C9 NINE

Is It Not Monstrous

ROSE

O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!

Is it not monstrous that this player here,

But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,

Could force his soul so to his own conceit

That from her working all the visage wann'd,

— William Shakespeare, Hamlet

NOTHING ABOUT THIS experience was particularly comforting. The fact that the drunk