Did the peasant arbeiters and equally peasant doles out there—any of them—have any idea that Gough’s use of the ancient word “shift” in his line meant something like “to make do”? Almost certainly not. Almost all of the beauty and subtlety of Shakespeare’s language was lost on them. (It had taken me years after the troupe adopted me to begin appreciating it.)

Then what in the hell were the Archons perceiving as they heard these archaic words through the dangling dragomen’s ears, saw our colorful costumes and overbright makeup through the dragomen’s eyes?

Alleyn caught my eye, forcing my attention back to the play, responded broadly to Don Pedro, and turned to the audience—ignoring the gravity sledge—and gave his chuckling Benedick’s reply.

“‘An he had been a dog that should have howled thus, they would have hanged him. And I pray God his bad voice bode no mischief. I had as life have heard the night-raven, come what plague could have come after it.’”

The night-raven, I knew and the arbeiters and doles almost certainly did not know—who in the name of the Gnostic God of All Opposites had any idea what the dragomen and Archons knew? — was the bird of ill omen.

There is always a party after a performance. There was that night.

Some worlds are so dolefully awful that we have to hold the party on the Muse, inviting the pretty girls and pretty boys aboard (there are no human dignitaries, mayors, burgomasters, commissars, or officials of importance in human life now, only the gray doles, and they don’t know how to party). On the more palatable worlds, and 25-25-261B qualified as such, we tried to move the party to a local pub or barn or similar public space. This rock had a pub in the oldest section of arbeiter town. (Those are the only two public institutions that have survived the end of all human politics and culture after our species’ hopeless enslavement—pubs and churches. We’d never partied in a church. At least not yet.)