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From Viagra To Shakespeare
The Literary Art of Spamming

7 August 2007

by Huw Collingbourne

Spam emailers seem to be steering a more literary course these days than hitherto. Once upon a time, the subject headers were pretty predictable – “Do you want a bigger penis?” or “Are your breasts too small?” being typical examples, occasionally spiced up with appeals to my avarice such as (to quite one of the classic spams of yesteryear), “Turn your washing machine into a cash cow.”

Assessed purely on the basis of my ‘spam profile’, it would seem that I must be greedy, fat, small of penis and of breasts, impotent, unhealthy (“Do you dream of being healthy?” being a common theme), a compulsive gambler, porn-obsessed and ready to drop everything at a moment’s notice and fly over to Nigeria to relieve various ex-ministers’ wives, deputies and close associates of millions of dollars of dubious dosh.

I can only conclude that I (and millions like me) have failed to respond to all these email temptations and, moreover, our spam-filters must be getting better at dumping them into our email waste bins. What else would account for the literary quotations with which spam email headers are now so frequently adorned? Here are two I received just this week...

“It must be getting riskier and riskier to open the Chamber of Secrets, with the school so alert and suspicious.”

I don’t claim to be an expert on the works of J. K. Rowling, but I’m hazarding a guess that this comes from a Harry Potter novel.

And then there was this one...

”I would to God my heart were flint like Edward’s, Or Edward’s soft and pitiful like mine.”

I confess, with shame, that I didn’t recognise this one. Indeed, my initial guess was that it might be taken from a Victorian novel. Mrs Henry Wood’s East Lynn perhaps (best known for its heart-rending... “Gone! And never called me mother!”).

Google helped me track down the actual source which turns out to be Shakespeare’s Richard III...

Gloucester: To fight on Edward’s party for the crown;
And for his meed, poor lord, he is mew’d up.
I would to God my heart were flint, like Edward’s;
Or Edward’s soft and pitiful, like mine
I am too childish-foolish for this world.

The email with this high falutin’ Shakespearean subject line was, in the event, trying to get me to buy cheap Viagra.

Damned cunning, these spammers...