The Twitter Poet of Avon
When the Poet of Avon, Mr. William Shakespeare, awoke this very morning, he stumbled headfirst into brevity. Twitter.
In doing so, he doomed all other English playwrights, a primarily sterile ladle of plagiarizing snakes, to drone on while in morbid awe of him for all eternity.
The notion of premièring himself on this afternoon, as the writer of fewest words, flung him into malicious merriment. “I am now and forever will be a port-wine reduction sauce of succinctness.
“My genius is the tabernacle of the truncated,” he boasted,” I will leave the breadth of things to the freshmen.”
“Verily,” he bragged (too loudly, for his mother, now overhears him while hiding behind his bedroom door), “and forever, my works will be posted with nails onto trees in twenty-six words and less and will be known to the audience as “tweets.”
Hearing this vow, his mother, the severely verbalized Mary Arden Shakespeare, dismays.
Mary was a woman who could trace her long-windedness as linearly as an erection, back to the most crucial exercise of unnecessary human print, “The Doomsday Book.” She feared her son was maneuvering into a near-criminal puddle of abbreviated verbal sulkiness.
She slumped, legs splayed into bunches of skirts, muttering miserably to herself (wholly in Old English, to her credit), “I will not allow him an eternity of pithiness of verse.”
But Bill speeds by her, determined to stop his life’s drudgery of taxing inventiveness before she can interfere.
“Romeo and Juliet” was already rewriting itself in his mind as a love story that lasts only as long as a stick of sassafras chewing gum.
“Romeo has the scheme, parents will be sorry; R. fucks everything up, big mess, J. is an idiot The End,” was all it needed to be.
Shakespeare sprints to Stratford’s Speaker’s Corner to announce the new course for England’s scholarly conversation.
“Forever on,” Bill bellows to a gathering crowd of the muddy, toothless, and lice-infested, “My tragedies and comedies will come to you now nailed on trees. To be read as “Twits.”
“Be it known that if it must be said, I will say it from inside the prison of twenty-six letterings or less. And all will carry a dollop of gruel for authenticity. Henceforth to be understood as my “gruel tag.”
“My histories, poems, and essays will remain on my Facebook page.”
William Shakespeare.
