Much ado about nothing?

In Competition No. 2944 you were invited to imagine what characters from Shakespeare’s plays would have made of this year’s fulsome celebrations of the 400th anniversary of his death and supply a verdict on behalf of one of them.

How would the Bard himself have reacted to all the fuss, I wonder. In the expert opinion of Professor Gordon McMullan, director of the London Shakespeare Centre at King’s College London, he would have welcomed the publicity but been ‘baffled by the celebration of him as a person because at that time they didn’t have our obsession with biography or the idea that plays are a reflection of the life of a writer’.

Here’s what you thought some of Shakespeare’s creations would have made of it all. First word goes to Caesar by way of Alan Millard, who gets to stuff a prize of £30 in his codpiece. The rest are rewarded with £25 each. Carolyn Thomas-Coxhead, Brian Murdoch, Josh Ekroy and W.J. Webster are unlucky losers.
 

I, Caesar, have much cause to feel aggrieved
That he, four centuries on, should still be praised
When but two Acts and one short scene he gave
For me to strut and fret upon the stage;
Brief was my time, and brief my speeches too,
‘Et tu, Brute’ my piteous epitaph
While he bequeathed to lesser men than I
The best of all the great soliloquies;
As constant as the northern star I shone
Yet, though my time to shine was all too short,
The crown I was denied I offer him
And shall my future with these words ensure:
Long may men mark his anniversary —
So long as he lives, he gives life to me.
Alan Millard
 
Tomorrow, and the next day, and the next —
This sycophancy makes me sick at heart.
Four hundred years, but still he will not die!
The brains are out; that should have been an end,
His candle brief as any other man’s,
And yet this walking shadow struts and plays
Upon the stages of this idiot world,
Disgorging nonsense to the crack of doom.