Mix your own drinks with recipes inspired by Shakespeare characters!
Two professors combined their love of cocktails with their love of Shakespeare to create Shakespeare, Not Stirred: Cocktails for Your Everyday Dramas, a collection of recipes with names like “Kate’s Shrew-driver” and “Othello’s Green-eyed Monster.” And they playfully illustrated it with images from the Folger collection, photoshopping glasses into the hands of well-known Shakespeare characters.
Shakespeare, Not Stirred authors Michelle Ephraim and Caroline Bicks.
In this episode of Shakespeare Unlimited, Rebecca Sheir interviews Caroline Bicks, a professor at Boston College, and Michelle Ephraim, a professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, about the inspiration for their book.
Listen to the podcast episode and then make “Juliet’s Emoji-to” and “Caliban’s Wrong Island Iced Tea” using the recipes excerpted below from Shakespeare, Not Stirred. Cheers!
Shakespeare, Not Stirred
Juliet’s Emoji-to
When you’re a teenager living in a Shakespeare play, you can’t just spew your emotions out on social media. Especially if you’re a young lady from a noble family, like thirteen-year-old Juliet Capulet. She has to cram all of her larger-than-life passions into tidy metaphors and controlled iambic pentameter lines. So when she’s freaking out about how her parents will never ever ever let her be with her One True Love because he’s a Montague and because they just don’t understand anything and don’t care about how miserable she is because they don’t even know what True Love is … it comes out as: “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other word would smell as sweet.” If only Juliet could have let loose in emoji. And then shared it all on Twitter. And Instagram. And Snapchat. And Tumblr.
- 2 oz. white rum
- 2 T. chopped mint leaves
- 1 ½ T. sugar
- 5 fresh cherries, pitted
- seltzer
- ½ lime, cut in four pieces
- lime wedge
Muddle mint, cherries, and sugar at the bottom of a heavy glass (if possible, one with a smiley face decoration). Add the lime pieces and muddle again. Fill glass with ice and pour in rum. Stir gently. Add a splash of seltzer, squeeze in juice from lime wedge and drop on top to finish.
Shakespeare, Not Stirred
Caliban’s Wrong Island Iced Tea
Spiked with three kinds of booze, this concoction is our tribute to Caliban, the native Prospero enslaves after he washes up on the shores of Caliban’s island in The Tempest. If Caliban had known how to speak Prospero’s language from the get-go, he could have told him: You’ve messed with the wrong island, Signor. Instead, Caliban loses everything to a usurping Italian who calls him a “born devil.” Eventually, Caliban does learn how to curse from the play’s intrusive colonizers—and how to drink, when a few more shipwrecked Europeans show up. Let our tropical version of the classic Long Island Iced Tea help you take back total cocktail domination at your next beach party. And we do mean your beach.
- 1 oz. Laird’s Applejack
- ½ oz. vodka
- ½ oz. Gosling’s dark Bermuda rum
- ½ oz. sour mix
- 2 oz. pineapple juice
- fresh pineapple for garnish
Mix ingredients together in a highball glass. Fill to top with crushed ice. Garnish with a pineapple wedge. Don’t share with anyone, even if they offer you cool stuff for it.
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