The Last Play: Fiction on Two Queer English Playwrights

“I don’t know why I agreed to shake my weary pen for them, once more.”

“I thought you had a distinct motive, Shakespeare,” said Emilia, and almost in a wink bent towards his person. “Indeed, I spy that motive up your sleeve. Look where you wear my love speech: On your sleeve.” Then she turned stern with him. “It was meant to be laid on the table at the tavern this afternoon, and gone in with the slips that Fletcher must stitch into a play. I thought my love speech was to be your last word.”

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After the personal debacle of publication of his Sonnets, Shakespeare has been out of sorts – and his late plays haven’t been up to standard, either. It’s time to leave London and the stage, but he still has a statement he wants spoken in public – if he dares.

When a playwright needs to talk himself into courage, how else than to talk to his own creation: Emilia the Amazon in a dumpy London room?

In Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Harold Bloom writes of Emilia’s speech on love between two girls: ‘The length, weightedness, and complexity of this declaration is unique in Shakespeare, and deserves to be better known as the locus classicus in defense of such love in the language.’

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With ‘My Subject is Death, or Am I His?’, a poem of the last days of playwright Thomas Lovell Beddoes, a latter-day Elizabethan in the Gothic age, anatomist and scientist, gay man, revolutionary.

And an Afterword on each piece by the author.

This ebook totals 10,000 words.