Dear footnotes in 17th century literature,
I hate you with a ready passion, for you are pointless. Why should I care that a character in Dryden’s play has the same reaction to a similar situation as a character in a completely different play by a completely different author? You mean people act the same in similar situations? No, I don’t belief.
Yeah, it’s called basic human nature. Thank you very much for interrupting the flow of this god-awful piece of required crap to tell me something so trivial, menial and overall just pointless.
Why aren’t you ever helpful? You don’t tell me what “hasped” means here, but you explain that “slip” means “evade.” Really? All you do is take what should be a two-hour reading assignment and double it. Because I’m too afraid that I’ll miss that one time that you might clarify the language. Because that’s the question that will be on the reading quiz and that’s the question that will be the difference between passing and failing the quiz.
Hey, footnote author…here’s a piece of advice: since you love 17th century literature sooo much (you loser) why don’t you take the work and re-write it using 20th century language? Take out all the “asunders” and “by my troths” and “sirrahs” and just say what a normal human being in our time would say. Like when Westside Story made Romeo and Juliet suck less.
Why is it so important that we read Shakespeare anyway? Nobody spoke in iambic pentameter then, nobody does now. Shakespeare was never good. He was a racist, perverted fashion mishap who showed audiences that the proper way for a woman to behave was to be a chaste, giggling, Disney Princess. Oh, and it’s totally fine to murder your daughter if she’s “undone,” (which means raped.) Where are your priorities?!
But for some reason, if I want to major in English and be a writer I have to read, interpret, analyze a 453-page paper on the Philosophical Implications of whether the character’s name in Cymbeline is Imogen or Innogen. Because some crusty old scansion Nazi decided that this amazing piece of art is just sooo important. I mean, really…like there’s no way a person can get through life and become successful without reading Much Ado About Nothing fourteen times. All you need to know is right in the title. There’s a bunch of ado - mostly about nothing.
But we skip over Kundera. Nobody knows Palanhiuk. McDonough is ancillary at best. Nobody knows about the struggles of the promiscuous doctor in the communist Czechoslovakia. We never examine the troubles of a capitalist society obsessed with beauty and youth through the eyes of a burn-victim turned transvestite turned model. We never see the farce of terrorist rebel groups who murder cats to make their point. But we have to find the details of perukes, merkins and codpieces.
I’m starting my own university. It will be called I’m Better than U and all my graduates will go on to be the bosses of all the graduates of Yale and Harvard and all the people who can pick apart an analyze Pope, Swift and Milton. Because nobody cares if you can do that.
