Fools and Mortals

‘I’m needed onstage,’ he had said, and hurried away.

  ‘Shouldn’t that be “meat and drink”?’ George now interrupted the rehearsal again.

  ‘It’s my line,’ Will Kemp growled, ‘why should you care?’

  Isaiah peered at the text. ‘No,’ he said, ‘Will got it right, it’s “drink and meat”, sorry.’

  I was feeling tired, so I wandered out of the yard and through the shadowed entrance tunnel where Jeremiah Poll, an old soldier who had lost an eye in Ireland, guarded the outer gate. ‘It’s going to rain again,’ he said as I passed, and I nodded. Jeremiah said it every time I passed him, even on the warmest, driest days. I could hear the clash and scrape of blades, and emerged into the weak sunlight to see Richard Burbage and Henry Condell practising their sword skills. They were fast, their blades darting, retreating, crossing, and lunging. Henry laughed at something Richard Burbage said, then saw me, and his sword went upwards as he stepped back and motioned with his dagger hand for the practice to stop. They both turned to look at me, but I pretended not to have noticed them and went to the door that led to the galleries. I heard them laugh as I stepped through.

  I climbed the short stairs to the lower gallery, from where I glanced across at the stage where George was still fretting about apples or loose planks, then, as the sound of the swords started again, I lay down. I was playing Uashti, a queen of Persia, but my lines would not be needed for at least an hour, and so I closed my eyes.

  I was woken by a kick to my legs and opened my eyes to see James Burbage standing over me. ‘There are Percies in your house,’ he said.

  ‘There are what?’ I asked, struggling to wake and stand up.

  ‘Percies,’ he said, ‘in your house. I just walked past.’

  ‘They’re there for Father Laurence,’ I explained, ‘the bastards.’

  ‘They’ve been before?’

  ‘The bastards come every month.’

  Father Laurence, like me, lived in the Widow Morrison’s house. He was an ancient priest who rented the room directly beneath my attic, though I suspected the widow let him live there for free. He was in his sixties, half crippled by pains in his joints, but still with a spry mind. He was a Roman Catholic priest, which was reason enough to have most men dragged on a hurdle to Tyburn or Tower Hill and there have their innards plucked out while they still lived, but Father Laurence was a Marian priest, meaning he had been ordained during the reign of our Queen’s half-sister, the Catholic Queen Mary, and such men, if they made no trouble, were allowed to live. Father Laurence made no trouble, but the Pursuivants, those men who hunted down traitorous Catholics, were forever searching his room as if the poor old man might be hiding a Jesuit behind his close-stool. They never found anything because my brother had hidden Father Laurence’s vestments and chalices among the Theatre’s costumes and properties.

  ‘They’ll find nothing,’ I said, ‘they never do.’ I looked towards the stage. ‘Do they need me?’

  ‘It’s the dance of the Jewish women,’ James Burbage said, ‘so no.’

  On the stage Simon Willoughby, Billy Rowley, Alexander Cooke and Tom Belte were prancing in a line, goaded by a man who carried a silver-tipped staff with which he rapped their legs or arms. ‘Higher!’ he called. ‘You’re here to show your legs. Leap, you spavined infants, leap!’

  ‘Who’s that?’ I asked.

  ‘Ralph Perkins. Friend of mine. He teaches dancing at the court.’

  ‘At the court?’ I was impressed.

  ‘The Queen likes to see dancing done well. So do I.’

  ‘One, two, three, four, five, leap!’ Ralph Perkins called. ‘It’s the galliard, you lumpen urchins, not some country dump dance! Leap!’

  ‘Goddam ill fortune about Augustine and his boy,’ James Burbage grumbled.

  ‘They’ll recover?’

  ‘Who knows? They’ve been purged, bled, and buggered about. They might. I pray they do.’ He frowned. ‘Simon Willoughby will be busy till Christopher recovers.’

  ‘That’ll please him,’ I said sourly.

  ‘But not you?’ I shrugged and did not answer. I was frightened of James Burbage. He leased the Theatre, which made him the owner of the building if not the land on which it stood, and his eldest son, called Richard like me, was one of our leading players. James had been a player himself once, and, before that, a carpenter, and he still had the muscular build of a man who worked with his hands. He was tall, grey-haired, and hard-faced, with a short beard, and though he no longer acted, he was a Sharer, one of the eight men who shared the expenses of the Theatre and divided the profits among themselves. ‘He drives a hard bargain,’ my brother, another of the Sharers, had once told me, ‘but he keeps to it. He’s a good man.’ Now James frowned at the stage as he talked to me. ‘Are you still thinking about leaving?’

  I said nothing.

  ‘Henry Lanman,’ Burbage said the name flatly, ‘has that bastard been talking to you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Is he trying to poach you?’

  ‘No,’ I said again.

  ‘But is your brother right? He says you’re thinking of walking away from us. Is that true?’

  ‘I’ve thought about it,’ I said sullenly.

  ‘Don’t be a fool, boy. And don’t be tempted by Lanman. He’s losing money.’ Henry Lanman owned the Curtain playhouse that lay just a brief walk to the south of ours. During our performances we could hear their audience cheering, the beat of their drummers, and the sound of their trumpeters, though of late those sounds had become scarcer. ‘He’s showing sword fights these days,’ Burbage went on, ‘sword fights and bear baiting. So what does he want you to do? Piss about in a frock and look pretty?’

  ‘I haven’t talked to him,’ I insisted truthfully.

  ‘So you’ve a lick of sense. He’s got nobody to write plays, and nobody to play in them.’

  ‘I haven’t talked to him!’ I repeated testily.

  ‘You think Philip Henslowe will hire you?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘He’s got plenty of actors.’ Henslowe owned the Rose playhouse, south of the Thames, and was our chief rival.

  ‘Then there’s Francis Langley,’ James Burbage went on relentlessly, ‘has he talked to you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘He’s building that monstrous great lump of a playhouse on Bankside, and he’s got no players, and he’s got no plays either. Rivals and enemies,’ he said the last three words bitterly.

  ‘Enemies?’

  ‘Lanman and Langley? Lanman hates us. The landlord here hates us. The bloody city fathers hate us. The lord mayor hates us. Do you hate us?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But you’re thinking of leaving?’

  ‘I’m not making any money,’ I muttered, ‘I’m poor.’

  ‘Of course you’re bloody poor! How old are you? Twenty? Twenty-one?’

  ‘Twenty-one.’

  ‘You think I started with money?’ Burbage asked belligerently. ‘I served my apprenticeship, boy, I earned my money, saved money, borrowed money, bought the lease here, built the playhouse! I worked, boy!’

  I gazed out into the yard. ‘You were a joiner, yes?’

  ‘A good one,’ he said proudly, ‘but I didn’t start with money. All I had was a pair of hands and a willingness to work. I learned to saw and chisel and augur and shape wood. I learned a trade. I worked.’

  ‘And this is the only trade I know,’ I said bitterly. I nodded towards my brother. ‘He made sure of that, didn’t he? But in a year or so you’ll spit me out. There’ll be no more parts for me.’

  ‘You don’t know that,’ he said, though he did not sound convincing. ‘So what parts do you want?’

  I was about to answer when Burbage held up a hand to silence me. I turned to see that a group of strangers had just come into the playhouse and were now standing in the yard, staring at the prancing boys on the stage. Four were grim-looking men, all with scabbarded swords and all wearing the white rose of Lord Hunsdon??
?s livery. The men stood, foursquare and challenging, to guard four women. One of the women was older, with grey hair showing beneath her coif. She signalled the men to stay where they were, and strode towards the stage, straight-backed and confident. My brother, seeing her, bowed low. ‘My lady!’ he greeted her, sounding surprised.

  ‘We have been inspecting an estate at Finsbury,’ her ladyship said in brusque explanation, ‘and my granddaughter wished to see your playhouse.’

  ‘You’re most welcome,’ my brother said. The boys onstage had all snatched off their caps and knelt.

  ‘Stop grovelling,’ her ladyship said sharply, ‘were you dancing?’

  ‘Yes, your ladyship,’ Ralph Perkins answered.

  ‘Then dance on,’ she said imperiously, before gesturing to my brother. ‘A word, if you please?’

  I knew she was Lady Anne Hunsdon, the wife of the Lord Chamberlain, who was our company’s patron. Some nobles showed their wealth by having a retinue of finely-clothed retainers ever at their heels, or by owning the swiftest deerhounds in the kingdom, or by their lavish palaces and wide parks, while some, a few, patronised the acting companies. We were Lord Hunsdon’s pets, we played at his pleasure, and grovelled when he deigned to notice us. And when we toured the country, which we did whenever a plague closed the London playhouses, the Lord Chamberlain’s name and badge protected us from the miserable Puritan town fathers who wanted to imprison us, or, better still, whip us out of town. ‘Come, Elizabeth,’ Lady Hunsdon ordered, and her granddaughter, for whose marriage my brother had been forced to abandon his Italian play and write something new, went to join her grandmother and my brother. The two maidservants waited with the guards, and it was one of those two maids who caught my eye and stopped the breath in my throat.

  Lady Anne Hunsdon and her granddaughter were cloaked in finery. Elizabeth Carey was glorious in a farthingale of cream linen, slashed to show the shimmer of silver sarsenet beneath. I could not see her bodice because she was wearing a short cape, light grey, embroidered with the white roses that were her father and grandfather’s badge. Her hair was pale gold, covered only with a net of silver-gilt thread on which small pearls shone, her skin was fashionably white, but she needed no ceruse to keep it that way, for her face was unblemished, not even touched with a hint of rouge on the cheeks. Her painted lips were full and smiling, and her blue eyes bright as she stared with evident delight at the four boys who had started dancing again to Ralph Perkins’s instructions. Elizabeth Carey was a beauty, but I stared only at her maid, a small, slim girl whose eyes were bright with fascination for what happened on the stage. She was wearing a skirt and bodice of dark grey wool, and had a black coif over her light brown hair, but there was something about her face, some trick of lip and bone, that made her outshine the glowing Elizabeth. She turned to look around the playhouse and caught my eye, and there was the hint of a mischievous smile before she turned back towards the stage. ‘Dear sweet Jesus,’ I murmured, though luckily too softly for the words to reach any of the women.

  James Burbage chuckled. I ignored him.

  Elizabeth Carey clapped her gloved hands when the dance finished. My brother was speaking with her grandmother, who laughed at something he said. I stared at the maid. ‘So you like her,’ James Burbage said caustically. He thought I was staring at Elizabeth Carey.

  ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘She’s a rare little kickshaw,’ he allowed, ‘but take your bloody eyes off her. She’ll be married in a couple of months. Married to a Berkeley,’ he went on, ‘Thomas. He gets ploughing rights, not you.’

  ‘What is she doing here?’ I asked.

  ‘How the hell would I know?’

  ‘Maybe she wants to see the play my brother’s written,’ I suggested.

  ‘He won’t show it to her.’

  ‘Have you seen it?’

  He nodded. ‘But why are you interested? I thought you were leaving us.’

  ‘I was hoping there’s a part for me,’ I said weakly.

  James Burbage laughed. ‘There’s a part for bloody everyone! It’s a big play. It has to be big because we need to do something special for his lordship. Big and new. You don’t serve up cold meat for the Lord Chamberlain’s granddaughter, you give her something fresh. Something frothy.’

  ‘Frothy?’

  ‘It’s a wedding, not a bloody funeral. They want singing, dancing, and lovers soaked in moonbeams.’

  I looked across the yard. My brother was gesticulating, almost as though he were making a speech from the stage. Lady Anne Hunsdon and her granddaughter were laughing, and the young maid was still staring wide-eyed around the Theatre.

  ‘Of course,’ Burbage went on, ‘if we perform a play for her wedding then we’ll need to rehearse where we’ll play it.’

  ‘Somerset House?’ I asked. I knew that was where Lord Hunsdon lived.

  ‘Bloody roof of the great hall fell in,’ Burbage said, sounding amused, ‘so like as not we’ll be rehearsing in their Blackfriars house.’

  ‘Where I’ll play a woman,’ I said bitterly.

  He turned and frowned at me. ‘Is that it? You’re tired of wearing a skirt?’

  ‘I’m too old! My voice has broken.’

  Burbage waved to show me the whole circle of the playhouse. ‘Look at it, boy! Timber, plaster and lath. Rain-rotted planks on the forestage, some slaps of paint, and that’s all it is. But we turn it into ancient Rome, into Persia, into Ephesus, and the groundlings believe it. They stare. They gasp! You know what your brother told me?’ He had gripped my jerkin and pulled me close. ‘They don’t see what they see, they see what they think they see.’ He let go of me and gave a crooked grin. ‘He says things like that, your brother, but I know what he means. When you act, they think they see a woman! Maybe you can’t play a young girl any more, but as a woman in her prime, you’re good!’

  ‘I’ve a man’s voice,’ I said sullenly.

  ‘Aye, and you shave, and you have a cock, but when you speak small they love it!’

  ‘But for how long?’ I demanded. ‘In a month or so you’ll say I’m only good for men’s parts, and you’ve plenty of men players.’

  ‘You want to play the hero?’ he sneered.

  I said nothing to that. His son Richard, who I had seen crossing swords with Henry Condell, always played the hero in our plays, and there was a temptation to think that he was only given the best parts because his father owned the playhouse’s lease, just as it was tempting to believe he had been made one of the company’s Sharers because of his father, but in truth he was good. People loved him. They walked across Finsbury Fields to watch Richard Burbage win the girl, destroy the villains, and put the world to rights. Richard was only three or four years older than I, which meant I had no chance of winning a girl or of dazzling an audience with my swordplay. And some of the apprentices, the boys who were capering onstage right now, were growing taller and could soon play the parts I played, and that would save the playhouse money because apprentices were paid in pennies. At least I got a couple of shillings a week, but for how long?

  The sun was glinting off the puddles among the yard’s cobblestones. Elizabeth Carey and her grandmother, holding their skirts up, crossed to the stage, and the boys there stopped dancing, took off their caps, and bowed, all except Simon, who offered an elaborate curtsey instead. Lady Anne spoke to them, and they laughed, then she turned, and, with her granddaughter beside her, headed for the Theatre’s entrance. Elizabeth was talking animatedly. I saw that the hair had been plucked from her forehead, raising her hairline by a fashionable inch or more. ‘Fairies,’ I heard her say, ‘I do adore fairies!’

  James Burbage and I, anticipating that the ladies would walk within a few paces of the gallery where we talked, had taken off our caps, which meant my long hair fell about my face. I brushed it back. ‘We shall have to ask our chaplain to exorcise the house,’ Elizabeth Carey went on happily, ‘in case the fairies stay!’

  ‘Better a flock of fairies than the
rats in Blackfriars,’ Lady Anne said shortly, then caught sight of me and stopped. ‘You were good last night,’ she said abruptly.

  ‘My lady,’ I said, bowing.

  ‘I like a good death.’

  ‘It was thrilling,’ Elizabeth Carey added. Her face, already merry, brightened. ‘When you died,’ she said, letting go of her skirts and clasping her hands in front of her breasts, ‘I didn’t expect that, and I was so …’ she hesitated, not finding the word she wanted for a heartbeat, ‘mortified.’

  ‘Thank you, my lady,’ I said dutifully.

  ‘And now it’s so strange seeing you in a doublet!’ she exclaimed.

  ‘To the carriage, my dear,’ her grandmother interrupted.

  ‘You must play the Queen of the Fairies,’ Elizabeth Carey ordered me with mock severity.

  The young maid’s eyes widened. She was staring at me, and I stared back. She had grey eyes. I thought I saw a hint of a smile again, a suspicion of mischief in her face. Was she mocking me because I would play a woman? Then, realising that I might offend Elizabeth Carey by ignoring her, I bowed a second time. ‘Your ladyship,’ I said, for lack of anything else to say.

  ‘Come, Elizabeth,’ Lady Anne ordered. ‘And you, Silvia,’ she added sharply to the grey-eyed maid, who was still looking at me.

  Silvia! I thought it the most beautiful name I had ever heard.

  James Burbage was laughing. When the women and their guards had left, he pulled his cap onto his cropped grey hair. ‘Mortified,’ he said. ‘Mortified! The mort has wit.’

  ‘We’re doing a play about fairies?’ I asked in disgust.

  ‘Fairies and fools,’ he said, ‘and it’s not fully finished yet.’ He paused, scratching his short beard. ‘But mayhap you’re right, Richard.’

  ‘Right?’

  ‘Mayhap it’s time we gave you men’s parts. You’re tall! That doesn’t signify for parts like Uashti, because she’s a queen. But tall is better for men’s parts.’ He frowned towards the stage. ‘Simon’s not really tall enough, is he? Scarcely comes up to a dwarf’s arsehole. And your voice will deepen more as you add years, and you do act well.’ He climbed the gallery to the outer corridor. ‘You act well, so if we give you a man’s part in the wedding play, will you stay through the winter?’