Upstart Crow

by Ben Elton

  fn3 Before the twentieth century, men of almost all societies, cultures, religions and ethnicities believed that whatever qualities a woman might have, possessing a cod-dangle made every man on earth her superior. A brief browse of the internet shows that this belief is dying only very slowly.

  fn4 This observation uncannily predicts the nature of the Southern Railways dispute of 2016 and most commuters’ reactions to it.

  fn5 Shakespeare’s prescience is extraordinary. ‘Ladette’ culture would not emerge until the 1990s.

  fn6 Amazingly, this is actually what happens in Titus Andronicus. The play makes Reservoir Dogs look like a Disney picture.

  fn7 Once more the Crow Folio provides evidence of the nature of Marlowe’s sexuality. While historical evidence leaves little doubt that he was extremely attracted to men, clearly he also harboured romantic and erotic feelings for some women. Particularly classy, brainy ones like Kate and Emilia Lanier, the Dark Lady of the sonnets.

  fn8 Mercifully neither of these characters can be found in any of Shakespeare’s known works (although there is a Doll Tearsheet in Henry IV Part 2).

  fn9 The curious nature of the hummingbird’s tongue was scarcely understood at this time. Shakespeare’s knowledge of it suggests a private and erotic interest in agile tongues.

  fn10 The practice within the British Secret Service of maintaining a clandestine science division to come up with improbable weapons that can only be used in very specific circumstances clearly pre-dates James Bond.

  fn11 The farthingale was the weird birdcage-like arrangement of hoops that women wore beneath their skirts in order to prevent them from getting through doors.

  fn12 The announcement of improbable and unquantifiable public support is something many actors claim, particularly after receiving a bad review.

  fn13 Burbage was wrong. There was enormous public interest in digging up Richard III, particularly from BBC 1’s Time Team who, having spent years failing to find so much as a significant teacup, had to face the fact that some navvies found a dead king in a car park.

  fn14 Comedians performing offensive material under the guise of irony was previously believed to be a post-modern phenomenon.

  fn15 Kate was quoting from The Two Gentlemen of Verona, which suggests that while Shakespeare had not yet had the inspiration for his Verona play, he was already toying with some of the verse. It should be noted that this is one of the clearer passages of the play.

  fn16 Startling evidence that the cabin-luggage-only model pre-dates the age of EasyJet.

  fn17 Countless generations of actors and audiences alike have put Shakespeare’s reliance on absurd disguises in his comedies down to lazy plotting. However, the folios suggest he actually believed that putting on a hat made a person completely unrecognizable, even to their lover.

  fn18 ‘To pledge or plight one’s troth’ means to ask someone to marry you. Most people don’t know this and presume it means to try and cop off with someone. Clearly Shakespeare didn’t know either.

  fn19 It seems strange that Shakespeare couldn’t see the obvious point that Bottom is making. On the other hand, if he had accepted Bottom’s logic, he’d have needed to rework the plots of most of his comedies.

  fn20 It is interesting to note that the Italians had an awareness of transgender issues and, as now, the Brits were probably a bit uptight about that sort of stuff.

  fn21 Kate was right, it absolutely wasn’t.

  fn22 Tantalizing to speculate what a deal of arse-numbingly boring productions could have been avoided if Anne had been more forceful in her efforts to dissuade Will from taking up comedy.

  Episode 4: Food of Love

  fn1 In this respect, it is clear that nothing has changed in Britain since. Being a selfish greedy immoral bastard is still a common cause of ennoblement.

  fn2 Boys of Shakespeare’s time were expected to be familiar with both Latin and Greek, but then they had more time than boys today as they didn’t study media.

  fn3 Shakespeare was identifying a trend in parental behaviour which has continued to our own day where kids whose parents refuse to watch them being crap at football and netball are offered counselling.

  fn4 Thomas Morley was indeed the foremost madrigal writer of the English Renaissance but, then again, there wasn’t a lot of competition.

  fn5 When Shakespeare did eventually use this phrase (in Julius Caesar) he merely concluded the ‘idle wind’ phrase with ‘Which I respect not’. Which is clearly not even as good as ‘small constipated squirrel’. He should have stuck with his instincts.

  fn6 It’s almost as if Shakespeare had actually visited the modern piazza at Covent Garden on a sunny day in the school holidays.

  fn7 History shows that Marlowe needn’t have worried. Five hundred years after he voiced this fear, posh boys continue to advance in Britain without merit.

  fn8 Shakespeare never put ‘deemable’ in a play; it never actually became a word.

  fn9 These were indeed the titles of enormously popular sixteenth-century English madrigals. As is still the case today, many pop songs were about men’s attraction to women (although Thomas Morley did not refer to April as his bitch or comment on Flora’s fine ass and pussy).

  fn10 Early Shakespeare proves he was the Tarantino of his day.

  fn11 It would take another five hundred years, but eventually Will Kempe’s vision of comedies without either jokes or laughter would come to pass.

  fn12 Extremely boring musical interludes were indeed a feature of Elizabethan theatre. Scholars have speculated that these moments were very much seen as wee breaks.

  fn13 The debt which Abba, Queen and The Four Seasons owe Shakespeare has never been properly noted.

  fn14 Shakespeare protests too much. It is in fact a very, very long scene.

  fn15 Then, as now, some popular musical personages devoted much of their creative talent to avoiding tax.

  fn16 This may be the first recorded moment of what has come to be known as the ‘U2 feint’.

  fn17 Once more Shakespeare’s uncanny prescience makes him truly a man for all ages.

  fn18 Kate’s fears were to prove accurate. Our modern-age reality celebrities regularly release titles chronicling their long struggles with being self-indulgent arseholes before publishing another one the following Christmas.

  fn19 Shakespeare did not take Bottom’s advice and stuck with the entire passage, although all anybody ever remembers is the first line.

  fn20 Morley seems to have been the first popular musical star to claim an early struggle on the thinnest of evidence. He certainly wasn’t the last.

  fn21 This was a massive hit in the late sixteenth century, although the lyrics then, as in pop music now, were a bit crap and meaningless.

  fn22 Scholars speculate that Disney may have seen stolen excerpts of the Crow Folios and pinched the idea for The Lion King from Miss Lucy.

  fn23 Shakespeare reflects so many of our modern sensibilities. The one thing pop stars want more than anything else is to be knighted.

  fn24 Shakespeare eventually shortened the title. Sadly he didn’t shorten the play.

  fn25 This curious snobbery existed even in Shakespeare’s day. Pinter can be endlessly revived and ancient Gershwin musicals can be presented at the National and Disney can recreate their cartoons word for word on the physical stage all to great critical acclaim, but if some rock band has the gall to think that their much-loved melodies might be appreciated and enjoyed in a new and theatrical context, then apparently they’re sell-out bastards.

  Episode 5: Beware My Sting!

  fn1 Shakespeare does actors a disservice here. There is more to stage fighting than he describes. Besides circling and clanging, they also periodically come close together, pushing their swords against each other before both leaping backwards with a fierce cry as if the other has forced them back.

  fn2 It is useful to have evidence that Shakespeare was aware of the glaringly illogical and inconsistent nature of the ending of the Two Gentl
emen of Verona. This may finally relieve scholars and schoolteachers alike of the onerous duty of pretending it’s somehow clever.

  fn3 Shakespeare was right to hope.

  fn4 The double-death ending was of course inspired by the youth Florian in the first episode of the First Crow Folio.

  fn5 Bottom and Kate are right. The nurse is extremely irritating, requiring an inspired comic actress to breathe life into the clucky duckyness.

  fn6 Before the Crow Folios, scholars believed that the word ‘feisty’ originated in the late nineteenth century.

  fn7 Clearly Will was to remember this phrase and use it in As You Like It. In fact, it’s generally considered to be the most memorable line in the entire play.

  fn8 It is interesting to note that the status of actors in society has changed very little over the years, even though these days they get knighthoods.

  fn9 Many modern-day actors also feel this great responsibility.

  fn10 As mentioned previously, the fact that Shakespeare got two geographical details wrong in thirty-seven plays has led many pompous snobs to claim one so ill-educated could not have written such masterpieces.

  fn11 Many people have credited Shakespeare with almost second sight in his understanding of humanity but he certainly didn’t predict the Trump and Brexit campaigns.

  fn12 Christopher Marlowe may not have been much of a playwright but he would have made an astute literary critic.

  fn13 Bottom was right. Once again, this simple serving man proves himself remarkably astute in his analysis of his master’s works. Perhaps Shakespeare’s career would have been even more spectacular had he paid more attention to Bottom’s comments and advice.

  fn14 Astonishingly, the word ‘chauvinism’ was not coined until the late nineteenth century and is derived from the name Nicolas Chauvin, who was a particularly patriotic Napoleonic officer. Kate is therefore showing prescience even more incredible than Shakespeare’s own.

  fn15 Marlowe here refers to Queen Elizabeth, whose failure to take a husband led to the presumption that she died a virgin. Yeah. Right.

  fn16 Just as audiences ever after would be confused by the blinding insanity of The Taming of the Shrew.

  fn17 These are exactly the tricks that Petruchio plays on Kate in his Taming of the Shrew and which audiences have pretended to understand and find funny. It seems Shakespeare’s own daughter wasn’t so easily pleased.

  fn18 Titania would feature in Shakespeare’s later play A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Clearly he was already toying with the cloying whimsy which was to make the actual play such hard work.

  fn19 Queen Elizabeth was an able and prolific law-maker, involving herself in every type of social change with the single exception of helping out her sisters. This is a side of her character that those who seek to hold her up as a female hero conveniently ignore.

  fn20 The Taming of the Shrew was said to be Elizabeth’s favourite comedy. It seems Marlowe was right. Elizabeth had absolutely zero interest in empowering other women. In fact, the opposite: she wanted to be the single woman that counted in a world of men. Like Mrs Thatch.

  fn21 The crap other Elizabethan playwrights wrote for their female characters (if they had female characters at all) simply beggars belief.

  fn22 Which is absolutely the only way that this play can be enjoyed.

  Episode 6: Sweet Sorrow

  fn1 Theatres in Shakespeare’s time and indeed for long after were thought to be places where the pursuit of every vice was more important than the actual plays being presented. Anyone who’s sat through a Pinter play might well have wished that the tradition had not died out.

  fn2 Extensive literary research has led some scholars to conclude that there is nothing as boring as Henry VI Part 3. Clearly they hadn’t read The Merry Wives of Windsor.

  fn3 Shakespeare would be surprised to know that the theory is still going strong four centuries later. Although those who knew him probably wouldn’t be.

  fn4 Shakespeare is indeed credited with inventing these words and many others. Sometimes he actually could be pretty clever.

  fn5 This iambic pentameter obsession was a bit like a mental illness. Scholars have rightly asked the question: why? Just why?

  fn6 This line was to appear verbatim in the finished script and any modern copyright lawyer would claim at least partial credit for Bottom.

  fn7 This is indeed the only way to vaguely enjoy Shakespeare.

  fn8 John Shakespeare was wrong. People had and would continue to say more nice things about his son’s plays than any other writer who ever lived. Even if secretly they didn’t mean it.

  fn9 Scholars have long known that Shakespeare married Anne when she was pregnant but it is useful to have it confirmed.

  fn10 See the First Folio.

  fn11 The modern practice of company shareholders ruthlessly acting in their own interests and not that of their clients (in this case the audience) appears to be a long-established one.

  fn12 Much has changed in British theatre since Shakespeare’s day but this at least remains the same.

  fn13 To the casual scholar, this appears to be Shakespeare working on the line ‘Vanity, thy name is woman’. In fact, he never wrote this line. He wrote ‘Frailty, thy name is woman’ in Hamlet, which might be considered as offensive.

  fn14 Shakespeare often used this trick in his plays, having failed to come up with a convincing ending based on character and motivation. He would simply truck on some previously unmentioned nobleman to give the impression of drawing a proper conclusion. The only discernible upside of this outrageous feint is that it has given generations of tired old luvvie-kissies the chance of a speaking role.

  fn15 The Spanish Tragedy is a useful addition to the canon of Elizabethan tragedy because if ever students tire of having to wade through Shakespeare they only have to take a quick glance at this play to realize how much worse things could be.

  fn16 It seems that the actorish habit of humble-bragging their great art by constantly referring to it as a trade and a craft is much older than previously thought. Interestingly, these same actors do not claim to be but simple players when being shown to the best tables in restaurants.

  fn17 Some scholars on first discovering this passage in the folio were forced to concede that Kempe had a point.

  fn18 The actors Burbage, Condell and Kempe were the first people in history to fail to understand the weird shit that Romeo and Juliet gabble when they first meet at the masked ball. Countless audiences that followed would sympathize.

  fn19 Nobody has ever, ever got this in the entire history of theatre, which is probably a good thing as it’s even less funny if you understand it.

  fn20 One can only speculate at how brilliant Romeo and Juliet would have been if Shakespeare had listened to Kempe.

  fn21 Fortunate for Shakespeare that he never lived to be commissioned by Channel Four.

  fn22 This was true then and four centuries later (except when the tax authorities occasionally catch up with them).

  fn23 It is perhaps some small comfort to all actresses who have had to put up with worse roles and lower pay than the men that Shakespeare’s most famous lover was first played by a girl.

  fn24 This is undoubtedly true. Juliet was one of the first great heroines of drama to be identified entirely in terms of her attitude to the leading man. But she wouldn’t be the last.

  fn25 Shakespeare wasn’t the only one with remarkable powers of foresight.