Mr Papadopoulos reached down and picked up the hollow shell. He held it to his ear and shook it as a child shakes and wrapped present: no sound. He cracked the shell gently against a timber and reached in with callused fingers to draw out a slip of paper folded as a Fortune cookie? His hands were now shaking. A hundred amber eyes blinked in anticipation. He unfolded the paper with more delicacy than he had ever handled anything in his entire life and saw the copperplate script in violet ink:

"Shakespeare."

Mr P let-out a whispered blasphemy salted with every expletive he knew. The literary hen cackled her affirmation and settled down in the hay. Her master blinked rapidly like his feathered audience and dribbled slightly as his jaw dangled airborne. Nobody was going to believe this. They hadn't taken him seriously since he made shoes for a goat, and chickens laying Elizabethan playwrights was on a whole different level to that. "Shake-es-peare?" he enquired. A mass cackle followed.
"Ok"

There had never been much call for reading in the farmhouse so he had to go to Athens for the book. He told his silent wife that he was going to get new oil filter for the tractor and she nodded her understanding. They looked at him strangely in the bookshop when he asked for Shak-es-peare. What, they inquired, would he like? A play? And sonnet? He asked for Hamlet because he knew that ham was a kind of meat and there was a certain logic there. He asked them to wrap it in one of their brown paper bags so that no-one would see it when he left the shop. He later brought a pornographic magazine so that he could read the play inside it on bus and avoid strange looks.

It meant virtually nothing to him, apart from the part about the ghost, which could have been made less wordy in his opinion, but it wasn't his choice. The hens were waiting in electric anticipation for him that night. The instigator of of request sat at the front and he acknowledged her with a curt nod of the head. "Well, it's not my cup of tea, and I don't think you'll like it, but I've brought you Hamlet. It's named after a kind of meat." A ripple of ascent twittered through the crowd.

They were spellbound. One of the hens inadvertently laid an egg when the ghost appeared and shrieks punctuated the the death of Polonius. Even the rooster, who normally strutted about the yard, disdainful of the nightly read, wandered in unobtrusively to catch the final act. After a number of hours, all was silence and Mr P, who frankly hadn't made much of it, asked  "So? Was that what you wanted?"

The chickens arose en masse and revealed the sea of eggs for him. Row upon row of large, fresh eggs for the market next day. "Well, well," he muttered, "you can never underestimate these birds." and as he picked them up, he felt one with the strange lightness of an inevitably hollow shell. He tapped it open hoping that it wouldn't be another trip to Athens, and unfolded the paper to reveal delicate violet writing:

"Charades."

He had to check that in dictionary and was glad to find that it didn't mean more books. "Have you ever played charades?" he asked his mute wife. She shook her head. "Want to try it?" she nodded. "OK, you go first." she sat in her fireside chair unmoving and he stared at her. She was growing a beard which he hadn't noticed before and her nose seemed to be sinking into her face. She wheezed a little as she breathed.  "Have you started yet?"

It was difficult. She tried to mime "Beethoven's Fifth", but she couldn't lift her left arm above elbow height and he'd never heard of it anyway. Finally he guessed "Shak-es- pere's Hamlet", mistaking her gargles for the death of  Polonius and she nodded in desperation and amazement that he'd heard of Shakespeare. He thought it lucky that she chosen the one play he knew and decided that he'd try and snip a few of those chin hairs when he slunk into bed later that night.