Aye, there's the rube...

Ugh...guess what today is. No, go on guess. Huh? No, it's-well ok, fine, it is Tanzanian Arbor Day, and it's really weird that you know that, but that's not what I was thinking of. It's April Fool's Day and it's the worst, like the actual worst day to be on the internet. 

Which I think is saying something.

If you told me this was happening
right now, I'd probably believe you.

It's a day where everyone gets cute and posts hilarious joke stories which in a post-Trump world full of mass shootings, pandemic, and rapid climate change becomes a minefield of "is this real or is everything just really fucked up?" I personally blame the April 1997 issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly. It's functionally pre-internet, I know, but I think it established a precedent of printing semi-plausible nonsense as fact and then having a good laugh at how we all had our trust betrayed.

And thus a generation's cynicism was born. 

The issue, printed at the height of Street Fighter II's popularity, claimed that if players jumped through a complicated and quarter-draining series of hoops they would get to fight a secret final boss character called Sheng Long. No such character existed and rubes did indeed spend who knows how much time and money trying to pull it off only for the magazine to clue us all in later that the whole thing was a ruse. Which, I mean, as a bunch of dumb, internet-less barbarians, why or how would we even know to doubt this entirely plausible story? It was, in 21st century parlance, a jerk move and I believe inspired the current tradition of internet April Foolery.

Inauthentic, sure, but better than patrons
peeing in the corner. Which was a thing.

And here it is, not even nine a.m. and I've already encountered a similar funny, funny joke about a thing that sounds plausible but is definitely a lie. And from Shakespeare's Globe of all places, giving it the stodgy patina of authority. Shakespeare's Globe, if you're unfamiliar, is already itself kind of a lie being a replica of Shakespeare's theatre but with concessions to modernity like a sprinkler system, restrooms, and a blog. A blog from which sprung the claim this morning that archivists had discovered a long lost play by Shakespeare in the theatre's attic.

Yeah, the attic. Which, ok, admittedly in these early hours of the morning and for the briefest of moments I may--I repeat may--have not immediately recognized this as a hoax. 

Although the attic of a theatre built in 1997 does seem like
an unlikely place to find a quarto lost since 1603.

I relate a lot of things to
video games, what of it?

The head researcher quoted is called Dr. Will Tosh and Tosh is British for bullshit, and I should have spotted that earlier, but otherwise the story isn't all that unbelievable. The play in question is Love's Labour's Won, a sequel to Love's Labour's Lost. And it probably is or at least was a real Shakespeare play as it's referred to in first hand accounts from the time, though it's lost now. It's also possible that it's just an alternate title for some other play that we do still have (maybe Much Ado About Nothing), or that it never existed in the first place. Or it was stuck in the seventeenth century equivalent of development hell. Who knows? It reminds me of how people used to insist that there was a sequel to the The Goonies, but they're just remembering the NES game The Goonies II. Doesn't matter, the point is there may have been a play called Love's Labor's Won.

Above: the scene earlier today.

But leaving aside the absurdity of finding a here-to-for undiscovered, leather-bound copy of a lost play just lying around in the goddamn attic of a twenty-five year-old theatre, waiting to make some researcher's career, it's not as though this would be outside the realm of possibility. I mean, while not a newly discovered play, scholars did use text analysis software to attribute a play called Cardenio to Shakespeare as recently as 2015, so it's not like being dead has ever stopped the playwright from adding to his resumé. 

Look, I don't want to tell The Globe how to April's Fool, but this isn't really a prank. It's more like, I don't know, academic fraud is too strong a term, but it seems like they could've been more funny when it comes to making up a fake story, you know? Huh? No, I don't think I can come up with anything better, I just-fine, how about:

Breaking news: Shakespeare's Ghost Haunts The Globe.
Theatre staff reports he's actually kind of a dick.*

*What? No good? Fine, but it's not like I'm getting paid for this.