- Burbage: Let me think this through, Will. Are you suggesting that we find somebody to write songs to fit your plays?
- Will Shakespeare: Well, I thought that at first. You know, work with a composer on an original score. But then I thought, no, we need guaranteed hits. Lots of them. And how do we get those?
- Burbage: By using songs that are hits already!
- Will Shakespeare: Yes! By St. Bernard's buttered barn-cakes, yes! I'm on fire today. First I invent the original stage musical and then instantly make it obsolete by inventing the greatest hits musical!
- Will Shakespeare: The public's demand for new plays is insatiable. And I have not a single solitary second to spare. I be like the springtime lark, who must needs build her nest, feed her young, tend her delicate plumage, whilst all the while singing merry songs that the fairies may dance in the greenwood glades.
- Anne Shakespeare: Is that you making the point that you haven't go a second to spare?
- Will Shakespeare: Yes, absolutely. Underlining, so to speak. I'm so pushed that I barely have a moment to illustrate my observations with extended metaphor and fantastical whimsy.
- Will Shakespeare: There is no terror in your threats, Greene, for I am armed so strong in honesty that they pass by me like the idle wind... of a... small... somewhat constipated squirrel.
- Robert Greene: Hmm. Tails off a bit at the end, don't you think?
- Will Shakespeare: It will get there. Probably just needs a couple hundred more syllables.
- Kate: I just don't think it's a play, Mr. Shakespeare. But it's not entirely irredeemable.
- Will Shakespeare: Irredeemable? It's the most deemable thing I've written all week.
- Kate: Deemable is not a word.
- Will Shakespeare: It is if I bloody say it is because in case you've forgotten, that's what I do.
- Robert Greene: Fellow poets, brother scholars, we meet today in the face of perhaps the most heinous attack on high culture since the first clown showed his bottom to the mob.
- Will Shakespeare: Well, we could just do the play straight with lengthy monologues instead of songs.
- Burbage: I suppose we have no choice. But what would you call it?
- Will Shakespeare: A Comedy of Mistakes, Misunderstandings and Coincidences.
- Burbage: Basically, it's just a comedy of errors.
- Will Shakespeare: Errors. Oh, I like that. That's good. I'll use that. A Comedy of Mistakes, Misunderstandings, Coincidences and Errors. Brilliant.