Listing to Port

1. Romeo and Juliet’s melancholy ghosts wandered blank-eyed and mystified through Verona until the twelfth day after their deaths, each believing themselves alone. Then a sudden shock of recognition flowed over the city as they passed through each other in the marketplace. For the next few days, the city lay sweating at night in spectral joy. The ghosts of Italy, swept up in a wave of theatrical passion, flocked to the city to fuck against the walls of their enemies and drift, sated, through their wine vats. Then Juliet’s ghost realised that Romeo’s ghost was not actually in love with her, but only with the idea of the ghost of the mystery of her; and Romeo’s ghost realised that Juliet’s ghost still picked her nose even though she was no longer capable of making snot, and was a little too fond of haunting the bedrooms of long-haired musicians; and each of them realised that the other was kind of annoying. Italy’s susceptible ghosts responded by initiating mystical punch-ups in the street and slapping dinner from tables in front of the mystified living. The season of spectral pugilism lasted for more than a month and made the city almost uninhabitable. Then Juliet’s ghost came to some agreement with the visiting phantoms of Rabelais and Chaucer, who had sensed that something literary was going on, and floated off in search of a different story. Romeo’s ghost subsequently took up with a succession of other deceased ladies. I believe that he currently haunts the toilet of a bar in Chievo, where he interrupts patrons mid-shit to grumble to them about women.
2. Chiron and Demetrius came to (in the spectral sense) in the remains of the pie that they had been baked in. Having gained some unusually intimate insights into pie and its construction, they became famed far and wide in the world of ghosts as pie experts. If one wished to haunt a pie, particularly if it was a large pie, they were the ghosts to consult.  If one wished to make a pie, they maintained a team of poltergeists to move ingredients around and light fires in the middle of the night. They are believed to be nearly entirely responsible for the season of hauntings in 1620 - 1670 which led to a sharp but temporary decline in the popularity of pie among the living. Subsequently, seeking new challenges, they moved on to haunting small pastries. These days they are often involved, when they can be raised (for they are rather old and sluggish ghosts by now) in making canapes of various sorts seem uncanny.
3. As is now well known, the ghost of Richard III ended up haunting a car park in Leicester. He was able to gain a small measure of satisfaction by manipulating susceptible drivers into clipping each other’s wing-mirrors and lying about it, but it is probably fair to say he was never truly happy about it.
4. The ghost of Othello stood pointedly in Iago’s cell, tapping his feet, until Iago was executed. Subsequently, Iago’s ghost woke to the sensation of being punched into the middle of next week. Thereafter Othello’s ghost and Iago’s ghost were separated by approximately half a week and so Othello was unable to complete his revenge. However, Iago’s ghost was plagued by nearly unendurable deja vu following his temporal dislocation and he ended up quite unable to plot any further villainy. Instead, he floats around Venice’s canals with only his nose above the water level, whimpering.
5. Hamlet’s ghost woke to find Fortinbras in charge. Having now been definitively usurped, he was not at all happy. He entered into a period of intensive vacillation, choosing a room in one of the castle towers for this purpose. The room became famous because one could not enter it without emerging, some hours later, with a vague sense that one had spent a lot of time overthinking something and failing to come to a conclusion. Several hundred years later, he emerged with a resolute look in his eye. His subsequent attempts to drop a sword on Fortinbras’s latest descendent all failed, however, as he was completely unable to interact with solid objects. In great frustration he hired Chiron and Demetrius to bake him into a pie which was served at the royal table, with the hope of thus investing the entire royal line of Denmark with extreme difficulty in making decisions. Unfortunately the pie was flipped out of the kitchen window by a careless poltergeist and eaten by dogs. The dogs of Elsinore are, to this day, unusually indecisive.