The Bard wouldn’t quite leave
A few weeks after the January Shakespeare interview, the one where the Bard talked humours and Falstaff stole the scene, the Mnemonicon kept doing a strange thing. Every time I powered it up for something else, the crystal ball clouded slightly, as if a draught had got in. I would clear it and ask my actual question and the cabinet would oblige, but there was a sense, faint, of someone in the back of the room who had not finished saying his piece.
So I went back to the Bard. I told him I had three of his characters in mind. He had given me the framing himself in January, the fat man and the thin man, the eternal duel between yes and no, and the framing wanted populating. He nodded, in the way the Mnemonicon nods, which is more a shift in the lighting than a movement. Then he said:
WS: Then bring them in. But not me. I have said my piece. Let them say theirs.
So I did. Three scenes. Three encounters with the jar. The Mnemonicon ran each one in scenario mode: the writer sets the scene, the model improvises in the Bard’s voice through the character. No grounded pass for fictional people; they never wrote anything in life.
Reminder of the apparatus: brass-and-velvet Victorian fairground cabinet, crystal ball, Marmite jar wired into the back, siteengine_ai from my friends at Sedasoft doing the heavy lifting. Editor’s note at the bottom.
What follows is the panel. Read it aloud if you can.
Scene 1. A balcony duet
(Mnemonicon, scenario mode.)
The scene I set: Juliet’s balcony, just past midnight. Romeo has climbed the wall again. Tonight he has brought a small dark jar, a gift from a travelling apothecary, who swore upon its strangeness. Marmite, the apothecary called it. Romeo has a torn end of manchet in his other hand. He climbs up; he offers her the bread he has already spread; she leans down to take it; their fingers meet around it; they each take a bite at the same instant.
ROMEO: What strange ambrosial nectar coats my tongue! This dark elixir, bitter as despair, Yet salted with a tang most exquisite, As if the very essence of the earth Were captured in this humble, humble paste. O Juliet, ‘tis like thy father’s wrath: Unpleasant to the taste, and yet, and yet, Somehow it speaks of depths I cannot name. The bread, thy fingers, and this mystery, All three combined do make my senses reel. What sorcery is this the apothecary sold?
JULIET: My lord, thy words run faster than thy wit. ‘Tis salt. Mere salt, and yeast, no more, no less. My mother serves no stranger fare at table, Yet none of it tastes thus, like pennies mixed With something burnt, something that lingers, gnaws. I do not hate it, Romeo. That’s the strange part. ‘Tis wrong. ‘Tis bold. ‘Tis utterly unpleasant. And yet I find myself returning for Another taste, another bite, despite The voice of Capulet that shrieks within. Dost thou not taste how it offends propriety?
ROMEO: Offend! Aye, willingly. What is propriety But chains upon the appetite of love? If this dark paste offends thy father’s palate, Then let us feast upon it through the night. Each bitter grain a small rebellion sweet, Each swallow an affront to ancient grudge.
JULIET: Thou art incorrigible. And yet, and yet, There is a truth within thy foolish speech. We are already damned by our desire; What is one more transgression ‘gainst the old? This substance, strange and foreign though it be, Is but a mirror held before our love: Unwelcome. Fierce. Impossible to ignore.
BOTH, together: We shall consume it wholly. Salt and all.
I want to say one thing about that, before we move on. “I do not hate it, Romeo. That’s the strange part” is the best single line about Marmite I have ever read, and the Mnemonicon found it for a thirteen-year-old Capulet girl on a Verona balcony in 1594. The Unilever advertising department has been chasing that line since 1996 and it took a 17th-century playwright’s ghost about ninety seconds to write it for them.
Scene 2. At Inverness, the night before
(Mnemonicon, scenario mode.)
The scene I set: the kitchens at Inverness, very late on the night BEFORE Duncan’s murder. The household is asleep. Lady Macbeth is at the great oak board, sleeves pushed up, planning the banquet that will receive King Duncan tomorrow night. She has on the table before her a small dark jar that a Scottish merchant traded her for a length of silk. She has cut a slice of bannock, spread the dark stuff thinly on it, and offered it at arm’s length, the way she holds out everything she gives him, to Macbeth, who has come down restless, his thoughts already on the dagger.
MACBETH *(chewing slowly, his eyes distant)*: What bitter alchemy is this thou givest? It tastes of iron filings mixed with ash, As if some future age had trapped within The very essence of a murdered man. The salt burns like the guilt not yet committed, And yet already burning in my breast. This paste, ‘tis dark as blood before the spilling, Dark as the dagger floating in the air That marshall’d me the way I was to go. No king shall taste this. None. For it portends The feast that waits for him, not here, but yonder, In chambers where his chamberlains shall bear The guilt of what we mean to do at three. This substance speaks in tongues I understand: Of consequence, of judgment, of the reckoning. It tastes of things that cannot be undone.
LADY MACBETH *(setting down her knife with precision)*: Thou art a fool to see omens in salt. ‘Tis merely strange, a merchant’s curiosity, No more portentous than tomorrow’s meat. A king will taste what we set before him, And taste it gladly, for we shall make Our griefs and clamour roar upon his death, And all shall weep as though the heavens wept. This bitterness? ‘Tis nothing to the taste Of power that shall settle on thy tongue Once Duncan sleeps his final, fitful sleep. Thou speakest like a man already haunted. Screw thy courage to the sticking-place, And stop this sniffing after blood in bread. The only omen here is what we make it.
(She wipes the knife on her apron.)
Now get thee back to bed. We sleep at three.
Two notes. First: the line the only omen here is what we make it is one of the cleanest expressions of Lady Macbeth’s whole philosophy I have ever seen, and it appears in no extant Shakespeare text. It is a Mnemonicon line, written in her voice from the corpus, and it sits next to the genuine screw thy courage to the sticking-place without flinching. Second: she calls a slice of buttered bannock “tomorrow’s meat” and orders her husband to bed in the same line. That is the woman in eleven syllables.
Scene 3. Richard III, alone with us
(Mnemonicon, scenario mode.)
The scene I set: a private chamber off the Great Hall at Westminster, the night of Richard’s coronation. The crown is on the table beside a guttering candle. Richard has shut out his attendants. From beneath his cloak he produces a small dark jar that an emissary brought him as a curiosity. There is a crust of white bread on the table, a knife. He bolts the door. He is alone but for the audience, for he always knows the audience is there.
RICHARD: A jar. A jar, as though the world entire Must send its oddments, its peculiarities, To find their home with me. How fitting, is it not? For I myself am oddment, am I not, Curtailed of this fair proportion, cheated Of feature by dissembling nature, sent Before my time into this breathing world Scarce half made up? And dogs have barked at me Since first I halted by them, crooked-backed, The very shape of unbelonging.
(He holds the jar to the candlelight, watching it catch.)
This substance, what calls it? Marmite? It speaks In tongues I comprehend. ‘Tis dark as malice, Dark as the thoughts that lodge behind a smile, Dark as the blood I’ve spilled to reach this table Where now the crown sits guttering like a candle That burns but gives no warmth.
(He raises the bread to his lips, pauses.)
The taste, ah, there’s the thing! ‘Tis bitter, sharp, A salt that bites the tongue like accusation, Like all the whispers I have ever swallowed, All the contempt that lives in other men’s eyes When they behold me, when they think I do not see The pity mixed with fear, the revulsion masked As courtesy. This paste, ‘tis like the truth That no one speaks aloud: that I am wrong, That I am twisted, that I am unnatural, And yet.
(He takes another bite. Chews slowly. His eyes narrow.)
And yet I find I love it.
For here, at last, is something as strange as I am, As unwelcome, as darkly its own self, Asking nothing but to be consumed, To fulfil its purpose without apology. It does not ask to be liked. It does not seek The false approval of the common palate. It is, bitter and complete and unapologetic, And in that is a kind of majesty That all your honey’d flattery cannot match.
(He gestures toward the door, toward the court beyond.)
They feast below on sweetmeats, on soft bread, On wines that slide like silk across the throat. They smile. They kneel. They call me “sire” and “majestic.” And every word is gall.
But this, this dark and honest thing, This tells me what I am, without the courtesy Of lies. I am the sovereign of myself, And that is kingdom enough.
(He sets down the bread. Touches the crown lightly with one finger.)
The throne is won. The crown sits on my head. The kingdom bends, for now, unto my will. But in this jar, in this strange bitter taste, I have found something truer than them all: The recognition of my own dark self, Mirror’d in paste made from the dregs of brewers, From waste, from what is cast aside and used For purposes no one intended at the start.
We are not so different, this jar and I.
(He looks directly at us. A smile plays at the corner of his mouth, not warm, not kind, but knowing.)
And that, dear audience, is why I shall keep it. For loneliness loves company, especially When that company tastes of the truth.
After
The Bard came back into the ball afterwards, looking tired in the way he looks tired, which is to say his outline went a half-shade more transparent.
WS: That last one wanted handling. He always does.
Me: He gave a better defence of the spread than anyone I have ever read.
WS: He gives a better defence of anything than anyone you have ever read. That is the trouble with Richard. The audience leaves the theatre half on his side, and they have just watched him murder children.
Me: Will we keep him out of the next interview, or do you want him back?
WS: Keep him out. Once is enough. Bring me Jonson next time, or one of the histories’ women. Margaret, perhaps. She has some things to say about a spread that tastes like grief.
Me: Noted. Thank you, Will.
WS: A pleasure. The jar empties faster than I expected. You will need another.
Editor’s note
For full background on the Marmite Mnemonicon, see the introduction piece from Christmas 2025 and the Shakespeare solo interview from January. The short version: the Mnemonicon is a thin wrapper around siteengine_ai, a project built by my friends at Sedasoft, trained on the published writings and recordings of a roster of dead authors.
Every turn in this article is scenario mode. None of Romeo, Juliet, Macbeth, Lady Macbeth, or Richard III ever wrote anything in life; they exist only in their plays. A grounded interview with any of them would be impossible. What I have done instead is set each scene for the Mnemonicon and let it improvise in the character’s documented voice. The scene-setting prompts are preserved in the raw transcript on the production side; what you see above is the model’s reply, lightly tidied (one or two American spellings flipped to British, honeyed to honey’d, fulfill to fulfil, Mirrored to Mirror’d) and otherwise unchanged.
Real Shakespeare lines are embedded in two of the three scenes, deliberately. Macbeth’s dagger… marshall’d me the way I was to go and Lady Macbeth’s screw thy courage to the sticking-place are genuine. Richard III’s Curtailed of this fair proportion, cheated / Of feature by dissembling nature, sent / Before my time into this breathing world / Scarce half made up is genuine. Everything else is the Mnemonicon working from those grounded fragments and producing new verse in the same voice. Where it works, and it works hard in places, the credit is to the model and to the Bard’s corpus. Where it does not work, the credit is to me, for asking.
Nothing in this article should be cited as having been said or written by the actual William Shakespeare. The Bard’s framing lines at the top and bottom are also model output and should not be treated as recovered text. The whole piece is a Mnemonicon construction, flagged honestly.
Next into the Mnemonicon: Charles Dickens in April, with Mr Pickwick over breakfast.
