Fools and Mortals

  ‘We all knew that,’ Will Kemp said, ‘the little bastard didn’t make a secret of it, did he?’

  ‘So now he can play Juliet,’ my brother said, ‘at the bloody Swan!’

  ‘Or he can play Titania,’ Thomas Pope, the quietest of the Sharers, said plaintively.

  ‘They’ll perform Romeo and Juliet,’ my brother said. ‘They know we’re almost ready to do the Dream. They want something no one else has done. It will be Romeo, God damn them.’

  ‘We can still play it, can’t we?’ Pope suggested. ‘The Swan won’t be ready for weeks. We can do it first!’

  ‘There was only one copy,’ my brother said bitterly.

  ‘Shit,’ Richard Burbage commented.

  ‘And it’s lost,’ my brother said.

  ‘Not if we get the pages back,’ I blurted out.

  Why did I say that? An impulse, I suppose. I was afraid of my brother’s wrath, and knew he disliked me, but at that moment I felt nothing but pity for him. I knew, we all knew, that he was proud of the new play, that he was excited for the story of the two lovers in far Verona. He had hoped to present Romeo and Juliet soon, perhaps at court or, if the weather relented, in the Theatre.

  ‘Get the pages back?’ my brother mimicked me cruelly, ‘how?’

  ‘You say Francis Langley is a friend,’ Rust suggested.

  ‘A friend?’ my brother shrugged and looked embarrassed. ‘We do business together, that’s all.’

  ‘And Francis Langley’s business is brothels,’ Will Kemp said enthusiastically.

  ‘And what if it is?’

  ‘You could appeal to him,’ John Heminges said.

  ‘He needs the plays more than he needs my friendship,’ my brother said. ‘He needs plays, he needs money. He’s up to his ears in debt at the Swan.’

  ‘Better get the whores working double fast,’ Will Kemp said.

  ‘He’ll deny having the plays,’ my brother said, ignoring Kemp, ‘right up to the day they perform Romeo and Juliet. So no,’ he swung around to look at me, ‘we can’t get the pages back.’

  ‘They stole them,’ I said, ‘so we steal them back.’

  He stared at me, and I stared at him. ‘You’re not that good a thief,’ he finally said.

  ‘I’m better than you think!’ I spoke the words savagely, defying him, and my truculent tone took everyone by surprise. It surprised me too, because a lot of anger had spewed out with those four words. My brother took a step backwards, thinking I was about to hit him, and no one spoke for a moment until Alan Rust broke the silence.

  ‘“Lord,”’ he said, quoting from the play we were supposed to be rehearsing, ‘“what fools these mortals be.”’

  ‘Hit him, lad!’ Will Kemp called.

  ‘Can we begin?’ Rust intervened. ‘We have work to do.’

  ‘But we don’t have a script,’ Richard Burbage said.

  ‘We still have the parts of the Dream,’ my brother said unhappily. ‘The little bastard didn’t steal those pages.’

  The first work was to replace the little bastard. The Sharers huddled, and I saw them glance at me once or twice, but I glared at them, daring them to give me the part, and in the end they gave Titania to Bobby Gough, Thomas Pope’s apprentice. He was a year younger than Simon Willoughby, and the choice surprised me. Bobby was skinny, very shy, very quiet, and prone to tears if anything went wrong or if he was reprimanded. In costume, with his face painted, he had a delicate beauty, but Titania, it seemed to me, was anything but delicate. She was a formidable queen, more than capable of facing down her wayward king, and Bobby, though he had a good clear voice and had played a couple of large roles well at the Theatre, seemed better suited for softer women’s roles than the defiant Titania. Still, he was chosen, and my brother gave him the fairy queen’s pages. ‘You can read them for now,’ he said.

  And a day that had started badly just became worse. We were rehearsing a scene towards the end of the play in which Titania, surrounded by her fairy entourage, was cosseting the monstrous ass-headed Bottom. When we had first read the scene we had kept interrupting the lines with laughter, but today it was only misery. Will Kemp, of course, knew his lines. ‘“I must to the barber’s, monsieur,”’ he declaimed, rubbing his cheek, ‘“for methinks I am marvellous hairy about the face, and I am such a tender ass, if my hair do but tickle me, I must scratch.”’

  Bobby Gough, sitting beside Will, was looking at the script. ‘“What,”’ he read, ‘“wilt thou hear some,”’ he paused, peering close at the page, ‘is that “sweet”?’

  ‘“Sweet”,’ I confirmed.

  ‘“Wilt thou hear some sweet music?”’

  Will Kemp stretched out, luxuriating on the thick cushions that represented the fairy queen’s bower. ‘“I have a reasonable good ear in music!”’ he said. ‘“Let’s have the tongs and the bones.”’

  Bobby was holding the page very close to his eyes. The light was bad, but not impossible to see by. ‘“Or say,”’ he said hesitantly, ‘“sweet love.”’ He paused and frowned, ‘“what,”’ another long pause, ‘“thou desir’st to,”’ he looked at me, ‘is that word …’

  ‘“Eat”!’ Will Kemp bellowed. ‘Christ’s belly, boy, it’s “eat”! Can’t you bloody well read?’

  Bobby looked close to tears. ‘I can read, sir.’

  ‘He has bad eyes,’ Thomas Pope, Bobby’s apprentice master, said anxiously. ‘He has to read things very close to his face, but he is diligent!’

  ‘Bugger diligence!’ Kemp stood, furious.

  ‘Bobby,’ Alan Rust took the boy’s arm. ‘Go to the window,’ he pointed up at the high oriel where the light was best. ‘Start learning your lines.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Rust turned on me. ‘Richard? Just stand in his place and read the lines.’

  ‘I don’t need to play the scene,’ Will Kemp said sullenly, ‘I know the damned lines. We can move on.’

  We moved on. In misery.

  Silvia and another maid came to the hall just before we ended that rehearsal. They began sewing white roses and red crosses onto the cloth that now garlanded the front of the stage, and Silvia kept glancing my way. We were rehearsing a scene towards the play’s ending with George Bryan playing Duke Theseus, and Thomas Belte, who was John Heminges’s second apprentice, playing Hippolyta. Both knew their lines. I was supposedly the bookkeeper again, working with all the separate parts, which were out of order, but luckily the players, all except poor Bobby Gough, knew their lines. I glanced at Alan Rust. ‘I need a piss.’

  ‘Go,’ he said distractedly, waving me away.

  I climbed to the stage and went through the curtained door to the tiring room, and, sure enough, Silvia followed. She embraced me. ‘Gawd, you’re nice and warm!’ She kept her arms wrapped around me. ‘So what was all that shouting about this morning? Her ladyship thought you were killing each other.’

  ‘We very nearly were.’

  ‘So tell me!’

  ‘Inquisitive, aren’t you?’

  She grinned. ‘You keeping secrets from me, Richard Shakespeare?’

  So I told her. Told her how the precious pages of my brother’s new plays had been stolen from the chest in the great hall, and how Simon Willoughby must have taken them. ‘And I’m a fool,’ I said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I promised to steal them back.’

  ‘You did what?’

  ‘Promised to steal them back,’ I paused, ‘except I don’t know where he took them.’

  She gazed up at me. Her arms were still around my waist, as much for warmth as for affection. ‘So you don’t know where to go?’

  I shook my head. ‘No.’

  ‘So how will you steal them back?’

  ‘They could be anywhere,’ I said.

  ‘Anywhere?’

  ‘They could be at the Earl of Lechlade’s house,’ I said, ‘wherever that is. Or over at the new playhouse.’

  ‘The earl? He’s at Westminster,’ she said.

/>   ‘You know that?’

  ‘I don’t know it,’ she said firmly, ‘but the ladies were talking about him because he turned up at court wearing ermine!’

  ‘Is that bad?’

  ‘God and His angels help you! Of course it’s bad! Only the Queen can wear ermine. It’s the law. And he wore these silly shoes with tall heels. He’s small, you see? Her ladyship says he’s a right little cockerel, but he was sent packing to get rid of the ermine. She said he must have lived close by because he went and came back so quick. Out and back like a bleeding ferret, she said.’

  ‘A cockerel and a ferret?’

  ‘Don’t you mock me, Mister Flute! Of course the little ferret could be staying at a tavern, some of the country lords do, but it’ll be a Westminster tavern, one close to the palace.’

  ‘I’m not mocking you.’

  ‘You’re not?’

  ‘I’m kissing you,’ I said, and I was, which she seemed to like. ‘Or more likely,’ I went on, ‘Simon took the plays to the Swan.’

  ‘The Swan?’

  ‘The new playhouse.’

  ‘Only if he walked all the way round by the bridge,’ she said scornfully. ‘No one was crossing the river by boat last night. And only halfwits were out walking in that snowstorm.’

  ‘I was.’

  ‘Well, that’s what I said,’ she grinned, ‘but if the little bleeder had any sense he wouldn’t walk far. Not to Westminster and not across the bridge neither. It’s much too far. He took them somewhere close.’

  Somewhere close. Of course! The weather alone dictated that Simon Willoughby could not have gone far, and that meant he had taken the stolen plays to some place in or very near Blackfriars. Somewhere safe.

  And I knew just where the little bleeder was.

  Things base and vile, holding no quantity,

  Love can transpose to form and dignity:

  Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind,

  And therefore is wing’d Cupid painted blind.

  A Midsummer Night’s Dream

  Act I, Scene 1, lines 232ff

  EIGHT

  ‘TELL ME ABOUT Romeo and Juliet,’ I said to my brother.

  I was walking with him. He had looked irritated when, as we left the Blackfriars mansion, I had fallen into step beside him, and had since ignored everything I had said. He had pointedly paused outside a saddler’s shop to examine the wares. ‘It helps to have the horse before buying the saddle,’ I had said, a comment that he pretended not to hear. Instead he had paced on down Cheapside, hurrying to escape me, but I had easily kept up with him. ‘Tell me about Romeo and Juliet,’ I now said again.

  ‘It’s a play,’ he said caustically, his anger at the loss overcoming his irritation at my company, ‘and that shrivelling little bastard has stolen it.’

  ‘So now I’ll steal it back.’

  That earned me a sneer. ‘From where? From whom?’

  ‘From whoever has it,’ I answered airily.

  ‘And whoever has it,’ he snarled, ‘will already be copying it.’

  ‘It will take at least a week to copy,’ I pointed out, ‘and it was only stolen last night. Maybe they’ve copied one page by now? Perhaps two.’

  We walked on in silence. My brother had the brim of his hat pulled down to hide his face so he would not be recognised. Folk did notice players as we walked around the city, and they frequently stopped us, wanting to tell us how they had enjoyed a play, though few people would want to accost us on this freezing evening. Some players welcomed the praise, while others tried to avoid it. Simon Willoughby, of course, could never receive enough compliments, and, like Will Kemp, he would prance in the street to attract attention. My brother preferred to hide. ‘The plaudits of fools,’ he once told me, ‘are worthless. Gratifying, maybe, but ultimately without any meaning.’

  ‘You don’t enjoy being praised?’ I had asked.

  ‘If the compliment comes from a person of wit, yes. Otherwise it’s just the yapping of a dog.’

  Now he kept his gaze low, not just to escape recognition, but to help negotiate the frozen slush and dung that paved Cheapside. He glanced up occasionally to gauge the sky, which, always sullen with London’s smoke, was now threatening with purple dark clouds. ‘There’ll be more snow,’ he said.

  ‘We should sleep at Lord Hunsdon’s,’ I said.

  ‘I doubt his lordship would welcome that,’ he remarked scathingly, ‘and after Fair Em he probably regrets inviting us at all.’ A gust of wind whirled snow from a roof, plastering it down onto our cloaks. ‘Shouldn’t you be out of the city before curfew?’ he asked.

  ‘I should,’ I said, ‘but I want to know if there’s a part for me in Romeo and Juliet.’

  He sighed, as if I were being tiresome, which I suppose I was. ‘That is up to the Sharers, not me.’

  ‘And you’re a Sharer,’ I said, ‘and the others listen to you. So is there a part for me?’

  He sighed again. ‘There’s a nurse you can play.’

  ‘A man’s part.’

  ‘Let me think,’ he said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. ‘Richard would have played Romeo if we still had the play, and Henry would have been Mercutio. There’s Juliet’s father, but you’re not nearly old enough for that role. But there are sundry serving men who clutter the stage. One of those, perhaps?’

  ‘A speaking part,’ I persisted patiently.

  ‘Tybalt, perhaps?’

  ‘What does he do?’

  ‘Very little. Maybe twenty lines? Fewer, I think. About the same as Peter.’

  I shuddered to think how Will Kemp would feel about having twenty lines or less. ‘What I’m asking,’ I said, ‘is whether you’ll give me a good part if I get the pages back?’

  He had stopped beside the old stone cross that dominated Cheapside. The cross was usually surrounded by beggars, who only fled when the Puritan preacher was there to demand the destruction of the papist symbol, but on this freezing day the cross was deserted. My brother looked at me with his customary distaste. ‘I have three slender hopes of retrieving the manuscripts,’ he said. ‘I can appeal to Francis Langley, which will do no good, but I can try. Francis would cozen his own mother for a penny. For a halfpenny! I could ask Lord Hunsdon to use his influence, but his lordship doesn’t like to be concerned with trivialities, and will not take such a request happily. Besides, there’s no proof I even wrote the two plays. Lawyers will involve themselves, and his lordship has a healthy dislike of lawyers. Or I can go on my knees to Sir Edmund Tilney and beg him to reject their scripts.’

  ‘Will he?’

  ‘Of course not. And even if he did, it wouldn’t stop them performing the plays in private houses.’

  Sir Edmund Tilney was the Master of the Revels, and was appointed by Lord Hunsdon, the Lord Chamberlain. Sir Edmund summoned players to perform before the Queen, but he also had the responsibility of making sure that no play contained seditious or heretical material. Every script, whether it was to be played at court or in a playhouse or by a company touring the county towns, had to be submitted to Sir Edmund, and no play could be performed anywhere in England or Wales until he had signed his name and fixed his seal to the first page of the manuscript. I had often taken play scripts to him, and had found him to be an affable man, always ready to gossip about players. ‘Have an apple,’ he had greeted me once, ‘it’s from my garden. How’s Will’s ankle?’

  ‘Much improved, Sir Edmund.’ Will Kemp had sprained an ankle during a performance of The Seven Deadly Sins.

  ‘He’s a naughty man!’ Sir Edmund had said. ‘Those jigs of his, eh? You know what the rogue does? He invents new lines. He makes them up as he goes along.’ He had chuckled. ‘By rights I should put him in the Marshalsea, but he’s funny. I confess he’s funny! So what have you brought us today?’

  ‘Another jig, Sir Edmund.’

  ‘Saucy, is it? Let me see!’

  Sir Edmund, a decent man, had the power to refuse a licence if the Swan submitted Romeo
and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream for his approval, which would mean the Earl of Lechlade’s players could not perform either play in public, but my brother was surely right that Sir Edmund, let alone Lord Hunsdon, would not want to be tangled in lawyers’ snares. So long as the plays did not insult the Queen or advocate papist heresy, then Sir Edmund would probably sign them. ‘There is a fourth hope,’ I said.

  ‘What?’ my brother asked. ‘That the goblins of the forest will rescue the plays?’

  ‘That I steal them back.’

  He sneered at that. ‘I have more faith in the goblins than in you.’

  ‘And if I do return them,’ I said, ‘I want a man’s part in Romeo and Juliet. A good part.’

  ‘If you retrieve the plays,’ he said caustically, ‘you can play Romeo himself.’ He gave a mirthless laugh at those words, then walked on. ‘Your path lies that way, I believe.’ He pointed up Wood Street.

  ‘I’ll be late for the rehearsal tomorrow,’ I called after him.

  ‘You won’t if you want to be employed,’ he snarled without turning. ‘We’re rehearsing the whole play tomorrow. We need you there, so be there.’

  ‘Maybe very late,’ I went on, ‘because I’ll be fetching you Romeo.’

  That checked him. He stopped, turned, and looked at me as the first snowflakes sifted from the dark clouds. ‘You’re a misbegotten fool, Richard,’ he said, but not in an unkind way, then he turned again and walked on.

  But he had not forbidden me to try. So I would be late for the morrow’s rehearsals.

  ‘I know why Simon stole the plays,’ I said that evening.

  ‘Why?’ Father Laurence was cocooned in his blankets, sitting close to the fire that I had fed with wood.

  ‘He was upset that he wasn’t given the part of Juliet.’

  ‘So he was jealous? Poor boy. Jealousy is such a destructive thing.’

  ‘And he was given gold,’ I added.

  ‘He suffered greed too?’

  I half smiled. ‘You can add lust, father.’

  ‘My goodness! Envy, greed and lust! He does need absolution. Who does he lust after?’

  ‘I saw him with the Earl of Lechlade. They were kissing.’