1) People understand that your tights are a costume.
2) You think Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are silly names? Try drawing heat with a name like The Gobbledy Gooker.
3) Children won’t cry and parents won’t get pissed if they see Romeo having lunch with Tybalt after the show.
4) The audience doesn’t scream “WHAT?” every time Hamlet pauses during a soliloquoy. “To be…” WHAT?! “..or not to be.” WHAT?!
5) That blood on Julius Caesar is fake. The blood on Ric Flair, not so much.
6) Helena and Hermia can play their fight scene the same way every night. In WWE it’d be jello one week, then a hot tub, then a pillow fight … with less and less clothing each time.
7) Shakespeare never wrote a comedy sketch about necrophilia and honestly expected an actor to make it work.
8) Nobody chants “You screwed Falstaff!” when King Henry tries to speak.
9) When Hamlet leaps into the grave to fight with Laertes, he doesn’t have to do it off a 10ft ladder. Through a table. Backwards.
10) In both cases there’s a script, nobody really hates the other guy, nobody dies and nobody’s really trying to beat anybody unconscious. So how come when people find out you’re a Shakespeare fan nobody ever says, “You actually watch that stuff? You know it’s all fake, right?”
Now I really need a play directed in a WWE setting. Maybe Coriolanus? Have The Rock play Coriolanus 😀