Debating Politics with Will Shakespeare!

... more the fool I, for Will may match words with a poniard and come away unscathed. Yet, I take him on to pluck out the heart of my pathos. Election day is on the morrow. Methinks I am easier played on than a pipe!

Will:   Then assume a virtue, if you have not. There’s special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ‘tis not to come, if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come.

Me:   O! woe is me to see what I have seen. Reason in itself confounded! Words, words, mere words, no matter from the heart. Tell me, Will, are they good men and true?

Will:   Words pay no debts. And to fear the worst, oft cures the worst. I had rather a fool to make me merry than experience to make me sad.

Me:   But in the gross and scope of my opinion, this bodes some strange eruption to our state. Oh, how full of briars is this working-day world!

Will:   You can suck melancholy out of a song as a weasel sucks egg! Trust none. For oaths are straws, men’s faith are wafer-cakes. And that is the humor of it. The game’s afoot.

Me:   Oh, what men dare do, what men may do. What men doing do, not knowing what they do!

Will:   Like a scurvy politician, you seem to see things thou dost not. Get thee glass eyes! The saying is true, “The empty vessel makes the greatest sound.” They but commit the oldest sins the newest of ways.

Me:   Truly sits the wind in that corner, Will?

Will:   As cold as any stone.

Me:   Then men of few words are the best men.

Will:   And the fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself a fool. Truly, I would have made thee poetical, woman. So give thy thoughts no tongue. Set honor in one eye and death ‘i the other and I will look on both indifferently. We must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures.

Me:   Cudgel thy brain no more about it, Will. Brevity is the soul of your wit.

Will:  What should such fellows as I do, crawling between heaven and earth? We are errant knaves, all. Though this be madness, yet there’s method in’t. Let me have men about me who are fat, sleek headed men and such as sleep at night. For the little foolery that wise men have, hath made for a great show. I must be cruel only to be kind. All the world’s a stage and all men and women merely players.