"What doth avail the tree unless it yield fruit unto another? l What doth avail the vine unless another delighteth in the grape? What doth avail the rose unless another took pleasure in the smell? Why should this tree be accounted better than that tree but for the goodness of his fruit?"

Mapping one deity onto another. The Stratfordian Christ-child: "Far from the sun and summer-gale, In thy green lap was Nature’s darling laid, What time, where lucid Avon stray’d, To Him the mighty Mother did unveil Her awful face: The dauntless Child Stretch’d forth his little arms, and smiled."

"MONTAGNE: And so you ended up using ground penetrating radar to look into his tomb. COLLS: Yes, absolutely. We were very relieved when the data did start coming back because it definitely confirmed that beneath the tombstone of William Shakespeare was in fact a grave."

"That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet” is plucked from Romeo and Juliet. “I know a bank where the wild thyme blows, / Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows” comes from A Midsummer Night’s Dream and “There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance... stems from Hamlet."

Adding a couple of Shakespeare birds to our Shakespeare daffodils and bumble bees.

"A modern adaptation of Shakespeare’s comedy The Taming of the Shrew, the 1999 teen romcom 10 Things I Hate About You stars Julia Stiles as Katarina Stratford, a misanthropic loner and stand-in for Shakespeare’s titular “shrew” Katherina, and Heath Ledger as the rebellious Patrick Verona,..."

'Whenever you talk about a “wild goose chase” or say something is taking “forever and a day,” you’re quoting Shakespeare... his work has formed the blueprint of everything from the plots and stock characters of your favorite rom-coms to popular ideas of the ideal couple.'

"Though this be madness, yet there is (some) method in it: as well as taking note of the mass of critical observations, I’ve been guided by my encounters with Shakespeare as a Telegraph theatre critic over the past 25 years." Thoughts? What are your 5 favorites? Least favorites?

Streisand quoting Shakespeare. Okay. Works for me.

"Each of the three texts will prove, upon closer inspection, to be three versions of Shakespeare's Hamlet — progressive revisions by the same author. * The names of Brahe's cousins Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern, however, do not come before the general public's eye until..."

"Anything they published, so long as it adhered strictly to the Stratford man, and portrayed him as the paragon of all that was admirable in human nature,..."

“Mr. Sedgwick wrote to me for a prayer for Sir Edward Vere.” To round out the story.

War is not a heroic affair.

Ben Crystal reads example passages from Shakespeare. The hillbilly pronunciation sampled on the *Beverly Hillbillies* was preserved in the isolated mountain valleys of W.V. The residents spoke mid-17th century English largely unchanged over centuries. *Root* actually rhymed with *foot*, etc.

'The beetle is furnished with two large membranaceous wings, which are protected from external injury by two very hard, horny wing cases, or, as entomologists term them, elytra. The old English name was “shard,”...' Patterson, *Insects Mentioned in Shakespeare's Plays*, 65-6.

The daffodil (Narcissus pseudonarcissus) is assigned to March in Bloom's *Shakespeare's Garden*. When daffodils begin to peer, With heigh! the doxy over the dale, Why, then comes in the sweet o' the year; For the red blood reigns in the winter's pale. Winter's Tale, IV. iii. 1

"Anything they published, so long as it adhered strictly to the Stratford man, and portrayed him as the paragon of all that was admirable in human nature,..."

"She gave strange oeillades and most speaking looks." *King Lear*, IV. v. 25 Cotgrave's French-English dictionary: "Oeillade. An amorous looke, affectionate wink, wanton aspect, lustful jest, or passionate cast of the eye,..."

...permit no Stage plays or Interludes to be played wherein either matters of religion or of the gouvernance of the Estate of the Commonwealth be handled or treated being no mete matters to be handled or treated upon, but by men of authoritie,... 1559 Proclamation of Qu. Elizabeth I

“Kill me a red hipped bumble bee on the top of a thistle.”— Midsummer Night’s Dream, IV.i.12. “The red-tailed bumble bee I speak of.”—Alls Well, IV.v.7. So much beauty and function fading into the past.

“Their claims of a relationship between their candidates' lives and the sonnets are contrived...”

“... works that did separately provide the bee texts of Elyot, North and Shakespeare...”.

“It is excruciating to be that boring (for soon you resemble what you do).

'From time to time, Shakespeare Authorship aficionados query after the name “John Lyly”. This happens surprisingly little given the outsized role the place-seeker, novelist and playwright played in the lives of the playwright William Shakespeare and Edward de Vere.'

"Even most people who assert that the Earl of Oxford was the poet and playwright Shake-speare (a group to which I resoundingly belong) do not seem to know that she was engaged, in 1598, to William Herbert, soon to inherit the Earldom of Pembroke,..."

"In October of 1601 De Vere begins to complain of his health again in letters to his brother-in-law, Robert Cecil, who was representing him in certain legal matters at Court."

Edward de Vere was Shakespeare is expanding!

Definitely, a lot of fun.

“The Countess’s description is consistent with the first epitaph written upon William Shakespeare.” I hope you will allow me to offer a non-conspiratorial Oxfordian alternative.

“The debate raged for some time: Had Shakespeare smoked pot? Tobacco? Both?”