A research team out of the University of California, Berkeley has determined that all productions of plays by William Shakespeare will be queer reimaginings of the original texts by January of 2030.
“We’ve seen the groundwork being laid for this over the last several decades,” said team leader Dr. Brenda Lark. “But, nonetheless, we were all pretty amazed by how imminently there will be absolutely zero straight Shakespeare productions on the horizon.”
“This is not some theoretical, abstract concept,” Dr. Lark said. “2030 is the near future.”
While Dr. Lark and her team of graduate students were not expecting such concrete and urgent results, no one on the project was particularly surprised by their findings.
“I mean personally, I haven’t seen or heard of a Shakespeare production that wasn’t a queer reimagining in years,” said Natalie Chen. “Nor had anyone else on the team. But, then again, we are in academia.”
Toward the beginning of the research process, it was anticipated that Shakespeare productions in liberal, urban hubs and college towns would skew extremely gay, but it was soon discovered that the productions of Midwestern high schools, puppet troupes, and semi-religious summer camps were also being queered at an exponential rate by theater students and their mentors.
“It is a phenomenon that is completely taking over,” said Dr. Lark. “So much so that in 11 short years, nothing else will exist.”
“Of course, we knew that there would be nary a straight Midsummer Night’s Dream or Twelfth Night left in 2019,” Dr. Lark continued. “But who could have guessed that King John or Henry V are being queerly reimagined as we speak. Even the Merchant of Venice, which we really shouldn’t be doing anymore anyway, but that’s a separate issue.”
The groundbreaking discovery made by Dr. Lark and her team has not made waves in any community.
“I’m not meant to editorialize in this way, but I was really happy with the results,” said Chen. “We obviously don’t need anymore wholly straight Shakespeare. I just hope that by 2030 people will stop coyly saying that they’re doing ‘actually sort of a queer reimagining’ because literally everyone is.”
Research indicates they will not.
