Cruel to be kind: Irreverently celebrating Shakespeare's birthday

Claudius (Craig Wallace, center), Rosencrantz (Romell Witherspoon, right), and Guildenstern (Adam Wesley Brown). Gertrude (Kimberly Schraf) pictured in background. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Folger Theatre, 2015. Photo by Jeff Malet.

T.S. Eliot lied! How can April be the cruelest month if it’s when we celebrate the birth and also, perhaps perversely, the death of William Shakespeare?

Maybe it’s not so perverse to acknowledge that Shakespeare was a man who, like all mere mortals, died. Maybe a dash of irreverence is the most reverent way to pay homage to a playwright who delighted in paradox, creating charming villains and combative lovers. Shakespeare also less-than-reverently pillaged such source materials as the histories of Holinshed and translations of Plutarch, taking what was useful, frequently changing it to suit his creative needs, and impertinently jettisoning the rest.

Perhaps impertinence is the only appropriate Shakespearean spirit. There are many examples of contemporary artists who have followed Shakespeare’s example, purloining his works for their own artistic purposes:

• Tom Stoppard, who famously plundered the plot of Hamlet for his worm’s-eye view of two of its minor characters in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.

• Mya Gosling, whose stick-figure web comic Good Tickle Brain is a fond satire of both Shakespeare’s plays and our ongoing dialogue with and appreciation of them.

• Author Jasper Fforde and songwriters Karey and Wayne Kirkpatrick, who each used the phrase “something rotten” from Hamlet as the title for two distinctively different projects: the former, the fourth book in the Thursday Next series of novels, about a literary detective who interacts with fictional characters who enter our world; and the latter, a very funny Broadway musical about Shakespeare’s fictional rival playwrights, Nick Bottom (!) and his brother Nigel.

• Devon Glover, aka The Sonnet Man, who fuses Shakespeare’s sonnets to the rhythms of contemporary hip-hop.

• Christopher Moore, who took the Fool from King Lear, named him Pocket, and created two comic novels featuring him as protagonist called Fool and The Serpent of Venice featuring characters from and surprisingly compelling back stories to not only Lear, but also (weirdly yet convincingly) The Merchant of Venice and Othello.

• Mark Rylance, who brilliantly ignored the supposed rules of speaking Shakespeare’s verse by choosing to sometimes stutter the words in his Tony-winning performance as Olivia in an all-male Twelfth Night, even going so far as to change the punctuation of one of Shakespeare’s most famous lines to one of surprise when he asks, “How now, Malvoli — ohh!”