Ruining Shakespeare in One Line
I’ve been going back through old files and I found a lot of the Twitter short stories—microfiction—I wrote back in 2010/2011. It seems to have completely died out but back in the day there was a big trend of people writing fiction within the 140-character limitation. It died off long before Musk got involved so we can’t really blame him, but TwiX these days doesn’t seem the right place for whimsy and creativity.
I kept a file of some of them with a vague idea of trying to do something. It never manifested and my good friend Simon Sylvester very much cornered the market with his book 140 Characters.
Regurgitating twiXes is something comedians tend to get mocked for but one of my original intentions for this site was collecting all these disparate things—my fallen leaves—together in one place and these very much count. So, over the next few months, in amongst all the other stuff, I’ll share a few of them.
These ones were never actually posted online. The idea was “ruining Shakespeare in one line.” The origin of the idea lies in a lecture I witnessed at Aberdeen university when I was an undergrad. Paul Hewison did a lecture on King Lear for the mature students’ access course (people over the usual university intake age who wanted to get a degree but needed a route back into the habits of study). I was a tutor on the course. A member of the department would do a lecture on a classic text—A Streetcar Named Desire, Pride and Prejudice, for example—and four of us would then hold seminars where the students discussed the text, then went home and wrote an essay.
Hewison, something of a maverick in the department, began thusly (paraphrasing): “Cordelia. What a spoiled little bitch. What a stuck up cow. All she has to do is say ‘yes, Father, I love you more than my sisters’ and Lear divides his kingdom equally, there is peace in the land, no one goes mad, no one loses their eyes. Lear lives out his days bouncing between his childrens’ homes drinking himself to death. But no. Cordelia has principles. Cordelia is high-minded. Cordelia has a point to prove. Cordelia can’t just shut the fuck up for five minutes.”
There was panic in the room. The students were shocked, first by the language which lecturers tended not to use in their lectures, then by the thought that somehow they’d misunderstood the play. They’d read Cordelia as a good character, the principled one who cared for her father and valued the concept of love too highly to treat it so cheaply. In the seminar afterwards the discussion was all along these lines. I sat back and said nothing. What Hewison had sown took root.
This was the genius of Hewison’s lecture: He didn’t actually believe Cordelia was “a spoiled little bitch.” Rather he wanted to shock those students into realising that there’s more than one way to look at literature. That there are multiple readings and no correct answers. Cordelia is portrayed as sympathetic, likable, but does that make her right? While Gloucester is getting his eyes gouged out, wouldn’t the thought have crossed his mind, “Why didn’t she just say what her father wanted to hear and we could all have got on with our lives? Would that have been so hard?” A little white lie to avoid tragedy.
20+ years later, I still think of that lecture regularly, and apply his lesson to my own teaching style: our job isn’t to impart knowledge; our job is to awaken critical thinking. Students in Japan tend not to have much experience with debate in the school system. I’ve learned that asking two students to take opposing views gets us nowhere. They politely agree that the other has a valid argument and leave it there. But if I take a ridiculous, extreme, obviously wrong position on a topic then the class as a whole are often compelled to argue with me. They don’t like telling their peers that they are fuckwits, but they are very happy to tell me that I am. If my students leave university having learned only one thing—and many of them do—then it should be that you do not have to respect the opinions of someone just because they are older and in a position of authority.
Anyway, back in 2011 I was thinking about Cordelia and Twitter fiction and hit on the idea of ruining Shakespeare plays in a single line. “Yes, Daddy,” says Cordelia. “I love you more than my sisters do.” The play ends there, all live happily or unhappily ever after, as their character dictates. What about the other plays?
The main reason I didn’t publish any of them is that the conceit requires this lengthy explanation. Not ideal for Twitter. I also thought that I should do all of his plays, a one-liner for each, and then publish them all. I can’t. Some are so obscure only real Shakespeare nerds would get the reference. How many of my Twitter followers are au fait with the plot of Timon of Athens?
A one-liner that derails Henry VI part III? That, my friends, is a very, very niche joke. Others simply don’t work. A Midsummer Night’s Dream has so many subplots that a one-liner couldn’t possible cover them all. Even if you come up with a line that encompasses all the lovers, you’ve still got Oberon and Titania’s nonsense that starts the whole thing, plus Puck, and then the mechanicals. If someone can come up with something in 140 characters that does the job, I will doff my cap to you. To date, I have failed. Answers in the comments section.
Here, though, are the ones I stand by. Ruining Shakespeare in one line:
“He’s a Montague? As if!”
“Listen," said Benedick. "All joking aside, I really fancy you.”
“Should we tell him about the ghost?” “No,” said Horatio. “You know what he’s like. He'll only over-react.”
“Oops,” said Desdemona. “Wouldn’t want to lose that.”
“This clause here, the pound of flesh thing,” said Antonio. “This is metaphorical, right?”
“No, it's too risky,” said Macbeth.