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Literally everyone circa 1590s-1600s: Mellifluous Master Shakespeare!!!! Honey-tongued Master Shakespeare!!! Sweet Master Shakespeare Shakespeare!!!! Cinnamon roll too good and too pure for this world Master Shakespeare!!!!
People writing Shakespeare fanfic/Anti-Stratfordians: But what if he were an arrogant narcissistic asshole, tho????? 👀👀👀👀
whenever someone calls USAmerican English the 'movie accent' I remember how somewhere last year I was on a train when suddenly the silence was broken by an american voice behind me somewhere and I immediately thought "Oh no, someones playing their tiktoks out loud again" and automatically turned around to put a face to my annoyance like you do when someones driving bad, and turns out a few rows down were just some actual in the flesh USAmericans having a nice conversation amongst themselves. I am sorry Americans I'm glad they let you out of the phone
VERY IMPORTANT a dam in the Netherlands, the weerdsluis lock, is directly on a migratory path for spawning fish. They have a worker stationed there to open the door for the fish, but they can take a while to open it. So to keep the fish from getting preyed on by birds they installed a doorbell. Only, the fish don't have hands to ring the doorbell. If you go to their website, they have a LIVE CAMERA AND A DOORBELL that YOU RING FOR THE FISH when they're waiting, and then the dam worker opens the door for them! I can't express how obsessed I am with this. look at this shit. oh my god.
Please check on the fish doorbell once in a while :)
the funniest meltdown ive ever had was in college when i got so overstimulated that i could Not speak, including over text. one of my friends was trying to talk me through it but i was solely using emojis because they were easier than trying to come up with words so he started using primarily emojis as well just to make things feel balanced. this was not the Most effective strategy... until. he tried to ask me "you okay?" but the way he chose to do that was by sending "👉🏼👌🏼❓" and i was so shocked by suddenly being asked if i was dtf that i was like WHAT???? WHAT DID YOU JUST SAY TO ME?????????? and thus was verbal again
Oh nooo I hadn’t noticed that my cat’s automatic feeder was getting low on food so as usual she dashed off when she heard the machine start but I couldn’t hear the usual sound of her food falling into the bowl so I went to look and my poor cat was just. Sitting there. Staring at her empty food bowl. Then for a second she glanced up at me then right back to her bowl with the biggest, saddest, most bewildered eyes you could ever imagine on such a small creature. I filled her bowl and the machine right away ofc but I still feel a little guilty 😭
You mentioned in the tags of one of your posts on Mercutio's (non-existant) sexuality that you're partial to the idea that he may have been inspired by Kit Marlowe; I want to hear all about this lol.
Also, do you have an Marlowe recommendations? I've heard good things so I would like to read some of his plays.
Oh, yeah, my Christopher-Marlowe-may-have-been-the-inspiration-for-Mercutio theory! Glad to talk about it.
So I’m definitely not the only one with this theory—some scholars have mused as much and I did come across them. But the case for Mercutio-as-Marlowe stands roughly as follows:
One of Marlowe’s nicknames was Mercury (!!). Now, Shakespeare clearly did not come up with the name, as he got it from his source material in Brooke et al. But as the Mercutio there was just some random courtier, I have no doubt that Shakespeare got an eyeful of that name in the Brooke poem and just 😏 and seized that golden opportunity to honor his friend in this way
By all accounts Marlowe was charming, erudite, intellectually edgy (an avowed Arianist and homosexual), with a nasty bit of a temper. Mercutio is much along those same lines
Marlowe and Shakespeare may have been friends as well as theater rivals, with similar backgrounds but (I suspect) opposite personalities and sensibilities—the iconoclastic Marlowe with the much milder Shakespeare. You see that same push-pull dynamic in Romeo and Mercutio’s relationship.
Mercutio was killed during his duel with Tybalt. Marlowe was killed while fighting with his fellow spies at a tavern/government safehouse in Deptford. So Shakespeare making Mercutio’s death off-stage may be a reference to Marlowe’s out-of-London death (and perhaps how Will came to find out).
So yeah, not much evidence, come to think of it. Just general vibes. Mercutio does have lines about dreams that are a reference to Thomas Nash, who was also friends with Marlowe and perhaps Shakespeare as well. But of course Shakespeare would make Mercutio a composite of his friends and not just limit himself to any ~one thing.
Against this is the fact that there is no clear evidence that Shakespeare and Marlowe knew each other. That said, the theater world was tiny and Marlowe wrote for Strange’s Men; Shakespeare may have been a player for them at the time. But it’s logical for many fangirls scholars to believe they knew each other and were friends/rivals and so forth.
As for recommendations, I’ve only ever read Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, which even got a Globe performance, and his Hero and Leander, a narrative poem along the lines of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis. I’m ashamed to admit that in class I mistook a passage from Hero for Shakespeare’s, an ignominy that will live in me forever until my dying breath.
But while Marlowe was never as great at character as Shakespeare, his verse was very good (if a little too regular with the masculine endings) and nigh indistinguishable from Shakespeare’s in the beginning. Also, Marlowe is 1000x gayer, even writing about Edward II and his forbidden romance with his favorite Gaveston. Hence his popularity in fangirl circles. If you like Shakespeare but feel he could have been more violent, political, and gay, Marlowe will be right up your alley. There have been tons of fanfiction about him, some notable ones of which are:
The Marlowe Papers (Barber)—author is a stupid anti-Stratfordian, but her verse is legit
A Tip for the Hangman (Epstein)—not feeling the main romance, but it was fun and well-researched
The Secret Life of Shakespeare (Morgan)—actually focusing on Will/Anne, but this version of Marlowe is my favorite. He is just as I’ve envisioned him
my mum forbade me to say anything to my dad about the top surgery thing, and it's just hit me how funny it would be if i got it done and didn't tell him and just waited for him to notice. i mean, what's he gonna say? "didn't you used to have tits?"