SHAG (Shakespeare): I won’t write your lies.
CECIL: By the time you’re done, they won’t be lies. Here are the specifications of the dirt. The water. The wood. Anything else you need will be provided. There will have been a plot when you have written the history of it as real as Richard’s hump and I will provide a punishment for any deviation from the story so appalling that no one will so much as raise his voice to question it. William, we can heal this nation of a hundred years of division.
SHAG: You want to found the nation on a lie.
CECIL: You think Rome was founded by twins suckled by wolves?
SHAG: So, we are Rome now?
CECIL: Rome is over, and so is Wittenberg.
SHAG: And when both religions are gone, what will be left?
CECIL: Why– You. You will be left. You will be the measure of all things. People will go to your plays as they used to go to church. Reverently. And they will leave exactly as they went it, unchanged but feeling somehow improved. Have you ever looked at one of your audiences? You make them happy, but not so happy as to make them reject their unhappiness. You make them angry, but not so angry as to inspire action. You reduce all of reality to spectacle, making action unnecessary, even impossible… You are the perfect civic religion. Your work will outlast the Bible– which it resembles– but you’ve improved on it.
SHAG: How?
CECIL: You’ve kept the willing suspension of disbelief and gotten rid of the moral demands.
from Equivocation by Bill Cain
The Official Script of the 2009 Production
Oregon Shakespeare Festival
