🍺 The Bawdy Review "Shakespeare Still Slaps: Falstaff & Sir Toby Belch Take On Millennials, Gen X, and Poor Prince Hal"
Filed from The Boar's Head Tavern, by The Third Player
Dramatis Personae:
Sir Toby Belch – Professional drunkard, amateur philosopher.
Sir John Falstaff – Old rogue, bard of bellyache, wine’s loudest echo.
The Third Player – Pub owner and spiritual embodiment of ball-busting with a laugh.
Mistress Nell Quickly – The matronly barkeep, tolerant and sharp-tongued.
Malvolio – Still bitter, still pompous, at the far end of the bar mumbling into his lemon water.
SCENE: The Boar's Head Tavern. A rainy Tuesday in London, timeless and cracked. The air smells of ale, gossip, and roasted onions. A fire sputters in the hearth. Falstaff and Sir Toby sit hunched over tankards, booming with laughter. Mistress Quickly slides between tables with a tray. The Third Player wipes the bar with one hand and pours with the other.
FALSTAFF: (slapping his gut)
Give me a cup of sack and a child of ten shillings, and I'll show thee a man twice a prince and half the virtue.
SIR TOBY BELCH:
Peace, you swollen bladder of a knight. Methinks your liver’s written more tragedies than the Bard himself.
FALSTAFF:
Better a tragic liver than a comic soul with no coin. Prince Hal's lot? Ah, youth today—full of ambition but nary a bawdy bone between them.
SIR TOBY:
Aye, these Gen-X knaves and millennial moon-calves—so woke they sleep through pleasure. I met a lad last night who quoted Rumi unironically at a gin bar.
FALSTAFF:
A gin bar! Marry, where is the poetry in botanicals and glass? A proper pub must reek of sweat and dark humor.
THIRD PLAYER: (chiming in while pouring)
And of pickled eggs, gentle sirs. Speak on, you gallant codpieces. The people want truth laced with piss and vinegar.
FALSTAFF:
Then here's truth: Prince Hal did me dirty. Used me like an Instagram filter, then ghosted me like I was some ill-made meme.
SIR TOBY:
Join the club. The young folk now treat us as walking HR violations. I pinched a wench on the elbow and was accused of micro-aggression.
FALSTAFF:
Micro-? There's nothing micro about Toby Belch. The man farts in iambic pentameter!
SIR TOBY: (bowing slightly)
"O, knight, thou lack’st a cup of canary! When did I see thee so put down?"
FALSTAFF: (raising his tankard)
"A plague of sighing and grief! It blows a man up like a bladder."
(He burps like a foghorn.)
MISTRESS QUICKLY: (from across the room)
Sirs, your tongues are looser than your breeches. And Falstaff, if thou spill’st thy wine on my floor again, I’ll wring thee like a dish rag!
THIRD PLAYER:
Let 'em be, Nell. Their wit is drunk, and so am I. Shakespeare didn’t write for the virginal minds of TikTok. He wrote for us: the lewd, the lost, the lively.
MALVOLIO: (from his end of the bar, muttering)
The devil himself is in these knaves. I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of them. The world is mad, and thus the truth is drowned in ale.
FALSTAFF: (aside)
There speaks the spirit of LinkedIn, sober and sour.
SIR TOBY:
Come, come, Falstaff, let us compare the ages:
We had wenches; they have dating apps.
We had broadswords; they wield hashtags.
We danced to lutes; they… twitch to EDM.
FALSTAFF:
We lied in beds with jesters and awoke with poems. They lie in DMs and wake with anxiety.
THIRD PLAYER:
But methinks the Bard knew. His jesters always spoke truth with a dirty mouth. His kings were flawed, his youths foolish. Shakespeare anticipated Twitter, gentlemen!
SIR TOBY:
“A sentence is but a cheveril glove to a good wit—how quickly the wrong side may be turned outward!”
FALSTAFF:
And his comedies—zounds, they’re the original sitcoms! Switch the costumes for hoodies and you'll find Much Ado is just Friends with pentameter.
SIR TOBY:
And Twelfth Night? Pure gender-bending, mistaken-identity madness! Tell me RuPaul hasn’t done Viola in drag.
MALVOLIO: (still mumbling)
I’ll be revenged, I’ll wear cross-gartered vengeance…
THIRD PLAYER: (raising a glass)
Here’s to the Bard—still bawdy, still bold.
And here’s to the players—still drunk, still gold.
The kids may TikTok, the elders may groan,
But Falstaff and Toby still rule this throne!
FALSTAFF & TOBY: (together, arms around each other)
"Give me life, give me laughter, and a wench at my side—
For in wine and in jest, shall old truths abide!"
Editor’s Note:
If this newsletter offended thee—go f%$^k yourself-lol. But if thy heart beateth still for a dirty joke and a timeless line—subscribe, share, and send us thy favorite Shakespearean insult.