Primrose Road

This began when I asked my brother if there were any grounds on which I could legally tithe him, i.e. take 10% of his annual income.

B: "As my beneficiary, your only option is to kill me. But you'd have to wait four more years to do that, because that benefit won't apply until then."
Me: "But what if you get married before then and make your wife the beneficiary?"
B: "Then you'd have to kill her too."
Me: "Okay, great."
B: "Just remember, though, you have to kill her first, then me. That's the only way you can collect."
Me: "Of course! If there's anything I've learned from Shakespeare, it's the correct order in which you need to kill people in order to collect an inheritance."

I've decided to delete my initial "Shakespeare Fanfic of the Week" post and combine it with this one, because a weekly look at Shakespeare fanfiction is going to wear thin quickly. So all of my thoughts on the fun-and-exciting world of Shakespeare fanfiction are compiled in this post.

(Invented compund adjective to delete from own vocabulary: "fun-and-exciting.")

Groundrules:
(1) I'm an English teacher. I don't make fun of grammar, because grammar can always be worked on, and more often than not, I'm sure even the best writers make flagrant errors when they're posting something other than a final draft.
(2) If your piece of writing is referenced in this post, please comment and I will gladly send you a piece of my writing to make fun of in a public forum.

The ideas behind "Shakespeare fanfic" (write a character's backstory, imagine what events in Shakespeare's life might have informed his plays, create a love story for a character you think 'deserves' one, re-set a play in the 21st century) inform adaptations like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Shakespeare in Love, the Ghost-in-a-Pac-Man-machine, Canadian-accented Strange Brew (IMDB's plot outline says it all), as well as the "Unspeakable ShaXXXspeares" of Richard Burt's book.

Here's what I've learned thus far from skimming through a sampling of the 978 Shakespeare stories on fanfiction.net:
(1) Shakespeare's works translate remarkably easily into gay porn, but only if the writer is a sexually inexperienced teenage girl.
(2) Many plays were missing a long-lost, sparkly-eyed sister who saves the day and screws the protagonist (or antagonist). (See the clever Sparklypoo Harry Potter comic for an illustration of this principle.)
(3) Plot is secondary -- tertiary, even -- nah, who needs plot when purple-eyed Serenabelle Capulet can swoop down, remind Mercutio and Tybalt that they have always loved each other, and turn Romeo and Juliet into a comedy / 1AM Showtime movie / emo-licious short story?

The difference between many of the fanfics on the site and the adaptations/revisions I've cited in the first paragraph: self-awareness.

A few favorites:

Romeo und Julia Geschichten lügen:
My German's not quite good enough to get through this one, and the "Humor/Romance" heading suggests the author is probably trying to be ironic, but it seems to involve Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy falling in love while studying for a Shakespeare test in Muggle Studies class, and they somehow meet the "real" Romeo and Juliet.

Charmed/Macbeth Crossover:
In this story, the three witches from Charmed go back in time to prevent Macduff from entering a "time portal" and killing the modern-day "Prince of England." I think that Macbeth's frozen head wants teachers at all levels to explain the importance of close reading to their students. ::throws fireball::

Inside the Mind of Ophelia:
A look at the action of the play from ... well, inside Ophelia's head, told in "I Canst Writeth Quitely In The Style of the Bard" language. Case in point:

"I questioned, how can King Hamlet’s death be a brevity to those who loved and adored him? Is it not like the ocean water spraying upon the dry sand every minute, slipping away into the deep abyss of the great blue. Has anyone faith? Ay, no one is faithful these days. The only remorse I see is the remorse that sits upon my Prince Hamlet’s brow. Hamlet has taken his father’s death hard, a burden twice as heavy."

Besides the FEMnE (Fake Early Modern English), there's some expertly crafted dramatic irony too:

"I cannot imagine the great impact on my life if my father died. I would love to share Hamlet’s pain, but I simply cannot for I know nothing of what his pain feels like..."

Finally, this author renders Ophelia's madness as a series of stream-of-consciousness statements about silence, Laertes, and virginity: "ALAS, PURE HEARTED!" Personally, I'd have gone with Lisa Simpson's "NOBODY OUTCRAZIES OPHELIA!"