I Whupped Shakespeare's Ass

As I've probably stated before, I'm an English major here in sunny Eugene, Oregon. I picked this major because English classes are the only ones I can take with any degree of enjoyment. (I'm also working on a Business minor, the classes for which keep my mood alternating between soul-sucking boredom and the intense desire to bludgeon my classmates indiscriminately.)

Anyway, if I ever slip through the fabric of time and have to go to college again, please remind me to take the Intro to the English Major courses before everything else. This term we're poring over Shakespeare with great care. Again.

This week: sonnets! Nothing but hot, sweaty iambic pentameter couplet-on-couplet action! I can dig the lecture part of the class, but the discussion section is horrible. Nobody wants to talk except for three or four of the girls, and all they want to talk about is blablablabla women in Elizabethan society blablabla kill Whitey blablabla was Shakespeare gay? blabla.

At first, I used my basic discussion section strategy and sat behind a guy with big shoulders. I spent a while drawing zombies in the margins of my notebook, but then the girls finally shut up and the GTF started analyzing the difference between Shakespeare's fair man and dark lady and I started to get an urge to write some poetry.

See, if you put me in a room with a bunch of iambic pentameter, I get an unholy hankerin' to write some. I have an eighty-line chunk of blank verse lying around here somewhere that was the effect of reading Paradise Lost and wanting to borrow my pal Spider's foot spa. That's right, three pages of metered verse about how much my feet itch. Maybe I'll put that up on Monday.

So sitting in class, staring at sonnets, I had a Brilliant Idea. Why does everyone like sonnets? Well, because they're on the syllabus they have a formula. Same reason people like to write bad haiku. Plus, people like that closing couplet at the end - almost like a punchline. What other verse form has a regular structure and a zinger at the end?

That's right: limericks!

I wrote five limericks based on Shakespeare's sonnets, which was actually pretty easy because I could cannibalize the rhymes and most of the rest of the line. Unfortunately, they got progressively dirtier as I went on, as limericks seem to do. Ah, well. No great loss there.

As I was finishing limerick number five and about to run out of space on my scratch paper, the GTF realized that nobody was paying attention to him and decided to take a poll.

"Who here likes the sonnets?" Listlessly, some hands went up.
"Okay, who didn't like the sonnets?" I raised my hand. I misjudged my peers' mendacity, however, and found myself alone. The GTF looked at me quizzically, as though expecting an answer.

So I gave him one. Bear in mind that public speaking makes me quiver and gesticulate wildly, in an effort to ensure that the audience is as scared of me as I am of it.

"Okay, look, nothing wrong with sonnets, right, but people today don't have TIME! Right? Right? So what has the same structure of a sonnet, kind of, except different? Rhyme rhyme rhyme rhyme kicker? That's right! Limericks! And limericks are only five lines, so assuming um five lines per limerick and fourteen per sonnet and saying for sake of argument they're all twenty syllables long (even though lines in a limerick are usually shorter) that's a savings of um um um um 64% in ink, paper and your valuable time! Here, see:"

And then I read my limerick adaptation of Sonnet 18, "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" Everyone was flabbergasted.

Okay, to be honest they were flabbergasted at about two sentences into my little speech. But now they looked kind of impressed.

"Could you read that again?" asked the GTF. I did, and he made some little motions with his pencil on his clipboard. Either he was taking down a line he liked, or he was circling my name on the roll sheet and making a note not to get me agitated. "Where'd you find that?"

Beaming with pride, I said, "I wrote it! Just now! Instead of paying attention! I have more, but they're all terribly dirty."

And that's when the bell rang. A couple of people in the class came up to me and asked to hear the dirty ones. These were people who knew me already, so they weren't afraid that I'd start biting them and twitching. After I finished my recitation, they suggested I share my timesaving sonnet/limericks with the world.

"Goodness," said I, "I know just the vehicle!"

Now, in a public service effort to improve the minds of the public, here are my Shakespearean limericks, in increasing order by number and by filth quotient. Links go to the original text (offsite). Not a substitute for reading the actual sonnet. Sonnets do not allow wearer to fly.

Sonnet 18

Art thou like a hot summer's day?
The winds ruffle flowers in May.
.....I think, 'stead of vernal,
.....I'll write lines eternal
Whose beauty will not pass away.

Sonnet 29
Disgracéd in all the world's eyes,
I weep and I rail at the skies.
.....I envy with glee
.....And I wish I weren't me
Until I remember your thighs.

Sonnet 71

Don't mourn for me when I am dead
And this world for the next I have fled.
.....If you think of decay
.....And the worms in the clay
It'll sure kill the mood in your bed.

Sonnet 127

In older times black was not fair,
Though darkness is now beauty's heir.
.....Still I can't do my duty
.....When I see my love's booty
Is covered with wiry black hair.

Sonnet 130

My mistress' eyes aren't like the sun;
Her breasts are a putty-like dun.
.....But, although she's not fair,
.....Worser still's false compare.
(Nice save! Now I'll still get me some.)