I’m heading out later this morning to go see Ian McKellan in King Lear, so perhaps this would be a good day for a Lear-related anagram. Let’s see what happens if I rearrange Lear’s powerful storm monologue into a glib weather forecast.

From King Lear:

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks!
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Strike flat the thick rotundity o’ the world!
Crack nature’s moulds, all germens spill at once
That make ingrateful man!

Shift around the letters, and it becomes:

Now, the AccuLuck rundown. AccuLuck has a glacial tornado-threshold unsure storm advisory tomorrow. We suggest to shun rain and lack hail. Shut up in a lovely daughter’s house. Thursday’s outlooks have staler luck with a sure percent chance of buckling king madness by lunch, but a likely redemption tilt at night. Friday, expect cutthroat deaths and restored order in time for the long weekend.

A quick word of explanation may be needed for this one.

Beatrice and Benedick both have speeches in which they “realize” that the other is in love with them and they decide to requite the love. Just for fun, I condensed and reworked Benedick’s speech to be an anagram of Beatrice’s.

Who says anagrams can’t be romantic?

From Much Ado About Nothing:

What fire is in mine ears? Can this be true?
Stand I condemn’d for pride and scorn so much?
Contempt, farewell! and maiden pride, adieu!
No glory lives behind the back of such.
And, Benedick, love on; I will requite thee,
Taming my wild heart to thy loving hand:
If thou dost love, my kindness shall incite thee
To bind our loves up in a holy band,
For others say thou dost deserve, and I
Believe it better than reportingly.

Shift around the letters, and it becomes:

Love me! why, ’twill be kindled. They hinted the lady is dandy: ’tis so; and wise, but for that she loves: say ’tis no indictment to her folly; I can horribly love her in turn. I could chance have some odd dumb quirk in divine wit undertaken, for I railed so long against marriage; but do not desires change? Can invented paper bullets of the brain divide man from the career of his hope? No; the continents must be peopled.

If you like, you can compare it to the original speech here (around line 90).

Sonnet LV:

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rime;
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone, besmear’d with sluttish time.
When wasteful war shall statues overturn,
And broils root out the work of masonry,
Nor Mars his sword nor war’s quick fire shall burn
The living record of your memory.
‘Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity
Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room
Even in the eyes of all posterity
That wear this world out to the ending doom.
So, till the judgment that yourself arise,
You live in this, and dwell in lovers’ eyes.

Shift around the letters, and it becomes:

Through brilliant sonnet rendered fifty-five,
Our poet really gives his honored trust,
In vows to quill his subject still alive,
While royals’ crypts in stone shall fall to dust;
But in short times who really truly knew,
Some simpler verse should many moons endure?
Imagine what this tribute should construe,
If real immortal fame were promised sure.
Fans read with universal lilting rote,
To wonder who that dreamboat could have been
Who should inspire this sonorous rhymed note,
As boy Fate slyly’s rolling such a grin:
All fame went to the author of that rhyme,
And not this unknown person lost to time.

Three quickies to hold anagram fans over for the week…

From Henry VI, Part One:

Is my name Talbot? and am I your son?

Shift around the letters, and it becomes:

Man, Mom is undeniably too astray.

From Henry VI, Part Two:

The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.

Shift around the letters, and it becomes:

Will tell false king to let shyster death whir.

From Henry VI, Part Three:

Off with his head

Shift around the letters, and it becomes:

The ho said “Whiff!”

From The Taming of the Shrew:

This is a way to kill a wife with kindness;
And thus I’ll curb her mad and headstrong humour.
He that knows better how to tame a shrew,
Now let him speak: ’tis charity to show.

Shift around the letters, and it becomes:

Society’s firm laws today would arraign him as a spousal abuser, but the times had no sense to think that women had inherent worth, which wilts the world with KKK hate.

From Henry V:

O! for a Muse of fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention;
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene.

Shift around the letters, and it becomes:

Be kind now and forgive this, our feeble enhanced figments of normal historical events, a great tale confounded with hotshot actors among cheap sets.

From Julius Cæsar:

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Cæsar, not to praise him.

Shift around the letters, and it becomes:

Marc Antony’s memory turns sour; oration is remembered for us in the encyclopædia.

From Henry IV, Part Two:

I know thee not, old man: fall to thy prayers;
How ill white hairs become a fool and jester!

Shift around the letters, and it becomes:

The newly-anointed Henry was too rehabilitated to hallo his former fellow Jack. Poms!

From Troilus and Cressida:

The ravish’d Helen, Menelaus’ queen,
With wanton Paris sleeps; and that’s the quarrel.

Shift around the letters, and it becomes:

The writer’s quill had spun equal enemies’ warpaths that have seen lands not here.

From The Comedy of Errors:

We came into the world like brother and brother;
And now let’s go hand in hand, not one before another.

Shift around the letters, and it becomes:

Both the worn globe-wanderer and the torn homeowner learn the locations of their abandoned kin.