To Tweet or Not to Tweet

Over at Tengrain's place, the Patron Saint of Small Bloggers posed a hilarious challenge- come up with a suitably Shakespearean spoof to describe the current shitshow. The results in his comments were pure comedy gold. While I am on record stating that Shakespeare's Macbeth was an egregious hit piece, I will grudgingly admit that it is one damn fine play. Therefore, here is an expanded take on Tengrain's joke challenge, spoofing the infamous dagger scene in Macbeth Act 2, Scene 1:


Is this a smartphone which I see before me,
The keypad toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.
I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.
Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible
To feeling as to sight? or art thou but
A smartphone of the mind, a false creation,
Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?
I see thee yet, in form as palpable
As this which now I draw.
Thou marshall'st me the way that I was going;
And such an instrument I was to use.
Mine eyes are made the fools o' the other senses,
Or else worth all the rest; I see thee still,
And on thy screen and buttons tweets of bile,
Which was not so before. There's no such thing:
It is the bloody business which informs
Thus to mine eyes. Now o'er the one halfworld
Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse
The curtain'd sleep; witchcraft celebrates
Pale Vladimir's offerings, and wither'd treason,
Alarum'd by his sentinel, the wolf,
Whose howl's his watch, thus with his stealthy pace.
With Twitter's ravening screeds, towards his design
Haunts like a ghost. Thou sure and firm-set bowl,
Hear not my tweets, which way they wend, for fear
Thy very tiles prate of my whereabout,
And take the present horror from the time,
Which now suits with it. Whiles I tweet, he lives:
Words to the heat of deeds too cold breath gives.
I go, and it is done; the bell invites me.
Hear it not, Mueller; for it is a tweet
That summons thee to vict'ry or defeat.


Now hurry up Mueller and bring Birnam Wood to Pennsylvania Avenue!