Word: elizabethans
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...sensible person would do. He left town. Then he pushed that limit, took those risks, to become king. And Fate tripped him up. Just like Newman and Redford, or those test pilots who crash in flames early on in The Right Staff. But not just like Macbeth, the ultimate Elizabethan screw-up. Anybody who's taken a high school Shakespeare class knows that Macbeth brought on his own tragedy. True, Lady Macbeth was the impetus for that saying. "Behind every successful man is a strong woman," but Lord Macbeth would have done it without her. He was too damned ambitious...
...Markey isn't as eloquent as Macbeth, but when he ignominiously quit the senate race last week, he screwed up Elizabethan style, with nobody to blame but himself. That's why in the past week and a half the local press has done nothing but rain down moralistic criticism--swatting Markey's hand and swiping his but at every opportunity. "Markey's Retreat," is the title of this week's Phoenix meditation, in which Markey is condemned as a "suitor scorned--actually not even scorned, but merely afraid of being scorned..." The Boston Herald's headline let the survivors speak...
Suppose you wanted to modernize Shakespeare, pull him up by his Elizabethan pantoffles and bring his 37 plays into our more streamlined age. Do not ask why you would want to engage in such a bootless enterprise; just assume it was your task. Well, first you would change the thees, the thous, the thys and the thines. Instead of "O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?"-one of the Bard's most famous questions-you would have Juliet ask, "Wherefore art you Romeo?" The archaic verb must go as well, of course, and what you wind up with...
...scholars. In his "To be or not to be" soliloquy, Hamlet asks himself why he should bear fardels. We would now say burdens and so, probably, would Shakespeare. Thus, in a Hamlet for 1984, "Who would fardels bear?" becomes "Who would burdens bear?" See? Anybody who has studied Elizabethan English, who has lots of time to waste and possesses a Falstaff-size ego can do it. Exit anybody. Enter A.L. Rowse, who proclaims himself "the world's leading authority on Shakespeare and his work" and who has made all these changes and more...
...historical pastiche in which Shakespeare, with Ben Jonson's connivance, manages to insert his name in the King James translation of the 46th Psalm ("Though the mountains shake . . . He cutteth the spear . . ."). The other, The Muse, tells of a scholar from an alternative universe who time-travels to Elizabethan England to verify Shakespeare's authorship of the plays. The scholar meets a bad end, but his copies of the plays fall into the hands of the Bard, who blithely plagiarizes them...