Fools and Mortals

  ‘He ran away from home,’ my brother had said, ‘and perhaps I should send him back?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Sir Godfrey had replied, staring at me. He had a gaunt face, deep lined, with sardonic black eyes. ‘Perhaps,’ he had said again, ‘but he is pretty. How old is he?’

  ‘Fourteen.’

  ‘Fourteen!’ Sir Godfrey had shuddered. ‘I like my boys younger. It’s simpler to train a puppy. Old dogs and new tricks, Mister Shakespeare, as you well know. Can you read, boy?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ I had said.

  ‘You can’t be a player if you can’t read.’

  ‘I can read, sir.’

  ‘Prove it to me,’ he had said, and drew the Bible towards him, looked for a page, then pushed it across the table. A dirty fingernail showed me what verse he wanted me to read.

  ‘“Thou shalt not lie with mankind as with womankind,”’ I read, and almost faltered because the verse was unfamiliar and surprised me, ‘“it is an abomination. Neither shalt thou lie with any …”’

  ‘Enough!’ Sir Godfrey was cackling with amusement. ‘So he can read. And he has a pleasant enough voice.’

  ‘He’s a clever boy,’ my brother had said grudgingly, and I remember how that had surprised me because I had never thought of myself as clever.

  Sir Godfrey had gazed at me for a few heartbeats. ‘Clever and mischievous, eh? Yes, mischievous! You ran away from home. Clever and mischievous. Not a happy conjunction. But he is pretty, very pretty,’ he had said hungrily. ‘But training lads takes money, Mister Shakespeare, it takes money.’

  My brother had paid him. I don’t know how much, I just heard the chink of coins being paid, which meant I had been sold to Saint Benet’s and to Sir Godfrey much as I had been sold to Thomas Butler in Stratford. And so I had donned a much darned grey robe and a half-starched ruff and begun my real schooling. The place was supposed to be a choir school, and every Sunday we put on surplices and sang psalms in Saint Benet’s church, but in truth we were being trained to be players because that was where the greatest part of Sir Godfrey’s money came from, from performances in the playhouse in the old monastic hall.

  By law we were restricted to one performance a week, but we often played three or more, and because we performed indoors the weather did not matter. Our stage was lit by candles. The youngest players were eight or nine years old, I was among the older boys, and, because I was tall and because Sir Godfrey discovered I had a talent for playing, I soon had leading parts. I was King Cyrus in The Wars of Cyrus, and Phaon in Sappho and Phaon. Phaon was a humble ferryman who was granted exquisite beauty by Venus so he could seduce Queen Sappho. ‘He was born to play the part,’ I remember Sir Godfrey telling some lordling who visited a rehearsal. ‘Is he not pretty?’

  ‘Exquisite, Sir Godfrey,’ the lordling had said. ‘Where is the play set?’

  ‘In Sicily, my lord.’

  ‘And you know, of course, that Sicilian ferrymen work unclothed?’

  ‘Do they so, my lord?’

  ‘They do, Sir Godfrey. A strange habit, I confess, but true.’

  ‘A remarkable habit, my lord,’ Sir Godfrey had said. It had been obvious that he did not believe a word that the lordling had spoken, but he liked the lie. He had smiled at me, or rather offered a grimace with his blackened teeth. ‘Undress, boy.’

  Yet even Sir Godfrey did not dare have me naked at a public performance, so instead I played the part wearing a skimpy loincloth and with my skin pasted thick with ceruse and powdered pearls so that in the candlelight my body appeared to shimmer. Sir Godfrey raised the price of entry for that play, which we ran for over sixteen performances, all of them to packed benches.

  I played men’s parts because I was tall, yet all of Sir Godfrey’s choristers were required to learn the skills of playing a girl. I was the moon goddess Cynthia in Endymion, wafting about the candlelit stage in a gown of silvery gauze. I was good. I knew I was good. And I wanted to be good, because to perform well was one way to avoid Sir Godfrey’s savage beatings, or the whippings administered by his two ushers.

  I stayed three years. Not willingly, but I had nowhere else to go, and when a boy did flee Saint Benet’s he was inevitably returned by the constables, who were in Sir Godfrey’s pay. It was not till I was seventeen that I dared run, and by then Sir Godfrey seemed happy to see the back of me. I was too old for him by seventeen. I went back to my brother, who had seen me play a dozen parts in Sir Godfrey’s hall, and he relented and let me play in Two Gentlemen of Verona. ‘You’re too old to be an apprentice,’ he had said, ‘so I suppose you’re a hired man. Or a hired boy. You can’t live with me. There’s a widow on Bishopsgate Street who lets rooms cheaply. Her husband was a very fine player, poor man. We miss him.’

  So I escaped Sir Godfrey, but in those three years I had learned so much.

  I had learned the gestures that express rage, sorrow, pleasure, and lust.

  I had learned to dance the jig, the coranto, and the galliard.

  I had learned to fight with a sword, for swordplay was frequent upon the stage in Saint Benet’s hall.

  I had learned to speak clearly so that my high voice could be heard by the folk standing in the cheap space at the back of the hall and in the gallery above.

  I had learned to play the lute, though never well, just well enough to sing a song onstage.

  I had learned to sing.

  I had learned to disguise my face so that men looked on me with lust.

  I had learned to thieve.

  I had learned that the ash rods held by Sir Godfrey’s two ushers hurt like biting serpents, that they drew blood. ‘Not his face!’ Sir Godfrey would command. ‘Not his face! His buttocks, beat his buttocks. Let me see blood!’

  I had learned to lie so that I could avoid the savage beatings.

  I had learned how to be a girl. We were made to dress as girls and walk in the streets, and if a man did not try to kiss us or feel under our skirts then we had failed the test, and failure meant another thrashing. Buttercup would follow us. His real name was John Harding, but from somewhere he had fetched the name Buttercup. He was a churchwarden at Saint Benet’s, and Sir Godfrey’s helper in everything; a huge man, muscled like an ox and slow of thought and speech, but strangely well-spoken. Rumour said Buttercup was of gentle birth, and perhaps that was true.

  I had learned that to be summoned to the vestry at any time, but especially after evensong, was to become Sir Godfrey’s plaything. And sometimes a wealthy patron, all velvet and pearls, perfume and satin, would be waiting there. ‘Go, boy,’ Sir Godfrey would say, ‘and I want a good report of you.’

  He made money by such assignations. Inevitably the patron would reward us, but we were searched as soon as we returned to Saint Benet’s, and the coins taken from us. ‘It’s for the poor of the parish,’ Sir Godfrey would leer. Sometimes those patrons were gross fat creatures, slack-mouthed and sweating, and we would be terrified. ‘Go, boy, Buttercup will fetch you in the morning,’ Sir Godfrey would say, and there would follow the chink of coin as we were taken away to be educated.

  I had learned so much. From the innocence of Stratford, which had bored me, my brother had sent me to the stew of Saint Benet’s, which had opened my eyes to the world. Now, though I hate Sir Godfrey more than I hate any other creature on God’s earth, I am grateful for the education he gave me. I can sing, dance, speak, fight, thieve, lie, and dissemble. I am a player.

  Buttercup was waiting outside the playhouse like a mastiff waiting for his master. He smiled happily when he saw me. ‘It’s Master Richard!’

  ‘Buttercup,’ I acknowledged him warily.

  He cracked a hazelnut in one massive hand. ‘Did you see Sir Godfrey?’

  ‘I had that pleasure, yes.’

  ‘Stop it!’ This abrupt command was to Sultan, the dog, which had growled, but now subsided, recognising that Buttercup was a far more formidable beast. ‘Good dog,’ Buttercup said, then smiled at me. ‘How fares you, Master Richard?’
>
  ‘Well enough. What brings you here?’

  ‘They want boys,’ Buttercup said, nodding through the entrance tunnel where the plasterer was taking down his ladders. He cracked another nut between a massive finger and thumb, then offered me one. He loomed over me, his face flat as a malt shovel with a broken nose, jagged teeth, a scar on his forehead, and another on his cheek. He had enormous hands, tree-trunk legs, and a chest like a barrel. He was all bone and muscle dressed in drab wool and buff leather. ‘Boys,’ he repeated.

  ‘I thought the choir school had closed,’ I said.

  ‘It did, yes, it did,’ Buttercup frowned as if the closure of Saint Benet’s school was hard to remember. I had heard that the playhouse roof had collapsed, its ancient timbers rotted, and Sir Godfrey had been fortunate that the old hall had been empty at the time. ‘But Sir Godfrey still has boys,’ Buttercup went on, ‘seven boys now, just enough for a choir. Not like the old days, Master Richard. But we have the beasts too!’

  ‘You’ll do beast shows here?’ I asked.

  He frowned again as if he did not understand the question, then nodded. ‘Mister deValle is hiring us to do the beast shows. We can give him dogs, the bear, and the cocks, but the cockerels aren’t as popular as the dogs. I do miss the old plays! But we have the choristers, so we can do boys and beasts.’ He brightened when he said that. ‘Boys and beasts!’ He laughed, then cracked another nut. ‘We saw you!’

  ‘Saw me?’

  ‘In that play about Hester,’ he said. ‘You were good in that. The way you shrivelled away when that bastard tried to rape you. I liked that.’

  ‘He did rape me,’ I said.

  ‘I liked that bit,’ he said, ‘and you were good.’ He paused, then offered me a smile. ‘You’re still the prettiest girl on the stage, Richard.’

  ‘I’m too old.’

  ‘No, no, no! You’re lovely. And the voice is good.’

  ‘My voice broke long ago, Buttercup.’

  ‘I like it all throaty and husky. Another nut?’

  ‘No, thank you.’

  ‘Now your brother … he mumbled.’

  ‘He had a sore throat.’

  ‘And he looked stiff. He walked like a duck.’

  ‘He was playing a villain,’ I said, for lack of anything else to say.

  ‘But I liked you,’ Buttercup said warmly. ‘So are you playing here?’

  ‘No,’ I said firmly. Even if I had been tempted by deValle’s gold I would have refused his offer once I learned that Sir Godfrey was a part of his schemes. ‘I just came to look at the place,’ I offered as explanation. The church clocks began to strike one all across London. ‘And I must go, Buttercup.’

  ‘And the other boy was here too,’ Buttercup went on.

  ‘Other boy?’ I asked. The sound of bells was thickening as more and more churches struck the hour.

  ‘The one whose feet you kissed, that one,’ he said, meaning the moment when Uashti had grovelled at the feet of Hester. So Simon Willoughby had visited this playhouse? And I remembered the lordling who had accosted him at the palace in Whitehall. The fair-haired lordling who was buying a playhouse, hiring players, but had no plays. ‘He’s a pretty boy, that one,’ Buttercup added wistfully.

  ‘I must go,’ I said.

  ‘Then God go with you,’ Buttercup said dutifully.

  I hurried down the lane to the river and ran along the bank to the Paris Garden Stairs. Swans were thick around the wharf, where two watermen waited. ‘Need a boat, young sir?’ one asked.

  I shook my head. I could see Silvia was already halfway across the river. She had her back to me as her father rowed her towards the Blackfriars Stairs and I felt an immense sadness. I had missed her by minutes. I was a laughing stock in my brother’s company. I was lonely, abandoned, poor and miserable. I walked east, going to the bridge, and though I should have been thinking about Simon Willoughby, a song was running through my head instead, a song from my brother’s play Two Gentlemen of Verona. It had been my very first part in a play with the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, and now, looking back, I wondered if it had been an omen. I had been playing Julia, disguised as a boy, and Henry Condell, playing the tavern keeper, had sung to me.

  Who is Silvia? what is she,

  That all our swains commend her?

  Holy, fair, and wise is she;

  The heaven such grace did lend her,

  That she might admirèd be.

  Is she kind as she is fair?

  For beauty lives with kindness.

  Love doth to her eyes repair,

  To help him of his blindness;

  And, being helped, inhabits there.

  Then to Silvia let us sing,

  That Silvia is excelling;

  She excels each mortal thing

  Upon the dull earth dwelling;

  To her let us garlands bring.

  SIX

  I DID NOT want to laugh.

  I was still bitter about the deception my brother had played on me, yet resentful as I was, I found myself reading Flute’s lines with ever more enthusiasm. No wonder, I thought, that the Lord Chamberlain’s wife had boasted of the play in court, because by the time we read the final scenes it was difficult to keep going through the laughter.

  Duke Theseus and his bride, Hippolyta, wanted to be entertained on their wedding night, and perversely chose to watch a play offered by a group of Athenian tradesmen, the mechanicals as my brother had called them, of whom Francis Flute was one. The duke had been warned that the mechanicals’ play was bad, that it was indeed atrocious, but he insisted on seeing it, and so we performed Pyramus and Thisbe.

  Time had forced us to abandon the first reading of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Blackfriars mansion, so we finished two days later perched on uncomfortable stools set around the chilly stage at the Theatre, and, as we read it, I remembered my brother’s very first play. I had been ten years old at the time, and he had been twenty, just two years married, and teaching in a village school near Stratford. Sir Robert Throckmorton, a great landowner at nearby Coughton, wanted what he called an ‘interlude’ for his granddaughter’s wedding, and my brother obliged by writing it. The interlude, really a short play, was called Dido and Acerbas and was performed by my brother, who played the villain Pygmalion, by one of his pupils who played Dido herself, by a wool merchant from Alcester who was the doomed Acerbas, and by a half-dozen other local men, all craftsmen. They rehearsed for at least three weeks, and, because Sir Robert was generously open-handed, folk from the surrounding villages were invited to watch the performance.

  The story, as everyone who has been to school knows, is a tragedy that ends with Dido committing suicide by hurling herself onto a blazing fire. What persuaded my brother that it was a good idea to celebrate a wedding with a play about death is a mystery, but the tragedy, instead of provoking tears, was first greeted by nervous laughter, which grew and grew until folk could not contain their mirth and the whole audience, gentry and commoners alike, had tears running down their cheeks. Sir Robert, far from being angry at the disaster, declared it the best entertainment he had ever seen, but my brother was mortified. I asked him once whether he had kept a copy of the play, and he had scowled at the question, then muttered darkly that it had shared Dido’s fate. ‘I burned it.’

  The interlude had ended with the heroine’s fiery death. My brother had first thought of using iron braziers filled with burning logs to create the crucial scene, but Sir Robert had feared for the safety of his great house, and so, instead, six of my brother’s pupils, none older than ten, were dressed in red cloaks, red hoods, and red gloves. ‘We are flames!’ one of them announced as they filed onto the makeshift stage where they crouched at the platform’s edge and then slowly rose, swaying from side to side and waving their hands above their heads as they chanted over and over, ‘We are flames! We are fire! Fiery flames and flaming fire!’ Meanwhile the heroine, clothed in a white gown far too big for the player’s small body, writhed in her death a
gony and tried to make her lines of defiance heard above the chanting flames. Like the rest of the company, the boys had been brave, forging ahead with their lines despite the laughter filling the hall, and all of them, boys and men alike, were richly rewarded by Sir Robert with coins. My mother laughed with everyone else, though Anne, my brother’s wife, was furious, asserting that her husband had shamed the family.

  Yet in his new play, written for the Lord Chamberlain’s granddaughter, my brother had turned the dross of Dido and Acerbas into the gold of Pyramus and Thisbe. I half remembered the Pyramus tale from my Latin lessons in Stratford, knowing it was about a pair of doomed lovers who were forbidden to marry by their respective parents, but who secretly met on either side of a wall, which separated their houses. The wall had a crack through which the severed lovers whispered, or in our case bellowed, their declarations of undying devotion.

  I had to play Thisbe against Will Kemp’s Pyramus, and I had been dreading it because Will Kemp was a bully. To the groundlings in the yard and to the folk who greeted him on the streets he seemed a jovial, open-hearted man who was quick with a smile and a quip, but in the company, far away from his adoring admirers, he could be sullen and savage. He was also good, so good that my brother wrote parts especially for him, knowing that folk would pay more than once to watch Will Kemp clown, sing, and caper. Kemp was always angry if the company performed a play that had no comic part suited to his talents because he believed the audience came to see him, not Richard Burbage. But in Nick Bottom, the weaver, he understood he had found a jewel, and, for once, he neither grumbled nor argued, but threw himself into the character with enthusiasm. When we came to the play’s ending, and the tradesmen of Athens at last presented their interlude of Pyramus and Thisbe to the duke, Kemp could no longer sit and read. He had to stand and move. He carried the pages with him, reading as he acted.

  ‘O grim-look’d night! O night with hue so black!

  O night, which ever art when day is not!

  O night, O night, alack, alack, alack.’

  He played the silly speech in a mock heroic tone, bemoaning that his love, Thisbe, had not arrived at the wall until, at last, she did. I stood and minced across the stage. Will Kemp had snatched Richard Cowley, the hired man who played Tom Snout, off his stool and placed him at the stage’s centre. ‘You’re the wall,’ he told him, and pulled out one of Cowley’s hands and made him hold his fingers apart. ‘The chink in the wall,’ Kemp explained, then nodded at me, ‘go on, Dick.’