Tavern jest over ye ole bar-be-cue
”
Devil take it!
”
exclaimed Ben Jonson as he slammed his tankard on the
tabletop.
”
What ails thee, Will?
”
William Shakespeare looked up, startled.
”
What’s amiss?
”
Tavern jest over ye ole bar-be-cue
“Devil take it!” exclaimed Ben Jonson as he slammed his tankard on the tabletop. “What ails thee, Will?”
William Shakespeare looked up, startled. “What’s amiss?”
“Aye, that’s what I would know. For the last three days you’ve heaved enough sighs to propel the Armada and look as though you could shed enough tears to float it.”
“‘Tis nothing, a bad dream I had four nights since. It will pass.”
“That’s not the answer of a friend,” Jonson said. “A dream, you say?”
“More like a vision, so real and yet remote.”
“Out with it, lad. You’ve naught but friends here.”
Shakespeare looked up at the ring of sympathetic faces in the Mermaid Tavern. “Well, then…”
“A dream, you say?” Jonson prompted him.
“Not so much a dream then, but more a vision; a vision of such wondrous proportion it seemed prophetic.”
“Tell us, Will; unburden your mind,” said George Chapman. “A burden shared is a burden lightened.” A chorus of “Aye” and “Even so” followed.
Shakespeare sighed. “In this vision, then, I saw a box with a gray crystal and little wheels beneath it. Even as I watched, a smiling face appeared on the crystal’s surface and spoke to a family gathered before it.”
“A shrine, then?” John Fletcher asked.
“I thought so with the devotion the family paid it, all eyes worshipfully on the crystal, but as the face continued speaking it touched on matters not of any church or faith I know.”
“Did this oracle speak in English or Latin or Greek, or mayhap another tongue?” Francis Beaumont asked.
“English, I think but not of any region we know,” Shakespeare said. “Many of his words were of a new minting, yet I followed the general meaning well enough. The oracle told of strange events – of pestilence and parades, of war and wealth – and the watchers sat enthralled.” He paused. “Then, as if by magic, the oracle vanished and in his place was a lass of passing pulchritude, beaming from the crystal, and clad in practically nothing.”
“Sorcery,” Edmund Spenser said. “Did she prophesize events as well?”
“Nay,” Shakespeare said. “She extolled the advantages of a device called a ‘bar-be-cue,’ if I have it right. Then she was gone and was followed by a man with a flask of blue liquid, who spoke to another man.”
“What did he say?” Jonson asked.
“As near as I remember, it was ‘Sirrah, thy breath is most foul.'”
“The scurvy knave,” Francis Drake growled. “I’d have cleaved him from clavicle to Clydebank had he durst proclaim me stinkard.”
“Was that the whole of it?” asked Richard Burbage. “‘Twould seem little enough to engender melancholy.”
“Nay,” Shakespeare replied. “I’ve but told the half. Short dramas appeared, one upon another, filled with sound and fury. Then, and here is what vexes my spirit, another followed. In it a woman closed a door, and said to no one in particular, ‘Home at last.’ I saw no humor in it but immediately the crystal was filled with tittering, and I….” He stopped as a roar of laughter exploded though the tavern.
Jonson bent double, emitting great howls, and Beaumont and Fletcher laughed so hard they had to hold each other up.
“Take thee for a merry rogue, Will Shakespeare,” Jonson gasped between bursts of hilarity, “if I were to look under my chair now doubtless I’d find one leg a good yard longer than the other from the way you’ve been pulling it. A box that laughs at its own wit! Ahahahahahaha!”
Shakespeare regarded the mirthful company at length, then murmured with a rueful smile, “Laugh while ye may, good friends, laugh. Methinks that ’twere true ’twere no laughing matter.”
