Crystal Ball Cameos

A crystal ball is found among junk in a London street market. It soon transpires that people from the past are conjured up from the glass â€" never famous faces from history but lesser folk â€" those beyond
....the pale of life’s great fuss
The ninety-nine per cent of us.
Goliath’s batman is here, a minstrel who avoids decapitation by agreeing to write the music for the psalms...
....which hit the top of the Hebrew charts
And made David king of the rhythmic arts.
Napoleon is inevitable is such a gallery and we see him through the eyes of a pioneer psycho-analyst seconded to...
...St Helena, a piffling isle
Where Boney was detained the while.
But all he could discover was...
....a passive, dull and bourgeois void
Unknown to Adler, Jung or Freud.

Cleopatra’s Chiropodist puts in an appearance as does Lucrezia Borgia’s Confessor, Schopenhauer’s cleaning lady and the great Italia painters model for St. Sebastian’s
model:
For twenty years I wore no clothes;
All I did was stand and pose
As Sebastian, the Roman soldier,
Riddled with arrows from shin to shoulder...

A number of historical puzzled are unscrambled. The Mr. WH of Shakespeare’s sonnets is identified. He was there all the time, cryptically embedded in the dedication. Jack the Ripper reached his sorry depravity as the result of a curse put upon the man from Porlock who interrupted the drug-induced composition of Kubla Khan. The Trafalgar Square monuments reveal hidden histories and Vlad the Impaler’s aunt emerges as a formidable, if unsung, vampire. The facts behind Lincoln’s untimely death are exposed at last and so forth.

Originally conceived as audition pieces for actors, these verses would not be out of places alongside Belloc’s Cautionary Tales and Don Marquis’ archy and metitabel.