Great Julius Casear's Ghost!
Bust out the musty period costumes, strike up the minstrel band and commence to awkwardly misquoting and misinterpreting Sonnets 1 through 154! 'Tis bloody Shakespeare’s birthday! The original Will. I. Am., William Shakespeare was born April 23, 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon. While some University types suspect that this is not the actual, factual date of his birth, but rather an observed one, I say: What bloody difference does it make to a man four hundred years dead? We’re having a party and the court jesters are atop their unicycles, set to juggle! The birthday boy was born the son of a successful glove-maker, back when glove-making was still a popular major in the school syllabus and promised one gainful employment. The third child of eight, young William showed an early interest in animal husbandry, but he grew to take a human wife, who later protested being a writer’s widow when Shakespeare set up shop in coffeehouses for days on end, availing himself of the free transistor radio signal — the WIFI™ of the day — and scribbling incessantly on college-ruled parchment paper. A versatile, prolific poet and playwright whose works have been the inspiration for at least one horrifying Franco Zeffirelli film and have been translated into every major language, Shakespeare has long been considered the greatest writer in the pre-Twitternet™ era, an honour that now falls to the innumerable bloggers, phony memoirists and would-be authorists looking to self-publish their material on Kindle®. To the conspiracy theory types — such as straight-jacketed Australian tough guy Mel Gibson and deranged-but-thankfully-deceased cable news screwball Andrew "None too" Brightbart — who posit that there was no actual William Shakespeare, but rather, a collective of writers in a shared Regus® office space with a soulless conference room and bogus receptionist, I submit ‘twould have been news to mother Mary, who endured a lengthy labor sans epidural, given only a wooden bullet to bite on, and who was said to have exclaimed, “Beware the Ides of March, or possibly April!” as the Bard exited her body.
