YOU'RE ALRIGHT I GUESS

Imagine being a millenial with actual feelings.

Shall I compare thee to a summers day
Or would you rather I not
Both are ok

Shall I profess my feelings in rhyming verse
Shall I compare them to the universe

Because they're deep and wide and ever expanding
And your company is never... demanding

But, whatever you prefer, I must confess:

You're alright
I guess

Cover art is a 1542 CE woodcut illustration by Andreas Vesalius, succinctly named: Figure of the heart rolled toward the right side but also showing the recurrent laryngeal nerves.

Historical footnote

If you recognise the first line of this, that’d because it is taken from Shakespeare’s seminally famous Sonnet 18. While there has been lots of debate about The Bard’s identity (as in was he just a pen name for a collective of other famous playwrights, because apparently being Christopher Marlowe just wasn’t good enough), there is an equal and opposite amount of consensus that the majority of his 154 Sonnets, including Sonnet 18 were addressed to another man who was, by popular theory, the 3rd Earl of Southampton.

This represents the sum total of interesting things about Southampton, aside from maybe that really big Ikea they have.

While Shakespeare’s Sonnets to Southampton (relationship status: It’s Complicated) collects the first 126 Sonnets, the subsequent 30-odd (127-152) are addressed, in desperately horny terms, to a Dark Lady. Just in case you were worried that things are going too well by this point, you’ll be glad to know that Billy S accuses said Dark Lady of having bad breath, worse skin and a funny walk.

Also, in an act of breathtaking charity, his actual own wife is only mentioned once in any of the Sonnets and, even then, she barely warrants a footnote despite bearing him three children, being a playwright herself and sharing her name with The Devil Wears Prada protagonist and Catwoman actress Anne Hathaway.

In fact, if you’d like a stark example of historical inequalities, please note above, where Shakespeare (maybe) gets a proper portrait painted by a proper painter and his wife gets what looks like a quick scrawl on the back of a napkin (ok, it is allegedly a 1700s copy of an early portrait of her but you get what I mean).

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