Oh my god how is this dated 2005 and I’ve not seen it? Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, done with Sesame Street characters. Tis just a textual piece – a script – not a video. But, still!

Curtain opens to show OSCAR standing on a balcony, staring glumly at a HAWK and a HANDSAW. A brass weathervane on the balcony is spinning; it stops at north-north-west for a moment, but ends up pointing southeast. ERNIE and BERT join OSCAR on the balcony.

BERT: Are you Prince Hamlet?

OSCAR: No, I’m a merchant from Venice.

ERNIE: Where’s Venice?

The weathervane spins back to north-north-west.

OSCAR: Of course I’m Prince Hamlet.

BERT: Prince Hamlet, we have a question for you.

ERNIE: We hear you’re having a bad month. We were wondering why that is.

OSCAR: Why am I having a bad month? You. have to ask why I’m having a bad month? Count von Claudius took away my trash. All of my lovely stinking trash. My whole foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.

Love it.

When I spotted this 11 Points article (via Reddit) that claims “11 Pieces of Evidence That Shakespeare Was Gay,” I thought, “Oh, lord, here we go again.” And at first read I thought, “Wow, terrible article with horrible points.”
Then I, you know, actually read it. And I’d like to think that this was the author’s whole point. First of all it’s a humor site. Second, his point is pretty plainly “Look, I have to make a pretty ridiculous leap before any of these can be considered evidence of anything, but the fact that I’m presenting them as research shows that people have, in fact, tried to make exactly this case with exactly these points.”
All the typical points are there — he didn’t love his wife, the sonnets are all about his love for another dude, too much cross dressing, you’ve heard them all before. A couple were new to me, though, like the urban legend that in the “original” Hamlet, the first letters of the last lines spelled out “I am a homosexual”? Come again? Given that there’s really no such thing as a single “original”, I’d still like to know what word supposedly started a line with the letter X.
Anyway, thought I’d post it and give the author a little acknowledgement for apparently being on the right and sane argument of the “We’ll never know for sure, and really, does it even matter?” debate. It’s an entertaining bit when you realize you’re not supposed to take it seriously.

Ok, the Bodycount game seems to be a clear win for Titus. So here’s version two of the game: which *play* has the highest onstage bodycount? The rules for this one are easier – how many bodies hit the floor? Note – dying offstage in this version does not count (Mercutio) unless your dead body is brought back on stage for some reason (Cordelia). So to kj’s point in the earlier thread, you can talk about the legions of dead all you want, but unless they’re lying at your feet, they don’t count. Somebody needs to go from on their feet to on their back.

While watching a commercial for Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s new movie, which looks like some sort of weird cross between “Falling Down” and “Death Wish”, I got to wondering about one-man killing machines. Specifically how people tend to joke about Hamlet being the bloodbath where everybody dies at the end. But, really, Hamlet only deliberately kills Claudius, no? He wounds Laertes, sure – but he didn’t know about the poison at that point. Likewise he sends R&G to their doom, but he’s not the one to pull that trigger. And Polonius, well, I suppose Polonius counts, but he was technically an accident. So we’ll mark Hamlet’s bodycount at 2, since even though he killed the wrong person, it was certainly his intent to kill somebody.
So, then, here’s the question. For onstage, mortal injury of another character, who has the highest body count in all of Shakespeare? I’m saying “onstage” on purpose, because the question really has more to do with how much killing the audience sees. So Macbeth’s murder of Duncan and the guards, for example, wouldn’t count.
Tybalt/Mercutio is why I called it “mortal injury”. Wounding somebody who then dies off screen? That counts.
I’m not familiar enough with each of the tragedies to count up accurately. Who wins? Richard? Titus?