Happy Birthday, O' Upstart Crow

Last week, at least as far as we know, was Shakespeare's birthday (April 23rd, or at least we suspect so, since he was baptised on the 26th and typically it was a three day delay). If he were a vampire, he'd be 444 years old now, which would be weird on a number of levels. Putting aside for the moment any images of Shakespeare roaming the streets at night, marauding for flesh, I thought I might put my expertise in the English Renaissance to use and offer a number of things you might do over the next few days to help celebrate the bard's birthday, things that will help you relive those glorious days of Elizabethan and Jacobean London in which Shakespeare thrived:

1) Blame all venereal disease on the French, specifically syphilis, which you should simply call "The French Disease."

2) Use a silken handkerchief for a prophylactic. You might be historically rigorous and use some sort of silken bow or tie to cinch your "little gentleman's cloak," or acknowledge the unbridgeable divide between then and now by slapping a couple of rubber bands on for good measure.

3) Relieve yourself into a bucket or bedpan for as long as you can stand the stench, and then casually toss your "night soil" out a second-story window into the street below. Bonus points if at least some of your filth lands on a passerby.

4) Draw your sword on a stranger for an imagined slight. Here's a good one: "taking the wall" of someone meant walking alongside the wall when coming against someone walking the opposite direction, thereby forcing the stranger to take the far side and thereby inevitably walk closer to, or in, the gutter and all the delicious filth that entailed (see #3). So, the next time someone coming against you politely cheats towards a building/wall, quickly stab him or her in the stomach with your shank.

5) Accuse a neighborhood woman of witchcraft. One sure-fire way of identifying a witch, according to common practice, was to burn a piece of thatch from her roof. If she came running, that meant she was a witch. And honestly, and poor son of a bitch still living under a thatch roof nowadays needs that kind of excitement in their poverty-stricken life anyway. Ha. Poor people.

6) Torture and execute Jesuit priests for sneaking into your country and covertly saying Mass. Alternately, if you want to play at being from the continent, declare the Queen of England the Antichrist and try to assassinate her. So long as your religious fervor burns bright, either choice is alright!

7) Die by 35.

8) Make jokes at the expense of the Irish and the Scots. Excellent options include jabs about their barbarity, quips about their ignorance, or simply oppressing them as a people ruthlessly for hundreds of years. To Hell or Connaught, right, you limey pricks?

9) Attend an execution during your free time. While hangings and beheadings are, obviously, your best bet, a close second would be pelting people in the stocks with rotten produce, rocks, or any leftover night soil from #3. Either way, make sure to shout and gesture wildly as if you were hammered drunk at a baseball game.

10) Become a candy-striper at your local hospital. Should you, in your expert opinion, decide the patient has 'bad blood,' simply apply leeches or just cut them open at the inside of the elbow--you know, where your heroin goes. If you find an amputee immediately post op, help close the wound by shoving a red-hot poker against it, or if you've got a small cauldron handy, pour boiling oil over it. The tingles, and the screams of inhuman agony, let you know it's working!


Isn't being a modern boring? If only we could be Early Modern all the time. Now that's how I want to live...at least until I hit 35.