Came in to work the other day and a coworker presented me with a book from her collection, Shakespeare’s Insults : Educating Your Wit. I had to admit, I do not have this one in my collection. Bit of history, when I wanted to teach myself Android app development I actually started out with a Shakespeare insult generator.

The book is definitely for reference, rather an a “How to Insult People With Shakespeare” sort of thing. Most of the chapters are a walk through play by play (or is it play-by-play?) listing everything that could be considered an insult. Unfortunately this ends up a case of “quantity over quality” and you get quotes like, “It out-Herods Herod” in the Hamlet section. An insult? Technically, sure, yes.  Does it sound like an insult out of context? Just barely. Or “Get thee to a nunnery?”  “If thou dost marry I’ll give thee this plague for thy dowry?”  Not so much insults and generally negative things.

You do what you’ve got to do to up the page count, I guess. I know that when I made my own statement against “love quote” collections by hand picking only those love quotes that could be used in weddings, I only managed about a 50 page ebook out of it. If a publisher told me to knock out 300 pages I’d probably do the same thing these guys did.

There’s about a dozen pages dedicated to insults for particular occasions – including fat, skinny, ugly, burping, farting….you get the idea. Not really what I’d think of as “occasions” but I’m just repeating what they called it.

There’s also a section in the beginning that’s more about how Shakespeare’s language worked in general, such as the few paragraphs on what exactly it meant to call somebody a “knave” and a “villain” and all the different variations Shakespeare used.  This part made me recall a conversation with Bardfilm over Coriolanus’ use of, “boy!” at the end of the play, how significant that was and how it might be played today.

Certainly a very good reference to add to the collection. There’s always opportunity to pull out some Shakespeare insults (just look at the recent Shakespeare Insult Challenge going around in the spirit of the Ice Bucket Challenge!)  It’s an older book (1995) so you might get lucky and score it on the cheap if you go hunting.

What’s your favorite insult?  I’m particularly fond of Kent’s rant in King Lear, mostly because I saw it live last summer and laughed until I cried. Imagine taking a deep breath and trying to do this all in one go:

A knave; a rascal; an eater of broken meats; a
base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited,
hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave; a
lily-livered, action-taking knave, a whoreson,
glass-gazing, super-serviceable finical rogue;
one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a
bawd, in way of good service, and art nothing but
the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pandar,
and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch: one whom I
will beat into clamorous whining, if thou deniest
the least syllable of thy addition.

I love how, after all that, including taking a shot at his mother, he ends with “And I’ll beat the crap out of you if you deny a word of it.”

Whenever I spotted a headline like “Coding is More Important Than Shakespeare,” I thought, “This ought to be good.” I think regular readers know me well enough at this point to know that I know both subjects quite well, and often cross them.

Here’s the thing. He didn’t say that coding is more important than Shakespeare (and he even returns in the comments of his original piece) to point this out.  The word Shakespeare appears just once in his original arguing, as does the word “programming”.  The word “coding” is absent.

It is a massive article by internet standards and, perhaps proving his point, most of the people who read it will not have the mental ability to understand it – and I count myself among those that don’t. I get his general idea that there is a set of “stuff people should learn” that is objectively more useful (and thus important) than other stuff.  He then goes into great detail with specific examples, and I’ll just say that poor Malcolm Gladwell does not come out of it well.

I like Khosla’s summary in the comments – “If there are 100 things you can learn, but you’ve only got space to teach 32 of them, how do you decide which 32?”  It’s a valid question that I ask myself regularly as I watch my children progress through school, knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that they will never again need to know half of what they’re being tested on. I think we should have more focus on finance, personally.

By the logic of practicality, I think he’s right. If you told me my kids’ school was going to offer programming or Shakespeare, I’d vote for programming. I think my life kind of proves that point, because I am not sitting here with a Shakespeare degree and self-taught in programming, but rather vice versa. This morning I had a conversation with the CTO of my company, who I learned used to be a theatre guy.

You have your entire life to learn whatever you want, and you shouldn’t ever stop. The debate isn’t over what is useful or important to learn – the original piece asks specifically about majoring in liberal arts.  You learn important things every day. No one is stopping you from learning Shakespeare whenever and however you want. But our society’s ability to place teachers in front of you, people who are paid to be there, in buildings that are paid to keep the lights on, and to provide you with text books and so on, for a certain period of time, is limited. We need to choose.

My daughter is in eighth grade and I believe the only Shakespeare she’ll see this year is Romeo and Juliet, at the end of the year, briefly.  When she goes to high school I’m led to believe that English lit is an 11th grade class, so I assume that if she sees any Shakespeare, that’s where it will be. But when it came time to ask about the curriculum I didn’t say, “Why isn’t there more Shakespeare?”  I said, “Why isn’t there more programming?” I wished there was more Shakespeare, sure. But, like Khosla said, if I’ve got two questions and only opportunity to ask one, which one do I pick?

I wish we could choose Shakespeare more often.  But I understand why we typically can’t. Why in the world do you think I’ve been exposing my kids to Shakespeare since birth? Did you really think I was going to rely on the system to provide it to them?  I consider it my job to educate my kids until a time where they can educate themselves.  The system merely provides some structure and filler for a period of time, intended to jump start them into the “real” world where, hopefully, they won’t fall flat on their faces as soon as someone stops holding their hand.

Bardfilm has done the usual amount of scholarly research for him and found this list of working titles that Shakespeare used for his plays.

Misogyny in Venice (Taming of the Shrew)

Four Weddings, and Hold the Funeral (Midsummer Night’s Dream)

Ebony and Ivory (Othello)

My Big Fat Greek Misogynist (Timon of Athens)

O, Henry (Henry VIII)

Four Funerals, and Hold the Wedding (Hamlet)

Call me Iago (Othello)

Whatevs! (As You Like It)

Throw the Pervert in the Laundry Basket (Merry Wives of Windsor)

So Many Twins (Comedy of Errors)

How to Win Friends and Influence Your Father (King Lear)

Everyone Wonders When Robin Hood will Enter (King John)

Guess Who’s Being Served for Dinner (Titus Andronicus)

Absolute Power Corrupts Folks in England (Any Henry Play)

Do you have any to share?  Use the Twitter hashtag #ShakespeareanWorkingTitles to make your contribution!

Our thanks for this guest post to kj, the author of Bardfilm. Bardfilm is a blog that comments on films, plays, and other matters related to Shakespeare.