Criticism that the classic doomed love story glorifies immaturity misses the point: Shakespeare was riffing on how people use the young/old binary to manipulate others.

The point of the play isn’t the exhilaration or the dunderheadedness of young love. Rather, the point is the language itself: the dazzling, disturbing rhetorical force of old/young, corrupt/innocent, experienced/naïve.

An Excellent conceited Tragedie…

Title page of the first edition.

Philip Davis pleasures his brain with shifting Shakespearean syntax, measures the results on an electroencephalogram, and finds evidence that powerful writing can literally change the ways in which we think …

Fascinating stuff.

Some interesting bits:

• Shakespeare was only 18 when he got married. His new wife was 26. All of the manipulative older women in his plays don’t reflect very well on Anne.
• The term ‘ham’–for an actor who overplays to the audience–originated during Shakespeare’s lifetime. The acting style of the period was highly formalized and gestural. ‘Ham’ refers to the old-fashioned style of strutting across the stage, exposing the ham-string of the leg.
• The ‘Nothing’ in Much Ado About Nothing of course refers to the sundry misunderstandings on which the plot is based. It also had a more indelicate connotation for 16th century playgoers. ‘Nothing’ was a slang term for female genitalia.
• In his will, he gave his wife the furniture and “my second best bed”. This sounds more provocative than it actually was, as guests usually got the best bed in a 17th century house.

Using Shakespeare’s original pronunciation brings out new meanings and innuendo.

Funny how simple sound shifts bring out dirty puns and double meanings!

1. “A pox o’ your throat, you bawling, blasphemous, incharitable dog!”
― Shakespeare, The Tempest

2. “I did not attend his funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.”
― Mark Twain

3. “Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.”
― Oscar Wilde

4. “He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends.”
― Oscar Wilde

5. “A knave; a rascal; an eater of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave; a lily-liver’d, action-taking, whoreson, glass-gazing, superserviceable, finical rogue; one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a bawd in way of good service, and art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pander, and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch; one whom I will beat into clamorous whining, if thou deny the least syllable of thy addition.”
― Shakespeare, King Lear

6. “She looked as if she had been poured into her clothes and had forgotten to say ‘when.’”
― P.G. Wodehouse

7. “The dress looked like it had been sown in a rage and put on in a tempest”
― Oscar Wilde, from The Picture of Dorian Gray

8. “There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.”
― Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist

9. “A strange horrible business, but I suppose good enough for Shakespeare’s day.”
― Queen Victoria (1819-1901), about  King Lear

10. “An unmanly sort of man whose love-life seems to have been largely confined to crying in laps and playing mouse.” 
― W. H. Auden, about Edgar Allan Poe

lascivious (lah-SIV-ee-es) — 1. given to or expressing lust; lecherous. 2. exciting sexual desires; salacious

Marcellus to Horatio and Bernardo, after seeing the Ghost,

Some say that ever 'gainst that season comes
Wherein our Saviour's birth is celebrated,
This bird of dawning singeth all night long;
And then, they say, no spirit dare stir abroad,
The nights are wholesome, then no planets strike,
No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm,
So hallow'd and so gracious is the time.

by William Shakespeare