I had looked behind constantly, fearing pursuit, but none came. How could it? DeValle had a broken leg, his horse had a headache, and Strawbelly Sam was doubtless too busy cornering the bear. I hurried, shivering, not just because of the cold, but because I was reliving the morning, remembering the stench of my hiding place and the terror of the moment when the horse reared above me.
I entered the mansion through the Water Lane gate where the guard gave me a familiar nod. ‘It’s cold,’ he said, stamping his feet. ‘Nice hat, Richard!’ I was wearing deValle’s flamboyant hat with its two long feathers.
‘It’s got a hole in it,’ I said.
‘All the best things do!’
I crossed the stable yard, where barrels were being unloaded from a massive wagon. ‘More wine for the wedding,’ a servant told me.
‘If they drink all that they’ll fall asleep in the play,’ I said.
‘More like during the sermon!’
Once in the house, a maid offered me a conspiratorial grin. ‘I’ll tell her you’re here!’
I smiled thanks and walked on, entering the great hall through the door from the scullery passage, though that door now led into the shadowed space that was our tiring room. Three short flights of makeshift stairs led up to the curtained entrances to the stage where the company was rehearsing. I stood for a moment at the head of the central steps, peering through the cloth. Richard Burbage, Henry Condell, Alexander Cooke, and Christopher Saunders were standing awkwardly on the stage, while my brother talked with Alan Rust. It was evident from the conversation that they had finished rehearsing the whole play, and were now discussing whatever scenes needed more work. ‘You could move to the right of the stage?’ Rust suggested to Richard Burbage.
‘But Hermia’s on the left.’
‘Can she cross earlier?’ my brother asked.
‘We’ll try that,’ Burbage answered, ‘but what if …’ then he fell silent, because I had pushed through the curtain.
‘What if …’ Rust began.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ my brother said curtly. He looked at me, plainly angered that I had come so late to the rehearsal. This was the first day the company had performed the whole play, and they would have had to work my scenes without me, which would have annoyed everyone. The rest of the players were gathered on the floor of the hall, and they, like my brother, glowered at me.
I ignored their anger, crossed the stage, jumped down to the hall floor, and went straight to the fire. I crouched there, feeling the heat seep into my frozen bones.
‘So good of you to join us,’ Alan Rust called to me caustically. Isaiah Humble had not returned, and Thomas Pope was evidently serving as the bookkeeper, the table scattered with the players’ parts, because the one fair copy was in my satchel. Will Kemp, lounging in a great chair close to the fire, chuckled, while the other players edged away from me as though they feared contagion.
There was a moment’s silence, as if the company was waiting for my brother to savage me for being so late, but when he said nothing Richard Burbage turned back to Alan Rust. ‘Where do you want to go from?’ he asked.
‘Go from “Oh, when she is angry”,’ Rust said.
‘What’s the line before that?’ Henry Condell asked.
Thomas Pope sorted through the pages. ‘It’s “No, sir, she shall not …”’
‘No, it’s not,’ I interrupted him.
They all looked at me. I could feel their anger, which just needed a spark to erupt. Alan Rust tried to keep the hall calm. ‘Go from “No, sir, she shall not …”’
I had taken the untidy pile of papers from the canvas bag. I stood, waited for Henry to say his line, then interrupted him. ‘“Two household friends,”’ I declaimed in a loud voice, ‘“alike in dignity, In fair Verona, where we lay our scene, From civil broils broke into enmity, Where civil war …”’
‘Give that to me!’ My brother came towards me, then stopped, terrified, because as he moved closer I held the thick stack of pages towards the roaring fire.
I waited till I was sure he had stopped, then drew the scripts back from the flames. ‘“Where civil war makes civil hands unclean,”’ I read on. ‘“From forth the fatal loins of these two foes, A pair of star-crossed lovers,”’ I paused, smiling, ‘you want me to burn it, brother?’
‘Richard!’ he pleaded.
‘Who plays Romeo?’ I asked, again holding the pages towards the hungry flames.
‘No,’ he said, his eyes on the pages, ‘no! Please, no!’
‘Who plays Romeo?’ I asked again, louder this time.
‘What is this?’ Richard Burbage jumped down from the stage, but my brother held out a hand to stop him.
‘What did you do?’ my brother asked quietly.
‘I’ll tell you what I did,’ I spoke loud and slow, making sure every man and boy in the hall could hear me. ‘I broke Simon Willoughby’s head. I shot a pistol at a man and his horse. I played hopscotch with a bear, and I have brought you these.’ I held the pages towards him.
‘He’s playing Romeo?’ Richard Burbage demanded angrily.
My brother ignored the question. He ignored the offered pages too, and I saw, to my surprise, that there were tears in his eyes. He walked to me and embraced me, his arms awkward about my waist. ‘Thank you,’ he whispered, ‘thank you.’ He stepped away and took the pages, holding them as if they were the most precious things in all the world.
‘He’s playing Romeo?’ Richard Burbage demanded again.
‘No, no,’ my brother said distractedly, ‘of course not, no.’
‘He can’t play …’ Burbage began.
‘He’s not!’ my brother snarled.
‘Why not?’ Will Kemp asked mischievously.
‘Quiet!’ Alan Rust intervened, and that tyrant king voice stilled the whole hall. He watched as my brother carried the two plays to the table and laid them down reverently. ‘Who had the plays?’ Rust asked me.
‘Sir Godfrey,’ I said.
‘Where do you want these?’ a voice called from the stage, and I saw a serving man carrying bolts of green cloth. Silvia was just behind him, her arms similarly loaded.
‘Anywhere,’ Alan Rust said impatiently, ‘just drop them!’ He turned back to me, ‘Sir Godfrey had them?’
‘He’s providing the beast shows for the new playhouse,’ I explained.
‘Oh, dear Christ,’ my brother muttered, ‘of course!’
‘And he had Simon Willoughby hidden at Scavenger’s Yard,’ I said.
‘Is that the place they keep the dogs?’ John Heminges asked, appalled.
‘It’s where they keep the dogs,’ I said, ‘the dogs, the fighting cocks, and a bloody great bear.’
‘So what happened?’ Heminges asked.
We are players, and we love an audience. Sometimes, if a play is going badly, it is easy to think of the audience as an enemy, but truly they are a part of the play, because an audience changes the way we perform. We can rehearse a play for weeks, as we were doing with A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but the moment the playhouse is filled with people, so the play is transformed. There is a new nervousness, of course, but also an energy. We often ran a whole play in the Theatre without any audience, simply as a rehearsal, and often it would be dull and dreary, grown stale by too much rehearsal, yet next day, with two thousand people gaping at the stage, it would come alive. I had my audience now, though I pretended to be unaware that Silvia was listening.
I had seen the serving man pluck her elbow, plainly wanting to leave, but she had stubbornly stayed, and the servant had stayed with her, and they both now listened as I described breaking into Scavenger’s Yard. John Heminges, God bless him, fed me my lines. ‘Weren’t you worried about the dogs?’ he asked.
‘I was terrified,’ I admitted, ‘so I took this,’ I pulled the dagger from the canvas bag. ‘I reckoned I might have to kill a couple before I reached the shed door.’ That was not true. The mastiffs would have reduced me to shredded meat long before
I could have scratched even one of them. I had thought that if the dogs were loose I would have had time to reach the shed before they reached me, and I could have left the yard by distracting them with meat from the larder. As it was, I had been lucky. ‘But I was lucky,’ I told John.
‘Lucky? How?’
‘They had a visitor, the Earl of Lechlade’s man.’
‘You know it was the earl’s man?’ my brother asked sharply.
‘I recognised him,’ I said, ‘and I listened to them talking.’ I put the dagger back in the bag. ‘His horse was inside the yard, so all the dogs were locked up.’
‘You were lucky,’ John said fervently.
‘Go on!’ my brother urged.
‘I sneaked inside,’ I said, ‘and that started the dogs howling, but I hid while Strawbelly quietened them. Then I went to the house door and heard them all talking. Simon Willoughby,’ I offered John Heminges an apologetic glance, ‘was supposed to be copying the plays, but they’d given him bad quills.’
‘Ha!’ my brother said.
‘So then Strawbelly Sam and his wife took deValle back to his horse …’
‘DeValle?’ my brother asked.
‘The earl’s man of business,’ I explained, ‘and they left Simon in the house, so I went inside, and I hit him before he could call for help.’
‘You hit him?’ John Heminges looked anxious.
‘He won’t know whether it’s Christmas or Easter when he wakes up,’ I said. ‘He was bleeding. I hit him too hard.’
‘Good,’ my brother said firmly.
‘I picked up the plays,’ I went on, ‘and left. Oh, and I released the bear.’
‘Is that Washington?’ Will Kemp asked. ‘I like Washington. He’s a mean old bastard. I saw him finish off a score of dogs in one afternoon.’
‘You released him?’ John Heminges asked. ‘Why?’
‘Because I reckoned they’d follow me,’ I explained, ‘and a bear in their way might slow them down.’ The company just stared at me. ‘He did too.’
‘Did what?’ Heminges asked.
‘He slowed them down,’ I said.
‘Wasn’t it dangerous?’
‘I ran faster than the bear,’ I said, as though that explanation was obvious. ‘I got out of the yard and kept running, but then deValle followed me. He was on horseback. I was going towards Leather Lane and he came after me with his sword drawn.’
‘Dear sweet God,’ John Heminges said quietly.
‘But I took this as well,’ I said, pulling the pistol out of the bag.
‘Dear sweet God,’ my brother echoed John Heminges, ‘don’t tell me you shot the Earl of Lechlade’s man!’
‘I shot his horse,’ I said, ‘not badly. I frightened the beast, but it threw deValle, fell over in the snow, and broke deValle’s leg. So I took his hat, and came here.’
‘Took his hat?’ John Heminges asked in puzzlement.
‘It’s a nice hat,’ I explained, ‘except for the bullet hole.’
Silence. We like it when an audience is silent, when no one coughs, no one shuffles, no one cracks a nut, or uncorks an ale bottle with a sudden hiss. Silence means the play is working, and we have the audience in our power. To a player, that breathless silence is better than applause, and that morning in the great hall my audience was silent.
My story, of course, had been accurate as far as it went, but I had left out rather a lot. My brother, in one of those careless moments when he forgot to be nasty to me, once told me that the art of storytelling was knowing what to leave out, and I dare say he is right, though often, learning lines of his plays, I wish he had left out twenty times more. I had left out my terror, the cringing terror that almost made me piss myself. I left out my heart beating wildly, my panic when deValle’s horse loomed over me and I had just pulled the gun’s trigger blindly and the pistol had suffered a hangfire. I did not confess that I had been hurled backwards by the pistol’s kick, that I had been screaming in terror and sprawling helpless in the snow, but instead I had made that moment sound coolly deliberate, as if I had aimed, when in truth my eyes had been closed and the shot was effective only by a miracle. I had been whimpering, shivering, scared halfway to death, yet, knowing Silvia was listening, I had painted myself as a hero.
And so I was! My brother looked at me with what might even have been mistaken for admiration and was certainly gratitude, John Heminges beamed, the boys gazed at me with awestruck faces, and even Will Kemp was impressed. He scraped back his chair, stood, then slapped me on the back hard enough to hurt. ‘Well done, lad,’ he boomed, ‘well done!’
Only Richard Burbage was unhappy. He drew my brother away, leading him by the arm to the space beneath the oriel window, and I saw them talking there, and Richard Burbage glanced at me, then seemed satisfied and went back to the new stage. My brother climbed to the window seat from where he beckoned me.
‘You can’t play Romeo,’ he greeted me.
‘You …’ I began.
‘You can’t,’ he said firmly, but surprisingly gently. ‘Sit down.’
I sat. He glanced out of the window. The warmth in the hall was melting the frost patterns so that drops of water ran down the outside of the glass to distort the view of the frozen river. ‘It’s still snowing,’ he said. ‘A hard winter!’
‘You said …’ I began again.
‘I know what I said,’ he interrupted me again, ‘and it was said lightly. Romeo is a big part, too big, and Richard will play it beautifully. What I will promise you is a man’s part of substance, a good part.’
‘Substance,’ I repeated the word.
‘A Sharer’s part,’ he said, ‘I promise it.’
‘A man’s part? Not like Francis Flute?’
He had the grace to smile. ‘Not like Francis Flute. You’ll like this part. A proper man’s part. You can grow a beard, and you’ll be paid well. I promise.’ He waited, expecting me to speak, but I said nothing. ‘It’s a good play,’ he said wistfully, ‘it’s even a very good play, and we can start rehearsals as soon as it’s copied. His lordship tells me Her Majesty has been asking for us to perform again, so now we have two plays to take to court. And you will be in both.’ He stood. ‘And spring will come! We can play both pieces at the Theatre when the weather clears. You will be busy, Richard, you’ll be busy and you’ll be paid. Now, we needs finish the rehearsal.’ He glanced down at the window seat. ‘Thank you,’ he said, then went down the stairs. I followed his glance, and saw he had left coins on the tapestry-covered cushion. Six shillings!
‘What’s his name?’ I called after him.
He turned and looked up at me. ‘His name?’
‘The part I’ll play.’
‘You’ll have to use a rapier to play him, so practise!’
‘His name?’ I asked again.
He pretended not to hear, but just walked on, and I wondered whether I could believe his promise. What had the Reverend Venables said? That promises in the playhouse were like kisses on May Day. I had just been kissed.
And beyond the window the snow fell harder.
There was still time to rehearse some more scenes, and they went well, maybe because everyone was in a good mood except for John Heminges, who still lamented his apprentice’s treachery. Even Bobby Gough managed to remember all his lines, though he was still nervous, perhaps because he was a year or so too young to play Titania.
The player who surprised me was Alan Rust. He was a tall man, strongly built, who usually played serious, middle-aged characters. His voice was deep and his presence onstage imposing, which made him a surprising choice to play Puck, Oberon’s mischievous servant, whose mistakes and jests propelled much of the play. When I copied the play I had seen Puck as a sprite, an elf, a merry goblin who would dance rather than walk and sing rather than speak. Indeed my brother suggested as much, sometimes calling Puck ‘Robin Goodfellow’, and there wasn’t a man in the company who had not grown up listening to tales of Robin Goodfellow’s pranks. He was a trick
ster, a spirit of the deep woods, a mischief-maker, and it was a part, I thought, which one of the boys would play well, and then the Sharers had given it to a man who normally played kings or lords or tyrants. Yet Rust transformed the part, and in doing that he rivalled Will Kemp as a cause for laughter. He did not try to diminish his stature, though he did make his voice higher than usual, and all his movements were deliberately light. In repose he was all dignity, but the dignity vanished when he moved. He danced, he trembled, he was impatient, he was funny. ‘My gentle Puck, come hither,’ Oberon called, and gentle Puck skittered across the stage too enthusiastically, skidded to a stop and then stood poised to dart away again.
‘Thou rememberest,’ Oberon went on, ‘since once I sat upon a promontory and heard a mermaid on a dolphin’s back,’ and Puck nodded too quickly and too eagerly. He was quivering, as if he just wanted to fly away on whatever errand was about to be his. It was plain he was not listening to his master. Oberon wanted him to remember that moment when the mermaid sang and the rude sea grew calm and the stars stooped to hear her music. ‘Thou rememberest?’
‘I remember!’ Puck said too quickly, and it was plain he did not, and that whatever followed would eventually go wrong because he was all energy and no sense. The potion of the magic flower would be poured onto the eyelids of the wrong lover, and the result would be star-crossed couples and confusion. ‘Fetch me this herb,’ Oberon commanded, pointing to the left of the stage, ‘and be thou here again ere the Leviathan can swim a league.’
‘I’ll put a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes!’ Puck said, and fled off through the right-hand door as if pursued by a bear. We all laughed.
Silvia laughed too. She had left the great hall after delivering the bolts of cloth, but had returned soon after with Jean, our seamstress, both women’s arms heaped with more fabrics. Lady Anne Hunsdon, grandmother to the bride, had inspected some of the finished costumes, and was now insisting that they be made even more ornate. ‘There is money, Master Shakespeare,’ I had heard her say to my brother, ‘spend it!’