Lost Shakespeare Play Discovered

A play manuscript, recently found in a skip around the back of Downing Street in London, has now been credited to William Shakespeare.

The play, MacBrown: Thief of Pensions, tells the tale of a insane Scotsman, who through devious manipulation, ends up ruling the whole of the British Isles, without having a mandate. The play tells how the MacBrown wages a ruthless campaign against all those he feels are against him, both within his government and outside it, whilst – ignored - the country goes to ruin as his lieutenants, the rude mechanicals, are left to think up more ways to tax the people and find more and more ways to bind them up in petty rules and regulations.

As the play progresses the delusions of the MacBrown become more and more obvious, even to those around him. They organise several plots against him, but MacBrown defeats them all with the aid of his one great ally, Oberon, the king of the fairies.

At one point the MacBrown is convinced that it is him, and him alone, who saved the world from financial catastrophe, despite his notorious fiscal ineptitude, which once saw him almost giving away all the gold in the kingdom in return for a magic bean way past its use-by date.

Then MacBrown begins to dabble in witchcraft, unleashing ‘the forces of hell’ against all who would oppose him, with the famous line that Shakespeare re-wrote for another of his Scottish plays: Is this a Nokia I see before me?

Eventually some of the former ruling classes nominate themselves a champion to take on the MacBrown in single combat over the House of Commons dispatch box, but to their shock the MacBrown seems invincible to defeat by mortal means and he just lumbers on, oblivious to the fact that the whole country wants him gone, but none of them seem to know how to get rid of him. Some even call upon the ghost of the dread Blair the Liar, the previous, deposed and despised, ruler of the British Isles, to come to their aid, but the ghost just sits amongst his piles of gold counting his money and laughing at them all.

Eventually, the play ends with the undefeated MacBrown looking out from his impregnable office in 10 Downing Street as the hordes of the downtrodden people of his kingdom mill about in defeat outside, unable to bring themselves to believe that they will ever rid themselves of the curse of the MacBrown.