In Don Marquis’s enduringly funny Archy and Mehitabel, Archy interviews a parrot named pete who once belonged to the fellow who ran the Mermaid Tavern back around 1600, and who claims to have overheard Bill Shakespeare muttering one night over his pints of sack to Ben Jonson and Frankie Beaumont about his keen disappointment in having been obliged to earn his livelihood as a playwright when he might have been a poet. Archy reports this interview all in lower-case letters and without punctuation, because he is a cockroach pounding out his ruminations night by night on Marquis’s old typewriter, jumping from key to key.