“I Am Shakespeare” (comedy) 1 Minute

Monologue Description: “I Am Shakespeare” is a comedy about a man who thinks he is the real William Shakespeare.

Character Description:  In this monologue, Shakespeare is a man who believes he is actually the real William Shakespeare.  He prances around Union Square Park in Manhattan and talks aloud to people and anything that will listen.  He speaks with a terrible English accent and the fact that he is drunk does not add to his blubbery.

SHAKESPEARE:

Behold, I pray you!  Lend me your ears!

I am Shakespeare, Willy, Will Shakespeare…

We are swollen men.  Men who have been drowned and kept under water for centuries.  Look at yourself cousin.  A man who can only be wiser from the burdens you have come to bare.  What a shambles!  Your brothers, they think they have gotten away with their wrongs.  Tis a mockery!  Tis a joke!  Tis a slander!  These two buffoons who neither tither nor thither, come as one to fight against the good spirits of angels.  EH!  Such lunacy!  Such infantile delight!  They have wronged their last man!

(beat)

(he looks at a young boy eating and sniffs in the air)

Is that a fig newton I see before me?  Tis nobler in my mind but more so in my belly…

(burps)

Yea.

Revenge shall be mine.  All the worlds afoul, gone wrong, dead.  Oh pitty me sir, pity me madam, pity me Christ and pity me pity.

I am who I say I am in this drunken stupor of madness.  Judge me not for I am Sir William Shakespeare, the great English writer of, of, of England or London or somewhere or other.

(recites a half ass poem)

The pain of man,

from her wretched heart,

the quick of man,

stunned from every start,

and on and on and on we go…

Back to Yorick!  Good day!  I bid you Adieu!