Cowards die many times before their death

I want to say something about Shakespeare. Some people shiver at the name. A girl on Million Pound Drop lost a shite load of money from not knowing that Romeo and Juliet is set in Verona. That town is so small, the only reason we know of it is because of that play. And what is known as one of the most famous love stories ever told is not actually a love story. If you read the epilogue, which you would have if you'd read the play, and even the Leo film has the exact same epilogue, except read by a Newsreader, you hear exactly what this story is about. Two families who have an "ancient grudge" which is reignited when their children elope, and only in their deaths can the families forget their strife. It is a tragedy, it is a play about humans and our simple yet destructive emotions: lust, love, hate, anger, jealousy, vengence. This is what Shakespeare did best, which is probably why this play is the most famous - he takes the very worst of us and entertains us with it. If you've ever read any of his early stuff, like Titus Andronicus, you'd see the twisted difference between him writing about the shitness in the world, and him just writing about death. I love the cruel twisted irony he constantly let his plays curl into, and the amazing sense of his immortality: he saw death coming, and he wrote himself into history. I love the way that his words are totally normal words, but people get so mixed up in the missing letters and double meanings that they give up before they've even tried.

Sonnets are complicated, and some of his plays do get story-heavy and confusing - A Comedy of Errors is a bitch to read, it needs to be watched, because the hilarity gets lost in half the stage directions. But I think Shakespeare could enlighten everyone, each a totally unique way, and inspire us to write about the world slightly different. If you read the passages below slowly, figuring out what each line means before getting scared of the next one, then you can see just how simple and honest his work really was. Shakespeare was all about life and death, and the mess that happens in the middle: anyone who thinks he was the most romantic man ever, or the inventer of new stories, or the beginning of some great era of plays, really needs to do a bit of studying. He's just a wordsmith, but a brilliant one nonetheless.

 Romeo and Juliet Epilogue:

Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life;
Whose misadventured piteous overthrows  
Do with their death bury their parents' strife.
The fearful passage of their death-mark'd love,
And the continuance of their parents' rage,
Which, but their children's end, nought could remove,
Is now the two hours' traffic of our stage;
The which if you with patient ears attend,
What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.