Fools and Mortals

  Fair Em, the Miller’s Daughter was the play that the company would present in the great hall on Twelfth Night as part of Lord Hunsdon’s Christmas celebrations. I had sat through the rehearsals, thankful that Isaiah Humble was still coughing in his lodgings, and was glad I was not performing in the play. It was clumsy compared to the Dream. ‘Em’s a good part,’ I said, telling the lie to encourage Simon. He did not respond, he did not even look at me, but instead went on gazing across the river to where the new playhouse was outlined against a dark sky. ‘It’s big,’ I said, and Simon just nodded, and I remembered him being held against the wall in the palace courtyard by a young lordling with bright hair. I watched him. ‘I wonder,’ I said, ‘what they’re going to call it?’

  ‘The Swan,’ he said, almost without thinking, still gazing across the grey, slow river. It was low tide, and thin slabs of ice gleamed on the mud banks.

  ‘The Swan?’ I asked. ‘How do you know?’

  He looked at me with some alarm. ‘I just heard someone say that,’ he said, but blushed as he spoke. ‘Maybe they’ll call it something else. Let’s read it again, please?’

  ‘The Swan?’

  ‘Go from where I wake up,’ he said.

  ‘I hear they’re looking for players,’ I pressed him.

  ‘“What angel wakes me from my flowery bed?”’ he said. There were tears in his eyes.

  I read Nick Bottom’s next line, and Simon responded and this time he knew all the lines. Knew every one. He smiled when we finished. ‘See, I’m good, aren’t I?’

  ‘You’re good,’ I said.

  ‘I knew I could do it!’

  ‘Do it with Will now,’ I said, and he nodded. I called down to my brother, who was with the other players by the fire. ‘He knows the lines.’

  ‘Richard.’ Simon had seized my sleeve. His pleasure at saying all the lines without any mistake had gone, replaced by a look of terror again.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Come down, then,’ my brother called.

  ‘Is there another door to the mansion?’ Simon asked me in a low voice. He was leaning close to me, and I could see a trace of red madder caked in his lips.

  ‘The main gate on Saint Andrew’s Hill,’ I said.

  ‘The guards won’t let me out. I need another door.’

  ‘Are you two lovebirds coming?’ Will Kemp snarled.

  ‘There’s someone I don’t want to meet,’ Simon hissed at me.

  ‘I don’t know another door,’ I said to Simon.

  ‘Boys!’ Alan Rust shouted impatiently.

  ‘He knows the lines,’ I called again to placate Alan. And Simon did know them. Titania, Queen of the Fairies, fell in love with Nick Bottom, a weaver with an ass’s head, without forgetting a word.

  And Titania had known the new playhouse would be called the Swan.

  Lord Hunsdon was generous. Each day, as well as ordering that the hall be warmed by a vast log fire, he had his household send us ale, bread, and cheese. He or his son, Sir George, sometimes came to inspect the work being done by Peter Strete, our carpenter, who, with his four men, had finished the stage, which stood five feet high. They were working now on the false wall that hid a space beneath the minstrels’ gallery. ‘We thought, my lord,’ my brother spoke to the Lord Chamberlain on the day after Simon Willoughby had asked me about another door leading from the mansion, ‘that we would shroud the wall and the front of the stage with cloth.’

  ‘With cloth?’

  ‘And instead of doors, my lord, we’ll curtain the three entrances.’

  ‘Cover the wall with cloth?’ Lord Hunsdon asked. ‘I thought you were going to panel it all.’

  ‘We could do that, my lord, and stain the wood as we first proposed, but the smell won’t be gone by Christmas.’

  ‘Ah,’ Lord Hunsdon said. ‘Well, we don’t want a stinking Christmas, do we? So you want me to buy cloth?’

  ‘Common cloth, my lord, say dyed wool?’

  ‘What does the damned stuff cost?’

  ‘A stick of dark purple, my lord, sixpence. We’d prefer the yellow, which is a penny more.’

  ‘And how many sticks?’ A stick was a roll of material.

  ‘Thirty, my lord, at least.’

  ‘Good Lord in His cradle! It’s damned expensive, your play-making!’

  ‘Spend or stink, my lord,’ my brother said.

  Lord Hunsdon laughed. ‘Then we’ll have to spend, eh? The womenfolk want this play, and what the womenfolk want we have to supply, eh? Talk to Harrison. I’ll tell him to have the sticks delivered.’

  Walter Harrison, the steward, must have been eager to save his master’s money because he came to the great hall that afternoon saying there was already some blue cloth in the house, and asking whether that could be used to disguise the raw wood scaffolding at the front of the stage. It seemed it could, because an hour later two servants brought the two sticks which they were asked to store beneath the stage. To my surprise and pleasure Silvia came with them. She shot me a secret grin, then curtseyed to my brother. ‘Her ladyship asks if we can sew white roses and red crosses to the blue cloth, sir,’ she said.

  My brother nodded absently. ‘Of course. Yes, of course.’ Then he frowned. ‘Red crosses?’

  ‘The badge of the Berkeley family, sir,’ Silvia said.

  ‘Ah, the groom. Yes, of course.’

  ‘I’ll look to it, sir,’ she said, curtseying again, then offered me the slightest jerk of her head as she climbed the temporary steps to the stage and vanished.

  ‘I need a piss,’ I said, though no one took any notice. The Sharers were arguing about how the play’s ending should be staged. My brother wanted the fairies to be on the gallery, and Alan Rust worried about providing enough candles to light that space, and they took no notice of me as I followed Silvia.

  She was standing at the back of the hall, in the dark space beneath the minstrels’ gallery, a space that would become our tiring room. Her face was pale in the shadows. ‘I just wanted to see you,’ she said.

  ‘And I you.’

  I kissed her, and she clung to me. ‘We’re just so busy, what with Christmas round the corner,’ she said. ‘It’s sew this and sew that. Be better when it’s over.’

  I held her, then remembered Simon’s question. ‘Is there another way in and out of the mansion?’ I asked her. ‘I mean besides the main gate and the one in the stable yard?’

  She leaned back to look up at me. ‘Are you planning to sneak in and find me, Richard Shakespeare?’

  ‘Of course.’

  She laughed. ‘There’s a door onto the river alley. But it’s bolted at night.’

  ‘Show me?’

  ‘Best be quick,’ she said, ‘her ladyship’s expecting me. Come on!’

  She led me down a narrow corridor that led from the scullery passage. We passed storerooms heaped with firewood, and others stacked with ale butts, and at the corridor’s end was a stout wooden door secured by an enormous iron bolt. ‘There,’ she said. ‘We’re allowed to use it, but Harrison always sends a servant before nightfall to check that it’s bolted.’

  ‘I’d better come when it’s light then,’ I said.

  She giggled, stood on tiptoe, kissed me, and ran.

  I stayed a moment, unbolted the heavy door and pulled it open, and saw that it looked into a narrow alley that led to Water Lane and so down to the river.

  The sleet had turned into snow. I watched the heavy flakes sift down to the greasy wet floor of the alley where they melted, but the snow was falling thick and it would settle soon enough. It rarely snowed before Christmas. In January and February it was common enough, but before Christmas? I shivered, closed the heavy door, slid the bolt shut, and went back to the hall. ‘It’s snowing hard,’ I said.

  ‘God help us,’ Will Kemp growled.

  ‘Can we continue?’ Alan Rust demanded.

  We were rehearsing two plays now. Fair Em and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. We were able to use the finished stage
, rehearsing by the light of lanterns that now hung from the minstrels’ gallery. Christmas was a week away, and the mansion was busy as servants stocked the storerooms, hung hams, and rolled in vats of wine. Manservants draped the great hall with holly and ivy, and a vast yule log was brought to the hearth. The log would be lit on Christmas Day, and it was hoped that it would burn through the twelve days of the holiday or else there would be misfortune in the house. It rested close to the fire, and woodlice, woken by the heat, crawled out from the bark.

  ‘We can’t use the mansion during the twelve days,’ my brother announced, ‘except for one rehearsal on the morning of the performance. Remember your parts!’ He glared at Simon Willoughby as he said the last three words. ‘The costumes will stay here, and the scripts stay here too.’

  ‘Can I take my scripts?’ Simon Willoughby asked. He was still nervous, still frightened of Will Kemp, but he was struggling through the rehearsals, and there had been small need for me to feed him lines.

  ‘You can take Fair Em home,’ my brother said, ‘but not Titania.’

  ‘Oh.’ Simon looked disappointed.

  ‘You have plenty of time to learn Titania before we do the wedding play,’ John Heminges consoled him. ‘Just make sure you know Em’s part.’

  ‘Does anyone know how Isaiah is?’ I asked.

  ‘Coughing up blood and spit, last time I heard,’ Will Kemp said with unholy delight. ‘He might be dead and buried by Twelfth Night!’

  ‘So be here on Twelfth Night,’ my brother said to me. He glanced up at the oriel window, though it was so gloomy outside that he could see little. ‘We’d best go home before the snow gets worse. Enjoy your Christmas season, masters.’

  Enjoy your Christmas season.

  I went home alone.

  SEVEN

  WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR sees the picture of a princess on the shield of the Marquess of Lubeck, who is in England for a tournament. The King falls in love with the girl whose portrait is painted on the shield, and, learning that she is Princess Marianne of Sweden who is being held hostage at the court of King Zweno of Denmark, he sails across the North Sea to woo her.

  Princess Marianne, though, is in love with the Marquess of Lubeck, and has no interest in the King of England and so rejects his suit, but her friend, Princess Blanche, who is the daughter of King Zweno of Denmark, falls in love with the Conqueror. Unfortunately for Blanche the Conqueror does not return her love, so Princess Marianne and Princess Blanche concoct a plan. Princess Blanche disguises herself as Princess Marianne, and the disguise deceives William the Conqueror, who elopes with Princess Blanche because he thinks she is really the Princess Marianne.

  ‘Sweet Jesus Christ,’ Alan Rust had said at one of the first rehearsals, ‘who wrote this crap?’

  ‘Not me,’ my brother growled.

  ‘God’s blood! Where did we find it? In a sewer? Rattle it along fast. Don’t give the audience time to think about it.’

  William the Conqueror discovers the deception, but happily realises that he has really been in love with Princess Blanche all along, and so he marries her, while Princess Marianne weds the Marquess of Lubeck. Meanwhile, in Manchester, Em, the beautiful daughter of a humble miller, is being wooed by three men, two of whom she does not want, and so she pretends blindness to deter the first, and deafness to repel the second, but in the end the man she does want to marry proves to be unfaithful, having sworn undying love to another girl, and so Em marries Lord Valingford, the man who had thought she was blind and who she discovers she really does love after all. It turns out that her father is actually Sir Thomas Goddard, a knight who has been banished by William the Conqueror, and who, instead of fleeing the country, has taken on the disguise of a miller in Manchester, and Em is thus revealed to be of gentle birth and thus a fit wife for Lord Valingford. William the Conqueror, played by my brother, recognises the injustice of Sir Thomas’s banishment and restores him to his proper estate, and so ends the play.

  ‘“And what says Em to lovely Valingford?”’ William the Conqueror asked.

  Simon Willoughby offered my brother a deep curtsey. ‘“Em rests at the pleasure of your highness!”’ he said, then paused, and the pause stretched, and from my vantage point above I saw the look of wide-eyed panic as the next words fled his mind.

  ‘“And would …”’ I hissed.

  ‘“And would I were a wife for his desert,”’ Willoughby squeaked too hastily.

  ‘“Then here, Lord Valingford,”’ my brother said grandiloquently, and I could hear the relief in his voice that Simon Willoughby had not forgotten too many of his lines and that the play was at last ending, ‘“receive Fair Em.

  ‘Here take her, make her thy espoused wife.

  Then go we in, that preparation may be made,

  To see these nuptials solemnly performed.’

  Exeunt. Flourish of drums and trumpets. Applause.

  It was listless applause. Applause that only stirred itself to tepid life when Lady Anne, the Lord Chamberlain’s wife, stood and called aloud, ‘Well played!’ Then the rest of the guests, wishing to be polite to her ladyship, imitated her enthusiasm as the players lined the stage and made a bow to the hall. It was a deep bow, but also a brief one, and then, with as much haste as they could manage without making it look like embarrassed flight, the actors filed back into the tiring room.

  ‘Sweet Jesus,’ Phil said, ‘but that was agony.’

  I had listened to the play in the musicians’ gallery which was not the best place to be the bookkeeper, but when we had tried putting me beneath the stage no one could hear me unless I shouted, and so I had shared the gallery with Phil and his musicians. I had occasionally peered over the balustrade to watch the players beneath me. My brother wore a crown that circled a bald spot that was slowly spreading towards the bald patch at the front so it looked as if a malevolent barber had shaved the outline of an hourglass on his pate. He, like every other player, had skipped lines, hurrying the performance because the audience had been restless. Many had been yawning and some had slept through the whole play, which was perhaps excusable because they had just finished a generous feast, and the great hall was heated by a fire worthy of the pits of hell in which the last remnants of the yule log burned bright, fed by baskets of wood to drive away the winter cold. Servants threaded the hall to serve mulled wine to those in the audience who were still awake. Wine and warmth, the enemies of players. I had watched Silvia, who, when she was not busy evading aristocratic hands as she poured the wine, had gazed at the stage in rapture. She, at least, had loved every moment of Fair Em, the Miller’s Daughter of Manchester, but most of the guests had chatted through it, had laughed at anything except the play, and were plainly as relieved as the actors when it was finished.

  Yet now, despite the play’s failure, they were laughing. Now they were suddenly awake and attentive because Will Kemp, who had played the miller, was back onstage. He strode to the front, held up his big hands, and bellowed for attention. ‘My lords! My ladies! Dear gentlefolk!’ The noise in the hall had slowly subsided, and Will, after bowing low to the assembly, had promised them something new and something better. ‘We shall present a play at the wedding. Something to please you all! And I can assure you there will be neither millers from Manchester nor conquerors from Normandy in our new play. It will be a play fit for the nuptials of a beauty.’ That had provoked laughter, then applause, and Sir George Carey, Lord Hunsdon’s son, had made his daughter stand to acknowledge the acclamation. Elizabeth dutifully stood, pale, shy, and pretty in the candlelight, and Will Kemp had been struck with a sudden inspiration. ‘My lords!’ he cried. ‘My ladies! Gentlefolk all! I pray your attention, for I have a poem for the bride.’

  ‘No,’ Phil, the chief musician, groaned, ‘no, please no. Not the farting song, please God, not that!’

  ‘“Can anyone tell what I ail?”’ Will had changed to a woman’s voice, high and shrill.

  ‘Thank God,’ Phil breathed. ‘It’s not the farting song
.’

  ‘“Was ever woman’s case like mine?”’ Will cried,

  ‘At fifteen years I began to pine,

  So unto this plight now I am growne,

  I can, nor will, no longer lie alone!

  If dreams be true, then ride I can,

  I lack nothing but a man!’

  They cheered him, Elizabeth Carey laughed, and the Lord Chamberlain roared his approval. Will Kemp bowed low to his lordship, then held up his hands to quieten the room again. He had evidently decided to compensate for the disappointment of the play by being the Lord of Misrule, the traditional maker of mischief on Twelfth Night. ‘One last poem,’ Will announced, ‘before we all go into this good night.’

  ‘No,’ Phil said quietly, ‘don’t do it, Will, just don’t do it!’

  ‘“It was a young man,”’ Will began.

  ‘Oh dear God,’ Phil moaned, ‘he is doing it!’

  ‘“Who lived in a town,”’ Will went on, ‘“a jolly husband was he,

  ‘But he would eat more at one set dinner

  Than twenty would eat at three …’

  Will stopped abruptly because my brother and Alan Rust had hurried onto the stage, taken Will by his elbows, and now hauled him back to the tiring room. Phil, thinking quickly, looked at his musicians. ‘The flourish again! One, two, one, two, three!’

  The drums and trumpets sounded, the candles guttered, the yule log collapsed into glowing cinders, and the guests were laughing.

  Christmas was over.

  I had not enjoyed Christmas.

  There had been no feast for me, except for the remnants of the meal served to Lord Hunsdon’s guests on Twelfth Night. That was when I ate cold swan for the first time, and it tasted like tough, sour mutton. There had been marchpane too, and I ate too much, so I was feeling sick. We were a morose group, sitting at the tables where the guests had eaten and surrounded by guttering candles thick with wax and the carcasses of swans and geese. Lady Anne Hunsdon, the bride’s grandmother, found us there. We all stood as she arrived, bowing awkwardly, the heavy chairs scraping on the flagstones. The servants, clearing away what was left of the feast, went onto their knees.