When he collapses into a crumpled heap of disjointed limbs, or gambols triumphantly to a playground refrain, his figure demonstrates operatic feeling with delicate precision.

“Where be your gibes now? Your gambols? Your songs?”

And occasionally the actors play the text too loud, so to speak, but it’s forgivable, especially given the language’s perverse gambols — who wouldn’t be carried away by these lines?

Virginia Woolf described his masterpiece, “Hydriotaphia,” a survey of funerary customs, as “a cathedral where the organ goes plunging and soaring and indulging in vast and elephantine gambols of awful yet grotesque sublimity.”

What’s left is a shimmering sensibility that gambols freely in a new age.