Page 195: Shakespeare speaks!

Having been discovered, the hand behind Hamlet Special Edition responds with a couple of prescient quotes from the Bard:

Triumphs for nothing, and lamenting toys,
Is jollity for apes and grief for boys.

is spoken by Guiderius in Cymbeline, Act IV Secne II. In this context, the passage suggests that critics have reveled in making a big deal out of a trivial fact (the authorship of Hamlet Special Edition). Not only is it a #MonkeyReference, but it also suggests that a jolly time was had at the expense of a bunch of hairless apes.

Joseph Noel Paton illustrated The Quarrel of Oberon and Titania (1849) from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.

This is followed by Theseus’s lines from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act V, Scene I:

More strange than true: I never may believe
These antique fables, nor these fairy toys.
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold.

This passage deals with how there is no single “reality,” that all is subjective, often based upon the biased perceptions of lovers, madmen, poets, et al. This meditation on the malleability of reality reflects the main theme of The Billionth Monkey, and the last line about more devils than vast hell can hold gives us another #DevilReference to boot!