Interrupted interview with Shakespeare by Willem M. Roggeman

Interrupted interview with Shakespeare On a midsummer night when I had had enough because even being alone can sometimes last too long I put a chair in front of me and on the chair a portrait of Shakespeare. I talked to him at length and he listened patiently so he turned out to be a great listener too, and thereafter asked him questions to which he responded enthusiastically, with comprehensive answers, because it was a long time ago that someone had asked him anything. He talked nineteen to the dozen about how he was obliged to marry the much older Ann Hathaway and about his friendship with the Count of Southampton for whom he wrote the poem 'Venus and Adonis', all he went through in the grubby alleys and slums of London and the blue colour of longing for the trees and lawns of Stratford. He had just begun to explain what he had projected of himself in Romeo and who actually was his Julia when a man entered the room. Without saying a word the man peered around and with a short sharp movement put an egg amongst Shakespeare's hair as if it were a birdsnest. Then he began loudly and with great conviction to call cuckoo, cuckoo. Shakespeare took the egg out of his hair and looked at it with sadness. He shook his head with disapproval or misunderstanding, and then tinkling loudly fell apart into hundreds of colourful pieces of glass.

Willem G. Roggeman (1935) [photo Internet]

Original Title: Onderbroken interview met Shakespeare - From: De Tweede Ronde - Tijdschrift voor literatuur - Herfst 1989 - Uitgeverij Bert Bakker BV, Amsterdam.