Scenes from the newly greenlighted, Pimp my Amazon Review, a six-part tale of everyday Oxfordian life.

Late at night.  Dodger is alone in his study.  He has just ticked 793 ‘Least helpful’ boxes on Amazon review pages.

The phone rings. It is one of his fans, Jimbo.

Jimbo:  Hi Dodger, it’s Jimbo.  Tell me what you think about this.  I’ve just written a paper called  ‘Shakespeare Stripped’.  I think that I have proved pretty conclusively  that the Bard  definitely didn’t  write in iambic pentameter.  Having conducted a close study of metrical systems in De Vere’s letters , I am going to direct  a production of Hamlet by Edward De Vere and get the actors to put stresses on completely different syllables from usual  to show just how  dumb the RSC has been for the last six  hundred years. You see, I’ll give the audiences copies of Oxford’s letters I have annotated so that they can keep looking down at the basic meter he uses which is a clever mixture of trochaic  and …

Dodger:  Great Jimbo.  Fascinating.  I can’t wait to read it.   Email me a copy. Goodnight.

Jimbo:   Erm… Dodger.  Look, I know some people are going to laugh but they laughed at Galileo, didn’t they?

Dodger.  Indeed they did, Jimbo. Good NIGHT.  (Puts phone down)  Oh Jesus.

(Phone rings).

Dodger:  Oh dear God, please let this not be Walter. (Picks up phone) Oh, Hi Walter!  How are you?

Walter:  Dodger, I just wanted to run something up the flagpole with ya, buddy. Get this. I’m pretty rootin’ tootin’   darned sure you are gonna LOVE it!   See, I think I can prove that when he was three years old, De Vere had a dawg.   And he wrote a poem to this dawg  which he was to use many years later. Can ya  guess what the poem was called?

Dodger: No Walter, I can’t. But do tell.

Walter:  Out damned Spot!  Spot was  the name of his dawg, yeah?  You see Dodger, ‘Spote’ is the past tense of the Dutch ‘Spuiten’  to squirt.   At three years old, De Vere was a squirt right, and ‘spote’ is an anagram of poets and those pirates were Dutch!   If you count a spoken inflexion on the end of  ‘spot’, there are fourteen phonemes in “Out damned Spote”.   If you add on the number in ‘dawg’… Jiminy Cricket, how many have you got altogether?

Dodger:  Oh wow, Walter. 17!

Walter: Hot diggety, dawg! Spot on!

Dodger:  Erm . Walter, I’m busy on a thread at the moment, putting an end once and for all to Shapiro’s career. Could you maybe, perhaps, NOT join me with that point?  Just for the moment. OK?

Walter: I love ya, Dodger. Ya know that, doncha?

Dodger:  Of course I do Dan… I mean Walter.  GoodNIGHT .   (Puts phone down and then his head on his desk.  Tugs at his hair.)