Sillybean

Friends, zombies, countrymen

In honor of the zombie literacy project. I could not resist the text my grad student, Ryan, suggested:

Friends, zombies, countrymen, lend me your ears;
For they are crunchy and delicious fried.
I come to bury Caesar, not to eat him.
The evil that men do lives after them,
The good is oft interred with their bones;
So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar was a zombie;
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Caesar answer’d it.
Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest–
For Brutus is an honourable corpse;
So are they all, all honourable corpses,–
Come I to speak in Caesar’s funeral.
He was my friend, faithful and just to me:
But Brutus says he was a zombie;
And Brutus is an honourable corpse.
He hath brought many captives home to Rome,
Whose bodies did the general bellies fill:
Did this in Caesar seem a zombie?
When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept;
A zombie should attempt to eat them:
Yet Brutus says he was a zombie;
And Brutus is an honourable corpse.
You all did see that on the Lupercal
I thrice presented him a tasty brain,
Which he did thrice refuse: was this a zombie?
Yet Brutus says he was a zombie;
And, sure, he is an honourable corpse.
I speak not to disprove what Brutus spoke,
But here I am to speak what I do know.
You all did love him once, not without cause:
What cause withholds you then to mourn for him?
O judgment! thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason. Bear with me;
My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar,
And I must pause till he cease to gnaw it.