4 - William Shakespeare

Summary

In Don Marquis’s enduringly funny Archy and Mehitabel, Archy interviews a parrot named pete who once belonged to the fellow who ran the Mermaid Tavern back around 1600, and who claims to have overheard Bill Shakespeare muttering one night over his pints of sack to Ben Jonson and Frankie Beaumont about his keen disappointment in having been obliged to earn his livelihood as a playwright when he might have been a poet. Archy reports this interview all in lower-case letters and without punctuation, because he is a cockroach pounding out his ruminations night by night on Marquis’s old typewriter, jumping from key to key.

… any mutt can write

plays for this london public

says bill if he puts enough

murder in them what they want

is kings talking like kings

never had sense enough to talk

and stabbings and stranglings

and fat men making love

and clowns basting each

other with clubs and cheap puns

and off colour allusions to all

the smut of the day oh i know

what the low brows want

and i give it to them

…

to think i am

debasing my talents with junk

like that oh god what i wanted

was to be a poet

and write sonnet serials

like a gentleman should