Over in this thread, I came to the stunning and disquieting conclusion that Shakespeare was a pirate!
I’m too tired right now, but I’ll bet some of you can come up with some great Pirate Shakespeare plays and quotes!
He sure speaks the lingo … “Down with the topmast! yare! lower! lower! Bring her to try with main-course” [Tempest I.i.]
He swears like a pirate, too: “A pox o’ your throat, you bawling, blasphemous, incharitable dog! … Hang, cur, hang, you whoreson, insolent noisemaker!” [Tempest I.i]
Well, we all know that Shakespeare pirated his plays from Bacon (or Oxford or Marlowe or whoever).
I am a Pirate. Hath not a Pirate booty? Hath not a Pirate hooks, peg legs, parrots, eye patches, swashbuckles, pieces of eight?–fed with the same pirate food, hurt with the same blades, subject to the same scurvy, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not “Arrrr”? If you tickle us, do we not hoist up the Jolly Roger? If you poison us, do we not visit Davy Jones’ Locker? And if you wrong us, shall you not walk the plank?
Alto – thwap
And of course there are pirates in Hamlet (though we never see them onstage), Pericles, and 2 Henry VI. Antonio in Twelfth Night is accused of being one though he certainly doesn’t act like it. 
And there’s a dead pirate in Measure for Measure (though he doesn’t get to haunt anyone)…
You, my friend, are a genius. If this weren’t so long and if I weren’t afraid to cut it, I’d pilfer it for my sig locker on the Ted.
Coincidentally, perhaps, John Barton of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s version of Shakespeare’s dialect is kind of close to what we might think of as pirate. There’s a hard R, a fairly flat vowel sound, and not too much nasal resonance. It’s a bit of a mix of Irish, Australian, and American.
To be, orrrr not to be!
Shakespeare was up on how to navigate by the st[arrrr]s:
O no! it is an ever-fixed m[arrrrr]k
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering b[arrrrr]k
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Hee hee. Only on the SDMB.
Mateys, swabs, old salts. Lend me your Arrrs…
…Wether 'tis nobler in the mind to endure the grapeshot and muskets of outrageous Spaniards, or to take arms against a sea of booty…
I thought this was obvious from his early play, “Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate’s Daughter”…
‘A zombie pirate robot ninja monkey. What could be more perfect?’
Avast! -'Tis- perfection, mateys!
I have new inspiration for the next batch of illustrations when I really ought to be working heh heh heh.
Thanks be to ye scurvey dawgs, BuckleberryFerry and Dewey Cheatem Undhow.
-end pointless post
(but it was kind’ve about piracy, kind’ve. And isn’t all inspiration about piracy?).
El Danger Djinn!
-peril of the low c’s-
‘A zombie pirate robot ninja monkey. What could be more perfect?’
Avast! -'Tis- perfection, mateys!
I have new inspiration for the next batch of illustrations when I really ought to be working heh heh heh.
Thanks be to ye scurvey dawgs, BuckleberryFerry and Dewey Cheatem Undhow.
-end pointless post
(but it was kind’ve about piracy, kind’ve. And isn’t all inspiration about piracy?).
El Danger Djinn!
-peril of the low c’s-
‘A zombie pirate robot ninja monkey. What could be more perfect?’
Avast! -'Tis- perfection, mateys!
I have new inspiration for the next batch of illustrations when I really ought to be working heh heh heh.
Thanks be to ye scurvey dawgs, BuckleberryFerry and Dewey Cheatem Undhow.
-end pointless post
(but it was kind’ve about piracy, kind’ve. And isn’t all inspiration about piracy?).
El Danger Djinn!
-peril of the low c’s-
aw crap!
sorry.
Sigh no more, mateys, sigh no more,
Tharr be a pile of treasure,
A trip to the sea, and back to shore;
And we be men of leisure.
Then sigh not so,
But shout Yo Ho,
And be you blithe and bonny;
Convertin’ all your sounds of woe
Into Ahoy there, matey.
Tom-arrr-ow and tom-arrrr-ow and tom-arrr-ow creeps in this petty pace
from day to day, to the last syllable of rec-arrr-ded time…
Savvy?
Oh Brave New World, that has such loot in it!
We arrrr such stuff as dreams arrrr made on!
And Phibbus’ carrrrrr
Shall shine from farrrrrr
And make, or marrrrr
The foolish Fates!
And yet of comfort no landlubber speak:
Let’s talk of waves, of worms, and parrots;
Make flesh our paper and with cutlasses
Write “Avast!” on the British colonists,
Let ‘em choose executors and talk of wills:
And yet not so, for what can they bequeath
Save their defiled bodies to Davy Jones’ Locker?
Their lands, their lives and all should b’long to us,
And nothing can they call their own but death
And that small model of the barren earth
Which serves as paste and cover to their bones.
All murder’d: for within the three corn’d hat
That rounds the mortal temples of a pirate
Keeps Death his court and there the Bandit sits,
Scoffing at States and grinning at gallows!
'Course, he had to make some changes to get it into Richard II.