Fools and Mortals

  ‘He’s lovely, my old pa,’ Silvia said.

  ‘He seemed nice,’ I said lamely.

  ‘He’s kind,’ she said. ‘He pretends not to be, but he is. Soft as a bubble, really.’

  I tried to think of something to say, anything! ‘Can I carry that?’ I blurted out, pointing to her basket.

  ‘I’m almost there,’ she said, nodding at the nearby cottages. She gave me a smile bright as the sun. ‘If you want a boat back, then my pa will be here when the clocks strike one.’

  ‘I’d like that,’ I said.

  ‘Till then,’ she said, and off she went.

  ‘My name’s Richard,’ I called after her.

  ‘I know,’ she said without turning around, ‘but I like Francis Flute!’ She whistled a pair of notes, and, still without turning, waved goodbye.

  I watched her go to the door of a small cottage, watched her go inside, then I walked towards the new playhouse. They wanted players.

  The marchpane had been sweet, delicious, heavenly.

  And how had she known my name was Richard?

  FIVE

  I WALKED SOUTH from the river, cursing myself for having been tongue-tied with Silvia. What had happened to all those clever words I had dreamed of saying? I promised myself I would say them all at one o’clock when I shared the wherry back to Blackfriars.

  The houses on this south bank were all built close to the Thames on either side of a lane that followed the riverbank. I took another lane that led inland, past a moss-covered stone cross that had half fallen, and within forty or fifty paces I had left the houses behind and was walking between dark hedgerows bordered by sour ditches thick with nettles. Scrawny cows grazed in small pastures. The few leafless trees were stunted and dark, while the lane was rutted and damp so that I had to leap across puddles to keep my boots from clogging with mud. The new playhouse loomed to my right, approached through a decaying gate that had been left open. The field around the new building was stacked with timber and heaped with masonry. A dozen men were busy high on the scaffolding, two of them winching up a precarious platform laden with roof tiles.

  It was large. Larger than the Theatre, and larger than the Rose playhouse, which lay to the east, close to the southern end of London Bridge. This new playhouse, I thought, would attract folk from Westminster as well as from London, almost all of them paying pennies to the watermen for bringing them to the Paris Garden Stairs. Silvia’s father might complain about the noise the playhouse would bring, but it would also bring him customers. A rough-coated dog woke as I edged between the timber piles, and started barking furiously. It leaped towards me, but was jerked to a halt by a chain fastened to a staple at the playhouse entrance. ‘Sultan!’ a voice shouted from the scaffolding. ‘Stop your poxy noise!’ The dog growled and whined, but let me pass.

  ‘Don’t mind Sultan, master. He won’t touch you unless Jem tells him to.’ The speaker was a craftsman who was perched high on a ladder where he was smoothing white plaster on the arched ceiling of the entrance tunnel. ‘And watch yourself, master,’ he added as a splatter of plaster fell from his trowel. ‘You’re mixing it too wet!’ he growled at his apprentice, a small boy half bent over a large barrel. ‘Safe now, master,’ he added to me, and I threaded my way between barrel and ladder and so into the huge yard.

  Where I stopped and gasped. The new playhouse was built much like the Theatre, but everything was on a larger scale and far more richly decorated. Men were gilding the balustrades of the three galleries, which, unlike the two at the Theatre, were entered by gated stairways from the big yard. Two labourers were laying flagstones onto a sand and gravel base. No one, I thought, could hurl a flagstone at the stage, while the Theatre’s stage was vulnerable to the yard’s cobbles. Will Kemp had once demanded that the cobblestones be replaced. ‘I don’t mind the bastards throwing soft things,’ he said, ‘but cobblestones hurt!’

  ‘Regard the cobblestones as reason enough to please our audience,’ my brother had retorted, and the cobblestones had stayed.

  The front edge of the stage jutted deep into the yard and was hung with cloth embroidered with swans swimming among reeds. A tiled canopy covered the rear half of the stage, and beneath it, immediately above the three doors through which the players would make their entrances and exits, was a pillared gallery, which, I supposed, was where the wealthiest customers could look down on the stage. Two massive pillars supported the high canopy, and a painter, perched on a scaffold, was turning the bare wood of the right-hand pillar into the smoothest marble. He was evidently working his way down the pillar, because the lower half still looked like wood, while the upper part gleamed like a cream-coloured stone veined with grey. It was extraordinary. I walked closer and could have sworn the top half of the pillar was made of the most expensive marble. The painter, a lugubrious man who wore a scarf around his head instead of a hat, saw my interest. ‘You like it?’ he asked, though without any enthusiasm.

  ‘It’s wonderful!’ I said in genuine admiration.

  The painter took a half step back on his scaffold and frowned at his work. ‘It’s a playhouse,’ he said flatly.

  ‘Of course it is,’ I said, puzzled by his response.

  ‘A place of deception,’ he said angrily.

  ‘You don’t approve?’

  ‘Do I approve of pretence? Of falsehood? No, sir, I do not approve. Of flattery? Of lies? How can I approve? Of blasphemy? Of licentiousness? I abhor it, sir, I abhor it, but a man must live.’ He turned back to his careful work. ‘A man must live,’ he repeated, this time resentfully, speaking to himself.

  ‘Mister Timothy Nairn is a Puritan,’ a voice spoke from behind me, ‘yet he stoops to decorate our house of satanic pleasures.’

  ‘In these hard days, Mister Langley,’ the painter said, ‘I am grateful that Almighty God sends me work to keep my family in bread. And it is God who will decide the fate of this place, not I.’

  ‘I’m surprised God doesn’t strike you dead for painting my pillars.’

  ‘All that I do is for His glory,’ Timothy Nairn answered dourly, ‘even in this den of iniquity.’

  ‘Iniquity!’ Langley sounded amused.

  I had turned to face him, seeing a stout, hard-faced man with a short brown beard. He wore rich clothes of dark blue wool slashed with yellow silk, clothes that belied his face that was knowing, scarred and battered. A formidable man. I knew he was a member of the Goldsmiths, but his money, it was rumoured, came not from fine jewellery but from the half-dozen brothels he owned. I offered him a respectful bow. ‘Mister Langley,’ I said, ‘I’m …’

  ‘I know who you are, lad. I saw you at the Theatre.’ He frowned, evidently trying to remember. ‘You played a daft mort who fainted. What was the piece called?’

  ‘Two Gentlemen of Verona, sir?’ I suggested, though I had pretended to faint in half a dozen other plays. ‘I played Julia.’

  ‘That might have been it. A shallow piece, whatever it was,’ he said scornfully, ‘but you were good. Who was the other lad?’

  ‘Simon Willoughby, sir. He played Silvia.’ The very thought of Simon Willoughby playing a character called Silvia now filled me with dismay. He was not worthy!

  ‘Simon Willoughby, aye.’ Something about the name amused Langley, because he gave a snort of laughter. ‘So why are you here?’

  ‘Curiosity, sir.’

  ‘Curiosity!’ he sneered at the word. ‘Let’s hope you’re not a puss cat, eh? Now get up onstage, boy, see how you like it.’

  I ran two or three steps and vaulted onto the high stage that was nearly as tall as a man. The stage, I now saw, had three trapdoors, which could be used as graves, as gateways to and from hell, or just for surprise entrances. At the Theatre we only had one trapdoor, approached through the stinking space beneath the stage where Pickles the cat waged a relentless war against rats and mice. I walked under the canopy, or the heavens as some players called it, and looked up to see cunningly painted clouds white against a blue sky. There we
re two trapdoors in the cloudy ceiling, and behind them, I knew, would be the flights; the windlasses used to lower players from the sky. Gods, goddesses, and angels had to hook themselves to the rope, pull up the trapdoor, and hope that the man turning the flight’s handle was sober. I turned to look back at the entrance and thought how big this house was with its towering galleries and its yard half as big again as the Theatre.

  ‘I had a fool here last week,’ Langley said, ‘who told me the place was too big. That his voice couldn’t reach the top gallery. Say something, lad, but don’t shout. Just speak as if you were playing natural.’ He turned and looked up, ‘Ben, are you up there?’

  ‘I’m here, sir!’ Ben, whoever he was, was hidden in the upper gallery from where I could hear the intermittent sound of a saw biting through timber.

  ‘Listen close, Ben,’ Langley called, ‘and tell me if you can hear the lad.’ He looked back to me. ‘Go on, boy, speak.’

  My mind had gone blank. I fumbled for words and found none.

  ‘Go on, lad! Ben’s listening.’

  ‘“As for thee, boy,”’ I suddenly remembered some lines, ‘“go get thee from my sight; Thou art an exile, and thou must not stay!”’ I did not shout the words, but spoke them as loudly as I would have done at the Theatre, and, mindful that an audience would be behind me as well as in front, I turned slowly as I gave the lines, which were from the second play I had performed with my brother’s company. In that play I had been a girl called Lavinia who was vilely raped and had her tongue cut out and her hands severed, but the words I spoke now had been George Bryan’s, who had played my father, a Roman called Titus Andronicus. ‘“And if you love me, as I think you do,”’ I went on, finishing my turn, ‘“let’s kiss and part, for we have much to do.”’

  ‘Kiss and part!’ Langley repeated, amused. ‘Did you hear that, Ben?’

  ‘Every blessed word, Mister Langley!’

  ‘Aye, I thought that poxy piece of slug shit last week was deaf.’

  ‘If the playhouse was full though …’ I began, then faltered.

  ‘Go on, lad, say up!’

  ‘If it’s full, sir, the sound will be softened. Especially if it’s been raining.’ I was trying to sound like an expert, repeating things I had heard from the likes of Alan Rust, my brother, and James Burbage. It was true, though. If the groundlings were in damp clothes we had to speak louder.

  ‘The buggers will have to shout then,’ Francis Langley said. ‘Too late to shrink the place.’

  ‘“For we have much to do!”’ another voice sounded, loud and angry. ‘Did you hear that, Langley? “We have much to do.”’ The voice seemed to come from above the stage, from the pillared gallery just under the heaven’s cloudy canopy. ‘Is that a player?’

  ‘Aye, it is, Mister deValle.’

  ‘Then bring the culley up!’

  Langley used a short ladder to reach the stage. ‘Be respectful when we get up there,’ he muttered to me under his breath, then led me through one of the three doors into the tiring house. He left the door open to let some small light into the room, which had no windows. It was large, twice the size of the Theatre’s tiring room, and smelt of new-cut timber. ‘I’ve spent almost three hundred pounds on costumes,’ Langley said bitterly. ‘Three hundred pounds! He insists, you see. This way, lad.’ He led me through a door into a corridor from which steps led upwards. ‘This goes to the lordlings’ chamber,’ he explained, climbing.

  ‘Lordlings?’

  ‘A place for the rich to hear the plays,’ he said hungrily, ‘sixpence a seat, at least. Maybe even a shilling.’

  ‘Who’d pay a shilling for a play?’ I asked.

  ‘Whoever sits up here, of course. And it won’t just be a play, boy,’ we had paused on a small landing and he winked at me, ‘there’ll be morts as well. So if they don’t like the play they can have the whore. I tell you, lad, whores are cheaper. You don’t have to buy costumes for whores, do you?’

  A second flight of stairs, narrower and steeper, climbed from the landing, presumably to the platform where trumpeters would sound their fanfare to announce a performance, but Langley ignored it, instead opening a richly carved door into the lordlings’ chamber. He beckoned me inside.

  I gasped. I might have grown up in a modest house, and now lived in a decaying attic with no comforts, but I knew luxury. We had played in the Queen’s banqueting hall in Whitehall, had amused her at Greenwich, and entertained her among the candlelit splendours of her Richmond palace, and this lordlings’ chamber would not have been out of place in any of those mansions. The walls were carved panels, painted with a dark resin that made them gleam. The smell of the resin filled the room, despite the open gallery that overlooked the stage. The floor gleamed with the same rich shine, while the ceiling had been painted with naked angels that flew among celestial clouds. I wondered if Mister Nairn, the Puritan painter, had been asked to depict the winged and shameless women who looked down on a large table set at the room’s centre. The table was smothered with plans of the new playhouse, while on the back wall was a great stone fireplace, almost as ornately carved as the one in the Lord Chamberlain’s great hall, only this marble mantel was supported by a pair of naked women, carved from a milky white stone, their arms folded above their heads as they flanked a brick hearth in which a fire burned. To the left of the fire was a settle, draped in a tapestry, on which a girl was sprawled. She looked drunk, or at least asleep. She had auburn hair, a mass of freckles on a pale face, her mouth was open, and she lay with her legs wide parted, one on the settle and the other on the floor. So far as I could see she wore nothing but a brief shift.

  ‘So who is he?’ a man asked belligerently. He had been sitting at the table, but now stood. He was as tall as I and far more elegantly dressed. He wore a rapier, its hilt a swirl of silver around a grip wrapped in red leather, while on his right shoulder was an elaborate badge showing a swan wreathed in lilies. I guessed he was in his thirties, full of confidence and swagger. He wore a short fair beard that jutted from his chin, while his moustaches flared wide with an upturned flourish. He saw me gazing at the girl. ‘Don’t mind Becky,’ he snarled, ‘mind me.’

  ‘Sir,’ I said, bowing.

  ‘So who are you?’

  ‘Richard Shakespeare, sir.’

  ‘Are you the writer?’ he sounded intrigued. ‘The one who owns a share of Langley’s whorehouses?’

  I was so surprised by the second question that I said nothing. My brother was a partner to Francis Langley? He owned brothels? Surely that was not true!

  ‘Well?’ deValle demanded.

  ‘Richard is his brother, Mister deValle,’ Langley said, without denying the business connection.

  ‘Brother to your whore partner,’ deValle spoke to Langley, and spoke savagely, ‘and he won’t write plays for you, is that true?’

  ‘He writes for his own company, Mister deValle.’

  DeValle sniffed and then gazed at me for a few seconds as a man might stare at a heifer he was wondering whether to purchase. ‘My name’s Christopher deValle,’ he finally said, ‘and don’t you dare think that name is French. The deValles are not French. The deValles detest that nation of pox-ridden slime-toads. The deValles are made of English oak from scalp to arsehole. We are Berkshire born, Berkshire bred, and loyal subjects of our Queen, long may she reign and God bless her snow-white bubbies. I manage the Earl of Lechlade’s affairs.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ I said, because he seemed to expect some sort of a reply.

  ‘Are you good?’ deValle demanded peremptorily.

  ‘He is good, sir,’ Francis Langley answered for me, ‘he’s famous for the women he plays.’

  ‘Women!’ deValle seemed horrified.

  ‘I play men’s parts now, sir,’ I intervened hastily. ‘When I was a boy I played women,’ I added, trying not to let my nervousness show, ‘but now I’m given men’s parts.’ Which, I supposed, was near enough true. Francis Flute was a man.

  ‘Becky!’ de
Valle shouted. ‘Wake up, bitch!’ The girl stirred and sat up, pushing her red hair away from her face. She looked wordlessly at deValle, who pointed at me. ‘Tell me what you think,’ he ordered.

  She yawned, stretched, then stood and sauntered around the table to look at me. I looked back. I guessed she was about my age, but she had a knowingness that made her seem older. Her eyes were green, like a cat’s, her face was freckled, and her hair a tangle of thick curls. She was attractive, no man could look at her and not be stirred, but the knowingness made her more than a little frightening. She reached out a hand and stroked my cheek. ‘He’s pretty.’

  ‘Pretty!’ deValle spat.

  ‘Handsome then.’ She smiled and flicked a finger across my nose. ‘I like him.’

  ‘If he could afford you,’ deValle said sourly, ‘he wouldn’t be here. Why are you here?’

  And what was I to say to that? That I was poor, owed rent, and needed employment? Or that I wanted revenge on my brothel-owning brother who had cozened me by offering me a man’s part only for me to discover that Francis Flute played a woman? My anger at that betrayal had brought me across the river, but this was no time to tell that truth. ‘I hear you want players, sir,’ I said, with as much dignity as I could muster.

  DeValle grunted at that. ‘You have employment now?’

  I nodded. ‘At the Theatre, sir.’

  ‘So why leave?’

  ‘I’m a hired man, sir,’ I said, ‘and they have plenty of those already.’

  ‘So you don’t get used much, is that it?’

  ‘I’d like to be busier, sir,’ I said.

  ‘He is good, Mister deValle,’ Francis Langley said eagerly. When we had met on the stage, Langley had been full of bluff confidence, but now, in deValle’s presence, he was humble.

  ‘So are the others we’ve seen,’ deValle said, ‘or so you say.’