 I met a parrot named Pete recently. Who's an interesting bird? Pete claims that formerly he was owned by the man who owned a mermaid tavern in London. Then I said, you must have known Shakespeare. Ah, known him, said Pete. Ah, poor mutt. I knew him well. He called me Pete. I called him Bill. Why do you say poor mutt? Wow. Bill was a disappointed man. He was always boring his friends about what he might have been and done if only he had had a fair break. Couple of sack and cherries and his tears would get sappy wet and run down into his beard and wilt his collar. I remember one night when Bill and Ben Johnson and Frankie Beaumont were sapping it up. Ah, ah, ah. I am Ben, nothing but a lousy playwright. And with anything like luck in the books, I might have been a fairly decent sonnet writer. I might have been a poet if I had kept away from the theater. Well, said Ben Johnson. I have often thought of that, Bill. But one consolation is, you are making pretty good money out of the theater. Money, money, said Bill. What the hell is money? What I want to be is a poet, not a businessman. These damn cheap shows I turn out to keep the theater running break my heart. Slapstick comedies and blood and thunder tragedies and melodramas. Say, Frankie, did that boy hear you order another bottle? My only consolation is every now and then I get to stick in a little poetry when nobody is looking. Well, said Frankie Beaumont. Why don't you cut it, Bill? I can't. I can't. Says Bill, I need the money. I've got a family to support down in the country. Well, said Frankie Beaumont. Anyway, you write pretty good plays, Bill. Oh, any mutt can write plays for this London public if they put enough murder in them. What they want is kings talking like kings never had sense enough to talk. And stabbings and stranglings and fat men making love and clowns basting each other with clubs and cheap puns and off-colored illusions to all the smut of the day. I know what the low bras want. I give it to them. The manager comes to me with this moldy old manuscript and says, here's a plot for you, Bill. It's the third of the month. By the 10th, I want a good script out of this that we can go into rehearsal on. Not too big a cast. Not too much of your damn poetry, either. Just some of your old familiar line of, oh, they eat up that false staff stuff for yours. Ring them in again. Give them a good ghost or two. And it's good to stick in a speech somewhere the queen will take for a personal compliment. And it's a pretty good bid, Bill. If you make the heavy villain a more or a dago or a Jew or something like that. Oh, but I don't need to tell you, Bill. You know this game. Just some of your old familiar line of, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. Why don't you kill off a kid or two? A prince or something. They like a little pathos along with the dirt. Oh, the thing that I am debasing my talents with junk like that. Well, says I, Pete. Bill's plays are highly esteemed to this day. And that's no, said Pete. Pour them up. Little he would care. What Bill wanted to be was a poet. Huh?