Tart up Your Shakespeare

(With Respects to Cole Porter)


Directors today in their liberty
Strive for originality;
To surprise us they revise with ease
Aeschylus and Euripides.
Into contemporary clothes
Sophocles or Marlowe goes.
And unless they alter what Molière meant,
Their egos cannot be content.
But at the avant-garde
The surest way of arrivin’
Is to tinker with the bard,
Whose mod directors are thrivin’.

Tart up your Shakespeare,
Update him somehow,
Tart up your Shakespeare
And the cynics you will wow.
If “epatez le bourgeois” ’s your motto,
Send King Lear to the heath in an auto;
When young Hamlet must punish high badness,
Cut all method right out of his madness;
Though the shrew for her own good’s a-taming,
Have her nudge-wink in feminist gaming.
Tart up your Shakespeare
And they’ll all kowtow.

Tart up your Shakespeare,
New relevance tout,
Tart up your Shakespeare,
So the public you can flout.
If a tragedy’s Coriolanal,
With Freud’s help turn it orally anal;
When Laertes weeps over Ophelia,
Make it incestuous necrophilia;
If the poet good friends would depict-o,
Turn them gay in flagrante delicto.
Tart up your Shakespeare
And you’ll gross them out.

Tart up your Shakespeare,
Revise him, and how,
Tart up your Shakespeare
And the cynics you will wow.
If Bassanio with Portia would tarry,
Make his motives at best mercenary;
When Iago maligns Desdemona,
Intimate that it’s her fault alone-a;
And because a sad tale’s best for winter,
Play A Midsummer Night’s Dream like Pinter.
Tart up your Shakespeare
And they’ll all kowtow.

Tart up your Shakespeare,
Update him somehow,
Tart up your Shakespeare
And the critics too will bow.
If the ingénue’s chaste and delightful,
Then portray her as sex-starved and spiteful;
If a line toward profundity’s leaning,
Use lewd gestures to upstage its meaning;
If the playwright’s own ending is happy,
Reconstruct it as tragic or sappy.
Tart up your Shakespeare
And they’ll all cry “ow!”
And they’ll all cry “wow!”
And they’ll all kowtow.


P.S. The upcoming Romeo and Juliet at the North Coast Rep will not be tarted up.