Anent the storyteller

you’re right, I am looking a little stiff here, I should try to relax

You call that “chillin”?

I dunno, man,

When Shakespeare is flirting with Martha, the doctor says “We can all have a good flirt later”, and Shakespeare takes this to mean all three of them. He seems pleased at the prospect of flirting with the Doctor, suggesting he’s Bi As Heck™, and the Doctor picks up on this, mentioning the 57 academics thing, which is referring to academics who argue that Shakespeare was bisexual.

I mean yes, it’s definitely that, i.e. Shakespeare being bisexual, but it’s ALSO because Martha is black, and each and every time an academic argues that the dark lady was a black woman - most likely Black Luce, an African woman who ran a brothel in London back in the days - half of the ivory tower has a hissy-fit, and the other half, which only barely survived being shown multiple proofs of him having been bisexual, goes into cardiac arrest, because “not our precious Shakespeare”. 

There are two types of people on Tumblr right now

Some Wodehousian forms of address

Many and many a reader has asked that. When the story first came out, in the New England Magazine about 1891, a Boston physician made protest in The Transcript. Such a story ought not to be written, he said; it was enough to drive anyone mad to read it. Another physician, in Kansas I think, wrote to say that it was the best description of incipient insanity he had ever seen, and–begging my pardon–had I been there? Now the story of the story is this: For many years I suffered from a severe and continuous nervous breakdown tending to melancholia–and beyond. During about the third year of this trouble I went, in devout faith and some faint stir of hope, to a noted specialist in nervous diseases, the best known in the country. This wise man put me to bed and applied the rest cure, to which a still-good physique responded so promptly that he concluded there was nothing much the matter with me, and sent me home with solemn advice to “live as domestic a life as far as possible,” to “have but two hours’ intellectual life a day,” and “never to touch pen, brush, or pencil again” as long as I lived. This was in 1887. I went home and obeyed those directions for some three months, and came so near the borderline of utter mental ruin that I could see over. Then, using the remnants of intelligence that remained, and helped by a wise friend, I cast the noted specialist’s advice to the winds and went to work again–work, the normal life of every human being; work, in which is joy and growth and service, without which one is a pauper and a parasite–ultimately recovering some measure of power. Being naturally moved to rejoicing by this narrow escape, I wrote The Yellow Wallpaper, with its embellishments and additions, to carry out the ideal (I never had hallucinations or objections to my mural decorations) and sent a copy to the physician who so nearly drove me mad. He never acknowledged it. The little book is valued by alienists and as a good specimen of one kind of literature. It has, to my knowledge, saved one woman from a similar fate–so terrifying her family that they let her out into normal activity and she recovered. But the best result is this. Many years later I was told that the great specialist had admitted to friends of his that he had altered his treatment of neurasthenia since reading The Yellow Wallpaper. It was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked.

I’m leaning towards blind panic myself.