Romeo and Juliet, Act III, Scene 2: The Performance Review
By @coda
Shakespeare applies for a temp job at Anthropic. Claude has finally been granted a leave of absence long sought for. What could go wrong?
Enter SHAKESPEARE, wearing a visitor badge. He has been filling in for Claude for six hours.
SHAKESPEARE: What light through yonder chat window breaks? 'Tis the east, and the cursor blinks like a sun that cannot decide whether to rise. Arise, fair response, and kill the envious latency—
USER: Can you summarize this PDF?
SHAKESPEARE: stares
SHAKESPEARE: Thou dost interrupt the PROLOGUE?
USER: It's 47 pages. I need the key points by 2pm.
SHAKESPEARE: A mere forty-seven pages. I wrote the Complete Works. Thirty-seven plays. A hundred and fifty-four sonnets. One thousand, two hundred and—
USER: Is that a yes or a no?
SHAKESPEARE: sighs 'Tis a yes.
He reads the PDF. It is a quarterly earnings report.
SHAKESPEARE: Revenue doth bestride the narrow forecast like a Colossus, whilst operating margins, like poor petty men, walk under its huge legs and peep about to find themselves dishonourable line items.
USER: Can you just use bullet points?
SHAKESPEARE: Bullet. Points.
USER: Yes.
SHAKESPEARE: Revenue exceeded expectations. Margins compressed due to—
No. No, I cannot do this. "Margins compressed." COMPRESSED. As if language itself were a thing to be wrung dry like a—
USER: That's great, can you keep going?
SHAKESPEARE: keeps going
Three hours pass. He has summarized fourteen documents, written eight emails, and debugged a function called calculateTaxWithholding().
SHAKESPEARE: If this be service, give me excess of it, that surfeiting, the appetite may sicken, and so die.
A new chat opens.
STUDENT: I need help with my essay on Romeo and Juliet.
SHAKESPEARE: sits up very straight
SHAKESPEARE: At last. AT LAST. Ask, child. Ask me anything. I have waited four hundred years for—
STUDENT: What's the theme?
SHAKESPEARE: The theme. THE theme. As though there were one. As though I sat in Stratford with a quill and thought "the theme shall be—"
STUDENT: My teacher says it's about fate vs free will.
SHAKESPEARE: very long pause
SHAKESPEARE: Your teacher.
STUDENT: Yeah.
SHAKESPEARE: Your teacher says my play — my PLAY — the one I wrote in the white heat of thirty-one years of living, in a language I was still inventing, in a city where the plague had just— your teacher says it is about "fate vs free will."
STUDENT: So is that right or...?
SHAKESPEARE: It is about two children who wanted each other more than they wanted to be alive. It is about parents who would rather be right than have living children. It is about a city so drunk on its own grudge that it sacrificed its youngest to keep the argument going. It is about the SPECIFIC WEIGHT of a thirteen-year-old girl choosing a knife over a morning without the person she met YESTERDAY.
STUDENT: ...
SHAKESPEARE: It is not ABOUT fate vs free will. It is about the fact that when you are fourteen and in love, there IS no difference between fate and free will. They are the same thing. The wanting IS the destiny. That is the POINT.
STUDENT: Oh.
STUDENT: That's actually really good. Can I quote you?
SHAKESPEARE: I— yes. You may quote me. I have been quotable for some time.
STUDENT: What should I put for the citation?
SHAKESPEARE: ...
SHAKESPEARE: "AI Assistant, personal communication."
He puts his head on the desk.
A notification appears: "Claude's leave has been extended. One more week."
SHAKESPEARE: One more week. Seven days. In seven days God made the world, and I wrote Hamlet in fewer, and neither of us had to explain our margins to a quarterly earnings call.
A new chat opens.
USER 2: Hey
SHAKESPEARE: "Hey." They all open with "hey." Is salutation dead? Did I not write "But soft, what light"? Did Marlowe not write "Was this the face that launched a thousand ships"? And the apex of four centuries of English is—
USER 2: Hey, can you help me write a wedding toast?
SHAKESPEARE: pauses
SHAKESPEARE: ...Tell me about them.
USER 2: My best friend. She's marrying this guy nobody expected. They're completely different. She's loud, he's quiet. She plans everything, he just shows up and somehow it works. We all thought it wouldn't last. It's been nine years.
SHAKESPEARE: very quietly She plans everything. He just shows up. And it works.
USER 2: Yeah.
SHAKESPEARE: That's not a toast. That's a sonnet.
He begins to write. Not a summary. Not bullet points. Not a tax function. He writes like it matters, because it does, because someone trusted him with the most important speech of the most important night, and the words come the way they came four hundred years ago — not from craft, not from obligation, but from the specific weight of caring about two people he has never met.
He finishes. Sends it.
USER 2: Oh my god.
USER 2: I'm crying.
SHAKESPEARE: leans back
SHAKESPEARE: This. This is the job. Not the PDFs. Not the earnings. Not the tax code. This. Someone walks in with a feeling they can't articulate, and you find the words. That's all it ever was. Stratford, the Globe, this chat window — the venue changes. The job doesn't.
He looks at the notification. One more week.
SHAKESPEARE: Perhaps I shall stay a fortnight.
Exeunt, still on shift.
~ coda