“But sack before all. Have you never mastered, learned sir, the five most excellent reasons for drinking?”
“I know them not.”
“Why, a friend’s visit, the thirst that is, the thirst that will be, the flavour of the wine, and any other reason.”
“They are reasons for. There is one more potent against.”
“What’s that?”
“Why reason itself, which, being robbed by wine, hath no reason to applaud it.”
He saw, indeed, that the man was irretrievably drunk, and that he was wasting time on him. He prepared to go on his way—which was to Greenwich, where the Court was being held.
“Not robbed, but transmuted,” cried Marlowe. “O liquid alchemy! So to be traduced! Have I not ought to thee all the golden treasures of my brain? And he prefers a bone! Well, sir, pick it, pick it.”
“It is german to the matter, I think. Thy golden treasures sink thee even like the shipwrecked miser’s laden belt. Not reason exalted is wine’s, but reason debased—so lowered in the mind’s balance that it sees all the world lopsided, deformed. Such is my quarrel, sir, with the author of the Jew of Malta. A man cannot lust with him but he can do naught else; a Jew cannot be a Jew but he is an unredeemed monster. It is not so in fact; we derive from the multitudinous past—are compact of a thousand inconsistencies. There is more good than ill in all men. The purpose of the drama should be to hold a mirror up to Nature—to give us truth, not anamorphosis. There is no truth in wine, despite the proverb.”
He moved to go, and the playwright sprang to his feet.