“The Way To Dusty Death” is also an Alastair MacLean book, for those of you who enjoy trashy thrillers.
(MacLean also gave us the much better “Guns of Navarone”, “Ice Station Zebra” and “Where Eagles Dare”)
There was a page in an old National Lampoon wher they took a speech from Shakespeare and turned every line into the title of a book, with a brief description of the book.
What Shakespearean play was “Ice Station Zebra” from?
Don’t you remember? In The Life and Death of King John, King Phillip mentions he has troops biovacced in Ice Station Zebra.
A Winter’s Tale, obvs.
Exeunt, pursued by a polar bear
Aside: The one time I saw that play was at Montana Shakespeare in the Parks, and they did an excellent job with that stage direction. The bear wasn’t actually seen, just heard, and we saw the actor’s reactions to it, but he was acting so well that you almost could see it. And this being Montana, it was of course a grizzly, not the black bear that ol’ Will probably had in mind.
Too bad bears of any sort aren’t found on Sicily. Not like Will was a stickler for accuracy.
Many people don’t realize that bears are not a natural species in North America. They were introduced by a Shakespeare lover who felt that every animal mentioned in his plays should live in America. So he released two bears into Central Park in 1890. The two bred and soon there were millions of them, overrunning New York City. To save themselves, the survivors gathered in the southern tip of Manhattan and erected an improvised defensive wall to keep the bears out. The bears, unable to get at the people, turned away and migrated throughout the rest of the country. The survivors re-occupied the city and the site of their wall was named Wall Street.
The Winters’ Tale isn’t set in Sicily. Shakespeare only has two settings for his plays, Around Here and Foreign Parts. The Winters’ Tale is one of the ones that was set in Foreign Parts. Where exactly doesn’t matter; it’s just not Around Here.
I’d heard that they brought in ferocious bulls to drive the bears out, and the first area to be so cleared was the market square.
The bulls drove the bears out of New York and west to Chicago and they’ve lived there ever since.
The tribe of early New Yorkers that survived the bear attacks not only swung hickory clubs at them, but developed an almost balletic ability to duck and weave to avoid the claws. Their contemporaries called them Dodgers…
Cf. the first act of P.D.Q. Bach’s opera The Abduction of Figaro, which takes place in “a town on the seacoast of Spain or Italy or somewhere.”
Legend has it that the tribe migrated west to seek their fortune in the warm California sun, but a handful remained behind. They haunt the subways throughout the city, always one step ahead…
And, somewhere, somehow, RFK jr got involved.
Eating the alligators they catch.
At some point, there were bears in Sicily. Google helpfully tells me that they disappeared somewhere between the late Pleistocene and “several centuries ago”.
This isn’t true. Bears have been in North America since the last Ice Age. The black bear, the brown bear, and the polar bear have been native to North America since at least then.
Vro-o-o-w!
Sometimes you get the joke…sometimes the joke gets you.