Shakespeare: And In Act 5, Scene 2, I Will Sprinkle In The Fact That Horatio Is Gay

full offense but cis people dont get to call us shemales and trannies and femboys and traps and “its”, and campaign to “drop the T” in LGBT and deprive trans people of resources and beat the shit out of us in bathrooms and make fun of us for having “baby faces” and strip us of our rights and murder us for being trans and joke about how we “identify as an apache attack helicopter”, only to turn around and call themselves “allies” when they police OUR identities, just because they call themselves “cis transmeds”! i cant!! im not fucking allowing it!!!

I was so confused during today’s Drac Daily about this part in particular

Because that??? Bro, that ain’t Hamlet.

I went digging and found someone attempting to explain it:

If it is referencing this scene then it’s the part in the play where Hamlet says he’s going to throw everything off the table of his mind and focus only on revenge (this does…not work out for him).

BUT THEN

SO BASICALLY

B A S I C A L L Y

Stoker’s dumb acting friend MISQUOTED SHAKESPEARE loudly and often enough that it wound up in this novel????????

Exactly two (2) students in the history of Hogwarts were brave enough to call Minerva Mcgonagall “Purrfessor” to her face.

Sirius Black

Fred Weasley

obsessed with how edward ii essentially opens with edward sending his bf a letter that’s like “come over my parents aren’t home”

𝙽𝚘𝚟𝚎𝚖𝚋𝚎𝚛 𝟸, 𝟷𝟿𝟸𝟷 𝚃𝚑𝚎 𝙳𝚒𝚊𝚛𝚒𝚎𝚜 𝙾𝚏 𝙵𝚛𝚊𝚗𝚣 𝙺𝚊𝚏𝚔𝚊, 𝟷𝟿𝟷𝟺-𝟷𝟿𝟸𝟹

Member of the “Sorry, I didn’t hear what you just told me, because there are those two people talking 5 meters away, a child crying on the opposite sidewalk, and 3 cars passing by, on all of which my brain focused and put at equal volume in my ear instead of politely putting your sound first” squad

Here is what they don’t tell you:

Icarus laughed as he fell. Threw his head back and yelled into the winds, arms spread wide, teeth bared to the world.

(There is a bitter triumph in crashing when you should be soaring.)

The wax scorched his skin, ran blazing trails down his back, his thighs, his ankles, his feet. Feathers floated like prayers past his fingers, close enough to snatch back. Death breathed burning kisses against his shoulders, where the wings joined the harness. The sun painted everything in shades of gold.

(There is a certain beauty in setting the world on fire and watching from the centre of the flames.)

Hamlet: I sure showed those guys, huh?

Hamlet: Did you see how uncomfortable they got when I started crying?

One of my favourite bits of media history trivia is that back in the Elizabethan period, people used to publish unauthorised copies of plays by sending someone who was good with shorthand to discretely write down all of the play's dialogue while they watched it, then reconstructing the play by combining those notes with audience interviews to recover the stage directions; in some cases, these unauthorised copies are the only record of a given play that survives to the present day. It's one of my favourites for two reasons:

It demonstrates that piracy has always lay at the heart of media preservation; and

Imagine being the 1603 equivalent of the guy with the cell phone camera in the movie theatre, furtively scribbling down notes in a little book and hoping Shakespeare himself doesn't catch you.