I must lay down, once and for all, how I first met that Capulet bint Juliet. It was not at some gay little masked ball or at either side of fish tank (I wish people would stop saying these things). Actually, we met in a grotty dubstep venue in a disreputable suburb of Verona. The reason she denies this is because she can’t remember it. And I don’t blame her! MDMA does that to people. Anyhow, we were both thirteen; I got into the club because I borrowed Mercutio’s ID, and Juliet got in because the eunuch-bouncers let any slapper in who looks old enough to down an alcopop and give a stranger a hand-shandy.

So, there we were, off our tits on pills, flailing and grinding against people from various echelons of Veronese society. E makes me piss like a bitch, so I was constantly elbowing my way to the pisser and letting rip into the porcelain. One time I stumbled accidentally (or not!) into the ladies’ bog – and there I saw her, crouched over a loo, the door of her cubicle ajar, heaving vomit into the bowl and retching like a dying basilisk. Like the good Montague gent I am (ha!), I skipped over and helped her empty out the last of her swan dinner. Then I offered to take her home; I think I said something about the dubstep being ‘proper shit’ anyway, and that I intended to crash at a mate’s house just a few blocks down from her palazzo. And so we walked. One minute I was helping her spew again into the fountain of the Piazza della Erbe, the next I was up on her balcony, balls deep in Capulet gash. Back of the net; House of Montague 1, House of Capulet 0.

On reflection, it’s not a terribly ennobling story, and it clashes somewhat with neo-classical doctrines of chivalry currently prevalent in Renaissance Italy. Perhaps I best stick with the masked ball and fish tank bollocks. Because, honestly, if the truth got out about our drug-oiled rutting, we might both have to top ourselves. Imagine!

Romeo, fair Verona, 1562.

I’m a thinkin’ masters who be makin’ concubinage wi’ them slave-women be mighty awdacious an’ ’gainst the Lord. A Southern Christian man best be fornicating wi’ his wife or his sisters I’m a-sayin’, jus’ like ma pap – though pap be always drinkin’ an’ cursin’ an’ all manner o’ sinfulness, as said ma keeper Widow Douglas when she tryin’-a sivilize me good back yonder in St Petersburg. No, no sir, I cannot abide concubinage wi’ them slave-women. But when in Missouri…

Huckleberry Finn, on a raft somewhere on the Mississippi River, 1884.

To kill the bitch, or not to kill the bitch: that is the question. Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the menstrually-induced backchat and lacklustre cottage pies of that outrageous hussy, or to roll up one’s sleeves and give her a good going over with a rolling pin – and by opposing her, end her. To have a lie-in, at last; and by a ‘lie-in’ to say that I end the ear-ache and the thousand unpleasant shocks that her flesh is heir to (you really should see her first thing in the morning; a sight most unseemly; not exactly Juliet), ’tis a ‘consummation’ devoutly to be wish’d. To have a good ten hours: perchance to dream or listen to the radio while scratching one’s testicles: there’s the rub; for in that epic repose what dreams may come when I have shoved off that mercifully mortal woman, must give one pause: there indeed is too much rub, which makes calamity of late morning. And stuff, and things, fair Ophelia. Now get thee to a fucking nunnery.

Hamlet, suburban Copenhagen, 1599.