I had rarely been happier. We bowed again. We were a company.
It had been a sweet comedy.
EPILOGUE
I DIED JUST after the bells of Saint Leonard’s rang the third hour of the afternoon.
We were back in the Theatre. It was a fine spring day, the sky clear with just a scattering of clouds, the yard was crammed with people, and the galleries were full. From the stage all you really saw were faces, two thousand of them. And all gazing at us as our story unfolded. This was only the second time we had told the tale, yet word had already gone around the city that it was a story worth hearing, and so folk had streamed across Finsbury Fields, too many folk, and some had to be turned away with the promise that we would play the piece next day and the day after that. Others wanted to know when we would perform A Midsummer Night’s Dream again, a play that also filled the Theatre time and again.
I was dressed in black hose, black boots, black breeches, and the doublet made from the softest Spanish black leather, slashed with strips of dark blue velvet, that I had saved from Fish-Breath’s knife in the winter that was past. My white shirt was frilled with French lace, I wore a falling band instead of a ruff, and my short hair was covered with a fine blue hat sporting the two black feathers I had taken from deValle and which I now tried to wear whenever I went onstage. The feathers were my talismans, my magical protection against the devils of the playhouse who would make you forget your lines. My beard was short, trimmed neatly. I was Mercutio, Romeo’s closest friend.
It was, as my brother had promised, a proper part, even a wonderful part. Richard Burbage played Romeo, and, in the rehearsals, he and I had drawn closer. He had even taken me to the Dolphin and bought me ale, told me tales of his father, and then, unexpectedly, talked of my brother. ‘There’s none like him,’ he had said.
‘None like you,’ I had retorted, and that was true. Of all our players, Richard was the most skilful, his only rival being Ned Alleyn who played with the Admiral’s Men at the Rose.
‘Aye, but we would be nothing without the words,’ Burbage told me, ‘nothing at all. Folk come to hear a play, and if the words aren’t there, nor will they be.’
The words! I had begun to listen more carefully to my brother’s words, and, albeit grudgingly, was beginning to understand their magic.
‘“I dreamed a dream tonight,”’ Romeo said to me.
‘“And so did I.”’
‘“Well, what was yours?”’
‘“That dreamers often lie.”’
‘“In bed asleep, while they do dream things true.”’
Romeo and Juliet, those star-crossed lovers, were moving fatally towards their end at which, like Pyramus and Thisbe, each would die because of a misunderstanding. And, just like Pyramus and Thisbe, they came from warring families. Romeo, by falling in love with the thirteen-year-old Juliet, was loving an enemy, and Juliet, in loving Romeo, was defying her family. They both must die, but Mercutio dies first.
I die in a brawl. I used a rapier, fighting against Tybalt, who was played by Henry Condell. Tybalt tries to pick a fight with Romeo for no other reason than Romeo is a Montague and Tybalt is a supporter of the Capulet family. Romeo will not fight because he loves a Capulet, but Mercutio, goaded by Tybalt’s challenge, draws.
Henry Condell was no mean swordsman, and our fight, even with the longer rapier blades, was spectacular. We moved from one side of the stage to the other, the blades flickering like snake tongues, clashing, sliding, disengaging. We had rehearsed each move, yet even so I found Condell fast as a viper. The audience gasped at the fight. They love sword fights. Many in the playhouse were swordsmen, they knew what they watched, and we had to make it seem real. The fight finished as I drove Henry back, feinting and lunging, beating off his counters, moving faster than he did, until Romeo, knowing that duelling in the streets is forbidden, tried to end the fight by standing in front of me and so barring my attacks. And then Henry, Tybalt, lunges under Romeo’s outstretched arm and pierces me in the chest.
The bell of Saint Leonard’s struck the third hour of the afternoon.
‘“I am hurt!”’ I cry, “a plague o’ both your houses.”’ I stagger, left hand clutching my wound, squeezing the pig’s bladder to ooze sheep’s blood. The playhouse was silent, the loudest noise my shoes scraping on the boards of the stage.
‘“Courage, man!”’ Romeo said to me, “the hurt cannot be much!”
‘“No, ’tis not so deep as a well,”’ I say, still clutching the wound, ‘“nor so wide as a church door; but ’tis enough, ’twill serve! Ask for me tomorrow and you shall find me a grave man. I am peppered, I warrant, for this world. A plague o’ both your houses! ’Zounds, a dog, a rat, a mouse, a cat, to scratch a man to death! A braggart, a rogue, a villain that fights by the book of arithmetic! Why the devil came you between us? I was hurt under your arm.”’
And so I die slowly, and, because it is always difficult to remove a corpse from a sunlit stage, I stumble away to die elsewhere. ‘“Help me into some house, Benvolio,”’ I pleaded to my brother, ‘“Or I shall faint. A plague o’ both your houses! They have made worms’ meat of me.”’
And so, my arm about my brother’s shoulders and with his arm about my waist, I staggered back to the tiring room, where my wife waits. Silvia now works at the playhouse and we live in the rooms that once belonged to Father Laurence, who is worms’ meat himself, though he gave us his blessing before he died on an April evening.
I have not seen Christopher deValle from that day to this. Rumour has it that he has gone to his master’s house in Berkshire where he is a steward, while his master, the Earl of Lechlade, who lurked behind our tale all winter, is banished from the court.
George Price, Piggy, has gone from London to God knows where, and his nephews with him. The Pursuivants still ride, but they come nowhere near us.
Francis Langley has found plays, and the Swan an audience. I saw him and my brother walking arm in arm on Bankside, deep in conversation. Peace has broken out between them.
Sir Godfrey, being the parish priest in Blackfriars, was forced to read the marriage banns for Silvia and I, but we were married by the Reverend Venables in his lordship’s chapel. The reverend took me aside afterwards and told me I was not much spoiled by having a beard. Sir Godfrey still supplies dogs and the bear Washington to the Curtain, and, sometimes, to the Swan playhouse, but rumour says he will soon retire from London and start a school for boys in some West Country cathedral town.
Simon Willoughby, the right-hand side of his face scarred deep and his blinded right eye milky white, was last seen begging for alms by Saint Paul’s Cross. He claims to have been a soldier wounded by a Spaniard in the Low Country, and plays the part well.
Her Majesty has demanded that we take Romeo and Juliet to her palace at Richmond. We shall do that soon. We are high in Lord Hunsdon’s favour, and even higher in the affections of his wife.
My brother lives with a woman named Anne. She is sociable, pretty, full of laughter, and married to another man. He and I are reconciled, perhaps because he likes Silvia. He kept his promise and gave me the part of Mercutio, and after our first performance he embraced me. ‘Well played, brother,’ was all he said.
Now he helped me off the Theatre’s stage. ‘Look at the mess!’ Silvia said, brushing at the sheep’s blood staining the white of the doublet. ‘It won’t wash out!’
I silenced her with a kiss.
We are the Lord Chamberlain’s players. We tell stories. We make the magical appear onstage. We turn dreams into truth. We are actors.
HISTORICAL NOTE
SOMETHING QUITE extraordinary happened in the last years of the sixteenth century; the professional theatre was born. There had been plays and players before, of course, but those companies had no permanent home. They toured England and Europe, playing in great houses, inn yards, and parish halls, but in the 1570s the first permanent playhouses were built in London. James Burbage, who had begun his career as a carpent
er, then became a player, built one of the first in Shoreditch, close beside the Finsbury Fields. By 1595, when the novel is set, the Curtain lay nearby, while across the river on Bankside, the Rose was attracting audiences, and the Swan was being built. In time there would be many more, most famously the Globe, which was not to be built until 1599.
Burbage named his new playhouse the Theatre, a word he plucked from classical Greece and a name that now encompasses a vast and exhilarating profession worldwide. Yet, in 1574, when Burbage leased the land and built the playhouse, he was taking a considerable financial risk. Not all playhouses thrived. The Red Lion had failed, and the Curtain would fall on hard times, but the Theatre and the Rose both proved profitable. They also changed the nature of the professional companies. Previously, when groups of actors toured Britain, they could present the same play in the different towns they visited, secure in the knowledge that an audience in Warwick would not be the same as the audience that had seen the play two or three nights before in Kenilworth. Thus they could survive on a repertoire of very few plays, but once the playhouse was permanent then they were performing for the same audience week after week, and that audience wanted something new, and so the professional playwright was born. We know, from Philip Henslowe’s diary, that the Rose presented around thirty different plays a year, and the Theatre must have felt the same pressure to perform new and fresh material. London, in 1595, had a population of around 200,000, making it by far the largest city in Britain, and a city needed a large population to provide permanent audiences for the permanent playhouses. And those playhouses were large. The Rose and the Theatre each accommodated around 2,000 people, while the new Swan would play to an audience of 3,000. Those figures are comparable with the largest theatres in modern-day London or New York! So, on any given day, a significant proportion of Londoners went to the playhouse, and those audiences constantly demanded new material. Much of it was undoubtedly dross, but those same early years saw the emergence of an astonishingly talented group of writers, among them Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd, and William Shakespeare. It is not fanciful to suggest that none of those playwrights would have achieved fame, and few if any of their plays would have been written, let alone survived, if the desperate hunger for new plays had not been dictated by the unrelenting demands of the permanent playhouses. Bricks and mortar, or more accurately, timber and plaster, were the necessary catalysts to give birth to one of the glories of civilisation; Shakespeare’s plays.
Yet the acting companies, despite their success, were vulnerable. They were hated by the emerging Puritans, and, famously, by the Puritan-ruled City of London, which was why all the playhouses were built outside the city’s boundaries. The new playhouses were popular, attracting enthusiastic audiences, which only exacerbated the Puritan attempts to close them down. What saved the profession was the patronage of Queen Elizabeth and the nobility. The most rancid Puritan was helpless in the face of the Queen’s approval of plays and players. When James VI of Scotland became King of England in 1603 that royal support became even more explicit, and the Lord Chamberlain’s Men became the King’s Men. The world owes a debt of gratitude to England’s monarchy and aristocracy because, without them, the nascent theatre might have been throttled at birth, and we would have no Shakespeare.
The boy theatres existed, and, by a quirk of the law, were allowed to perform inside the City of London. One such school was in Blackfriars, though it was not active in 1595. The boys performed adult plays, and, because they performed indoors, were not constrained by weather. In 1596 James Burbage, alive to the advantages of an indoors playhouse, was to purchase a hall in Blackfriars, which, after many legal wrangles, became a playing space for the company. That hall, or perhaps the great halls of the Inns of Court where many of Shakespeare’s plays were first performed, is the true ancestor of most modern theatres. The Globe is justly famous, though it should be remembered that many of Shakespeare’s finest plays had their first performances in the Theatre, but Blackfriars, a ‘hall theatre’, changed the profession. In an open-air playhouse, like the Globe, actors shared the same natural light as the audience, and, because the stage was thrust forward into the yard, they had spectators all around them. They had to play to the whole audience, almost half of whom were behind them when they faced outwards at the front of the stage. It was like a modern play presented ‘in the round’, but a hall theatre placed the whole audience in front of the stage, as is the case with most theatres today. The audience was also protected from the weather, which was good for profits, and, within the limits of candlelight, could sit in relative darkness, while the players were lit. There could be no ‘fourth wall’ in an open-air playhouse, and there is plenty of evidence that the audience had few inhibitions about talking back to the players. Behaviour in a hall theatre was more decorous. Hall theatres could seat fewer people, but the price of admission was higher, much to the displeasure of London’s apprentices.
The play in which Richard acts the part of Queen Uashti was Hester and Ahasuerus by an unknown playwright (quite definitely not the Most Reverend William Venables, who is fictitious), which was performed by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in the 1590s. The lines quoted are not from the play, the text of which is now lost, but either from a civil pageant celebrating Hester, which was performed for Queen Elizabeth in the City of Norwich, or else from a play of 1561, The Virtuous and Godly Queen Hester, which is also by an unknown author.
We do possess the text of Fair Em, the Miller’s Daughter, the full title of which is A Pleasant Comedie of Faire Em, the Miller’s Daughter of Manchester. With the Love of William the Conqueror. No author’s name is given in the two editions that survive from the sixteenth century. There have been suggestions that the play was an early work by William Shakespeare, but that seems most unlikely. Nor is there any evidence that the Lord Chamberlain’s company performed the play, but that was certainly a possibility.
Scholarly consensus suggests that Romeo and Juliet was written after A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The two plays were certainly written very close together, sometime in the mid-1590s, and I suspect that the Pyramus and Thisbe interlude in the Dream, which ends with the grotesque suicide of the two lovers, was Shakespeare’s sly burlesque on his own Romeo and Juliet. The version of the opening sonnet of Romeo and Juliet, the famous ‘Two households’ speech, which Richard quotes in Chapter Nine, is not a mistake, but rather the version printed in the First Quarto of 1597, and which, I suspect, was the version first heard on the stage before Shakespeare revised the speech into its more familiar form.
The jig Jeremiah and the Cow is entirely fictional, but all plays were followed by a jig, which was, in effect, a bawdy playlet tacked on to the main feature. We have the scripts of a few of those jigs, which consist of a simple story, usually about sex, some extemporary jokes, and dancing by the company. The jigs were not staged after a royal command performance, but whether the actors lined up and took a bow as I suggest in Chapter One is not certain. That company bow is certainly recorded after the Restoration of 1660, when jigs fell out of fashion, but it does not seem unreasonable to speculate that it might have derived from the more formal presentation of plays in aristocratic mansions and royal palaces. The poem that I have Will Kemp reciting after the performance of Fair Em, the Miller’s Daughter is ‘Lye Alone’, found in the Reliques of Ancient English Poetry collected in the eighteenth century by Bishop Thomas Percy. We are also indebted to the good bishop for the text of ‘Panche’, which is the ‘farting song’ Will Kemp failed to complete. Kemp was famous as a comic actor, more famous, probably, than Shakespeare to a London audience. Nick Bottom was a marvellous part for Kemp, and perhaps he embellished the role with extemporary dialogue, a practice Shakespeare deplored, ‘and let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them,’ he writes in Hamlet’s speech to the players. The clowns that added their own dialogue are ‘villainous’, Shakespeare wrote, and show a ‘pitiful ambition’, and I suspect he had memories of
Will Kemp in mind when he expressed that condemnation. Will Kemp is identified in the Quarto text of Romeo and Juliet as the actor who played the serving man Peter, a very small role for such a prominent player, but Kemp would doubtless have dominated the jig following the tragedy. Kemp left the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in 1599.
The book A Conference About the Next Succession to the Crowne of Ingland was published in 1594, and did, indeed, infuriate Elizabeth I. The pseudonym R. Doleman almost certainly conceals Robert Persons (sometimes Parsons) who was a Jesuit priest and a leader of the mission to convert England back to Roman Catholicism. He was a clever, subtle man, and his book was banned in England. The ageing Queen detested any discussion of the succession. She had no direct heir, of course, and while most people in the 1590s would have assumed that the Protestant James VI of Scotland would succeed her (he was a great-grandson of Henry VII and did, indeed, succeed to Elizabeth’s throne), the Queen obstinately refused to name him or anyone else. The moment she did name an heir, of course, power would begin to flow away from her as courtiers sought the approval and patronage of the next monarch.
The spellings in the cast list (Hippolita, Lisander, etc.), which differ from today’s accepted spellings, are how the names appear in both the Quarto and Folio editions. I have used the more modern versions except where the novel quotes a document that might have been contemporary with William Shakespeare, or, as he once spelled his own name, Shakspere. We have six surviving signatures of William Shakespeare, each is spelled differently from the others, and not one of them is spelled Shakespeare!
The idea that Shakespeare wrote an interlude called Dido and Acerbas is entirely fanciful, yet the notion that Shakespeare had been a schoolmaster before settling in London is not entirely without foundation. John Aubrey, the seventeenth-century antiquarian and gossip, who is usually reckoned to be as unreliable as he is amusing, wrote in his book Brief Lives that Shakespeare ‘had been in his younger years a schoolmaster in the country’, and notes in the manuscript’s margin that he had that information from ‘Mr Beeston’. Mr Beeston was William Beeston, a somewhat disreputable actor and theatre owner, and the son of Christopher Beeston who had been an actor with Shakespeare in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. The period between 1585 and 1592 is often termed ‘the lost years’, because we have no records of Shakespeare’s activity in that period, but Aubrey’s citation of Mr Beeston offers the tantalising prospect that perhaps the recollection was accurate.