Fools and Mortals

  ‘Well,’ Lady Hunsdon said brusquely, ‘that was not what I expected. Do sit down.’

  ‘I’m sorry, my lady,’ my brother had remained standing.

  ‘Did you write it?’

  ‘No, my lady.’

  ‘I thought not. It lacked wit. And you, young man,’ she stared at Simon Willoughby, ‘you must remember your words.’

  Simon Willoughby mumbled assent. His face still bore the lustrous paste of powdered pearls and ceruse, but his blush showed through.

  ‘The wedding play …’ my brother began nervously.

  ‘Is better, I know, much better,’ her ladyship interrupted, ‘but is it a fitting entertainment if it’s done badly? Many of the same guests will be here. Perhaps they’d prefer something else. Jugglers? Tumblers?’

  No one responded. I knew what the Sharers were thinking, that if we were not needed at the wedding then they would not be paid for all the work they had invested in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Silvia was among the servants clearing away the remnants of the Christmas feast, and she caught my eye and looked anxious.

  ‘The music was pleasant,’ Lady Hunsdon went on.

  ‘What a good woman she is,’ Phil, sitting beside me, said quietly.

  ‘More music! More dancing!’ her ladyship said. ‘The Queen likes such things.’

  ‘Her Majesty is attending the wedding?’ my brother, still standing, asked.

  ‘She has not deigned to tell us whether she will attend or not, but if she does, Master Shakespeare, she will expect something spritely and witty. Nothing vulgar and coarse.’ She shot a meaningful glance at Will Kemp.

  ‘We …’ my brother began.

  ‘And,’ Lady Anne interrupted him, ‘she will expect the players to know their words! All of them. Do enjoy your food.’ She swept from the great hall.

  There was a moment’s silence, then Will Kemp belched loudly. ‘Does that mean we’re still employed?’

  ‘It means we start rehearsals again tomorrow,’ my brother said.

  There had been a bone-handled knife with a silver pommel engraved with a rose left on the table, and when Lady Hunsdon had arrived and distracted everyone’s attention, I had managed to slip it into my sleeve. It would sell for a shilling or two, and I needed every shilling I could find. A hard winter meant a dead playhouse, and a dead playhouse meant penury.

  A dozen of us slept that night in an empty stable of the mansion because it was past curfew and we could not leave the city. I remember looking up at a candlelit window and wondering if Silvia was there, but there was no chance of finding out because the doors into the mansion from the stable yard had been bolted. And that was Christmas, 1595.

  In Stratford, as a child, I had looked forward to Christmas. My mother baked shrid pies, the traditional dish, mixing shredded mutton, which represented the shepherds, with thirteen fruits and spices, which stood for Christ and his twelve apostles. She usually made four or five, each large enough to feed a dozen people, and I would help carry the unbaked pies to Hamnet Sadler, the baker in Sheep Street, where all our neighbours would take their own pastries to be cooked in his big ovens. Then, over the twelve days, we would visit each other’s houses to eat the pies. There was singing, dancing, and laughter, there were wassail bowls of mulled ale, spices, and chopped apples. The worst days of winter were yet to come, when the pastures about the town would be hard with frost and the river might freeze, and the bell of Holy Trinity would toll too often to announce a death, but for twelve days there was the warmth of welcoming hearths, there was food, and there was laughter.

  My mother believed that at the chimes of midnight on Christmas Eve the cattle in their stalls and the sheep in their pastures knelt to celebrate the birth of Jesus. I had once sneaked from the house to peer into the cowshed behind Goodwife Larkin’s house. ‘The cows didn’t kneel,’ I had told my mother on Christmas morning.

  She laughed at that. ‘Silly boy, of course they didn’t! They never do if you’re watching.’

  We decorated the house with garlands of ivy, we welcomed the mummers who circled the town in gaudy costumes, and we forgot the dark days to come. But in London, that winter, my Christmas was dark. The Widow Morrison had baked her shrid pies, but I was forbidden to taste them. ‘You owe me rent, Master Shakespeare,’ she had told me on Christmas morning.

  ‘I know, mistress.’ I had paid her two of the shillings that Lady Elizabeth Carey had so generously given me, but it had not been enough.

  ‘A shilling and threepence! By Plough Monday, or I’ll put you on the street!’

  ‘Yes, mistress.’

  ‘On the street, in the snow!’

  The snow had melted by Plough Monday, and I was still in the attic, I suspected because Father Laurence had paid what rent I owed. ‘Did you, father?’ I asked him.

  ‘I’m going deaf, Richard, going deaf. How was your rehearsal yesterday?’

  ‘It went badly, father.’

  ‘Young Willoughby again?’

  ‘He knows the words,’ I said, then shrugged, ‘well he did know them before Christmas. But now? As soon as he has to say them to Will Kemp he forgets them again.’

  ‘Poor boy.’

  But Father Laurence was the only one feeling sorry for Simon Willoughby, who, as December ended and January brought in more sleet and bitter cold, struggled with Titania’s lines. Isaiah Humble returned for a few days, but then began coughing again. Augustine Phillips and his apprentice were still sick, and the company’s mood grew even worse when my brother announced that he had finished his new play.

  That should have been good news. We all knew he was excited by the tale and had resented breaking off its composition to write the wedding play, and he was in an ebullient mood when he arrived in the great hall one morning and dropped a thick sheaf of papers on the big table. ‘The story, my masters,’ he announced, ‘of Romeo and Juliet.’

  ‘And who in the devil’s arsehole are they?’ Will Kemp demanded.

  ‘Star-crossed lovers,’ my brother said.

  ‘That’s good, Will, that’s good!’ Richard Burbage responded immediately.

  ‘Tell me I’m Romeo,’ Will Kemp growled.

  ‘You …’ My brother was plainly astonished by the demand, as was everyone else, yet it was equally plain that Will Kemp had not been jesting. ‘Romeo will be Richard,’ my brother spoke firmly, nodding at Richard Burbage, ‘and Juliet—’ He stopped abruptly. I suspected he had been about to name Simon Willoughby for the part, but Simon had been so feeble in the last few days that my brother dared not suggest him. ‘If Christopher Beeston is recovered, then he’d be an excellent fit for Juliet.’

  ‘But I thought …’ Simon Willoughby began, and looked close to tears.

  ‘Christopher would be an excellent choice,’ Alan Rust said savagely. ‘He can remember his lines.’

  ‘Don’t we Sharers fit the plays?’ Will Kemp demanded.

  ‘Juliet is thirteen,’ my brother said, ignoring the question, ‘so Romeo can’t be much older. Seventeen? Eighteen, perhaps? And he’s beardless.’ He looked at Richard Burbage, who wore a short brown beard.

  ‘I can shave,’ Burbage said.

  Kemp growled unhappily, grudgingly accepting that his age prevented him from playing Romeo, but he was still in a belligerent mood. ‘So what part do I play?’

  My brother looked pained. ‘There’s a servant called Peter.’

  ‘A big part?’

  ‘It’s not a comedy,’ my brother said evasively.

  ‘How many lines?

  ‘As I said, it’s not a …’

  ‘How many lines?’

  ‘As many as I wrote,’ my brother snarled.

  ‘Folk don’t come to the playhouse to be miserable,’ Kemp said forcibly. ‘They want to laugh.’

  ‘Peter is a good part,’ my brother said unconvincingly, and that left Will Kemp in a foul mood for the rest of the day, and when Kemp was unhappy the rest of us suffered.

  We finished early on those winter a
fternoons. Those of us who lived beyond the city’s gates had to be outside the walls before the curfew sounded, and those who lived inside the city were supposed to be home before full dark. The constables rarely bothered those who disobeyed, but no one liked to walk the night-time streets unless they were in company, and armed company at that.

  We finished early that afternoon, the same afternoon in which Kemp had grumbled at the part of Peter. The church clocks were striking four as my brother put the scripts inside the big wooden chest that stood to one side of the great hall’s hearth, though this day he put two plays into the chest, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and the new play. ‘Does it have a name?’ Alan Rust asked.

  ‘Romeo and Juliet, I think.’

  ‘Romeo, Juliet, and Peter,’ Will Kemp suggested harshly.

  ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ my brother said firmly, ‘for certain.’ He closed and locked the chest, then put the key back in its hiding place on the high carved mantel. ‘We all meet here tomorrow,’ he went on.

  ‘If we can get here,’ John Heminges said gloomily, ‘it looks like snow again.’

  ‘Just get here!’ my brother snapped. The day’s rehearsal and Will Kemp’s unhappiness had left us all in an irritable mood.

  We gathered by the fire to pull on our cloaks that had been set there to dry. Simon Willoughby left first. ‘I need to piss,’ he announced.

  ‘You need to learn your lines,’ Will Kemp growled.

  ‘I’ll wait for you in the yard,’ Simon said, then fled across the stage and out into the scullery passage.

  ‘Tomorrow morning,’ my brother called up to the musicians on the gallery, ‘same people, same time. We’ll carry on from where we stopped today.’

  We all left together, heading towards the Water Lane gate and the winter dusk. No one spoke much, no one cared to say much until we filed into the stable yard where Will Kemp cursed. ‘Goddamned weather!’ The sleet was falling hard.

  ‘It will turn to snow before nightfall,’ John Heminges said to me, ‘and you’d better hurry if you’re to leave the city before dark.’ He frowned as he looked around the yard. ‘Where’s Simon?’

  ‘He was pissing,’ Kemp said, ‘one of the few talents he has left.’

  ‘Simon!’ Heminges called. ‘Simon!’ There was no answer. A stable hand peered from one of the doors, then vanished. ‘Simon!’ Heminges called again, but there was still no answer. ‘He said he’d wait for us here, didn’t he?’ Heminges asked plaintively.

  ‘Maybe he was meeting someone,’ Richard Burbage suggested, ‘and he didn’t want the rest of us to know whose bed he’ll be wetting tonight.’

  ‘I give the boy too much freedom,’ Heminges said. ‘Half the time I don’t know where he is at night.’

  ‘He’s never late for rehearsal,’ I said.

  ‘What use is that,’ Will Kemp snarled, ‘if he can’t remember his part?’

  John Heminges looked pained, because any criticism of an apprentice reflected badly on the master. ‘He’s usually reliable,’ he said to me, letting the other players walk on ahead, ‘but I don’t understand why he’s so nervous.’

  ‘Titania’s a big part.’

  ‘He’s had larger. Much larger. The spoiled little beast!’ He said the last four words vengefully.

  ‘He’ll be here in the morning,’ I said, trying to placate him.

  Heminges frowned at me. He was a Sharer, of course, and a kind man too, but that cold evening he was angry. ‘Do I wait for him or not?’ he asked. He expected young Simon to accompany him back to the comfortable house in Saint Mary Axe where he lived with a young wife and three small children.

  ‘He’ll find his way home,’ I suggested.

  ‘He’ll have to,’ Heminges said, then shivered. ‘You’d better hurry.’

  The city’s gates were closed at nightfall, which came early on those dark, wintry days, and the guards on the gates were notori-ously surly with anyone trapped on either side. If I was to get home I needed to use the closest gate, and use it quickly. I followed the other players out into Water Lane and looked up and down the hill, but if Simon Willoughby had come this way he had long disappeared. It was possible, of course, that he had used the door that led into the River Alley, a door I had shown him the day before, and it was certain, at least to me, that whoever Simon was avoiding was a person he did not want the rest of us to see. And that, surely, meant someone from a rival company, from the Swan, and I remembered the lordling lifting Simon’s skirts at the palace. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ I said to John Heminges.

  ‘Fare you well,’ he said, ‘and hurry!’

  The church bells would be ringing the curfew soon, announcing the slamming of all the city’s gates, and so I left by the nearest, Ludgate, and followed the course of the wall first north and then east around the city. I was cold, wet, and miserable. The curfew sounded as I passed Newgate, and by the time I reached Smithfield I was sopping wet, and there was still the Aldersgate, Cripplegate, and Moorgate to pass. The sleet seemed to harden, driven by a spiteful wind, and some time after dark it turned to a thin snow that caked on my sodden cloak. I was alone, but no footpad would be abroad on this frozen night.

  I did not go home. The attic had no fire, it would be cold as ice, and I needed warmth. Father Laurence might or might not be awake, and if he was awake he might have the company of some secret Catholic seeking to make confession, but just two doors down from the widow’s house was a small and cheap tavern called the Falcon, and the Falcon, for all its shoddy ways, at least kept a fire burning in winter.

  The tavern’s grand name belied the place. Most local people called it the Stinking Chicken, because it lay just close enough to the sewer-ditch beside Finsbury Fields to smell like a cesspit. The Chicken had one room for drinkers, a door into Bishopsgate Street, another opening onto an alley, and a third leading to the malodorous room where the innkeeper, Greasy Harold, brewed his ale. Rickety stairs led to an upper chamber where Marie, a fading French widow, supplemented the Falcon’s small earnings, or, more commonly, where travellers who failed to reach Bishopsgate before curfew could sleep in flea-ridden blankets for a penny. There were no travellers this night. I burst through the front door, shivering, whimpering, and more dead than alive, to see an almost empty room. Greasy Harold and his wife Margaret were there, with Marie, and with Dick, an old and morose man who seemed to live in the tavern. I ignored them because, thank God, there was a fire in the hearth.

  I crouched by the flames, too cold to speak.

  ‘You’ll catch your death, Richard,’ Margaret said. She was a kindly soul to all except her husband. ‘Get that wet cloak off.’

  ‘Snowing, is it?’ Greasy Harold asked.

  ‘What do you think?’ Margaret snapped at him, then came and lifted the cloak from my shoulders. ‘Look at you! Soaked through. You are a silly boy!’

  ‘I’m cold,’ I managed to say.

  ‘Get all that wet stuff off. I’ll fetch you a blanket. Pour him some humptey, you bullock.’

  ‘If he pays,’ Harold said.

  ‘I’ll pay,’ I stammered, through chattering teeth. I had sold the silver-hilted knife for a shilling and threepence, a good price.

  The evenings were always the dullest time of my day. Mornings were often spent in rehearsal, the afternoons were for performances when the weather allowed, but evenings, especially winter evenings, were empty. In summer there were always folk on Finsbury Fields, a few shooting at the archery butts, some playing bowls or skittles, a noisy bunch of apprentices kicking a ball, and most just lazing in the long twilight, but in winter the cold clamped down and the dark came early and the curfew locked the city tight. I hated going back to the cold attic, alone and lonely, and it was frustrating to sit in the Dolphin, even though the ale was better, because the Dolphin’s whores were pretty, and I rarely had enough money to afford such company. Nell was gone, sadly, killed by the plague two years before, but Alice, the pretty elfin girl from Huntingdonshire, was still there, and she woul
d sometimes sit with me until a customer demanded her. ‘Round and round the mulberry bush,’ she would always say when a man beckoned to her. ‘Roly-poly time!’

  The Stinking Chicken was cheaper. The ale was watery and the conversation stupid, if there was any conversation at all, but there was company, there was warmth, there were candles that someone else had paid for, and there was Margaret, motherly and kind, always ready to cosset me. She hung my outer garments over two chairs close to the fire and brought me a mug of humptey, which was ale into which her husband had grudgingly poured a thimbleful of brandy. Margaret had heated a poker in the fire and now dipped it into the mug to mull the humptey. The poker hissed. ‘Drink that, Richard,’ she said.

  ‘Good brandy, that,’ Greasy Harold remarked from the back of the room, ‘not cheap rubbish.’

  ‘Don’t mind him,’ Margaret said. Flecks of ash floated on the scummy surface of the ale, but it was warm, and I drank it. I was still shivering, but beginning to feel alive again.

  ‘I saw your brother yesterday,’ Dick said.

  I kept silent as Margaret draped a blanket around my shoulders. ‘He used to drink here,’ she said, ‘but not now.’

  ‘He’s gone bald,’ Dick said. ‘I know, because his hat blew off.’

  We all contemplated that news. Conversations in the Chicken were often like this, though Margaret was happiest if I came of an evening after being at the palace. Then, just like her friend the Widow Morrison, she wanted to know every detail of what the Queen had been wearing, of what the Queen had said, and who had sat near the Queen. Somehow, in her head, I was an intimate friend of Elizabeth, by the grace of God, Queen of England, Ireland, and France.

  ‘His hat blew off,’ Dick said again, worried that the rest of us had not fully comprehended his news, ‘and he was bald.’

  ‘It was windy yesterday,’ Margaret said encouragingly.

  ‘He’s not all bald,’ Dick elaborated, ‘but he will be soon.’

  ‘Votre frère est chauve, oui?’ Marie asked.