This sort of thing reminded him unpleasantly of the Pentlands. The Fool in “Lear” alone he thought admirable—a sad, tragic, mysterious fool. For the rest, he went about and composed parodies, which, with a devil’s grin, he told himself would split the sides of posterity. Such as: “Aye, nuncle, an if Shrove Tuesday come last Wednesday, I’ll do the capon to thy cock, as Tom O’Ludgate told the shepherd when he found the cowslips gone. Dost bay with two throats, Cerberus? Down, boy, down!”
The admired beauties he was often tired of, perhaps because he had heard them so often, and it seemed to him, moreover, that Shakespeare often spoke absurdly and pompously when he might better have spoken simply, as in the scene where, being informed by the Queen of the death of his sister by drowning, Laertes says:
"Too much of water hast thou, poor Ophelia, And therefore I forbid my tears."
You really can’t beat that (he thought). Aye, Ben! Would he had blotted a hundred! A thousand!
But he was deep in other passages which the elocutionist misses, such as the terrible and epic invocation of Edmund, in King Lear, drenched in evil, which begins:
“Thou, Nature, art my goddess,”
and ends,
“Now, gods, stand up for bastards.”
It was as dark as night, as evil as Niggertown, as vast as the elemental winds that howled down across the hills: he chanted it in the black hours of his labor, into the dark and the wind. He understood; he exulted in its evil—which was the evil of earth, of illicit nature. It was a call to the unclassed; it was a cry for those beyond the fence, for rebel angels, and for all of the men who are too tall.
He knew nothing of the Elizabethan drama beyond Shakespeare’s plays. But he very early came to know a little of the poetry of Ben Jonson, whom Margaret looked on as a literary Falstaff,
