[Entry from William Shakespeare’s recently discovered blog, “Honour’d in the Breach”]

Well now I’m not so sure workshopping Shrew was such a great idea.

Like I said the other day, I was really looking forward to the new group. I’d been working with the others for like SO LONG that we were all starting to get on each other’s last nerve, you know? (“Do be or don’t be”? Puh-LEEZE.)

So I’m sitting in the tavern at that table in the back. And every time the door swings open I’m like totally checking out the newcomer, wondering if it would be Bacon, deVere, or Greville (so-called Lord Brooke). Marlowe I knew from the old group of course and wasn’t crazy about bringing him along to this one. (Drunken sod, if I had to lay a shilling I’d say he’ll die in a tavern.) But he was already there. Not with me, of course, at the bar. Chatting up the strumpet of the day, and a right loony Ophelia she was too.

Bacon strode in first. ‘Struth,I knew him by reputation right enough. He had every bit the swagger I expected, and lacked every bit of wordsense you need in a good workshopper. By evening’s end he had us all pretty pissed, except for Marlowe who’s always pissed anyway. On the other hand the boastful cock did come up with “Gremio,” the “Gresio” I’d been using always bugged me. Too much the slur on the Eye Tees, you know? So “Gremio” it is.

I had high hopes for deVere. I’d heard so much good about the man. He certainly knows his words, and he certainly knows (ha ha) his Queen. I did like much of what he had to offer but eventually concluded he had, like, too much to offer. When he told us about the bloke he borrowed the 500 Cs from I seized ‘pon it at once and made him Kate’s da. Then we all had a good beery laugh like old chums about Bertie and deV’s sister and I managed to put some of that in, too, and the stuff about Italy, well, a little local spice never hurts and Christ knows I cannot supply any of that meself. But then deV got greedy. Started on that piggish swill about “A Shakespeare/deVere Production” and he wasn’t jokin’ neither. Who’s the think he is? Pox him, I say. Pox him soundly.

Greville, what can I say. Seems like a right enough chap. But as the saying goes, all the world’s a stage and if you can’t make an appearance till the curtain drops, you sir are no player. Or however it goes. By the time he showed up I’d already tidied me pages. I might show him some o’me other stuff sometime, if he’s lucky hehe.

Which left Marlowe. Lucky for me he had already had one or two or perhaps three too many, or he would have recognized himself in, ha ha, Christopher Sly. That seemed to sail over everybody else’s noggin too, perhaps I should be making the point more sharply. Christopher Toolow, perhaps? Nay. Sly it is.

Anyway, Marlowe was Marlowe. When he slid me his copy of the draft, o’er which he had spewed his draught, I stopped attending to him.

Surprisingly to me, worst of all was my own dear dear Anne.

She had been at me for weeks, she had, and perhaps ’twas the last time I’ll let her peek at my stuff ahead of time: You’ve gotta make Kate do this. Make her do that. Kate would nary say any such thing. All that muck and I went along with it just to shut her up. But when she plunked herself down at the tavern, elbowing deV aside (granted, he’s an arse-licker and I was well rid of him) and trying to keep Marlowe from tossin’ peanuts ‘twixt her bazooms, and THEN in front o’me workshopmates starts saying this and that about men and womenfolk and how the one needs a little more of this and the other less of that… well I have to say I do love the woman dearly dearly after all but am starting to wonder if she really deserves to get my best bed when I am dead and in the ground, you know what I’m saying? Blest be the woman that spares these stories and that woman clearly is not Anne.

But I showed her, indeed I did. This morning before I mailed to the printer the final quarto or folio or whatever the Hades they call it these days, I crossed out that “rights of woman” oration at the end which dear dear Anne had insisted on. Hehe, came up with some good stuff. “My hand is readie, may it do him ease” indeed. Dear dear Anne will crap a pretty brick when she hears that tomorrow night. ‘Course it doesn’t make much sense considering all the rot that came before but at this point I just want to be shut of it. Let the critics sort it all out, I say.

More later!

[Hat tip to Moonrat, of Editorial Ass]