‘Dear God,’ my brother murmured to no one, ‘it’s working.’
Silvia had crept to the right-hand entrance and pulled the curtain back a couple of inches to stare at the dancing, singing boys. ‘It’s beautiful!’ she whispered. She turned, and I saw the candlelight reflected in her eyes. ‘It’s beautiful!’ she whispered again. I stood behind her, hands on her shoulders, and just watched as the dance slowly ended, fairy after fairy leaving the stage until finally Titania yielded to tiredness and sank onto the bed of violets and wild thyme. The music faded as she fell asleep, there was a heartbeat of silence, then Oberon appeared at the far side of the stage. He advanced slowly and silently towards his sleeping queen, and I swear we could have heard a mouse squeak in that great hall.
Then Oberon stood above his queen, and the audience gasped as he squeezed the flower over Titania’s eyes, then held their breath as she stirred. She moved, she moaned in her sleep, Oberon froze, but she did not wake. The hall was silent, quite silent. The fairy king smiled as he let the magical drops fall on her eyelids. ‘“Wake,”’ he commanded Titania, ‘“when some vile thing is near!”’
I moved the curtain very slightly and stared across the hall to where the firelight was brightest. The Queen was leaning forward, gazing, her bright red lips slightly parted, her eyes as wide and shining as if they had been anointed with belladonna.
And the confusion began.
Hermia is in love with Lysander.
Lysander is in love with Hermia.
Demetrius is in love with Hermia.
Helena is in love with Demetrius.
And no one is in love with Helena.
But Oberon is determined that Helena should gain her heart’s desire, and so he has ordered Puck to squeeze the magic juice on Demetrius’s eyes. Puck would recognise Demetrius by his Athenian garb, which, on that winter afternoon in Blackfriars, was doublet and hose of silver cloth over which Henry Condell wore a vaguely Roman toga. Richard Burbage, playing Lysander, wore a black doublet and black hose over which he wore another vaguely Roman toga. Puck, seeing a sleeping man wrapped in a toga, anointed his eyes with the flower, except he squeezed the juice onto Lysander instead of onto Demetrius. Lysander, who has gone to sleep close to his love Hermia, wakes to see Helena, who has just stumbled upon the sleeping lovers.
Now Lysander is in love with Helena.
Helena is in love with Demetrius.
Demetrius is in love with Hermia.
And Hermia is in love with Lysander.
And, as if that were not confusion enough, we mechanicals rehearse our play in the same moonlit wood where Titania is sleeping, and where, not far off, the four Athenian lovers also sleep. Puck has discovered our rehearsal, but, like his master Oberon, he can make himself invisible, so we do not see him. We rehearse, and Nick Bottom goes offstage into a hawthorn brake, which in our case was the tiring room, where Puck magically converts his head into an ass’s head. Will Kemp pulled on the wicker and rabbit-skin head and came back onto the stage.
The hall, which had been chuckling at the scene where we rehearsed Pyramus and Thisbe, roared with laughter when Will came back.
Those of us onstage fled in terror, leaving Nick Bottom, quite ignorant of his new and monstrous head, pacing up and down in front of the bower where Titania sleeps. Nick Bottom sings to himself.
And Titania awakes.
She sits up, she stretches, she yawns, she hears Nick Bottom singing, she sees him walking, and she freezes.
She stares. Her eyes widen. The audience, knowing what is coming, laughed in expectation. It was a nervous laugh, but in its sound you could sense the great burst of laughter that was waiting to happen. It was like a taut bowstring, held to the ear and quivering with its immense power, just waiting to be released.
Nick Bottom still sings. Then Titania, gazing entranced at the shambling peasant with an ass’s head, speaks.
‘“What angel wakes me from my flowery bed?”’
And the great hall exploded with laughter. The Queen, usually so careful of her dignity, was laughing as much as the rest. The bride had her hands clasped in front of her mouth, her eyes fixed on the stage, a look of sheer delight on her face.
Will Kemp was in heaven.
Once, a couple of years before we performed A Midsummer Night’s Dream and at a time when my brother was still speaking civilly to me, a half-dozen of us had gone to the Dolphin tavern after the first performance of Richard II. The play had gone well, and my brother was in a generous and expansive mood. Nell, the pretty redhead, had sat next to him, cradled in his arm. He had ordered us oysters and ale, but had said little except to the playgoers who came to our table and congratulated him. To them he was polite, but he did not encourage them to linger. He was happy.
The conversation was loud as players relived their moments on the stage. Augustine Phillips had played Richard, and was chuckling because he had almost forgotten some lines, ‘I was in a panic!’
‘It didn’t show,’ someone had said.
‘Which lines?’ my brother had asked.
‘“For now hath time made me his numbering clock,”’ Augustine had recited.
And my brother, usually so reticent, had been sparked by the line. Had we seen his lordship’s clock in Somerset House, he had asked, and none of us had. He had described it to us, a marvellous invention of dials and wheels, of cogs and chains, which drove a pointer around a dial painted with numbers to tell the time. To make the clock work, he had said, it was necessary to pull a weight upwards, and then the weight, released, slowly descended to drive the intricate mechanism behind the clock’s face. ‘A play is like that,’ he had said.
Will Kemp had laughed. ‘My arse it is, Will!’
‘Truly!’ my brother had said, his right hand stroking Nell’s hair.
‘And how, my demented poet,’ Will Kemp had demanded, ‘is a play like a clock?’
‘Because we spend the first part of a play pulling the weight upwards,’ my brother had said. ‘We set the scene, we make confusion, we tangle our characters’ lives, we suggest treason or establish enmity, and then we let the weight go, and the whole thing untangles. The pointer moves around the dial. And that, my friend, is the play. The smooth motion of the clock hand, the untangling.’
And Will Kemp, usually so scornful, had nodded and raised his pot of ale. ‘Here’s to untangling.’
And so, by the time we trimmed the candles’ wicks for the third and last time, we had untangled our play. There had been a spectacular fight between Hermia and Helena, a fight that kept our audience laughing, swords had been drawn, because folk liked to see swordplay onstage, but after the fighting and the fury the lovers’ confusion had been resolved, and by the time we snipped the wicks for the last time, Hermia was in love with Lysander, Lysander was in love with Hermia, Helena was in love with Demetrius, and Demetrius was in love with Helena. Hermia’s father, who had begun the play demanding his daughter’s death, was now reconciled to her marrying Lysander. Duke Theseus and Hippolita would marry, Hermia and Lysander would marry, and Helena and Demetrius would marry. Titania, released from her devotion to Nick Bottom, was reunited with Oberon. It was a wedding play. It was nonsense, happy nonsense, lovers soaked in moonbeams, froth, and we had reached the happy ending.
Except the play was not over. The weight had still not pulled the chain all the way down, the clock was still ticking, and the pointer still moving. The lovers’ confusion was untangled, but still there was more to come, and, just before Phil’s musicians played the music to entertain folk as the candles were trimmed, Nick Bottom, now reunited with the rest of the mechanicals, announced that they would go to the duke’s palace in hopes of presenting their play, Pyramus and Thisbe. ‘“And, most dear actors,”’ Nick Bottom pleaded with the rest of us, ‘“eat no onions nor garlic! For we are to utter sweet breath; and I do not doubt but to hear them say, it is a sweet comedy. No more words: away! Go away!”’
I took off my goose-turd green coat, step
ped out of my boots, breeches, and hose, then strapped on my false breasts that were linen bags stuffed with felt and stiffened with withies so that they jutted unnaturally. They were bigger, much bigger, than any I had worn before. Silvia laced them at my back, then I sat as she smeared madder on my lips. There would be no ceruse for Thisbe. We were tradesmen playing players, and must look grotesque, not beautiful. I would play Thisbe barefoot and bare-legged, though of course I had not shaved my legs any more than I had shaved my face, on which a day’s stubble showed dark. Silvia brought me my dress, a simple dress in straw-coloured linen tied at the waist with a pale blue sash. She giggled. ‘You’re a pretty girl, Richard Shakespeare.’
‘“Nay, faith,”’ I said, pulling the dress over my head, ‘“let me not play a woman.”’ I draped a bright red mantle around my shoulders like a shawl.
It was night outside. The dark comes early in February, and the high oriel window at the hall’s far end was black. The music was jaunty, befitting the play’s ending. In the hall, servants fed the fire, served wine, and trimmed the candles on the long tables. Folk laughed and talked, but fell instantly silent as the music ended, the drum beat and the trumpet sounded to announce that the play was continuing. Duke Theseus, with his bride and his courtiers, went onto the stage.
I sat, listening to the dialogue onstage, as Jean brought me the wig. We rarely used wigs at the Theatre, they were brutally expensive, delicate, and tended to fall apart too quickly, but this wig was a monstrosity. It was made from the tail hairs of a grey horse, dyed a bilious yellow, and then treated with wax so that the strands stuck out in unkempt spikes. Silvia laughed, the boys who were fairies giggled, everyone backstage grinned when Jean slid the wig over my hair. ‘How does it feel?’ she asked.
I nodded my head and tugged gently at a strand of yellow hair. ‘It feels firm,’ I said.
‘Ready?’ my brother called quietly.
‘Ready,’ I said. I took Silvia’s hand, kissed it, and moved to the big central entrance.
The play’s weddings were over, and now the newly married couples waited in the duke’s hall for their evening’s amusement. The painted hangings had dropped again, hiding the green magical wood, benches had been placed on the right of the stage, and there the three newly wedded couples sat and demanded entertainment. ‘“A play there is, my lord,”’ Philostrate, the duke’s Master of the Revels, said, ‘“some ten words long, Which is as brief as I have known a play: But by ten words, my lord, it is too long.”’
‘“What are they that do play it?”’ the duke asked.
‘“Hard-handed men that work in Athens here, Which never laboured in their minds till now.”’
‘“And we will hear it!”’ the duke said.
‘“No, my noble lord! It is not for you!”’
But dukes, like queens and lord chamberlains, get what they want, and so the mechanicals of Athens, hard-handed men, a weaver, a joiner, a bellows mender, a tailor, and a tinker, present their play. And if there had been laughter before, and there had been much laughter, it was as nothing to the laughter that greeted The Most Lamentable Comedy and Most Cruel Death of Pyramus and Thisbe.
It began with my brother’s stumbling, stuttering, agonising prologue. I watched the Queen through a crack in the curtain and saw her smile. How often had she gone to a town in her realm and listened to some nervous mayor greet her with a prepared speech, but the man was so nervous that his fine words became mangled and his sense quite lost? Peter Quince’s prologue was the same, a disastrous introduction to a ludicrous play. And when the prologue was done, we players were introduced, one by one.
Will Tawyer, the trumpeter from Phil’s musicians, went onstage first and blew a mighty fanfare. The audience waited, expecting the fanfare to bring on a new character, but no one appeared. There was nervous laughter from the hall as the audience suspected some player had missed his entrance, then Tawyer blew his trumpet a second time and Will Kemp stumbled onto the stage as if he had been violently pushed from behind. He was no longer Nick Bottom, but Pyramus, wearing an ill-fitting breastplate that hung down over his belly, a wooden sword stuck in his belt, and a battered helmet. He recovered his balance and struck an heroic pose, and the laughter broke against the stage like a wave.
A second fanfare introduced Thisbe. I minced on, all shy and modest, glancing coyly at the audience and immediately looking away, hands clasped high to hide my pretty face, my breasts wobbling, all provoking shrieks of laughter from the hall.
My brother had to pause in his speech to let the noise subside. Will Kemp, of course, kept the laughter going by preening, but I doubt my brother minded, then at last another fanfare brought Richard Cowley onto the stage. He was Tom Snout, the tinker, but in Pyramus and Thisbe he was playing the wall, and was dressed in a vast swathing robe that Jean had painted with masonry. He spread his hands wide, looked dumb, and there, hanging from his outstretched arms, was a wall, and I heard a woman almost choking with laughter. She was gasping for breath, squawking between each gasp, and every squawk only made the rest of the audience laugh the more.
Peter Quince brought a measure of calm by bringing John Sinklo onstage. He played Moonshine, because the mechanicals were worried there would not be enough light to illuminate Pyramus and Thisbe and so supplied their own moon. John, wearing a night-dark robe onto which Silvia had sewn silver crescent moons, carried a small thornbush, a lantern, and had Caesar, Lady Hunsdon’s small yapping dog, on a rope leash.
And last came John Duke, playing the lion. He was swathed in a robe made from rabbit pelts, while on his head was a floppy mask, also of rabbit skin, from which great teeth protruded. He wore gloves that had claws attached. He made a feeble threatening gesture with the wooden claws, which prompted Caesar to bark furiously, and the duke, fearful of dogs, leaped sideways.
We were indeed ludicrous, and our play, of course, was equally ludicrous. I wondered if my brother was remembering Dido and Acerbas from so long ago. In that interlude, his very first work, he had tried to make an audience cry with grief as Dido burned herself to death, and instead had made them weep with laughter. Now he made an audience weep again, but this time with merriment and joy. The story of A Midsummer Night’s Dream was over, the lovers had found each other and had married, and all we did now was to celebrate their love and happiness by telling them a tale of thwarted love and miserable death.
Pyramus and Thisbe must meet secretly because their two families are enemies and so disapprove of their love. The story comes from the Latin poet Ovid, we had been taught it at school, and in Ovid’s telling it is a tragedy. The doomed lovers meet at the wall, using a crack in the masonry to talk with each other. Richard Cowley played the wall, spreading his arms so that his stone-painted robe made a barrier through which Pyramus ripped a hole with his wooden sword. He sees Thisbe through the newly made chink. Will Kemp was bending over, his vast rump sticking out to the audience’s delight. ‘“I can hear my Thisbe’s face!”’ he cried, ‘“Thisbe!”’
‘“My love thou art!”’ I called desperately, ‘“My love I think!” I bent to the wall.
‘“O kiss me through the hole of this vile wall!”’ Pyramus pleaded.
I puckered my lips and jammed them into the thickly-painted cloth, while Will did the same from the other side. We gave the kiss a few heartbeats, letting the audience laugh, then I recoiled, pretending to spit out lime. ‘“I kiss the wall’s hole,”’ I wailed in grief, ‘“not your lips at all!”’
‘“Wilt thou at Ninny’s tomb meet me straightway?”’ Pyramus asked.
‘“’Tide life, ’tide death. I come without delay!”’ I said, and with that I ran from the stage, using small tripping steps, while Will exited on the far side.
The story is well enough known. How Thisbe encounters a lion on her way to Ninus’s tomb, but escapes the dread beast at the expense of her mantle that she lets fall to the ground, and how Pyramus, finding the mantle, which has been stained with blood by the lion, thinks his belo
ved is dead and so kills himself. This was Will Kemp’s favourite scene, a death he could exaggerate, and he stabbed himself, or rather slid the wooden sword repeatedly beneath his armpit, he staggered about the stage, he recovered, he staggered again, and finally collapsed at the front of the stage and gave the audience a look of utter despair. ‘“Now die!”’ he called, still stabbing himself, ‘“die, die, die …”’ and then he stopped.
A look of panic came to his face. This was not Pyramus, this was a frightened player who had forgotten his lines. He froze, the wooden blade poised, and the embarrassing silence stretched, then my brother, pretending that Peter Quince was the play’s bookkeeper, hissed the forgotten word, ‘“Die!”’
‘“Die!”’ Will shouted.
There is nothing like the laughter of an audience who love what they hear and love what they see. Some in the hall were helpless with laughter. The Queen watched us avidly, while the bride, I think, was tearful with joy. We were celebrating her wedding.
I died next, slaughtering myself above the body of Pyramus and tugging a scarf of red silk from my bosom to denote blood. My wig fell off, which only added to the mirth as I fumbled it back on. I died. And then the other mechanicals dragged our corpses from the stage, and the fairies returned and danced to the sound of sweet music, and Oberon called down blessings on the house. The audience, all smiling, calmed, and Puck bade our farewell to them in the play’s final speech. ‘“Give me your hands!”’ he called, encouraging them to clap, and they clapped.
We lined up onstage as a company. We basked in their pleasure. We had taken Her Majesty and her courtiers from wintry London and transported them to a magical wood in Athens. They clapped, they stood, they cheered, we bowed.