Rare Breakebone Folio To Be Auctioned For Charity

A rare chance to acquire a folio page of William Breakebone's Sonnets. Fine auctioneers and valuers Sotherbone's are expecting keen interest from one or other of his several admirers.

Fine Auctioneers and Valuers Sotherbone's have today disclosed that an anonymous donor has generously offered for auction a rare manuscript of a Sonnet by Elizabethan master William Breakebone [1564-1616]. Proceeds of the sale will be used to revitalise the fortunes of the Late Mr Threadbone Memorial Pole Fund which, despite "a substantial donation" from another anonymous donor [known only as Mrs AJT] has somewhat languished since his unfortunate passing in a motorised mini-tractor incident some years ago. Few who attended his dramatic cremation/conflagration - in which both his mortal remains and said mini-tractor were despatched skyward in a series of explosions reminiscent of the Corfe Mullen blitz - will ever forget the occasion.

The manuscript to be auctioned - once the property of Professor Thrupiece and believed to have been kept in the Thrupiece Archive in Great Heaving since his disappearance - has unquestionable provenance ["Property of The Great Heaving Thrupiece Archive - NOT-TO-BE-REMOVED] and is thought likely to fetch "a tidy sum" - perhaps as much as 4 inches' worth of the planned memorial pole. William Breakebone was a near contemporary of Midlands bard and minor playwright William Shakespeare whose work is sometimes attributed to Breakebone but which, scholars believe, differs from the master's by virtue of being more popular, more literate and betterer spelte.

That Sonnet in full:

Shalle I compayre thee to a Haddocke’s minge?

Thou art more fow and more endentulous to boote.

Foul spleynes do pricke the nostryl dugs of theye

That sumer’s trumps hath all too quick panjuced.

Betimes too quart the stynge of arselicke thrummed,

And oft his hemp conflaptions thwart

And every cleat from comelynesse sometime desponds to pustulous compart

By chickeryl or broadfart’s prancing gayte unpunced.

But thy eruptive marl shall not unjuice,

Nor lance indiction of that quirl thou spoynes,

Nor shall Abraxas ponce thy tansomeloin in his ripe spargeous meyne,

When in engrossed pendiculars to shake thou frow’st.

So meyte as girth can grype , or flank can spur

So meyte is this, and this gives rancyd stooles to thee.

The complex ancestry of William Breakebone. Scholars believe that there may exist an (in)direct line through to both the Thrupiece and Threadbone familes as well as to the Breakepiece, Threadpiece and Thrubone branches.