[John Whitworth]

I didn't compete in the Pretentious Tosh Stakes, which is just as well. The five winners were way beyond my competence. Bazza and Bill were worthily among them.

The new competition will surely have a huge take-up among Spherians.

No. 2669 Take two
You are invited to take one of Shakespeare’s soliloquies (please identify) and recast it in the style of the author of your choice. Verse or prose permitted: 16 lines/150 words max. Please email entries, where possible, to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 13 October.

[John Whitworth]

Macbeth: If It Were Done… by A. A. Milne

I need to do it quick.
It has to be tonight.
Cos Nanny says so most pertick-
ly. Nanny’s always right.

I’d do it and be glad,
If no one ever knew,
And no-one told me I was bad.
I hate it when they do.

There’s Jesus, who is good,
He’ll know without a doubt.
You do what Jesus says you should,
Cos if you don’t, watch out.

One bad is all it takes,
And everything gets badder.
Your life becomes a lot of snakes
Without a single ladder.

[George Simmers]

Nice one, John, and I'm sure the highly contrasting style is the way to go. I've tried Sylvia Plath's version of "Oh that this too too solid flesh would melt..." But I suspect that the anguished Hamlet is too Plathy to begin with, and I'd have done better to try Betjeman or someone like that.

This stuff, all this flesh, I want it to melt
And turn to a dew.
Yes, I think I'll become a dew, but I do
Wish God was not so against the thing I'm good at.

Now the world has turned to a bad garden,
Swarmy with weeds. Because daddy, you bastard,
You died, and they stuffed you stiff
In wood, in a box like a piecase,
She and that crook, but look,
Before she's worn out those black slingbacks,
Her funeral shoes,so snug on her feet,
She's naked as a teacup and at it with him,
With my sexy uncle.

I seethe and I shriek at how quickly they started
Making the sheets messy.
But what can I do? Nothing.

[John Whitworth]

I cant stand Plath and therefore I like your soliloquy mightily.

Some sort of Rock treatment? There was a dreadful something called 'Catch My Soul' which was 'Othello' transmogrified into something rich and strange. Well, strange anyway.

Is Elvis a poet?

[Mary Meriam]

I like Plath, but still think your poem is absolutely hilarious, George!

[Roger Slater]

I wrote this for a Speccie last March. It didn't win then, but I might try it one more time since John and Bill won, so can't reuse theirs. I'm not that hopeful, though, since it didn't even get me an HM. Frank got an HM, so maybe he'll win outright this time.

TO BE, OR NOT TO BE
W.S. Gilbert

I am the very model of an indecisive Danish bloke.
I can't decide if I should live or end my life with just one stroke.
I wonder, is it nobler in the mind to suffer fortune's slings?
The problem is, nobody knows the consequence that dying brings.
If death were just an end to pain and heartache and a thousand shocks
you wouldn't see me hesitate to lie down in a plain pine box.
The rub may be the pain of life is better than what dreams may come,
enough to make a suicide in retrospect feel awfully dumb.
For otherwise who'd bear the whips and scorns of time, the law's delay,
and who would bear a fardel when we all know how much fardels weigh?
The native hue of resolution's sicklied o'er with casts of thought.
It's time to put away my knife until my father's killer's caught.
But was it just a fantasy, the words my father's phantom spoke?
I am the very model of an indecisive Danish bloke.

[Orwn Acra]

If there is anything wrong with yours, Roger, it is that it avoids the triple rhymes. That's what makes the original so good.

-the boy who can't even get an HM

[Max Goodman]

Do the rules tend to be very literal? Would, for instance, a famous speech from Shakespeare ("All the world's a stage," "Hath not a Jew eyes") not be considered cricket if it isn't a soliloquoy?

[George Simmers]

I'd wondered about 'All the World's a stage' - but I doubt if anyone could beat Robert Conquest's limerick version:

Seven ages. First puking and mewling,
Then very pissed off with your schooling.
Then fucks and then fights,
Then judging chaps' rights,
Then sitting in slippers, then drooling.

[Philip Quinlan]

Roger

I hereby, by the power not invested in me, sadly, declare you the winner.

Philip