When it’s not practical (or legal) to unseam someone who’s done you wrong from the nave to the chops, why not use Shakespeare’s words as weapons a bit less literally? A man who says an Internet seller ripped him off by not delivering the goods after he’d paid him used the Bard himself for revenge by way of a whole lot of texts.

The 24-year-old from tells The Bristol Post over in ye olde England that he was angry over a PS3 and some games he never received. And because he paid by direct bank transfer, which is against the site’s terms and conditions, his purchase wasn’t protected.

When the police proved to be no help either, he took matters into his own hands, literally: Using a Shakespeare iPhone app he was able to copy and paste Shakespeare plays into text messages with a few swipes.

For each play he sends, he only has to hit “send” once, and his phone then breaks everything up into individual, 160-character messages (of course, he has an unlimited texting package as well).

So that means for the 37 works of Shakespeare, the seller will receive about 29,305 texts. The guy has sent 22 so far, including Hamlet, Macbeth and Othello.

Peeved at not receiving his stuff but realizing he didn’t want to go the creepy route of finding out where the guy lived and using that against him, he decided just to be super, super annoying. Not that we condone such behavior, of course.

And it sounds like the seller is pretty ticked off.

“I got the first reply after an hour, and then a few more abusive messages after that. His phone must have been going off pretty constantly for hours,” the sender says. “But recently he has taken to calling me and giving me abuse on the phone. I tried to ask him if he was enjoying the plays, but he was very confused.

Despite the negative feedback from his literary revenge, he says he’s going to keep doing it.

“If nothing else I’m sharing a little bit of culture with someone who probably doesn’t have much experience of it.”

Was it his fault for violating the TOS of the site? Probably, after all — buyer beware when you choose to go against those terms. But it’s still not cool to take someone’s money and give nothing in return. Just call it Revenge of the Bard.



You can follow MBQ on Twitter where she would gladly read some Shakespeare if that’s what gets tweeted: @marybethquirk

Bristol man gets revenge by texting works of Shakespeare to rogue internet seller [Bristol Post]