Henley Street
December 4, 1615
So the plays evolved, week by week, line by line, the crabbed scrawl, poem and song, comedy and tragedy; so the characters came into being: Agrippa, Iago, Ophelia, Troilus, Falstaff, King Henry, bearded and beardless, slut and angel, lady and commoner: they gawked across my sheets of paper: I see them here, about me, crowding my candle’s niggard flame.
But look, they have become phantoms!
Never again, king or coward, never Romeo and Juliet, never a pair of lovers to kiss and die beside a tomb. It was the nightingale and not the lark that pierced the fearful hollow of my ear...
Phantoms.
Let me be taken, let me be put to death, and not wait here, await the hand of tyranny, the slow grasp of this town’s sod. I am to lie inside the church. The bell will toll. They will carry me. On my grave they’ll cut these words: I decree:
Good friend, for Jesus’ sake forbear
To dig the dust enclosed here:
Blessed be the man that spares these stones