My medic acquaintance (I hesitate to say “friend”) is slumped over her desk.  She’s been awake for 36 hours, revising about something laughably trivial like curing terminal disease. I bounce into the room and kick her chair to make sure she’s alive. I am a satyr at the masque. I am Miranda, Queen of the Fairies. I am a frolicking wood nymph. I prance for a bit in front of her crumpled form.

After a while, she looks up. Her face is horrifying. It’s all smeared with tears and mucus, and the remains of what looks like some kind of nasty empty carbohydrate. She looks like someone’s set fire to an effigy of Cyndi Lauper and just sort of let it dribble and coagulate.

“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”

She hiccups piteously. A lump of wet snot falls onto what looks like an incredibly complex diagram of a urethra.

“Out, vile spot!”

I spend the next hour trying to extricate a protractor from the depths of my left thigh.  A small price to pay for liberty.

Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your ears! Shakespeare term heralds the traditional opportunity for English students to rise up en masse from the perpetual tyranny of our slimy, Machiavellian academic peers. May their green-eyed chiding that we’re not doing a “real subject” comes back to haunt them, Hamlet-esque, to the point of a complex and questionable psychological breakdown as we gambol under the summer sun. No one really knows what the future brings. We may end up sleeping under bridges, using the tattered rags of our first novels as fuel to cook sewer rats.  But, right now, as Henry VI so nobly put it “we are the champions.”

Alarums and excursions abound.  Last week, we acted out the history plays with small ensemble cast of special trained ducks. Don’t get me wrong, it’s no walk in the park. Hedonism and ornithological antics can only take one so far. Turning pages is difficult. Sometimes I get eye strain, and have to whack on a DVD instead of reading a play. It’s basically the same thing as reading.

Also, it’s not as if we’re paying obscene amount of money solely to day drink in parks. We are most definitely learning. Did you know, for example, that Shakespeare employed a small army of marmosets to type up his last plays? Or was it capuchins. Either way, it made them much more poignant. Did you know that Pericles is actually the title of a Shakespeare play, and not just some sexy elf from game of thrones? Don’t strain yourselves readers. In the mountains of the mind, the air is thin.

When all’s said and done, it’s only fair. The rest of the year, we are the hardest workers in Cambridge by a country mile.  You see, English isn’t like maths or engineering. We have to use our souls. It’s tiring, challenging work. Supervisions are the stuff of nightmares. Once a boy said a word with four syllables in it, and had to be hospitalised immediately.  We wade through forests of symbols, calling out for our mummies and daddies to take us home to bed.  We try to get kudos by reading Baudrillard, and all of a sudden Disneyland is a trembling mirage of horror. Is Mickey just a mouse shaped amalgamation of cultural tags? Is Pluto a simulacrum, or just a really strange dog? Oh doctor, it hurts.

The bottom line is, if you happen to gaze out from the darkened cave of the library and spot a baby English student struggling to open their third bottle of Prosecco, please help them out. Spare a thought for our internal struggles, and not the kind that come from eating too many strawberries. Contrary to what it might look like, we are deeply, ineffably sad. Books have poisoned our minds with sorrow. We might wear stupid moccasins and kimonos, but inside our hearts are dying. If Shakespeare term has taught us anything, it’s that our existence is painfully meaningless, a baseless, dusty fabric rounded by a great sleep.  Now, if you’ll excuse me, I haven’t been drunk punting in ages.