Brit gets revenge on scammer by texting him all of Shakespeare

"My text will tell the anger of my heart, or else my heart concealing it will break," William Shakespeare might have written, had he just been conned out of £80 on Gumtree.

Sadly that bitter fate befell Edd Joseph, a young gentleman of Bristol, who resolved to indulge his inflaming wrath by sending the Bard's entire works -- 160 characters at a time -- to the dissembling knave who took his money.

Joseph was in the market for a second-hand PlayStation 3 and sent £80 by unrecoverable bank transfer to a scurrilous crook in Derby who never delivered the goods. (Never use bank transfers, kids!)

Having considered a more direct form of confrontation, our hero realised he could copy entire tranches of text from the Internet into a text message on his iPhone -- and thus overwhelm his enemy's mobile with thousands of messages.

Twenty-two plays have now been delivered, across 17,424 texts. Luckily, Joseph's O2 contract has unlimited messages, so it's not costing him a penny. O2 declined to comment on the story.

The swaggering rascal on the receiving end, however, has been less than impressed.

"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," Joseph told the Bristol Post. "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."

Joseph contacted the police and Gumtree, but neither held out any hope of a more traditional redress.

In total the complete dramatic works of Shakespeare will take 29,305 texts to transmit. "I'm going to keep doing it," Joseph said. "If nothing else I'm sharing a little bit of culture with someone who probably doesn't have much experience of it. I'm not a literary student, and I'm not an avid fan of Shakespeare but I've got a new appreciation you could say -- especially for the long ones."