Upstart Crow

by Ben Elton

  fn8 The Latin translates to: ‘Syphilis (or French disease).’

  fn9 Shakespeare’s lack of a classical education made him the butt of snobbish jibes all his life. And beyond it. Ben Jonson famously sneered that Shakespeare knew ‘little Latin and no Greek’, proving that Jonson was a pompous, patronizing twat.

  fn10 We might expect that Kate – with all her spirit and intelligence – would come up with a better comeback to Will’s outrageous male entitlement. Perhaps she told him to futtock off and die but Shakespeare’s mysterious chronicler, to spare his blushes, failed to report it.

  fn11 In Shakespeare’s day many considered theatres nothing more than debauched centres of drunkenness and lechery. That would certainly make the National a bit less futtocking dull.

  fn12 It would indeed be an interesting experiment, even in our modern age, if the Royal Shakespeare Company did just half a play, or maybe the first and last acts. Would anyone notice? Really? And we’d all be out in time for the pub.

  fn13 Bottom is right. The Ancient Greeks laid down many rules of theatre which are considered useful even to this day. If only they’d been clear that four-hour history plays are TOO FUTTOCKING LONG.

  fn14 Adolescent boys were indeed employed to play all female parts in Shakespeare’s day. With a play as long as Hamlet, Gertrude might have gone onstage a boy soprano and taken her bow as a beefy baritone with a bum-fluff moustache.

  fn15 This is a fair point from Shakespeare. Unfortunately, he never edited later.

  fn16 It would take several centuries for history to provide an answer to Bottom’s question and when it came it was brutal.

  fn17 A truly astonishing revelation that the clichéd business of women claiming men can’t multitask pre-dates female newspaper columnists.

  fn18 Either Kate had a time capsule and had seen an episode of The Inbetweeners or men have always been a bunch of utter wankingtons.

  fn19 Will was expecting a lot from a sheet of a twine and a bit of old curtain, but then drama types always have been wont to over-enthuse.

  fn20 Here is evidence that despite his literary prowess, Will suffered from massive self-delusion. His plays are definitely mad long.

  fn21 If only Kate designed our modern theatres.

  fn22 Kate’s choice of lunch suggests that the fashion for slightly ridiculous and arbitrary salad ingredients pre-dates the invention of Marks and Spencer.

  fn23 Shakespeare tries out a line that would later appear, unimproved, in Julius Caesar.

  fn24 It is a little-known historical fact that the length of sermons delivered by the puritanical God-prodding Pure-titties was a major cause of seventeenth-century Catholic revivals, some worshippers preferring to risk being burned at the stake rather than sit through any more of them.

  fn25 Historians often speak of the ‘teenager’ as a modern phenomenon, beginning in the 1950s. This record of Susanna Shakespeare suggests that the essential teenage characteristics of furious entitlement and aggrieved self-pity have been a part of family life for much longer than previously supposed.

  fn26 It is true that John Shakespeare was arraigned before the courts on just these charges. The Bard’s dad was a seriously dodgy geezer.

  fn27 It is not surprising that Will had not heard of syphilis. The dreaded disease was a recent phenomenon in the West at this point and its name only recently fixed.

  fn28 This is the very first allusion to chips in all English literature.

  fn29 Some critics argue that Shakespeare is indulging in gender stereotypes here.

  fn30 Kate scores a historical first here. This is the first recorded instance of a woman calling a man a patronizing bastard.

  fn31 Etymologists have always believed that the expression ‘to have a chip on one’s shoulder’ derives from English naval shipyards and refers specifically to wood chips. It is extraordinary to discover that the term refers to potato chips and was, like so much else in the English language, invented by Shakespeare.

  fn32 It is surprising to discover that the X-Factor-style deluded sense of entitlement is a much more venerable aspect of English theatrical tradition than previously thought.

  fn33 Syphilis, sive morbi gallici is the title of the 1530 poem by Girolamo Fracastoro and the origin of the word syphilis.

  fn34 In Shakespeare’s day, an Oxbridge degree clearly entitled a man to practise law. In our own age, of course, it also allows a man to become Prime Minister and run the National Theatre.

  fn35 Shakespeare drew on this as inspiration for the final scene in his Merchant of Venice in which Portia, disguised as a man, argues on behalf of Antonio, and which was of course a lot longer.

  fn36 Shakespeare reproduced this verbatim in Merchant of Venice despite the fact that it’s really not a very good line. What, for instance, does ‘not strained’ mean? There is no record of anybody ever saying that mercy was strained so it seems odd that Shakespeare should deny it.

  fn37 Quite apart from Greene’s point that flesh contains blood, Will is required to deliver the debt, not Greene to take it. Greene had only to demand that Will pay up his dues, blood or not. The whole thing is just futtocking ridiculous and yet Will saw fit to use it as the killer scene in Merchant of Venice. The man certainly had some bolingbrokes.

  fn38 Scholars have speculated that evidence of this very ‘Bob’ can be found in another historical source, the venerable Blackadder Chronicles, an ancient but fragmented family history which came to light in the 1980s. Whether this Judge Bob is indeed the same person who was briefly in a cross-dressing, trans-inquisitive relationship with Edmund Blackadder during the mid-sixteenth century will always remain a point of speculation.

  fn39 Audiences do not usually boo and jeer and call Shakespeare a total wankington but most critics agree it’s only because they are fearful of looking stupid.

  Episode 1: The Green-eyed Monster

  fn1 Mary and John Shakespeare did indeed apply for such an honour, even before their son’s success. The cock-snobbled folderols at the College of Heralds suggested that they futtock offeth.

  fn2 Shakespeare is exaggerating. John Shakespeare was only dragged before the Stratford courts twice. Although he may not have been caught on the other occasions.

  fn3 It seems that the Bard cannot speak without unveiling a human truth. Here he recognizes that people only despise financial skulduggery when perpetrated by someone richer than them. They see their own small infringements as nothing more than natural justice. For instance, a person may despise the multimillionaire tax-avoiding lord while excusing their own slightly inflated holiday insurance claim because the bastards can bloody afford it.

  fn4 Unbelievably, this really was the title of Raleigh’s book. Fortunately for him he never had to plug it on a chat show.

  fn5 Not one of Shakespeare’s better lines. It is fortunate for Ben Elton that he is no longer credited with writing the folios or he’d have to take responsibility for this disappointingly lacklustre image.

  fn6 This is uncanny. Shakespeare not only predicted Big Brother but actually understood that it would be riveting for a couple of series before degenerating into repetitive disappointment.

  fn7 Finally an explanation is found for the perplexing lack of written evidence of Shakespeare’s existence.

  fn8 It is unlikely but not impossible that Pink was acquainted with the Crow Folios when she wrote her first hit.

  fn9 This one’s not exactly a zinger either. Perhaps the Bard was feeling poorly himself that morn.

  fn10 Then, as now, the English lost all sense of proportion at the prospect of minor royalty. In fairness, the phenomenon is not confined to England (witness Sarah Ferguson’s continued employment on American daytime TV).

  fn11 This appears to be a deliberate reworking of Queen Elizabeth’s famous speech at the time of the Spanish Armada. She spoke of having ‘the heart and stomach of a king’, which is a powerful image unless you think about the stomach of her own father, Henry VIII, which was like a pasty sixteenth-century Space
Hopper.

  fn12 This phrase appears to have meant ‘posh’ and Shakespeare would go on to use it in Hamlet. The Bard might have been a bit pissed off had he known that four hundred years later the phrase, with a punning change of spelling, would be far better known as the title of a Penelope Keith sitcom. Mind you, he nicked plenty of stuff himself.

  fn13 This can of course only refer to Shakespeare’s cross-racial masterpiece Othello. Othello would, for the next three and a half centuries, provide white male actors (who already believed they were better at playing women than women) an opportunity to claim they were better at playing black people than black people.

  fn14 It is true that the land now known as Scotland was never conquered by the Romans. Let’s face it, the Scots were just too futtocking hard. Well, in a country where the thistles are waist high and the men wear skirts, you’re going to toughen up a bit.

  fn15 These two famous mistakes appear in Shakespeare’s plays, something which has caused much amusement amongst cock-snobbled folderols.

  fn16 And indeed every Hollywood movie or God-bothering TV Bible story since. The myth that Jesus would have looked like a middle-class California hippy circa 1968 dies hard.

  fn17 These are images that would appear in Othello, proving again how much stuff Shakespeare pinched.

  fn18 And it seems he wasn’t ashamed to admit it.

  fn19 This is also an image that Shakespeare would later use in Othello. And yet here Greene delivers it in the manner of an aside which by strict convention Shakespeare could not overhear. The repetition must therefore be an extraordinary coincidence.

  fn20 Shakespeare actually appears to have pinched half his play from this encounter.

  fn21 Here we can clearly see the genesis of the whole plot of Othello with all its coincidences and misunderstandings. Audiences have long been exasperated with the Bard’s ridiculous plots, regularly spluttering, ‘But that just would never happen’ into their gin and tonics at the interval. But the folios offer clear evidence that it not only could, but did. The Bard is therefore vindicated.

  fn22 Anne Shakespeare was thought to be illiterate, but yet is quite an astute drama critic.

  fn23 Potpourri were very popular in Elizabethan London and used to mask the general smell of poo. Although it is difficult to imagine that a few dried herbs disguised the scent of 200,000 people crapping at close quarters on a daily basis with literally no municipal plumbing whatsoever.

  fn24 This very same idea ended up as yet another beat in the convoluted plot of Shakespeare’s Othello.

  fn25 Scholars now consider that Otello’s conversation here is superior to the lines Shakespeare eventually gave to his fictitious Moor. Stupid, certainly, but at least comprehensible.

  fn26 Shakespeare did pinch this line.

  fn27 And this one, which is actually pretty good. Scholars continue to argue that Shakespeare could not have heard this line delivered in the manner of an aside.

  fn28 Another one that would eventually be used in the play. Since the emergence of the Crow Folios, scholars are beginning to wonder whether Shakespeare actually wrote any of his stuff at all.

  fn29 Shakespeare here appears to understand the complex plot in which he is enmeshed, something which his future audiences rarely would.

  fn30 Again, it appears Shakespeare reserved his best lines for his private life.

  fn31 ‘Bonsoir’ was sixteenth-century French for ‘good evening’. It is also twenty-first-century French for ‘good evening’.

  fn32 For those who have forgotten the plot, this is what Will asked Kate to say if ever Otello enquired about him. A similar plot beat confused and irritated audiences to Shakespeare’s Othello.

  fn33 Scholars have discussed how Shakespeare’s plays could be improved if someone were to burst in at the end to recap the plot.

  fn34 In Othello, the Moor suffocates the innocent maid with the pillow (which scholars have generally agreed makes for a better ending than this).

  fn35 This is true. Raleigh was an amazing sailor, navigator and adventurer. However, he was also a complete bullshitter.

  fn36 Many black people were born in the port towns of England during this period. Although not quite as many as are implied in the background shots and crowd scenes in BBC costume dramas.

  fn37 Shakespeare was right. It would take many centuries before black actors played leading roles in England, and then mainly those called Idris Elba.

  Episode 2: I Know Thee Not, Old Man

  fn1 During the worst anti-Catholic excesses of Elizabeth I’s reign, people were held in suspicion over the use of candles. This meant that those staying up late to finish reading a book risked being burned at the stake.

  fn2 Up until the discovery of the Crow Folios, the first record of the term ‘ploughman’s lunch’ was in 1837 in Lockhart’s Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott.

  fn3 The English College in the French town of Douai was indeed a training ground for Catholic martyrs, some of whom were infiltrated into England in plots to kill the Queen. Proving once again that one person’s martyr is another’s radicalized terrorist.

  fn4 Many scholars over the years have marvelled at how Shakespeare’s works speak to each new generation with equal force, that his political and philosophical vision can illuminate any age. Here, for instance, Shakespeare satirizes Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway almost four hundred years before she was born.

  fn5 This is true. Most English kings of the period thought killing Frenchmen was a sacred duty but Henry V was a true zealot. This might be the reason he has remained so popular in England over the centuries.

  fn6 Clear historical evidence exists that a Simon Hunt taught at Stratford Grammar School during the time of Shakespeare’s boyhood, but what the pupils thought rhymed with ‘hunt’ will forever remain a matter of conjecture.

  fn7 Evidence exists that schoolmaster Simon Hunt did leave England that year. It is thought that he left because of his Catholic convictions, although maybe he simply got sick of the joke.

  fn8 History has proved that Shakespeare wasn’t actually better than that.

  fn9 Current law dictates that at least one Tudor movie and one epic Tudor TV series must be made each year.

  fn10 Henry VIII had sores and ulcers on his rotting left leg. None the less he pulled six wives and countless mistresses. It might have had something to do with him being a king.

  fn11 Except people still think Henry the Bonk wrote ‘Greensleeves’.

  fn12 Henry VIII certainly wasn’t thick, he just worked out early in life that writing learned religious texts in Latin just wasn’t as much fun as gorging, quaffing and shagging.

  fn13 Taking Catholic communion was indeed dealt with most harshly throughout Elizabeth’s reign. However, the traditional services were incredibly long and incredibly dull and conducted in a language that only the priest spoke, so some found being dragged off and burned a bit of a relief.

  fn14 This is the first recorded gag about wine snobbery in English literature.

  fn15 This is a sentence that Shakespeare would later use in Macbeth. Some people quote it to this day, although evidence suggests that they tend to think ‘the adage’ the cat is stuck in is some sort of room or box. In fact, an ‘adage’ is a proverb or saying. Shakespeare is quoting from a now lost adage about a hesitant cat. Little wonder that it’s lost because it sounds like a very boring adage indeed.

  fn16 Whether Shakespeare was employing poetic licence or he really was about to crap himself will for ever be a mystery.

  fn17 Shakespeare clearly forgets to talk in the manner of an aside and Hunt then overhears him.

  fn18 It would appear that perhaps Will did indeed foul his puffling pants.

  fn19 Shakespeare never claimed to have invented the English language but numerous over-excited English literature teachers have done it for him.

  fn20 The first reference in all literature to dogging, pre-dating the 1980s by many centuries.

  fn21 Since the discovery of the Crow Fo
lios, scholars have speculated that had Will used this curious episode from his private life as inspiration for a play, he would have invented the bedroom farce.

  fn22 Shakespeare uses this line later in his immortal Hamlet. Sadly it didn’t make any more sense then. Sparrows? What’s all that about?

  fn23 Here, Shakespeare defines the concept of post-traumatic stress, for which psychologists of the 1970s often take credit.

  fn24 Campion was a saintly Catholic martyr, or a heretic terrorist, or an absolute nutter, depending on your point of view. He was eventually hung, cut down while still alive, his dick and balls were then cut off and his entrails removed and burned before his still conscious eyes. His head was then cut off and his body quartered. They did not futtock around in those days.

  fn25 Shakespeare uses these words in Henry IV Part 2. Ironically, it seems he actually stole them from Marlowe.

  fn26 Here, finally revealed, is the inspiration for John Falstaff, Shakespeare’s most famous comic character and a huge favourite of Queen Elizabeth, who even demanded he be resurrected for a spin-off (The Merry Wives of Windsor). It was Shakespeare’s deeply dodgy dad.

  fn27 The propensity for wanting to murder people who believe in the same God as you do but with minor differences in worship seems, in fact, to be common to all religions.

  fn28 As previously noted, Shakespeare’s boastful, boozy charlatan John Falstaff was indeed a huge hit in both parts of Henry IV and, unlike pretty much all of Shakespeare’s other comic characters, remains quite funny to this day.

  Episode 3: I Did Adore a Twinkling Star

  fn1 The term ‘patronizing’ derives from ‘patron’. There can be no doubt that in sixteenth-century England the rich and powerful exploited the talents and industry of others while purporting to be on their side. Thank goodness that doesn’t happen any more.

  fn2 While Shakespeare was uncannily astute when it came to the inner workings of other people’s minds, he had little understanding of himself. Will was, in fact, not always as good at histories as he claims. As anyone who has slumbered through King John or Henry VIII will attest.