A servant burst through the door from the scullery passage. ‘She’s coming,’ he hissed, ‘she’s coming!’
‘Oh Christ,’ George Bryan moaned. He sat on a tiring chest, rocking backwards and forwards, his hands clasped in apparent prayer.
‘Tom, Percy!’ my brother called. ‘Light the candles.’
Tom and Percy were both serving men of Lord Hunsdon’s household, but this day they would be our stage hands. They each lit a taper from the candles in the tiring room, and vanished through the curtained doors. There were fifty candles on each side of the stage; all of them big church candles, standing over three feet high, and all made of expensive beeswax so the Queen would not be assaulted by the stench of tallow. ‘Money,’ Lord Hunsdon had moaned when the big candles arrived, ‘it’s only money!’
‘I’ll tell the musicians she’s coming,’ I said, and without waiting for an answer I left by the back door, raced up the stairs and onto the gallery, only to hear the Queen’s trumpeters announcing her arrival before I had a chance to speak. The guests in the hall stood, the men bowed and the women curtseyed. Phil’s musicians stopped playing.
The Virgin Queen! Elizabeth came into the hall dressed in glowing white, the white of silk and satin, her red hair wreathed with a headpiece of bright silver in which rubies glinted. A stole of ermine was loosely draped on her shoulders, not hiding the whitened skin of her bosom against which diamonds gleamed. She walked slowly, head high, not acknowledging the respectful guests, but guided towards her canopied dais by her cousin, Lord Hunsdon. The front of her hair had been shaved to achieve the high, fashionable forehead, and her face was pasted white and smooth beneath the bright red loops and swirls of her thick curls. ‘Is that a wig?’ Phil murmured in my ear.
‘Of course it is,’ I whispered, ‘she’s old enough to be your grandmother.’
‘If she was my grandmother,’ he said, ‘I’d be the Prince of Wales.’
‘God help the Welsh,’ I said. The Queen’s ladies-in-waiting followed her, and behind those four women came the bride and the groom, both quite outshone by their monarch. The bride looked pretty, in pale yellow slashed with purple, while her husband was in dark blue. The families of the couple followed, all stopping and the men bowing as the Queen climbed the two carpeted steps to her solitary table. ‘Shouldn’t you be making a noise?’ I asked Phil.
‘Not till Grandma sits,’ he said.
The two serving men were still lighting candles, slowly brightening the stage with its painted hangings. The Queen sat, and Phil’s musicians began playing again, softly at first, as the guests resumed their chairs and the murmur of conversation began again. I stood in shadow, watching, trying to ignore the nervous beating of my heart every time I thought of going onstage. More wine was served, and silver plates heaped with delicacies were being carried to the tables. The families of the bride and groom took their seats, the bride gazing expectantly at the empty stage. Lord Hunsdon was bending over the Queen’s chair, listening, and I saw him straighten, turn, and nod towards Walter Harrison, who, in turn, spoke to Percy, the serving man who was lighting the candles on the left-hand side of the stage.
‘We’re beginning,’ I told Phil.
Percy finished the last few candles and disappeared under the gallery. Laughter sounded in the hall, the voices rising as the wine in the great silver jugs fell. I heard footsteps on the stairs, then the door opened and John Heminges came onto the gallery. ‘We can start now,’ he told Phil. Heminges, who had shed his great stiff cloth of gold cape, came and stood beside me to look down on the glittering, jewelled audience in the hall. ‘God help us,’ he said softly.
The music ended. There was silence in the gallery for a few seconds, then the drummer began a slow beat on his largest instrument, the sound reverberating through the hall, and after a dozen of the blows had largely silenced the audience, the trumpeter stood and blew a fanfare that faded to let Phil and the other musicians begin a sweet and melodic dance. And beneath us the boys of the household and the fairies of the company came onto the stage to dance. There were no words, just the boys dancing to the music, and Percy and Tom had come onto the gallery and now hauled on the ropes that lifted the painted screens to reveal the glittering forest behind.
It had been Alan Rust’s idea to begin the play with a voiceless dance, a dance to quieten the audience, a dance that would look like something from a masque, something that hinted of the magic to come. The dance did not last long, but it worked, because I could see the audience gazing in silence at the dancers, who were interrupted by a sudden crash as the drummer beat hard on his drum and the two painted screens fell back down to denote that we were now inside the palace. The falling screens made the closest candles shiver, but none went out. The barefooted dancers left through the left and right doors, and heavier footsteps sounded as the players came onto the stage from the big central door. George Bryan, who only a moment before had been quivering in terror, who had vomited in his nervousness, now strode with his head high and his voice full of confidence.
‘“Now,”’ he said, ‘“fair Hippolyta, our nuptial hour
‘Draws on apace; four happy days bring in
Another moon: but oh methinks, how slow
This old moon wanes …’
We had started.
George Bryan and Thomas Pope began the play. Pope was another Sharer, a quiet and unassuming man who often took older parts. He had purchased his share in the company on the death of his father, a Puritan wool merchant who had hated the playhouses. ‘Every time I walk onstage,’ Thomas liked to say, ‘he twists in his grave.’
He played Egeus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Egeus was Hermia’s father and begins the play by complaining about his daughter. He wishes her to marry Demetrius, but Hermia is in love with Lysander who, Egeus maintains, ‘“hath bewitched the bosom of my child.”’ He accuses Lysander of singing beneath his daughter’s window and of showering her with gifts; a bracelet fashioned from Lysander’s own hair and with ‘“rings, gawds, conceits, knacks, trifles, nosegays, sweetmeats!”’ So now Egeus demands justice. He appeals to the duke that either Hermia be forced to marry Demetrius, or else, according to the law of Athens that my brother had invented, she should be put to death for disobedience.
Our audience in the great hall gave a slight gasp when Thomas Pope uttered the word ‘death’. That was a good sign. They were listening. True, some listened only because they feared the Queen’s displeasure, but that audible gasp meant that many had already been drawn into the story being told onstage.
It would have been different in the Theatre. The groundlings there like to let us know their opinions, and doubtless would have shouted a protest at Egeus’s outrageous suggestion that his daughter should be executed for refusing to marry Demetrius. Playhouse audiences like to talk back to the stage or to argue with each other about what they watch, but that was much less likely in candlelit halls. There is an art to playing in the Theatre. We cannot pretend the spectators are not there, they are all around us, the closest of them sit on the stage itself, while others lean on it, put their ale bottles on it, and crack their nut shells on its boards, and so we often speak directly to them, wink at them, but always try to be ahead of them. ‘Keep it moving!’ Alan Rust growls before we enter. ‘Don’t give them space!’
Will Kemp loves to give them space because he sees a comment from the audience as a challenge, as a contest of wit that he is confident of winning. He will even stop a play to trade barbs with the groundlings, cheered on by the many who come just to enjoy his coarse sallies. My brother hates it when Kemp begins inventing lines, but there is little he can do because Kemp is too celebrated. But the rest of us are enjoined to keep speaking the lines quickly and naturally. ‘Don’t sound like a town crier,’ my brother snarls whenever a player slows in a rehearsal to stress the words heavily.
‘Don’t give them time to think,’ James Burbage tells us. ‘Lead them by the nose or they’ll start throwing things!’
>
I slipped out of the gallery and went back to the tiring room. The opening scene was going well enough, but the audience was becoming restless as Hermia and Lysander plotted to run away, and Helena, who was in love with Demetrius, vowed to betray their plot to him. It was a long scene, and from the tiring room I could hear coughing from the audience, always a sign that they are losing attention. I was listening closely to Alexander Cooke, playing Helena, and heard the lines that told me the scene was close to its ending.
‘Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind;
And therefore is wing’d Cupid painted blind …’
I moved to the right-hand entrance. Will Kemp was already there, and nodded to me. We were the mechanicals, the clodhopping craftsmen who would present a play to the duke and his bride. Five of us would enter onto the right of the stage, while only Peter Quince entered from the left. ‘Let’s wake the buggers up,’ Will Kemp growled softly to us. ‘Enjoy yourselves!’
I stood behind the entrance curtain and felt the fear. The fear of forgetting the words, of being overcome by blind panic. ‘If you’re not frightened,’ Richard Burbage once told me, ‘you’re not a player.’ I was frightened, wishing suddenly to be almost anywhere except in this hall with this daunting audience.
Helena finished her speech, vowing to regain Demetrius’s love. She left on the far side of the stage, and Will Kemp, sensing that the audience needed to be stirred, swept the entrance curtain aside and leaped onto the stage. Tom and Percy, up in the gallery, loosed new hangings to hide the painted pillars. The candles again flickered madly as the fresh hangings, both made of plain brown cloth, dropped into place. The plain brown suggested we were still indoors, but no longer in a palace. We appeared between the new hangings, shambling into the candlelight in our dull costumes. I could sense that Kemp wanted to shock the audience, to waken them and make them laugh, but it was my brother who altered the mood in the great hall.
He came onstage slowly and with a puzzled expression. He ignored us, instead he peered out into the hall and looked around, becoming ever more puzzled, and he left a pause so long that James Burbage, who was serving as our bookkeeper because Isaiah was still sick, whispered his opening line. My brother ignored the whisper. He still looked at the audience, still apparently bemused, and then his eyes widened as he gazed directly at the Queen, and at last spoke his first line, not to us, but to the hall, and spoke it in a tone of pure bewilderment. ‘“Is all our company here?”’
They laughed. It was not polite laughter, instead it was a great gust of enjoyment, almost of relief. Our audience, apprehensive that they were being forced to endure a two-hour ordeal, had realised they might enjoy it instead. We no longer needed the Queen’s presence to keep them attentive. We had captured them.
We came offstage exultant. The play might have started slowly, but the mechanicals had warmed the audience. We fed from their enjoyment, finding an energy that had never infused the rehearsals. I had shrieked in pretended horror on the line which had so angered me the first time I read it. ‘“Nay, faith, let me not play a woman!”’ I had not meant to shriek, it just came, and the audience laughed. They kept on laughing, so much that Will Kemp had to pause during his imitation of a lion roaring. Peter Quince had just given the lion’s role to Snug, and Nick Bottom wanted it instead. ‘“Let me play the lion too! I will roar!”’ And of course he did roar, bellowing crudely at the audience, who rewarded him with laughter, so Kemp naturally had to embellish the lines to add more roaring. My brother interrupted him to bring us back to the script, not that anyone noticed. They liked us, and as we left the stage, having promised to meet again to rehearse our play in the woods close to Athens, we were all grinning.
The music began and I snatched up a pair of shears. Tom and Percy had lit the candles, but they had to stay in the gallery, so two of us mechanicals took the right-hand side of the stage and two the left, where we trimmed the wicks, cutting off the excess to make a clearer, brighter flame. Guests chatted and drank wine until the drumbeat and trumpet flourish announced that the play was resuming. The two servants on the gallery hauled up the hangings, and the wood was revealed again, sparkling with green light. Alan Rust entered dressed all in green, even his face was green. Jean had spent days boiling woad and greenweed to find a green dye that would mix with the ceruse, and she had added haughty eyebrows in black. Puck, looking ludicrous, entered with stately pomp and the audience applauded. ‘“How now, spirit! Whither wander you?”’ he began, and the hall fell silent to listen to the play.
‘No!’ Bobby Gough suddenly wailed in the tiring room. I turned to see that one of the children had stood on his queenly train, Bobby had stepped away at the same moment, and now Titania’s gauzy white robe was torn from shoulder to hip.
‘Dear Lord above,’ Silvia hissed. ‘Come here!’
‘I have to go onstage!’ Bobby wailed.
‘You’ll go onstage when I tell you,’ she said. ‘Now don’t fidget. And you,’ she glared at her nephew, who, dressed as a fairy, stood waiting to follow Titania, ‘don’t pick your nose.’ She plucked an already-threaded needle from her apron. ‘Don’t move,’ she told Bobby, and I watched the needle flash down the long tear. Jean moved in to help, tacking the lower hem with more thread.
‘“But room, fairy!”’ boomed Puck, ‘“here comes Oberon!”’
‘“And here my mistress,”’ the fairy answered onstage.
Silvia snapped the cotton with her teeth and slapped Bobby’s bum. ‘Go, mistress!’ she said. ‘Go!’
There was another gasp of astonishment when Oberon and Titania, along with their fairy entourages, entered the stage. The players shimmered, they glowed, they were apparitions in silver and gold. Then they argued, and the audience paid them the greatest compliment of all, they were utterly silent. Not a creak of a chair, the clatter of a plate or a cup, not a cough, nothing. The stage was filled with magical creatures who glittered in the candlelight. The fairy king and fairy queen faced each other, they argued over the Indian child, until Titania, played with a sudden new confidence by Bobby, refused her king’s demand and swept haughtily from the stage, and Oberon, simmering with anger, summoned Puck. ‘“Thou rememberest,”’ he said to Puck,
‘Since once I sat upon a promontory,
And heard a mermaid on a dolphin’s back
Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath
That the rude sea grew civil at her song
And certain stars shot madly from their spheres,
To hear the sea-maid’s music.’
And I wished Father Laurence could have heard John Heminges say those words, because they flowed like the sea-maid’s music itself, like a melody with a soft beat, and still the audience was silent, entranced by the poetry. Even in the tiring room we were silent and unmoving as the magic on the stage wrapped about us.
‘“I remember.”’ Puck said, and then Oberon orders Puck to find the purple flower that would yield the sorcerous juice which, dripped onto a sleeper’s eyelids, would cause the sleeper to fall in love with the very next creature that he or she saw. Oberon’s revenge on the stubborn Titania would be to squeeze the flower’s juice onto her eyelids, and he knew exactly where to find her.
‘I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows.’
And on that bank, where he knew she would be sleeping, Oberon would anoint her eyelids and,
‘The next thing then she waking looks upon,
Be it on lion, bear, or wolf, or bull
On meddling monkey, or on busy ape,
She shall pursue it with the soul of love.’
Oberon thus plots his revenge, but is interrupted by the arrival of Demetrius and Helena from Athens. ‘“I am invisible!”’ Oberon tells the audience, and, astonishingly, no one in the hall mocked the claim, no one seemed to think it unlikely, instead they remained silent, watching Oberon as he, invisible to Demetrius and Helena, listens to the two lovers squabbli
ng.
‘It’s going well!’ Bobby Gough, his face glinting with the powdered pearls, whispered to me. He sounded surprised.
I hugged him. ‘You’re doing well,’ I told him. He was too. Of all the players, we had been most worried by Bobby, fearing he was too young for such an important part, but in his first scene he had invested Titania with a sly authority. He knew he could not rival Thomas Pope’s Oberon for stature or dignity, and so he had found an insinuating, seductive manner. The men in the audience, watching him, forgot he was a boy. He was a goddess, Queen of the Fairies, slim, beautiful, desirable, and sly.
‘“I love thee not!”’ Demetrius snarled at Helena, and she appealed to him, reminding him that he did once love her, but Demetrius is in love with Hermia, and so he stalks from the wood, spurning Helena.
Invisible Oberon, who has been still and silent through the quarrel, now stirs and swears he will punish Demetrius for his callous behaviour. He will use the juice of the magic flower to force Demetrius to love Helena, and so he orders Puck to find the callow man. ‘“Thou shalt know the man,” he tells Puck, ‘“by the Athenian garments he has on.”’ And Puck, having found Demetrius, will use the flower’s magical juice, ‘“Fear not, my lord, your servant shall do so.”’
Puck and Oberon left the stage, and Phil, above us, started a slow lyrical tune, all breathy flute and delicately plucked strings. The small children of the household ran onto the stage and began their dancing. Two of the company’s apprentices, also dressed as fairies, had to carry Titania’s bank, where the wild thyme blew onto the stage. It was a very low table with legs scarce five inches long on which were mounted sprigs of cloth-leaved hawthorn and sprays of white-petalled flowers. The boys almost tore the entrance curtain when it snagged on one of the table’s nails, but Alan Rust leaped forward and snatched the curtain back, and the two boys, who played the fairies Moth and Cobweb, managed to carry the table to the centre of the stage. There Titania would sleep, but first the boys all sang.