A well-known playwright and bit-part thespian, William sits on a three-legged stool, looking slavishly up at Lucy. His features are like many another dreamy-eyed poet’s: tallow-complexioned, strong nose, sensitive lips, the makings of a beard and moustache. He wears a black velvet doublet with gold trim, black breeches cut into cerise silk panels and fashionably slashed leather shoes with cork heels. In his right hand are several sheets of foul papers, drafts of some love poems.

Oh, and he stinks. They all do. Stanley finds himself gagging as he peers over William’s shoulder and dips into his heart and mind, this newly discovered ability seemingly the most natural thing in the world.

Winter mist has been creeping up on William ever since his young son Hamnet died:

Grief fills the room up of my absent child

Grief comes in waves, he has learned. Too often his tears are so swilled that their sediment, anger, rises to the surface, leaving the taste of bitterness stinging his throat. No one understands him. He is always having to prove himself. Because he is the son of an illiterate glove-maker. The upstart playwright who didn’t go to university. Because the woman he loves is a bloody strumpet who, after all these years, still makes him feel like a man naked in a forest in a thunderstorm.

He is unravelling his papers. They are not yet published and he wants to test them on his current objet d’amour. Stanley looks down at the parchment paper, the jagged handwriting in black ink, the crossings out and thumb smudges, and realizes it’s written in Elizabethan English and he can scant comprehend it.

William: My love is as a fever, longing still,
For that which longer nurseth the disease.

He recites like an actor, typically over-egging his vowels and attacking consonants with an excess of plosive gusto. Lucy replies in a rotten English, cobbled together from the gutter and the gentry.

Lucy: William, thou art such a wimp. Pull thyself together.
I am in a mire and only thee can extricate me.

William reads from another sonnet, but Stanley finds himself fixated on Lucy. Her presence so dominates the room that he cannot help but be drawn to her, like someone else he has just met.

William: Past cure I am, now reason is past care,
And frantic-mad with evermore unrest.

Lucy: Well, that makes two of us. Past care am I too,
and frantic mad with terrible turbulence.

William: Thou art as tyrannous, so as thou art,
As those whose beauties proudly make them cruel.

Lucy: Yea, yea, but I do have a problem, sirrrah!
Marry! ’Tis not safe for my kinde here any more.

Her Majestie will have all blackamoores banished.
I will be as a fox with no place to hide. Damned

by the colour of my skin, hounded. As I speak,
they are rounding us up. I can no longer tarry.

William shuffles through his papers.