In Competition No. 2578 you were invited to imagine the speech that Shakespeare, as a boy, might have delivered as he was slaughtering a calf. This challenge was inspired by John Aubrey’s portrait of the young bard in Brief Lives: ‘His father was a butcher, and I have been told heretofore by some of the neighbours, that when he was a boy he exercised his father’s trade, but when he killed a calf he would do it in a high style, and make a speech.’
You plundered the works of the adult Shakespeare with inventiveness and to great effect. Michael Brereton’s slaughterhouse oration was accompanied by scholarly analysis. Part of his footnote reads: ‘…the greater and lesser tragedies, the Roman plays, and most of the histories are nothing less than Shakespeare’s expiation of the deeds of his slaughterhouse years…. Every tragic hero, from Richard II to Lear, represents, in this view of the plays, a calf.’ Honourable mentions also go to Max Ross, Paul Griffin, Frank McDonald and Noel Petty. The winners printed below get £25 each, except George Simmers, who pockets £30.
Thou bleeding piece of meat, can it be meet
That thou shouldst die, to feed the appetite
Of some tun-bellied Stratford alderman?
Was it for this my sharp intrusive knife
Did pierce thy throat and force thee to the
change
From lusty bullock to unfeeling veal?
Oh I could weep, but that a second thought
Comes hasty on the footsteps of the first.
That alderman will gobble down his share,
(And more besides) but others too will taste
The bounty of thy flesh, thy blood, thy tripes.
Yes, worthier folks will gain good nourishment
From this thy rich, though most unwilling, gift.
For what’s at stake is steak; your steaks will
feed
A poet’s fancy, build a playwright’s frame.
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