In last week's episode they had discovered the prescence of Beatle lyrics in 12th Night and narrowly averted introduing product placement into Shakespeare's plays. In this episode they discovered that Shakespeare's Dark Lady and muse was Oz of Ozima and living in the Palace of Westminster. Quite germane was the fact that at a poetry slam, Dibble had caught the Zeitgeist and recited Sonnet 18, not quite beating Will's Hamlet Soliloquy but causing Miriam, teenage daughter of the Bishop of Winchester, to fall in love with him (Dibble that is, not Will - do keep up). Will was also tempted to transpose 12th Night from Illyria to the Crystal Palace in golden beached Australia. Careless talk and all that.
Our brave quintet, along with Will, dressed as the Ladies in Waiting of Miriam gained entrance to the Palace. Whilst Dibble showed Miriam that even without trying he was a thoughtful and sensitive lover (at least by her standards), the others found Oz (or Germaine Greer) teaching Hey Jude to the ministrels. John managed to steer them round to Hey Nonny instead. Then whilst Germaine was distracted and insensed by Lucius' notion that prostitution was a decent profession for a woman, Will was made to overhear how strong women really enjoyed the Taming of the Shrew treatment. Germaine was so taken aback that she punched him out of a window, fortunately the future selves of the PCs had travelled back to place at net at that very point and promised a Dark Lad a position at the court (arranged by Miriam) in exchange for looking after Will. Germaine was then wrestled into a sack and lowered out of a window into a boat, the boatman having been promised sex with Miriam in exchange for delivering the sack back to the PCs' inn (it was one of those dark room affairs). Their business concluded, the PCs made good their escape.
At one point Miriam and Dibble created an anomaly and had a premonition of their future baby but this was cleared up by some more Zeitgeistiness, namely John persuading Will to take all the crap bits out of Hamlet, the clowns, that other soliloquy, Dogsberry, ...
So, a session in which mechanics and players combined to deliver an entertaining evening's play. Five is possibly slightly too many, it makes decisions about where to place numbers in the matrix perhaps slower than they might otherwise be, but the game does still work.
