If there’s one man who liked a bit of punning wordplay, it’s Mr William Shakespeare - you could say he was Bard to the bone. And so what better way to celebrate his birthday than by taking his deathless prose and forcing it into a series of increasingly terrible puns?

That’s exactly what @tes asked teachers on Twitter to do, using the hashtag #ShakespeareJokes. @MrWespieser must be congratulated for keeping his punchline in iambic pentameter. “What did Macbeth say when he met The Rolling Stones?” he asked. The answer, of course: “Is this Mick Jagger I see before me?”

Another Macbeth-based joke came from @SGGS_English, who tweeted: “Knock, knock. Who’s there? Ferris. Ferris who? Ferris foul and foul is fair.”

A virtual retelling of one of Shakespeare’s plays was suggested by @ColinStephens8, who mooted the possibility of renaming The Comedy of Errors as “404”.

In a pun so devilishly tortuous that the Bard himself would surely approve, @neilayates submitted this potential headline: “Man who choked on Paxo to claim for damages: `Much to sue about stuffing’.”

And our own favourite Shakespeare joke: “What’s Hamlet about? Four hours long.” Brevity may be the soul of wit; we, alas, are not. Sarah Cunnane

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