Wherefore art thou "wherefore"?

A few months ago I played Bards Dispense Profanity with a bunch of friends. For those of you who don’t know, it’s the Shakespearean version of Cards Against Humanity. It has quotations from Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets on the white cards, and the usual CAH prompts (plus some Shakespeare quotes to mad lib) for its prompt cards.

A of mine friend that has never read Shakespeare, drew a quote from R&J as a prompt (“It is the East, and Juliet is the  _____?”), and had a lot of trouble deciding which card won the round because she had no idea what the reference meant. The group, composed mostly of English majors (hence why we were playing in the first place), took a 15 minute break to give her a micro-lesson about about it. A highlight of the discussion: She didn’t believe us when we told her that the word “wherefore” means “why.”

English majors when you ask what something means

(She ended up picking a card with a piece of poetry about the sun because we told her that the full line was “But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?/It is the East, and Juliet is the sun” (II.ii.2-3). It was my card. I won that game.)

The next day, I hung out with that friend. At one point she brought up the game from the night before and why I was so interested in Shakespeare because it had always seemed so boring to her. I told her that most of Shakespeare’s plays, even the tragedies, are at least one-third dick jokes and another third petty insults. She didn’t believe me. We went to a used bookstore, found a copy of Romeo and Juliet, and sat on some sofas and went through some of the highlights of the play.

Here is a small selection of innuendos she didn’t get from the first two acts:

• The first Montagues we meet are joking about taking Capulet women’s virginities.
• Romeo is so sad at the beginning of the play because Rosaline’s “strong proof of chastity well armed” (I.i.219) means he can’t “ope her lap to saint-seducing gold” (I.i.222), i.e. get into her pants.
• Juliet is Romeo’s rebound. She deserves better (as do most women in literature).
• Mercutio tries to “conjure” Romeo from the orchard by taunting him with sex jokes.
• The Nurse offers to get a ladder so that Romeo can give Juliet a booty call on their wedding night.

My friend is still not exactly a Shakespeare fan, but she did enjoy our conversation. The whole exchange made me realize that Shakespeare’s plays might be popular in the same way Saturday Night Live is popular if we changed the culture surrounding it and better explained what key words and phrases mean.