Parody Shakespeare Quotes

To explode or to implode - said Qwfwq - that is the question: whether 'tis nobler in the mind to expand one's energies in space without restraint, or to crush them into a dense inner concentration and, by ingesting, cherish them. To steal away, to vanish; no more; to hold within oneself every gleam, every ray, deny oneself every vent, suffocating in the depths of the soul the conflicts that so idly trouble it, give them their quietus; to hide oneself, to obliterate oneself; perchance to awaken elsewhere, unchanged.

Well, what do you know? Fakespeare!

CREONTA: Rope! My rope! Hang those two thieves by the neck until they are dead. THE ROPE: Alack, but vile and ill-natured female! Upon wherein did thine affections tarry when I didst but lie here and rot for many a year? Nay, but those fellows tooketh care to remove the wetness that didst plagueth me of late and hath laid me upon the cool ground to revel in a state of dryness. Nay, I wouldst not delay them in their noble course for all thine base and bestial howling. CREONTA: Then, you, dearest donkey, precious beast of burden, tear those two apart and eat their flesh! DONKEY: Nay, but alas for many a season didst you but keep the food of the tummy from me and my mouth when it was that I required it of you. These fine gentlemen of fortune didst but give me carrots of which to partake which I did most verily and forthsoothe with merriment. I havest decided that thou dost suck most verily and no longer will I layth the smackth down in thine name but will rather let such gentlemen as these go free of themselves. TRUFFALDINO: [To the audience.] Well, what do you know? Fakespeare!

Sam laughed. "One of these days you're going to forget your lines and have to thribble, and it's going to come out in Yorkshire-ese." He put a hand to his brow, in a parody of the way I played Ophelia in Hamlet. "'Gog's blood! I wis some scanderbag has brast his noble costard wi' a waster!'" He yodeled the last word in imitation of my uncertain voice. I tried to scowl at him, but my features kept wanting to break in to a grin. "You sot! I'll never again be able to do that scene wi' a straight face!

Nashe, the city’s most feared and fearless satirist, once compared the closing stanza of Harvey’s latest poem to a fart after a bowel movement. Nashe also transformed Shakespeare’s exalted Venus and Adonis into a porn parody about one man’s epic attempt to bring a London prostitute to orgasm using a dildo. Constantly offending authorities, forever on the run, Nashe jumped pen name to pen name: Cutbert Curry-knave to Pierce Penniless to Adam Evesdropper to Jocundary Merry-brains. A pamphlet got him tossed into Newgate Prison, a satiric play forced him to flee London. A friend and collaborator of Shakespeare’s, Nashe died likely of the plague around 1601, two years after the queen thought it prudent to set his life’s work ablaze in a great bonfire of lost lewd literature.

Shakespeare’s pen was dipped in courtly scandals and his audience titteringly aware of who it was being pulled apart onstage. Nobody was safe from his satirical barbs, not Elizabeth’s hunchbacked secretary of state Robert Cecil, whose deformities were likely parodied in Richard III; not the powerful Lord Burghley, ruthlessly mocked in Hamlet as the Alzheimered Polonius; and not even the queen herself, who once snappishly complained of having been roasted in Richard II.

Whoever he or she was, ‘Shakespeare’ would have enjoyed the debate.” It was true. Shakespeare reveled in parodies of patronizing scholars, puffed up on their own authority; in fools who turn out to be fonts of wisdom; in disguises and mistaken identities and things not being what they seem.

We all know Shakespeare occupies a paradoxical place in contemporary culture. On the one hand his work is revered: quoted, performed, graded, subsidized, parodied. Shakespeare! On the other hand – cue yawns and eye rolls, or fear of personal intellectual failure – Shakespeare can be an obligation, a set text, inducing a terrible and particular weariness that can strike us sitting in the theatre at around 9.30 p.m., when we are becalmed in Act 4 and there’s still an hour to go (admit it – we’ve all been there). Shakespeare is a cultural gatekeeper, politely honoured rather than robustly challenged. Does anyone actually like reading this stuff?

If we bloggers have offended, Think but this, and all is mended, That you have but wander’d here While this wordage did appear. And this sprightly, vigorous theme, No more yielding but a dream. © 2025, Stewart Stafford. All rights reserved.

In every decade, up to and including until Dylan’s last album, thus far, of self-penned material, 2012’s The Tempest, Shakespeare appears in Dylan’s songs. The Bard of Avon appears in parody, in allusion, in burlesque, as a touchstone, in quotes and intertextuality that ranges from a light touch to being central to a song’s meaning. The same is true of Dylan’s prose and film scripts and, with increasing frequency as the years have passed, Shakespeare has been used by Dylan, in interview, to offer revelatory insight into his own working practice.