Though we know little about the personal life of the great playwright William Shakespeare, it is understood that he was a shrewd businessman, ruthless in the name of his art, and that he well recognized his own genius. No doubt, he still had plenty of the common human flaws.

Don't believe me? Well here he is, in the flesh, coming tonight to a theatre near you.

"The Bastardization of the Bard," a clever, ribald comedy written and directed by Drew McGowan, is the latest offering of Bard In Your Own Backyard, the local Shakespeare society. It opens tonight (Friday) at the Studio Stage Door, downtown on 11th Avenue.

McGowan has set out to explore one of the lesser known of Shakespeare's axioms: If you set out to deliberately fail and end up succeeding, then which have you done?

The peoples of the Elizabethan Age in England were renowned for their love of language, poetry, creative invective and colourful slang. They also had a reputation for a dedication to the bawdy, and an unusual intersection of the normally rigid English class system. Towering over this period is the person of the great William Shakespeare (henceforth known as William).

Thus, the stage of "Bastardization of the Bard," is peopled with drabs, bawds, runagates, fine incony bloods, and coxcombs a-bousing and bolling 'til they must couch a hogshead, all with their exquisite fashion sense. In this London, a dose of strong poison will leave you with a crippling case of existential angst. In this violent, gallant time, it's not the size of the sword but the way that you use it. Organizing the mayhem to his own ends is the playwright.

William (Dave Prinn) is commanded by Queen Elizabeth (Susan Hanson) to write and perform a new play within one month, which will please her mightily. William, in the spirit of the Renaissance, can't pass up an opportunity to "stick it to the Man" (in this case, "the Woman"). He therefore sets out to create a play which will offend her mightily, for reasons of convoluted Shakespearean psychology. To summarize: He will "teach the queen the price of her ignorance towards true art," says he.

Of course, the price of failure (or success) will be the state-sponsored severed heads of William and his "producer" and right-hand man, Cyril (Mark Casey). William is unperturbed by the prospect, but Cyril is perturbed, very perturbed indeed, and grows increasingly desperate as disaster looms.

As for William's troupe of actors, whom history knows as The Queen's Men (Barnaby, Samuel and Worth, as played by Stuart Driedger, Dean Nicholson and Thom McCaughey), they are so distracted by their own foibles that they go merrily along for the ride, anticipating greater glory.

Then there are two wild cards, whom William recruits all the way from the mean streets of the slums of St. Giles, or some such hellhole, the two bawds Rachel (Ashlée Perrault) and Rose (Michelle Heinz), to compound his anarchistic, revolutionary, self-destructive scheme. Women acting upon the stage for the very first time? Perish the thought.

But even William is thrown for a loop with the introduction of Sir Alfred Kingsley IV, a veteran actor foisted on the troupe by Elizabeth's steward, the hapless Marsden (Joe Pereira). Sir Alfred Kingsley IV (Bud Abbott in one of his saltier roles) has peculiar foibles of his own. Here's a complicated mix indeed.

This "brilliant allegory for failure" and fine bowdlerization of the Shakespeare legend is pun-happy, allusion-heavy and sex-friendly. If you want to see if William's head ends up on a pike at the front of London Bridge, five pence is the challenge you must endure.

"The Bastardization of the Bard" features Bud Abbott, Dean Nicholson, Joseph Pereira, Ashlée Perrault, Dave Prinn, Mark Casey, Stuart Driedger, Thom McCaughey, Susan Hanson, Michelle Heinz , Chelsea Hanson and Jaxon Jensen. It runs March 4 and 5, March 9, 10, 11 and 12 at the Studio Stage Door. Tickets on sale at Lotus Books.

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