The Tragedy of Arthur

You deicde, and you make our night what you want. Brilliant and ours. Stupid and theirs.

Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?" wrote Marlowe, the man Shakespeare feared for many years was the better writer, the man who with those words issued a license to misery to millions of underexperienced teenagers and thousands of overeducated middle-aged jackasses.

How strangely distributed are our scruples. When they are evenly spread across our lives, we are judged good people. Mine, unfortunately, tend to bunch up.

Maria, groaning for scraps, would drape his head on my feet as I ate, trying to camouflage himself as my napkin or the rug.

Shakespeare’s lines are a nursery of titles for other, better writers: Pale Fire, Exit Ghost, Infinite Jest, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, The Sound and the Fury, Unnatural Acts, The Quick and the Dead, Against the Polack, To Be or Not to Be, Band of Brothers, Casual Slaughters. At the very least, I have never named one of my books after his stuff.