Marty Smith is an actor I’ve worked with a couple of time in the last fifteen years, and now I’ll be murdering him nightly – he’s playing Duncan in Mac. As a rehearsal challenge, our stage-manager has requested limericks about Shakespeare. Marty promptly won the game before the rest of us even started. I’ve gotten his permission to post them. Here are the first batch:
My name is Will Shakespeare, the poet;
If you’re literate surely you know it.
Put a bee in my bonnet,
And out comes a sonnet,
Or a play script, if I don’t blow it.
I writeth my plays in blank verses,
And earn withal handsome purses;
But an actor jejune
Speaks words out of tune,
No matter how much he rehearses.
One syllable short then one long,
Make an iamb to build me a song,
I think it’s divine
To use five to a line,
But sometimes e’en I get it wrong.
An ungrateful daughter of Lear,
Took to bawdy behavior, I fear;
She made Benedick swell,
And took Beatrice as well,
And let Falstaff in at the rear.
A licentious king of the Danes,
His escutcheon o’er flowing with stains,
Foul murder and sex,
Like Oedipus Rex:
Death’s all he got for his pains.
Petruchio came in by horse,
To woo shrewd Kath’rine by force;
He pursued and subdued her,
Then wed and well screwed her,
So she bankrupted him in divorce.
A duke in the forest of Arden,
Felt his lance do a dance, and then harden;
With no women around,
He sat on the ground,
And touched Touchstone right in the garden.
More tomorrow.
