‘Scream at her as you run,’ Alan told Kit, ‘I don’t want silence! And don’t let her reach you,’ Alan added to Alexander. ‘Let her get close, then run for your life. Take shelter behind the two men.’
‘Do I follow her?’ Kit asked.
‘No, just stop where she was standing. Turn and face her, but you’re not going to attack her while she’s with the men. Now let’s do it again.’
Richard Burbage, either tired or bored, fetched a chair from the big table and took it to the pretend stage. He sat. The real stage was being built at the other end of the hall, filling the big space with the sounds of saws and hammers. Alan Rust was looking over Isaiah Humble’s shoulder to read the lines, when Isaiah suddenly sneezed.
‘Oh, for God’s sake, Isaiah!’ Rust recoiled from the sneeze.
‘Sorry,’ Isaiah said, then sneezed again.
Rust snatched up the pages and moved away from Isaiah. ‘Kit?’ he called, ‘go from “You juggler, you canker-blossom, you thief of love.”’
‘Sorry,’ Isaiah said. He looked ill, but who would not feel ill in this miserable, cold, wet weather?
My brother came to the fireplace. ‘We’re rehearsing Titania and Oberon tomorrow,’ he told me, ‘and the mechanicals on Friday. Do you know your lines?’
‘All of them.’
‘So you don’t have to stay now,’ he said pointedly. ‘Come back on Friday.’
‘I’ll wait for the rain to stop.’
‘It’s not going to stop. It will never stop. The sky is as black as Satan’s arse.’ He turned to watch Kit scream and run across the stage.
‘Faster!’ Alan Rust shouted. ‘Run like you mean to kill her. Do it again.’
‘You’re having a Christmas play here?’ I asked my brother. I would much rather have asked him whether it was true that he and Francis Langley were Sharers in a brothel, but I knew the question would only receive scorn and would elicit no answer.
‘A play for Twelfth Night?’ he said, then grimaced as though the idea was unwelcome, but then relented and answered. ‘His lordship wants one, yes.’
‘Which one?’ I asked a little too eagerly, making him frown at me. I was hoping, of course, that it would be a play in which I had a part, anything that would bring me back to Blackfriars and Silvia.
‘I was thinking about Love’s Labour’s Lost,’ my brother said, ‘but that’s hardly tactful.’
‘Tactful?’
Isaiah Humble began coughing and could not stop. Rust turned and frowned at him. ‘Sorry,’ Isaiah managed to say.
‘God spare us the plague,’ my brother said quietly.
‘It’s winter,’ I said, ‘the plague doesn’t strike in winter.’
‘It strikes when it will,’ my brother said brusquely. ‘And Love’s Labour’s Lost would not be tactful because at the end of the play the princess delays the marriage for a year, and I don’t suppose Lady Carey would take that as a good omen for her daughter’s wedding. And Christmas plays need to be short. Most of the audience is drunk, asleep, or both, so we must give them something light and quick.’
‘Love’s Labour’s Won?’ I suggested.
‘We did that for his lordship two years ago,’ he said, staring into the fire with a frown. ‘Maybe Fair Em? We haven’t played that here.’
‘I thought you didn’t like it?’
‘It’s written with a shovel,’ he said derisively, ‘but it’s short, folk seem to like it, and his lordship hasn’t seen it.’
I had not seen Fair Em, the Miller’s Daughter either. ‘Is there a part for me?’ I asked, hoping that I would have reason to come to the mansion for the Christmas revels.
‘No,’ he said, without hesitation.
Isaiah sneezed, coughed and moaned. He found a handkerchief and buried his nose in it, then sneezed again. ‘For God’s sake,’ Rust snarled at Isaiah, ‘take your coughing away. Go home. Get better.’
‘Or die!’ Will Kemp added.
‘Sorry!’ The poor man stood and fled past the carpenters and out through the door.
‘If you’re going to stay here,’ my brother said to me sourly, ‘then be the bookkeeper till Isaiah gets back.’
‘You’ll pay me?’
‘For God’s sake, yes,’ he said irritably, ‘we’ll pay you. Now sit down.’
I had a job. In Blackfriars! I sat at Isaiah’s place, took the pages back from Alan Rust, and hid my happiness.
Is she kind as she is fair?
For beauty lives with kindness.
Love doth to her eyes repair,
To help him of his blindness.
They hang thieves. Any sizable town has a gallows, and London has several, though the only hangings I had seen were at Smithfield. The condemned, their hands tied behind their backs, were brought to their death on a cart, the ropes were tightened around their necks, and the cart dragged away so that they fell a foot or so, jerked to a stop, and started dancing. If they had friends, and if the constables and the hangman stood back, they might die quickly by having those friends drag down on their ankles, but that was never popular with the crowd, who liked to see the spasms and the dancing legs and the piss dripping off their bare feet. Their feet were almost always bare; they might be thieves, but they were always poor. ‘Rich thieves,’ my brother had told me more than once, ‘don’t end up on the gallows. They live in Grays Inn or at the Middle Temple and wear black robes.’
Sir Godfrey had liked to take us to a Smithfield hanging. When I was an unwilling pupil at Saint Benet’s there were usually between fourteen and twenty of us, and we would walk in procession, dressed in our grey robes, and Sir Godfrey, resplendent in his priestly cassock, would demand a path through the crowd, a path made easier by the looming presence of Buttercup, who only had to growl to frighten folk. ‘Behold,’ Sir Godfrey would preach to us when we reached the front of the eager crowd, ‘the fate of malefactors. Witness the wages of sin!’
When a hanging man’s bladder began to empty he would push us forward. ‘Crawl beneath the piss, boy, crawl! Be baptised again!’ He believed, as other folk did, that to be christened by a dying man’s piss would keep us from a similar fate.
Yet if the wages of sin were death by hanging, Sir Godfrey had no compunction about keeping us from sin. When he tested our ability to pass as girls he would insist that we minced down Cheapside or some other crowded street and so tempt men to follow us. If it was Cheapside, we would vanish into Cooper’s Alley that was dark even on the brightest summer’s day. The alley led beneath overhanging houses, then turned sharply right into a dank evil-smelling courtyard where Buttercup and George Harrowby, one of the school’s two ushers, would be waiting. The man would follow, lured by a smile and by a wave of small fingers, then find himself trapped in Buttercup’s fearful grip. ‘What do you want with my little sister?’ Buttercup would growl.
The man would protest, but a protest uttered when you are rammed against a wall with ham-like fingers tightening on your throat is futile. Some men would grope for a knife or even a sword, but George Harrowby would have his own dagger ready. ‘You like the taste of steel?’ he would ask, rat face grinning and dagger’s point pressed against the victim’s ribs. They always paid.
‘You’re a good boy,’ Buttercup would tell us. He would sometimes slip us a coin if Harrowby was not watching. ‘Hide it, boy, hide it.’ The constables knew what we were doing, but Sir Godfrey was generous to them, and they ignored us.
At first I had been scared to walk London’s streets dressed as a girl, but I had learned to enjoy it. It is different being a girl. A man can walk London’s streets, and no one will notice him unless he is a lordling with lace, satin, silk, and a sword, but a girl, even a girl drably dressed as a servant, is watched all the time. I was always aware of the appraising glances, some brazen, some furtive, but constant. Men called to us. ‘Come to me, sweetheart, I’ve got something special for you!’ They laughed, they touched us. Every young woman, except the well-born who were escorted by retainers,
was prey to any man. My height deterred some, but others found it exciting. ‘Wrap those long legs round me, puss!’ they would say, and I would offer them a coy glance, a smile, and lead them into the alley where Buttercup and Harrowby lurked. I would help relieve them of their purses. I became a thief.
I learned that money was the object of life, and I wanted money. I wanted the servants, the fine clothes, the respect in the street, and a horse of my own. I wanted to ride into Stratford and spit on Thomas Butler and his sour wife, to spit on all those who had told me to work harder, work harder, work harder. To work harder for what? To become a carpenter? A cobbler? A glove maker or a ditch-digger? To be someone who was forever pulling my forelock? To be always bowing, snivelling and flattering? And so I began to thieve, and I found I was good at it. Sir Godfrey rewarded me by not whipping me. I had a skirt with a slit that opened to a deep pocket, and I became adept at dropping small valuables into that hiding place. One of the other boys, dressed like me, would distract the shopkeeper or his apprentices, and I would slide a small silver cup or perhaps a trinket into the pocket; anything that Sir Godfrey could sell. The trick of it, I learned, was to linger in the shop after stealing the item, to make myself pleasant, to smile, and always leave unhurriedly. By sixteen I was an accomplished thief.
And they hang thieves.
And at seventeen I became a player with my brother’s company, playing small parts that grew larger, and though by playing I made money honestly, it was never enough, and I became a thief of opportunity, no longer dressed as a girl, but now a hunter of London’s alleys. My victims were drunks who were helpless, or perhaps a newly arrived bumpkin who failed to guard his baggage, and on one glorious day a nobleman, whose purse contained sixteen shillings. His lordship had been at the Theatre, paying for one of the precious stools at the edge of the stage, and he had brought a bottle of wine with him, though he was drunk enough when he first sat down. By the end of the play the bottle was empty and he was slumped against the stage’s back wall, asleep. He woke after the audience had left, and, in a slurred voice, demanded that two of us help him home. He had no servant, which was unusual for a lordling, but Simon Willoughby and I steered him across Finsbury Fields to the Moorgate where he suddenly demanded that we leave him at the Spanish Lady, a tavern just inside the gate. We helped him to a seat, where he fumbled in an embroidered purse and gave me a coin. ‘Wine, boy, get me good wine, and a tobacco pipe. Go fetch!’
He was asleep within moments. Simon and I looked at each other, I put a finger to my lips, then quietly, stealthily, I unbuckled his purse. We left the Spanish Lady, each of us eight shillings richer, and I never saw the man again. I sold the purse, a fine one with silver thread and silver buckles, for another shilling.
Simon Willoughby, being younger than me, had been over-excited by the theft, and I had to snarl at him to keep silent when we returned to the Theatre. I never stole with him again, though sometimes he would look at me with a raised eyebrow as if to suggest we should try another such adventure. He was John Heminges’s apprentice, and his wages, such as they were, went to his master who might or might not give him a portion, though Simon probably did not care. He was a pretty boy, and, as my brother had said, he had smeared half the beds of Whitehall with his joy. He was not short of money, I knew. He was a good player, too eager for praise, but reliable onstage, and much loved by our audiences, yet that Christmas season, as we rehearsed A Midsummer Night’s Dream, he behaved strangely.
He was playing Titania, Queen of the Fairies, and it was one of the larger parts. She and Oberon, the fairy king, had quarrelled over an orphan boy that each wanted as a companion and whom Titania would not surrender. In revenge, Oberon played a trick on her, pouring onto her eyelids the juice of a magic flower that would cause her to fall helplessly in love with the very first creature she saw on waking. ‘“What thou seest when thou dost wake,”’ John Heminges intoned, leaning over Simon Willoughby’s sleeping body, ‘“Do it for they true love take;
‘Love and languish for his sake.
Be it ounce, or cat, or bear,
Pard, or boar with bristled hair,
In thy eye that shall appear
When thou wak’st, it is thy dear.
Wake when some vile thing is near.’
And the vile thing was Will Kemp, playing Nick Bottom, whose human head had been magically changed into an ass’s head. ‘“Bless thee, Bottom, bless thee!”’ my brother, playing Peter Quince, exclaimed, ‘“Thou art transformed!”’
It was nonsense, of course! It was, as Hippolyta says of Pyramus and Thisbe, ‘the silliest stuff that ever I heard’. But somehow the nonsense worked. It is one of the marvels of the playhouse that whatever you lay in front of the groundlings, they believe. ‘They want to believe,’ my brother once explained. ‘They do half our work for us. They come wanting to be amused, to be impressed, to be awed, to be frightened. And they have imaginations too, and their imaginations amend our work.’
But the imaginations of the wedding party would need to work hard if they were to amend Simon Willoughby’s work, for he could not remember his lines, nor remember where onstage he was supposed to be as he spoke them. He was nervous and often close to tears, especially when Will Kemp became annoyed with him. It was not like Simon, who, for all his flirtations and silliness, was assiduous in learning his lines and proud of his ability to play them. He, like most of the boys, wanted to remain a player, and dreamed of being a Sharer one day, yet now, day after day in the great hall of Blackfriars, he stumbled and stammered his way through the rehearsals.
There was a moment when Nick Bottom came onto the stage just after Puck had transformed his head into that of an ass. We mechanicals all fled in terror, leaving him alone except for Titania who had been sleeping, unseen by any of us, at the back of the stage. Nick Bottom, puzzled by his companions’ terror and unaware that he had been turned into a monster, walked up and down singing.
‘The ousel cock so black of hue
With orange tawny bill,
The throstle with his note so true,
The wren with little quill.’
‘I’m sorry, Will,’ John Heminges interrupted. He was talking to my brother. ‘“The ousel cock”? “Orange bill”? Doesn’t the cock ousel have a black beak?’
‘Who the hell cares?’ Will Kemp erupted.
‘The hen bird has the orange …’ John Heminges began, then backed hurriedly away from Kemp’s anger.
‘No one bloody cares!’ Kemp shouted. ‘Black beak, blue beak, green arse, red arse, any colour arse you bloody want! Can we keep going?’
‘Keep going,’ Alan Rust said quietly. ‘Just sing the last line again.’
Will growled the last line, and Titania woke, saw the grotesque figure singing, and spoke: ‘“What angel wakes me from my bed?”’
‘Flowery bed,’ I corrected Simon.
‘Oh shit,’ Simon said.
‘Do it again,’ Alan Rust said patiently.
Simon got it right next time. Will Kemp went on singing as Titania’s fairy court came onstage. Four of the fairies had speaking parts, and they were played by apprentices, while the other three were small boys from Lord Hunsdon’s chapel choir, and all seven gently joined in Will Kemp’s song.
‘The finch, the sparrow, and the lark,
The plain-song cuckoo grey
Whose note full many a man doth mark
And dares not answer no.’
Titania was fully awake now and gazing at the ass-headed human with wide eyes. She had fallen in love instantly, provoked by the magic potion. Will finished his lines and waited. And waited. Silence. Except that the carpenters were still working on the stage. A saw sang and a hammer banged. ‘Titania,’ I said softly, ‘your line.’
‘Sorry.’
‘“I pray thee, gentle mortal, sing …”’ I gave him his line.
‘“I pray thee, gentle mortal,”’ Simon hurried to interrupt me, ‘“sing again. Mine ear is … mine ear is …”’ He
faltered again.
‘“Much enamoured.”’
‘“Much enamoured of thy note, so is mine eye enthralled to thy shape.”’ Simon looked about to cry as he went silent again.
‘For sweet Jesu’s sake,’ Will Kemp snarled.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Who gives a duck’s turd for your sorrow? Learn the damned lines, you prickless little horror.’
‘The children!’ one of Lord Hunsdon’s retainers, responsible for the small boys, remonstrated.
‘Give Simon the page,’ my brother suggested quietly.
I gave Simon the page. ‘Start from “though he cry cuckoo”,’ Alan Rust said.
And Simon, despite having the page in his hand, faltered again, which only prompted a volley of impious and filthy oaths from Will. ‘I can’t read it,’ Simon complained, ‘it’s too dark in here.’
It was indeed dark in the great hall, the only light coming from the high oriel window beyond which the Surrey sky was shrouded by smoke beneath the dark winter clouds. I had four candles on the table to help me read the lines, but it was deep shadowed where Simon, Will, and the fairies rehearsed.
‘Richard,’ my brother said, looking at me, ‘read it through with Simon. Up on the window bench.’
The rest of the players gathered about the fire smouldering in the big hearth while Simon and I climbed to the oriel window. I read Nick Bottom’s lines, and Simon spoke his. He remembered them all except two. ‘I do know them,’ he said to me.
‘You do.’
‘But when Will’s there they keep running away from me,’ he said miserably.
‘Will can be scary,’ I said, ‘but Bottom isn’t. He’s wearing an ass’s head! Let’s do it again,’ I suggested, but he was no longer listening, staring instead across the river at the vast playhouse being built by Francis Langley. The scaffolding on the outside had been taken down, the tiled roof evidently finished.
‘It’s not just Titania,’ Simon still sounded miserable. ‘I have to learn Em’s lines too. She has a lot!’