Barton and Cisse Reflect on QPR's Relegation & Survival

Barton
How long will a club lie i' the Premiership ere it rot?

Cisse, the Clown
I' faith, if it be not rotten before it dies--as we have many pocky clubs now-a-days, that will scarce hold the laying in--he will last you some eight month or nine month: a Wanderer will last you nine year.

Barton
Why them more than another?

Cisse the Clown
Why, sir, their hide is so tanned with their trade, that they will keep out goals a great while; and opposition goals are a sore decayer of your whoreson Premiership body. Here's a skull now; this skull has lain in the earth three and twenty days.

Barton
Whose was it?

Cisse thet Clown
A whoreson mad fellow's it was: whose do you think it was?

Barton
Nay, I know not.

Cisse the Clown
A pestilence on him for a mad rogue! a' poured a flagon of Rhenish on my head once. This same skull, sir, was Warnock's skull, our Tony's jester.

Barton
Let me see. Alas, poor Warnock! I knew him, my Cisse: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! My gorge rims at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? Your gambols? Your songs? Your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the training field on a roar? Not one now, to mock your own grinning? Quite chap-fallen? Now get you to Mark Hughes' chamber, and tell him, let him paint an inch thick, to this favour he must come; make him laugh at that! Prithee, Cisse, tell me one thing.

Cisse the Clown
What's that, my lord?

Barton
Dost thou think Birmingham looked o' this fashion i' the Prem?

Cisse the Clown
E'en so.

Barton
And smelt so? pah!

Cisse the Clown
E'en so, my lord.

Barton
To what base uses we may return, Cisse! Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Birmingham, till he find it stopping a bung-hole?

Cisse the Clown
'Twere to consider too curiously, to consider so.

Barton
No, faith, not a jot; but to follow him thither with modesty enough, and likelihood to lead it: as thus: Birmingham collapsed, Birmingham were relegated, Birmingham returneth into the Championship; the Championship is earth; of earth we make loam; and why of that loam, whereto he was converted, might they not stop a beer-barrel? Imperious Caesar, dead and turn'd to clay, might stop a hole to keep the wind away. O, that that earth, which kept the world in awe, should patch a wall to expel the winter flaw! But soft! but soft! aside: here comes Mark Hughes and a funeral procession!

(Later)

Enter Joey Barton, thoughtful:

Barton:
To be a Premiership club or not to be a Premiership club. That is the question. Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them. To be relegated, to be no more--and by going down say we end the heartache, and the thousand natural shocks that survival is heir to. 'Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished. To go down, to slide-- to slide--perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub, for in the Championship what dreams may come
when we have shuffled off this Premiership coil, must give us pause. There's the respect that makes calamity of so long life. For who would bear the whippings and scorns of the Prem, th' oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely, the pangs of despised defeat, the law's delay, the insolence of the Premiership, and the spurns that patient merit of th' unworthy takes, when he himself might his quietus make with a bare relegation? Who would the Prem bear, to grunt and sweat under a weary life, but that the dread of something after the drop, the rediscovered country, from whose bourn few travellers returns, puzzles the will, and makes us rather bear those ills we have than fly to others that we know not of? Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, and thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, and enterprise of great pitch and moment with this regard their currents turn awry and lose the name of action. -- Soft you now, the fair Onouha! -- Nedum, in thy orisons be all my sins remembered!