LITERARY MAGAZINE
ISSUE 4
The Penny Dreadful
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The Penny Dreadful
“Kapla!” Issue 4 Sample
ISSUE 4
Editors John Keating & Marc O’Connell Assistant Editor Cethan Leahy Graphic Design Leyla Bulmer (leylabulmer.com)
www.thepennydreadful.org Š Copyright remains with authors and artists, 2014. Published by The Dreadful Press, Cork, Ireland, 2014. Printed by Lettertec Ireland Ltd. Carrigtwohill, Cork.
Calligraphy Ciara Norton
All rights reserved. The material in this publication is protected by copyright law. Except as may be permitted by law, no part of the material may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the copyright owner.
Art Work Leyla Bulmer
ISSN 2009-5589 (Online) ISSN 2009-5570 (Print)
4 Introduction
Poetry 42 Matthew Sweeney 44 Himali Soin 45 Graham Allen
Fiction
46 Michael Dineen 47 Cal Doyle
8 Max Goodwin Brown
50 Michael Whelan
13 Sara Baume
51 Keith Payne
19 Claire-Louise Bennett
52 Michael N Shanks
20 George Constantin
53 Daragh Breen
25 Dave Lordan
54 Doireann Ní Ghríofa
29 Colin Heffernan
55 James Patterson
34 Karl White on Rob Doyle
56 Graham Allen on Billy Ramsell
38 Featured Illustrator / Leyla Bulmer
61 Contributors
Contents
Section 1
Section 3
You have in your hands the long awaited issue 4 of the Penny Dreadful. Eager to find out what literary treats await you, you begin to read the introduction and learn by the end of this sentence that it comes in the form of a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-esque interactive narrative.
The cardboard box is full of your old favourites: Dahl! Blyton! Proust! You spend the next three hours reading about chocolate factories, lashings of ginger beer and the twin curses of time and memory.
If you decide to ignore this conceit and begin reading the magazine, go to page 8. If you are reminded of your now lost childhood and wish to futilely attempt to recapture it by looking for your old books in the attic, go to Section 2.
Section 2 You climb the ladder into your attic, each step a creak. It has been many years since you were last up here, as confirmed by the stale odours and the surprisingly numerous rat skeletons. You locate a box with ‘BOOKS’ written in crude lettering. You move to open it but pause when you notice an elegant wooden chest next to it, with the legend ‘Cronus’ engraved on it. A strange glow emanates from between its lid. If you decide to open the box marked ‘BOOKS’, go to section 3. If you decide to open the mysterious chest, go to section 4.
INTRODUCTION
If you decide to continue reading and fancy a story about a misanthropic chicken man, turn to page 20. If you decide finally to open the mysterious chest, go to section 5. If you decide to go to the kitchen and eat a bun instead go to section 4.
Section 4 Suddenly and inexplicably you fall to your death. So it goes. THE END
Section 5 You open the chest and with a trembling hand you lift out the contents. ‘It’s some kind of amulet!’ you say to no one in particular. You examine it and discover there is a triangular hole in the back of it. If you decide to wear the amulet (even though it’s a bit gaudy), go to section 6. If you decide to insert, into the hole, the triangular key your grandfather mysteriously gave you as a present when you were 5, go to section 4.
Section 6 You slip it around your neck and wow! You are surrounded by a wall of dazzling light. In a few moments, it disappears and you find you are no longer in your attic. In fact you have no idea where you are. You look down and see you are on a ledge very far from a carpeted ground. You then look around and notice that you are surrounded by literary magazines and
giant humans. In a moment, the truth dawns on you. Your greatest dream came true, you have transformed into Issue 4 of the Penny Dreadful! THE END
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
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The Penny Dreadful
Hands / Max Goodwin Brown
The fireworks display is entering its elegant middle phase. Stately mushrooms of light are spreading their caps across the black. Fred stands in the crowd on the brow of the hill, communing with the colours. Very profound, he feels. Looking around, he’s indignant, offended almost, to see how many people are filming the sky with their phones. At what point, he wants to know, will any of them feel the inclination to watch a blurred video clip of something they can’t even be bothered to watch while it’s actually happening? Still, he decides he may as well take a photo. He pulls out his phone and points it up. In his defence, he likes to think that photography is a hobby of his. Whenever he compiles a list of his interests—for a CV say, or a dating profile—photography always solidly occupies third or fourth place. He has a little look at his dating profile, since he has his phone out anyway. No messages. Nor are there any when he checks it again ten minutes later, shuffling downhill through the gunpowder haze. As he comes out of the park his thoughts move to tomorrow night’s gathering. Tish will be there, of course. She’s with someone new now—according to Helen anyway. Fred is pleased by how little this bothers him. Even so, he hopes Tish won’t be tactless enough to bring the bloke along. It’s supposed to be a small dinner after all—the eight of them have known each other for years. Fred doesn’t miss her. Not really. But he does miss the companionship. Misses having a playmate, a person to fiddle with. The new app has finished downloading by the time Fred arrives home. He has a look at it while he waits for his food to heat up. Ni-ni-ni-ni, Ni-ni-ni-ni, Ni-ni-ni-ni, Ni-ni-ni-ni The familiar tune prickles out of the handset as the words drift into view: THE EROGENOUS ZONE Then: SELECT: STAN or FRAN Fred goes for the latter. A drawing of a nude woman appears on the screen, limbs splayed Vitruvian-man style. Fred taps her lightly between the legs. The woman rotates backwards 90 degrees like a table-footballer. Her upturned pelvis comes surging forward to fill the frame. From the kitchen table Fred looks down the length of his empty flat. The TV, resting massively on its cabinet against the opposite wall, looks back. Fred sees the glazed shape of himself inside it, a charcoal smudge floating in a grey square. Eyes down to the smaller screen. A digital vulva, outer lips drawn back, presents itself frankly. Bip and a grid forms over the top of it. Arcs and contour lines swell into view. Tiny arrows flanked by tiny labels creep across the picture. Shading appears. Fred prowls the region with his eyeballs, taking in its dips and grooves, its elevations. Gingerly, he sends his thumb in to explore.
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North Korea / Sara Baume
The guinea-pig is one week pregnant when Kenny and Lindsay watch a nature documentary on filial cannibalism. At this point, the young couple have no idea that the guinea-pig inhabiting their guest bedroom, Kenny’s misguided Valentine’s day gift to his fiancée, was raped by her own brother in the pet shop’s communal hutch. It’s a form of infanticide, the presenter says, where adults tend to eat the young of their species and sometimes even their own immediate offspring. The programme features wolf spiders and mormon crickets and tropical goby. They spit and swarm and flit their diaphanous fins in an ominous sort of way. But filial cannibalism is not limited just to exotic species, the presenter says, in certain circumstances it will occur amongst cats, dogs, rabbits, rats, even the noble chimp. When the programme finishes, Kenny notices that the blinds are still open even though it’s dark outside and people on the street below will be able to look straight into the glowing rectangle of their living room window as though it’s a drive-in cinema screen and he and Lindsay are actors in a tortured romance. Lindsay stretches her hand across the sofa and for a second Kenny thinks that she is reaching for his, but instead she snatches the remotecontrol and prods at the buttons with a manicured thumb. There is a sliver of diamonds winking on her third digit and Kenny realises that this is the first time he’s noticed it in months. Now the engagement ring has become just another part of Lindsay’s hand, an extra knuckle or a birthmark, a burn or freckle or scar. Kenny gets up and goes to the window. Across the road, four small boys are busying themselves with the smashing of a shatterproof bus shelter. Their gelled crew-cuts twinkle beneath the streetlamp; their faces are lit by a psychotic kind of boredom. He lowers the blind. ~ The guinea-pig is three weeks pregnant when Kenny realises that Lindsay hasn’t stepped across the threshold of the guest bedroom since Valentine’s day. Every morning he pretends to be asleep until she’s left for work. Then he sets up his laptop on the spare bed and sits cross-legged on the floor beside the guinea-pig’s pagoda-shaped hutch. Every night he cooks two platefuls of food which he and Lindsay eat off their knees in front of the television, then he sluices their sauce puddles down the sink before loading the dishwasher. As he sluices, Kenny always wonders why Lindsay consistently leaves behind a single mouthful of every meal, as though the last four peas or two severed strands of noodle are mysteriously impossible to swallow. He remembers a time when he was able to dismiss this along with all of her other unnecessary rituals: the way she dusts the foliage of the bonsai tree, the way she folds the dangling sheet of toilet paper into a perfect triangle. He can’t remember precisely when these things ceased
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Obit for an Unman / Dave Lordan
He was a grown-up toddler. A middle-aged orphan. A lonely old queer that no-one in their sober senses had a minute to spare for. I don’t mean to be insulting, to him or to anyone else. I’m only saying here and now what he used to say about himself, at least when I knew him, which is years back. Lonesome and bitter and needy, he attempted to endear himself by way of self-deprecating candour: I’m nothing but a misfit. This world has hated me from day one because I am different. And not just different; useless as well. I mean ugly and weak. I mean maladapted. Unable to cope with prevailing conditions. A modern neanderthal. Too gentle and hairy by far. I’m a fish that can’t swim. A chimp that can’t climb. I’m the opposite of the superbeast that’s going to rule the world from now on. I’m what’s being killed off by the smart phones with their nanochip brains and their cadmium hearts. I’m not even interested in reproduction. I don’t want to make another, improved version of myself. I can’t improve anything. Thus he would pitch his fluent, well-practiced self-hatred into my gaze, as if my face were a dark pit into which you could throw such, without fear of it echoing back with ten times the wrath attached. I listened, nodded, smoked, sipped. I was that much away from telling him he ought to go off and find a scenic tree to hang himself from, but I never did. Who would want to be the one to take the final blame for the death of the unman? He was polyphonically paranoid also, in the form of a non-stop interior diatribe against himself that was in constant development. It was delivered, over a lifetime, in numerous different and interchangeable voices. Some were an interior playback/remix of those who really had hated him, like his mother and father and the whole of St Joseph’s primary school. Others were phantom taunters and at least partly his own creation; he told me sometimes that the moon put on an angry woman’s face and scolded him. He told me that when he was six a Santa Claus had visited him in the middle of a summer’s night and clattered him on both cheeks until he screamed. He still believed in Santa Claus, but was terrified of him. He told me of a little creature which he referred to as The Critic, a brute who appeared on his right shoulder every time he tried to do something productive, to blare at him how useless he was, how he shouldn’t bother, how he should go out and get a real job. But perhaps these grotesques came not from inside him but from another dimension beyond, an infinite dimension of hate, where a cornucopia of gloating gargoyles nourish themselves on human self-loathing. In his whole lifetime he achieved nothing but his own broken-heartedness. He had no durable effect, whatsoever, on anyone or anything else. Although he tried, he really, really tried to find some traction, some importance, some function. What he tried most of all was literature. He tried to turn the bitter, damning voices, both inner and outer, into characters and dialogues and plots. We both drank in Grogans, back when I was drinking and keeping company with anyone who 12 The Penny Dreadful
She & Him / Colin Heffernan
The day came in wretched. They were safe from the worst of it usual-like, had made for modest comfort amid the bother all round them, but that morning began a holler of north-westerly wind that twisted and snarled up the harbour. It unleashed an unfairness of rain, brought it to bear upon their little huddled home behind and beneath the ageing stadium. She stirred first, his waking a rib-shuddering kick from her. There wasn’t the time for sentiment. Not with the bed wetter by the second. ‘Up to fuck,’ she snapped and him moaning but capitulating still, knowing how her bitter had the better of him unless he was drunk and riddled with the need for her share of whatever they were having. He was the reactive type then, white-knuckled against the world, his eyes cut with a kind of fitful violence. It had made for mischief, for enemies. He’d have stayed in the city-centre certain-like until one or other of them killed him or worse. Just for saying he hadn’t turned and trotted away, see. But he listened sometimes and she bawled loud enough when he didn’t. She set about the day, rolled him off the old mattress and hauled it out of the bluster, propped it against the cold granite of the stadium’s utilitarian shell. That hidden nook, their corner, was a curious thing. They’d laid out beneath the austere shade of its rear a kind of something for themselves, furnished with those few and simple things, acquired or stolen. He had found it, a little hiding hole between two of the structure’s massive supports, a man more worried by the cold than the harm might come more efficient-like from a boot while he slept. The shelters were no use to them, dry-houses and them not dry folk on any a night save they were short the necessaries for wetting it. They needed something else and he’d come back all enthused that day, found her waiting at the promenade bench where he’d left her on the Mall. He led her a treasure trail and what a sight they made, the pair of them a giddy drunk, a skittish drunk. He’d spotted the mattress in a skip up the Old Blackrock by the hospital, the springs bust out of its guts like mechanical hernias and the tail-end steeped half deep in a fetid collusion of rainwater and badness. They’d hoisted it out, trotted beneath it at first, renewed somehow, younger for a first piece of luck in the longest time. He’d run out of puff before they’d planted a hundred steps, swore colourful-like at each one came after. He’d suffer like a saint once, what had bred a first fondness in her, the stoic hold of him. Now he was given to sucking the air out of her with his bristling self-pity. Still they’d made it down the long industrial road at his beckoning, through the mottled fluttering of light apportioned by the silhouette-remnants of winter trees, past the jog-and-dog set who watched their little drama curiously. The classy middle uppity was all around them but he promised a foxhole there on enemy ground and a foxhole he’d found. They collapsed on their trophy once it was laid out, hidden in the stadium’s shading. They laughed and threw arms one round the other, the first and only like that, heart-jabbering sweaty. They waited until the next day to steal the sleeping bags off the pair who slept out the back of the old tax building. Too many victories in one
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Issue 4 Sample
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Rob Doyle Here are the Young Men Dublin. The Lilliput Press, 2014 ISBN: 978-1-84351-619-4 304pp. p.bk. €12.00 Review by Karl White
Rob Doyle’s debut novel Here Are The Young Men is something different from the usual fare dished up by contemporary Irish writers. Instead of self-satisfied laments over the state of the nation or its chequered past, Doyle aims to throw a literary hand grenade into the rather dreary and moribund in-house that is current Irish fiction. The manner in which he chooses to do is by resurrecting something that was thought to be (to borrow a phrase from the book) ‘as dead as the fucking dodo’, namely the philosophical novel. The narrative recounts the adventures of a group of Dublin teenagers who have just finished their Leaving Cert exams and now face that great grey slop known hopefully as ‘the future’. Matthew, Rez, Kearney and Cocker are all inner-city Dubliners and avid drinkers and drug users. Spared all middle class notions of ambition, the freedom of life after school consists primarily in having an infinity of time to do even more drugs and hang around aimlessly. The summer passes in a grey smog as they attempt to figure out what to do with their lives. Matthew, the novel’s sometime narrator, has vague ambitions to study literature at university and engages in a tentative romance with Jen; Kearney spends his private time playing violent computer games and devising ones of his own,
Review The Penny Dreadful
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Leyla Bulmer is an Australian/Irish freelance illustrator and designer. Leyla studied visual communications in Cork and on finishing her education she began to take on a variety of freelance work including designing the Penny Dreadful starting with their first issue in 2012. Since moving back to Australia she continues to design for the literary magazine. Leyla has completed branding and design jobs for skateboarding organisations, hotels and restaurants, bands, music events and projects, and websites among other things. She works as an illustrator for The Shoe Alternative alongside other freelance illustration projects. Leyla can add photography to her list of enterprises, most recently she was attached to a harness taking photographs from a roof for an Australian company. “For as long as I can remember I have loved anything that fell within the remit of the creative world. I spent time as a kid with one of my mum’s friends who was an artist and loved to get stuck in to anything that gave me a freeing artistic outlet whether it was painting, drawing, puppet making or transforming my clothes and jewellery into something a bit more interesting. This stuck with me all the way through school and provided me with a support as I never particularly found solace in the academic side of things. I like to read an article and let my imagine do its thing then translate it onto paper. I use people I know as muses for my work. I often start with taking photos and work from there. I usually use
water colours and continuous-line drawings, I feel the two flow together nicely. Depending on the project I may bring elements together in a digital format. Since moving to Melbourne I have found the change of scenery and culture inspiring and can already see its impact on my work. It is a very creative city that is providing me with a solid platform to get my design and illustration business off the ground. I am also gaining great experience through some of the voluntary projects I am involved in. Looking forward I would like to have an established design and illustration business while also furthering my education in the world of Art Therapy.� Website - leylabulmer.com
Featured Illustrator /
Leyla Bulmer
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The Good Man / Matthew Sweeney
The good man killed a fly once and didn’t eat for a week. Since then he’s been kind to everything. He whistles dogs to come to him. Cats sidle up and rub his legs. Cows come to fences to be near. Even crows flap around, above him. But it’s children he favours most. Every Saturday morning he dons brightly coloured clothes and stands outside the Opera, blowing balloons, which he twists into hares, penguins, alligators, even pterodactyls, and gives to any child who wants one. The he beams a smile and goes to a vegetarian restaurant for lunch. We all should be like the good man but we’re not. So he goes home and meditates, then sleeps in his white hammock, with the parrot asleep above him, and he dreams of a pale rider on a grey horse galloping across a dusty plain, with white flowering bushes and granite rocks, and a river.
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Billy Ramsell’s new collection of poetry presents its readers with a sustained and impressively coherent journey through the modern technological scene. Commencing with the merging of human and mechanical forms in the morning journey of a commuter, Ramsell’s new book sets off on a Dantean journey into the rhythms of technology and desire, repetitive beats and recurrent physical need. Strange how from up here it’s all some bright machine.
Billy Ramsell The Architect’s Dream of Winter Dublin. The Dedalus Press, 2013 ISBN. 978-1-906614-78-2 80pp. p.bk. €12.00 Review by Graham Allen
Ramsell’s digital, networked, connected world is not the stock one of alienation and ubiquitous nostalgia. As is made clear by the collection’s first core poem, ‘Repetitive Beats,’ a kind of mini-Under Milk Wood for the internetgeneration, Ramsell finds a new, fresh source of inspiration from the pulsive, vibrating world of technological sound and vision. A young Irish poet who has already securely established his special gift for rhythmical expression and thinking, Ramsell quickly makes it clear that he is as much the Virgilian guide as the awefilled Dantean observer. This is a collection that appears, from its first section, to be taking us to a new well of inspiration for whatever transformative and receptive capacities we have
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Graham Allen is a Professor in The School of English, UCC. His books include Harold Bloom: A Poetics of Conflict (1994), Intertextuality (2nd Ed. 2010) and Mary Shelley (2008). His collection, The One That Got Away (2014), and his epoem Holes are published by New Binary Press. He has published poetry in numerous journals. He won the Listowel Single Poetry Prize in 2010 and has been shortlisted in a number of competitions, including The Crashaw Prize (2013) and the Fool for Poetry Prize (2014). Sara Baume’s short stories have appeared in The Stinging Fly, The Moth and the Irish Independent as part of the Hennessy New Irish Writing series. She is winner of the 2014 Davy Byrnes Short Story Award and her debut novel, Spill Simmer Falter Wither, will be published by Tramp Press in 2015. Claire-Louise Bennett recently brought together a collection of work in a book called Pond. This endeavour was assisted by the Arts Council in Ireland. Some of the stories included have appeared in The Stinging Fly, The White Review, Colony and Gorse. Daragh Breen was born in Cork. His work has been published widely in Irish literary journals, including Poetry Ireland, The Stinging Fly, Cyphers, The SHOp and the Cork Literary Review. He has read at the Cork Spring Poetry Festival and Poetry Ireland’s ‘Introductions Series’. Max Goodwin Brown lives in London and studied in Aberdeen. His passions are writing and food. Some day he hopes to combine the two in a professional context. He writes short stories, a few of which have been published, both online and in print. George Constantin is a writer from Los Angeles. His publications include short fiction in lively-arts.com and Phoebe. He was managing editor, poetry editor and publication designer of the literary journal Flies, Cockroaches and Poets. Michael Dineen was born and raised in Cork. He currently resides in Dublin and works in data mining. He has previously been published in Southword, The SHop and The Weary Blues journals. He is partial to a pint of stout and also enjoys long runs, obscure art house movies and a good game of hurling among other simple pleasures. Cal Doyle’s work has appeared in a number of journals and anthologies. He has read as part of Poetry Ireland’s Introductions Series. He lives in Cork. Doireann Ní Ghríofa is an award-winning bilingual poet. She was recently awarded the Ireland Chair of Poetry bursary. Her work has also been shortlisted for many prizes, including the Pushcart Prize (USA), The Venture Award (UK), the Strokestown Poetry Prize and the Jonathan Swift Award among others. Her first collection of poems in English is forthcoming from Dedalus Press. www. doireannnighriofa.com Colin Heffernan lives in Cork City. He has one novel, locked in drawer, which is without an ending or much sense. He is finishing a second novel. He has recently had work published in an anthology entitled The Several Deaths of Finbar’s Father & Other Stories.
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Dave Lordan is a writer based in Dublin. Wurm Press published his short fiction debut First Book of Frags in 2013 and his third collection of poetry Lost Tribe of The Wicklow Mountains is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry. He is fiction editor at Colony.ie. His website is www.davelordanwriter.com and he can be contacted at dlordan@hotmail.com. James Patterson’s poetry has been featured in the journals Cyphers, Wordlegs, Southword, The Irish Left Review, The Weary Blues, and in the upcoming Autumn issue of Poetry Ireland Review. He is currently studying for an MA in Creative Writing at Queen’s University Belfast, and lives in his hometown of Newry, Co. Down. Keith Payne is an Irish writer living by the sea in Vigo, Galicia. Recent publications include the Irish Times, The Dublin Review of Books and The Trinity Journal of Literary Translation. Michael Naghten Shanks lives in Dublin. His writing has featured or is forthcoming in various Irish and International publications including Colony, The Honest Ulsterman, gorse, New Irish Writing, wordlegs, The Quietus, and theNewerYork. He has featured in the anthologies 30 under 30 (Doire Press) and New Planet Cabaret (New Island). He has been listed for various prizes including the Fish Short Story Prize, the Over The Edge New Writer of the Year, and a Pushcart Prize. He has read at events and festivals in Ireland and the UK. He is editor of The Bohemyth. Himali Soin writes looking out of Euclid’s window. Recent poetry has been published in the Bread Loaf School of English Journal, Prairie Schooner, on Kritya, Pyrta, Muse India, Art Slant, Asia Writes, CNN Travel and Quay, amongst others. She has a column of ekphrastic poems for TAKE on Art magazine. Her poems also feature in a few anthologies such as Seamus Heaney’s Yellow Nib Poetry in English by Indians. Matthew Sweeney’s most recent publication is The Gomera Notebook (Shoestring 2014). His last full collection Horse Music (Bloodaxe 2013) won the inaugural Piggott Poetry Prize. Bloodaxe will publish a new collection, Inquisition Lane in 2015. Michael J. Whelan served as a peacekeeper in South Lebanon and Kosovo which inspires his work. He was 2nd Place Winner in the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award 2011, Shortlisted in 2012 with a Special Commendation in 2013. He was 3rd Place Winner in the Jonathan Swift Creative Writing Awards 2012, shortlisted in the Doire Press and Cork Literary Manuscript Competitions and selected for the Eigse Eireann/Poetry Ireland Introductions 2012. His work has appeared in Hennessy New Irish Writing, Poetry Ireland Review, the Red Line Book Festival and other literary magazines and newspapers and most recently in The Hundred Years War—Modern War Poems published by Bloodaxe UK. He was awarded an Arts Bursary for Literature from the South Dublin Arts Office in June 2014. Karl White is a freelance writer based in London. He has reviewed books for the Sunday Telegraph, the Sunday Business Post and Philosophy Now. He has written for Colony and co-edited and contributed to a volume of essays on Samuel Beckett. He has also authored educational guides on Shakespeare.
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Graham Allen Sara Baume Claire-Louise Bennett Daragh Breen Max Goodwin Brown George Constantin Michael Dineen Cal Doyle Doireann Ní Ghríofa Colin Heffernan Dave Lordan James Patterson Keith Payne Michael Naghten Shanks Himali Soin Matthew Sweeney Michael J. Whelan Karl White
www.ThePennyDreadful.org
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