men are minor characters typically given to crap actors.
fn9 Shakespeare is clearly wrong. Scholars have conducted copious research and written countless footnotes pertaining to Shakespeare’s so-called ‘comedy’ scenes, which have remained definitely not funny.
fn10 It appears that Shakespeare had not yet finalized the plot. It is tantalizing to speculate how much better the play might have been if he’d resisted the urge to overcomplicate it.
fn11 Will’s Henrys are indeed very long, and seem even longer.
fn12 It is interesting to speculate that had Shakespeare followed his initial instinct, he would have written the first gay couple in a popular smash, beating the lesbian wedding in Friends and Mitchell and Cameron from Modern Family by some four hundred years.
fn13 Scholars have long speculated that the dense obscurity of Shakespeare’s language would have made him something of a pain in the arse in conversation. This exchange appears to confirm that suspicion.
fn14 Robert Greene was an English poet and early rival of Shakespeare. He is thought to have died in 1592, but we know that this episode took place in 1596 (when Susanna was thirteen). We can therefore conclude that Greene lived far longer than has previously been supposed.
fn15 This is the earliest known example of the familiar ‘Master-bater’ joke, which has appeared in many different forms over the years.
fn16 To prevent actors and playwrights presenting radical, anti-establishment ideas, no play could be presented without licence from court. Censorship laws continued until the mid-twentieth century before finally being abolished when the authorities realized nobody actually gave a flying toss about actors’ and playwrights’ radical anti-establishment ideas.
fn17 It appears that Shakespeare coined the phrase ‘glass ceiling’. Since he has so often been credited for phrases he did not invent, there is some poetic justice in him being denied credit for one he did.
fn18 Historical evidence suggests that Shakespeare was in denial and that he definitely was going bald.
fn19 Commedia dell’Arte was an early form of improvised clowning, which originated in Italy. Like later forms of improvised clowning, it was probably a bit crap.
fn20 The Italian peninsula was the centre of Western culture between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, delivering artistic innovations in painting, literature, philosophy, architecture, mathematics and science. The United States holds a similar position of influence in modern Western culture, having developed reality television.
fn21 Here Will Shakespeare establishes a theory of theatre that would eventually result in Harold Pinter.
fn22 This episode suggests that the socially corrosive self-interest of English posh boys goes further back in history than previously assumed.
fn23 The Burst Ballsack and the Fisted Peasant still exist today but have merged and become the Bullingdon Club, of which David Cameron and Boris Johnson were members.
fn24 A fascinating historical insight. It had previously been assumed that the practice of rogering dead farmyard animals at Oxbridge parties was instigated by recent members of the Conservative front bench. It seems, however, that the ritual is hundreds of years old.
fn25 In Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet we first discover Romeo pining over a girl called Rosaline. It seems reasonable to suggest that Shakespeare was influenced by Florian and that Rosaline was a real Elizabethan woman, although whether her knees were indeed sweet will ever remain a matter of speculation.
fn26 This is generally considered one of the best bits of Romeo and Juliet, although it’s even better if you only quote the second half of the sentence starting with ‘a rose’.
fn27 It is reasonable to presume that Florian is employing poetic licence as, considering the Elizabethan diet, neither Kate’s breath nor her fartle-barfles would have smelt great. On another note ‘all the perfumes of Arabia’ is quoted in Macbeth. Will probably nicked the phrase from Florian.
fn28 This song is clearly the source of a very similar verse which appears in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. True to form, when Shakespeare put it in a play he made it four times longer and cut the bit about bonking, which was the only good bit in it.
fn29 This incident – included verbatim in Romeo and Juliet – can be established as the first public utterance of this famous passage. It is ironic but also fitting that it was spoken in the context of gender confusion involving a cross-dresser, a subject that held a lifelong fascination for Shakespeare.
fn30 Bottom is clearly acting on Will’s instructions, so it seems safe to conclude Will conducted his own life in a manner as chaotic and random as the plots of his plays. With this in mind, it’s hard to see how he lived as long as he did.
fn31 Potions like this have been a staple of drama for many centuries. The appropriate character, usually female, simply took a sip and fainted away, then woke up at exactly the right time to further the plot. There appears to have been no scientific basis for these potions but audiences never complained. Possibly because they were asleep.
fn32 Will’s naïve expectation that his ridiculous plan will work out mitigates the awfulness of his plots because at least he appears to have believed this shit.
fn33 Florian appears to have died quickly and conveniently although it is in fact almost impossible to stab yourself to instant death. In reality, both Florian and Romeo would have died horribly and agonizingly probably over many bloody hours. It therefore seems likely that the author of this biographical text employed the same theatrical licence as Shakespeare.
fn34 Shakespeare reused this line when writing the death scene in Hamlet. Except he used ‘Prince’ instead of ‘idiot’ and left out the bit about the tiny brain.
fn35 Gammer Gurton’s Needle is dense, impenetrable, baffling and spectacularly unfunny. It therefore can be seen as the first play in an English theatrical tradition that was to find its full expression in the plays of Harold Pinter. Unlike a Pinter play, however, Gammer Gurton’s Needle contains one identifiable gag. The plot concerns a lost needle which is later discovered in the lead character’s britches when he sits on it. This is not bad for a five-hundred-year-old joke.
Episode 2: The Play’s the Thing
fn1 Scholars have long speculated Anne and Mary could read but pretended they couldn’t in order to avoid having to wade through any of Will’s plays. Generations of schoolchildren might well have wished they had the same excuse.
fn2 Mumming plays were a traditional form of ‘entertainment’ – essentially a load of shouty old bolingbrokes – that have increasingly been recognized as an excuse for performers and audiences to get completely and utterly pissed.
fn3 Shakespeare was wrong. Research has revealed it wasn’t even funny the first time.
fn4 Unless you’re completely and utterly pissed.
fn5 This offers a fascinating window into Shakespeare’s methods and confirms the view held by generations of schoolchildren that much of Shakespeare’s writing is in fact completely random and that the Bard himself understood this.
fn6 This is further evidence of Shakespeare’s astonishing prescience. These days absolutely everything from pop videos to soaps has to have a bit of lesbian snogging in it.
fn7 Lamington Eve is not a thing and never was, which is proof that nobody in England has the faintest idea about any church holidays except Christmas.
fn8 Shakespeare was definitely going bald.
fn9 Shakespeare was wrong. Audiences mostly find this sort of scene very boring.
fn10 Evidence that Shakespeare invented the ‘zombie’ genre, pre-dating The Walking Dead by over four hundred years. And imagine how much better Henry V would have been if King Harry had found himself battling an army of French zombies at Agincourt.
fn11 Here, Shakespeare brilliantly reflects the inner workings of the human soul. Modern travellers confronted by a similar situation will profess a grudging sympathy for the victim while secretly harbouring furious resentment that the death of a deeply depressed or mentally ill person has slightly inconvenienced them.
fn12 The London theatre scene of Shakespeare’s day was small so there can be no doubt that two theatrical titans such as Shakespeare and Marlowe would have known each other. Scholars have speculated that they might even have been friends. The emergence of the Crow Folios confirms that they were, or at least that Shakespeare liked Marlowe and Marlowe liked Shakespeare’s ale and pie.
fn13 Shakespeare clearly had an inferiority complex where Christopher Marlowe was concerned. Scholars find this surprising as Shakespeare was the greater poet. However, Marlowe was single, a hell-raiser, drinker, sexual adventurer, international secret agent and he went to Cambridge. Whereas Shakespeare was a fartsome baldy boots who lived in the Midlands. You do the maths.
fn14 Not only was Shakespeare fully aware that A Midsummer Night’s Dream was a load of old dung balls, but he was also the first writer to use the ‘dream’ cop-out to explain a crapsome plot.
fn15 Had Shakespeare stuck with this title – rather than the palpably false A Comedy of Errors – he would at least have managed expectations.
fn16 This is perhaps the most significant revelation in all of the Crow Folios. Idiotic conspiracy theorists searching to fill their dull pointless lives have long sought to suggest that Marlowe wrote Shakespeare’s plays (despite him having died before 90 per cent of them were written). It is indeed ironic to discover that Shakespeare wrote Marlowe’s.
fn17 Tamburlaine and Doctor Faustus are of course two towering classics of English literature on which Marlowe’s reputation is largely built. The fact that Shakespeare simply gave them to his arch rival is astonishing and has led scholars to suggest that the Crow Folios are an elaborate twenty-first-century fraud.
fn18 Bottom is, of course, right. The cold-sore gag is a bit rubbish. One can only speculate that Will’s plays might have been significantly better if Bottom had pointed out the crap lines more often.
fn19 While there is little doubt that Marlowe did indeed work for famed Elizabethan spymaster Francis Walsingham, the nature of his work is unknown. What can be surmised with relative certainty is that it involved a lot of drinking and shagging.
fn20 And, of course, the entrapping and burning of Catholics, which was something of an obsession in Elizabeth’s day.
fn21 This brief exchange establishes yet another astonishing first for William Shakespeare. It has long been thought that the use of the traditionally female insult ‘bitch’ to demean a man originated with African-American rap poets. It now appears to have been common usage in Elizabethan English.
fn22 It is sad to speculate how much richer historical language would be if Shakespeare’s lost two-queen bitch-slap play had survived.
fn23 This is true. Shakespeare was the only
major poet of the entire English Renaissance who did not attend either Oxford or Cambridge universities. The grip of those two institutions over British arts was as strong then as it is now. To quote Shakespeare himself on the subject, ‘The absence of real advances in social mobility in sixteenth-century Britain is absolutely futtocking outrageous.’
fn24 When they aren’t gorging, quaffing and rogering dead farmyard animals.
fn25 This exchange appears to confirm what generations of schoolchildren have long suspected – that Shakespeare was not quite as clever as he blooming thought he was.
fn26 This appears to be an early attempt at what would become a celebrated line in Hamlet: ‘The play’s the thing wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.’ Shakespeare probably rejected the earlier version because it wasn’t in iambic pentameter. Every line had to have five beats. Scholars have often asked, ‘Why? Just why?’ It may have been a form of OCD.
fn27 This speech from Shakespeare’s actual life prefigures the famous advice that Hamlet gives to the players. In the play, Hamlet is gentler, disguising his frustration in flowery language, but here we get the real Will, the true frustrated writer whose every line is at the mercy of some blooming actor.
fn28 Pinching credit for the script is an essential part of an actor’s craft, now taught in the first term at RADA.
fn29 This incident, unknown until the discovery of the Crow Folios, must surely rank as the greatest example of literary self-harm in the history of English theatre. Scholars take comfort in the hope that it was one of the crappier ones, like The Merry Wives of Windsor or Henry VIII.
fn30 This previously unknown play now enters Shakespeare’s canon. Being less than a page long, it is likely to prove very popular with schoolchildren.
fn31 Anne appears to have invented a term that would not be used again until the advent of ‘dude’ movies in the early twenty-first century. This proves that Will was not the only member of the Shakespeare family to add words to the English language.