PURE MALT ,
SCOTCH WHISIO
COMPETITION
Fake antique
Jaspistos
IN COMPETITION NO. 1810 you were given a start of one and a half lines of blank verse and invited to continue in convincing Elizabethan or Jacobean fashion.
The line and a half came not from my own 'quick forge and working house of thought' nor from any actual dramatist nearly 400 years dead, but from Bernard Shaw's Cymbeline Refinished, where the old showman CI unhestitatingly recom- mend my version') attempts to out- Shakespeare Shakespeare. Foolishly, he left 89 lines of the original intact, which made it all the easier for the reader to notice the difference between a wideawake
ape with a tin ear and the Bard, even when nodding.
The prizewinners, printed below, get £20 each, and the bonus bottle of Drummond's Pure Malt Scotch whisky goes to Martin Woodhead's Jacobean fake — in the style of John Marston, he warrants me.
When I lived in a cave methought a palace Must be a glorious place: rare marble, gold, And orient silk; the people nigh to gods. Well, I have seen much since: gross, sweating lords Preening like peacocks o'er a nest of mire; Fair gentlewomen, patched with hair and lime Like alehouse walls; and maids, as dovecotes white, But full of holes, and stink, within, their talk Dark assignations, privy cuckoldings So that I thought their very coronets Must tarnish 'neath the thoughts their rancid brains Nightly revolved. Ambition willed them prize Their lord's least droppings; lust led therm in chains Like captive marmosets. I once did dream, But now broad waking, see my follies plain. Earth, yield me roots! Give me my cave again!
(Martin Woodhead) When I lived in a cave methought a palace Must be a glorious place, in what esteem I held the homes of kings and goodly queens, Dreaming, perchance, I might by dint of fate Live such a life. But fortune is a hag That goes bedecked in comely frocks and wig, That wears a smiling check as if to say, 'Come kiss me, I'll be thine!' Too late I know The fear of brigands that attend my gate, The hate in eyes that would my gold were theirs, The voice of night that asks a thousand times After my safe repose. 0 little man, Thy very lowness lets thee lie asleep In leaden dreams surpassing silver dread; Thy humble ale can only better grow While one by one my wines turn into gall.
(Frank McDonald) When I lived in a cave methought a palace Must be a glorious place, the pebbles then My only courtiers and the innumerate sands My servile people. Now my world is puffed Up to this gaudy bubble, learned music By night and day waits on me, fruits and treats Leap to my fickle palace, men of war Stand ranged along my marble-cladded walks In glistering hauberks throwing back the sun, Obeisant. Yet through all this pomp of time A tremulous stir of nothingness pervades, And now methinks if I should stab my finger Through this weak tegument, all would dissolve, Discandy, and I'd be beside the sea, Telling its leaden waves, forlorn again.
(Hilary Corke) When I lived in a cave methought a palace Must be a glorious place, where all might sport In revels, pageants, banqueting delights And every whim of sovereign pleasure's rule. Now, plucked by Fortune to this kingly state, I revel but in complot and intrigue, Dine on conspiracy and machination Of dukes and chamberlains, play the deaf man To courtly barbs and flattery. Darksome cave, How straight your cranking labyrinths now appear, How soft your bouldered floor, how bathed in sun Your deep recesses, how refined your store Of nature's victuals! There's a realm, methinks, A king might quit his palace to regain, And live, a ruined shepherd, like old Cyclops, Warmed by the solace of a grateful flock.
(Philip Dacre) When I lived in a cave met hought a palace Must be a glorious place — as when mere tears, Tumbling their turn around these precious orbs, Do sanctify what's seen as 'twere a diamond Dipp'd in a sudden dash of glinting starlight. There's faith, i' faith. For when the waters dry, When dewdrops are but imprints on the cheek, Then, brazen as the sun, arrives a truth Too dolorous to tender mortal minds. And, crystal shatter'd, who might not perceive The land's long lie? So, thus to be enthron'd, Confirms no single fragment of that dream Which lit my hermit's paradise of rock. The cave, the court: in neither lies my vantage.
(Bill Greenwell)
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