The tale had always seemed most unlikely to me. Egeon, the merchant, had been at sea with his wife, his twin sons, and twin boy servants, when the ship had hit a rock and they had all been thrown into the stormy waves, and the wife, one son, and one servant had drifted one way, while Egeon, with the other son and servant, had drifted the other. It took Pallant forever to tell the story. I closed my eyes, and a moment later a voice said, ‘Open your mouth.’
‘Hello, Alice,’ I said, without opening my eyes.
‘Nut for you,’ she said. I opened my mouth, and she put a hazelnut on my tongue. ‘Are you a girl again?’ she asked.
‘I’m a woman. An abbess.’
She tucked her arm through mine and nestled into me. ‘Can’t see you as an abbess,’ she said. It was chilly, but at least it was not raining. ‘But you do look lovely as a girl,’ she went on.
‘Thank you,’ I said, as ungratefully as I could.
‘You should come and work with us.’
‘I’d like that,’ I said, ‘but what happens when some bastard lifts my skirts?’
‘Just roll over, of course,’ she said.
‘Your hands will be tied behind your back,’ Rust shouted at poor Pallant, ‘so don’t gesture!’
‘Does he find his wife again?’ Alice asked me.
‘I’m his wife,’ I said, ‘and yes. He finds me at the end of the play.’
‘But you’re an abbess! How could an abbess be married? They were nuns, weren’t they?’
‘It’s a long story,’ I said.
‘But he does find her?’
‘He does,’ I said, ‘and his long lost son too.’
‘Oh good! I was worried.’
She was sixteen, perhaps fifteen or maybe seventeen, a slight girl from Huntingdonshire, with very fair hair, a narrow face, squirrel eyes, and a weak chin, but somehow the parts added up to a delicate beauty. She could play an elf, I thought, or a fairy, except the surest way to rouse the fury of the Puritans was to put a girl on the stage. They already accused us of being the devil’s playthings, purveyors of evil and the spawn of Satan, and if we did not have the protection of the Queen and of the nobility, we would have been whipped out of town on hurdles long ago.
‘It’s so sad,’ Alice said.
‘What’s sad?’
‘That he was shipwrecked and lost his wife.’
‘It’s poxy stupid,’ I said. ‘If they’d all drifted, they’d have drifted in the same direction.’
‘But it didn’t happen that way,’ she protested. ‘Poor old man.’
‘Why don’t you go home?’ I asked her.
‘To the Dolphin?’
‘No, to Huntingdon.’
‘And milk cows? Churn butter?’ she sounded wistful. ‘I was shipwrecked. So were you.’
‘By my bastard brother,’ I said vengefully.
‘By my bastard lover,’ she echoed. She had been seduced by a charming rogue, a man who wandered the country selling buttons and combs and needles, and he had enticed her with a vision of a happily married life in London, and the silly girl had believed every word only to find herself sold to the Dolphin, in which she was half fortunate because it was a kindly house run by Mother Harwood, who had taken a liking to the waif-like Alice. I liked her too.
Hoofbeats sounded in the outer yard, but I gave them no thought. I knew we were expecting a cartload of timber to make repairs to the forestage, and I assumed the wood had arrived. I closed my eyes again, trying to remember my second line, then Alice uttered a small squeal. ‘Oooh, I don’t like them!’ she said and I opened my eyes.
The Percies had come.
There were five Pursuivants. They strutted through the entrance tunnel, all dressed in black, with the Queen’s badge on their black sleeves, and all with swords sheathed in black scabbards. Two stayed in the yard, while three vaulted up onto the stage and walked towards the tiring room. ‘What the hell are you doing?’ Alan Rust demanded.
They ignored him, going instead into the tiring room. The two remaining Percies stood in the yard’s centre, and Rust turned on them. ‘What are you doing?’
‘The Queen’s business,’ one snarled.
They turned to look around the Theatre, and I saw the two men were twins. I remember thinking how strange it was that we were rehearsing a play about two sets of twins and here was the real thing. And there was something about the pair that made me dislike them from the first. They were young, perhaps a year or two older than me, and they were cocky. They were not tall, yet everything about them seemed too big; big rumps, big noses, big chins, with bushy black hair bulging under their black velvet caps, and brawny muscles plump under their black hose and sleeves. They looked to me like bulbous graceless bullies, each armed with a sword and a sneer. Alice shuddered. ‘They look horrible,’ she said. ‘Like bullocks! Can you imagine them …’
‘I’d rather not,’ I said.
‘Me too,’ Alice said fervently, and made the sign of the cross.
‘For Christ’s sake,’ I hissed at her, ‘don’t do that! Not in front of Percies.’
‘I keep forgetting. At home, see, we had to do it.’
‘Then stop doing it here!’
‘They’re horrible,’ Alice whispered, as the twins turned back to stare at the girls from the Dolphin. They sauntered towards us. ‘Show us your tits, ladies,’ one said, grinning.
‘They’re not ladies, brother,’ the other said, ‘they’re meat.’
‘Show us your tits, meat!’
‘I’m leaving,’ Alice muttered.
The girls fled through the back, and the two young men laughed. The players, all but my brother and Will Kemp, had retreated to the edges of the stage, unsure what to do. Kemp stood at the stage’s centre, while my brother had followed the Percies into the tiring room. The twins strolled towards the stage and saw Simon Willoughby in his long skirt. ‘He’s a pretty boy, brother.’
‘Isn’t he?’
‘Are you a player?’ one of them demanded of Simon.
‘Show us your duckies, pretty boy,’ the other one said, and they both laughed.
‘Give us a treat, boy!’
‘What,’ Will Kemp demanded belligerently, ‘are you doing here?’
‘Our duty,’ one of the twins answered.
‘The Queen’s duty,’ the other one said.
‘This playhouse,’ Rust said grandly, ‘lies under the protection of the Lord Chamberlain.’
‘Oh, I’m terrified,’ one of the twins said.
‘God help me,’ the other said, then looked at Simon, ‘come on, boy, show us your bubbies!’
‘Leave!’ Kemp bellowed from the stage.
‘He’s so frightening!’ One of the twins pretended to be scared by hunching his shoulders and shivering. ‘You want to make us leave?’ he demanded.
‘Oh, I will!’ Alan said.
One of the twins drew his sword. ‘Then try,’ he sneered.
Alan Rust snapped his fingers, and one of the men who had been guarding the prisoner Egeon understood what the snap meant and tossed Rust a sword. Rust, who was standing close to the bulbous twins, pointed the blade at their smirking faces. ‘This,’ he snarled, ‘is a playhouse. It is not a farmyard. If you wish to spew your dung, do it elsewhere. Go to your unmannered homes and tell your mother she is a whore for birthing you.’
‘God damn you,’ the twin with the drawn sword said, but then, just before any fight could begin, the right-hand door opened and two of the three Percies who had evidently searched the tiring room came back onto the stage. One was carrying clothes heaped in his arms, while the second had a bag, which he flourished towards the twins. ‘Baubles!’ he said. ‘Baubles and beads! Romish rubbish.’
‘They are costumes,’ Will Kemp snarled, ‘costumes and properties.’
‘And this?’ the Pursuivant took a chalice from the bag.
‘Or this?’ His companion held up a white rochet, heavily trimmed with lace.
‘A costume, you fool!’ Kem
p protested.
‘Everything you need to say a Romish mass,’ the Pursuivant said.
‘Show me the nightgown!’ the twin whose sword was still scabbarded demanded, and the Percy tossed down the rochet. ‘Oh pretty,’ the twin said. ‘Is this what papists wear to vomit their filth?’
‘Give it back,’ Alan Rust demanded, slightly raising his borrowed sword.
‘Are you threatening me?’ the twin with the drawn blade asked.
‘Yes,’ Rust said.
‘Maybe we should arrest him,’ the twin said, and lunged his blade at Alan.
And that was a mistake.
It was a mistake because one of the first skills any actor learns is how to use a sword. The audience love combats. They see enough fights, God knows, in the streets, but those fights are almost always between enraged oafs who hack and slash until, usually within seconds, one of them has a broken pate or a pierced belly and is flat on his back. What the groundlings admire is a man who can fight skilfully, and some of our loudest applause happens when Richard Burbage and Henry Condell are clashing blades. The audience gasp at their grace, at the speed of their blades, and even though they know the fight is not real, they know the skill is very real. My brother had insisted I take fencing lessons, which I did, because if I had any hope of assuming a man’s part in a play I needed to be able to fight. Alan Rust had learned long before, he had been an attraction with Lord Pembroke’s men, and though what he had learned was how to pretend a fight, he could only do that because he really could fight, and the twins were about to receive a lesson.
Because by the time the second twin had pulled his blade from its scabbard, Alan Rust had already disarmed the first, twisting his sword elegantly around the first clumsy thrust and wrenching his blade wide and fast to rip the young man’s weapon away. He brought the sword back, parried the second twin’s cut, lunged into that twin’s belly to drive him backwards, and then cut left again so that the tip of the sword threatened the first twin’s face. ‘Drop the rochet, you vile turd,’ Rust said, speaking to one twin while threatening the other, and using the voice he might have employed to play a tyrant king; a voice that seemed to emerge from the bowels of the earth, ‘unless you want your brother to lose an eye?’
‘Arrest him!’ one of the twins called to the Pursuivants. His voice was pitched too high, too desperate.
Just then the last of the Pursuivants came from the tiring room, his arms piled with papers. They were our play scripts that had been locked in the big chest on the upper floor. ‘We have what we want,’ he called to his companions, then frowned when he saw the discomfited twins. ‘What …’ he began.
‘You have nothing,’ my brother interrupted him. He looked angrier than I had ever seen him, yet he kept his voice calm.
For a heartbeat or two no one moved. Then Richard Burbage and Henry Condell both drew their swords, the blades scraping on the throats of their scabbards. ‘Not the scripts,’ Burbage said.
‘Not anything,’ Rust said, his sword’s tip quivering an inch from the twin’s eyeball.
‘We are here on the Queen’s business …’ the Pursuivant carrying our scripts began, but again was interrupted by my brother.
‘There has been a misunderstanding,’ my brother said. ‘If you have business here,’ he spoke quietly and reasonably, ‘then you must make enquiries of the Lord Chamberlain, whose men we are.’
‘And we are the Queen’s men,’ the tallest of the Pursuivants on the stage insisted.
‘And the Lord Chamberlain,’ my brother still spoke gently, ‘is Her Majesty’s cousin. I am sure he would want to consult her. You will give me those,’ he held out his hands for the precious pile of scripts. ‘A misunderstanding,’ he said again.
‘A misunderstanding,’ the Pursuivant said, and meekly allowed my brother to take the papers. The tall man dropped the costumes. He had seen the ease with which Alan Rust had disarmed one man, and he gave a wary glance at Richard Burbage, whose sword was lifted, ready to lunge. I doubted it was the swords that had persuaded him to stand down, despite Rust’s display of skill. I suspected it was the mention of Lord Hunsdon, the Lord Chamberlain, which had convinced him. ‘We’re leaving,’ he called to his fellows.
‘But …’ one of the twins began a protest.
‘We’re leaving!’
They took nothing with them, instead, trying to hold onto their damaged dignity, they stalked from the Theatre, and I heard the hoofbeats as they rode away.
‘What in the name of God …’ Richard Burbage began, then shook his head. ‘Why would they dare come here? Don’t they know Lord Hunsdon is our patron?’
‘Lord Hunsdon can’t protect us from heresy,’ my brother said.
‘There’s no heresy here!’ Will Kemp said angrily.
‘It’s the city,’ my brother sounded weary. ‘They can’t close us because we’re outside their jurisdiction, but they can hint to the Pursuivants that we’re a den of corruption.’
‘I should bloody well hope we are,’ Will Kemp growled.
‘They’ll be back,’ Alan Rust said, ‘unless Lord Hunsdon can stop them.’
‘He won’t like it,’ my brother said, ‘but I’ll write to his lordship.’
‘Do it now!’ Will Kemp said angrily.
My brother bridled at the aggressive tone, then nodded. ‘Indeed now, and someone must deliver the letter.’
I hoped he would ask me because that would give me a chance to visit the Lord Chamberlain’s mansion in Blackfriars, and it was there that the grey-eyed girl with the impish smile was employed. Silvia, I said the name to myself, Silvia. Then I said it aloud, ‘Silvia.’
But my brother asked John Duke to carry the message instead.
And I went back to Ephesus to play Emilia.
THREE
IT WAS TWO weeks later that Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon, the Lord Chamberlain and our patron, came to the Theatre himself. He did not come to watch a performance, indeed he had never seen a play in the Theatre, but instead arrived unexpectedly during a morning rehearsal. The first we knew of it was when four of his retainers, all wearing dark grey livery with the Carey badge of the white rose bright on their shoulders, strode into the yard. They wore swords, they came confidently, and those of us onstage went very still. The four men were followed by an older man, limping slightly, with a harsh, life-battered face, and a cropped grey beard. He was stocky, with a broad chest, and wore simple clothes, undecorated, but dyed a deep black, betraying their expense. He had a gold chain about his neck and a golden badge on his black velvet cap. If it had not been for the gold and the expensively dyed clothes, a man might have mistaken him for a tradesman, one who had spent his working life wrestling with timber or stone, a hard, strong man, and certainly not a man to cross lightly. ‘Master Shakespeare,’ he addressed my brother, ‘I received your message.’
‘My lord,’ my brother snatched off his hat and went down onto one knee. We all did the same. No one needed to tell us who the hard-faced older man was. The badge on his retainers’ shoulders told us all we needed to know. A fifth retainer, a slim man also in the dark grey livery that displayed the Carey badge, had followed the older man and now stood respectfully a few paces behind his lordship with a satchel in his hands.
‘No need to kneel, no need to kneel,’ Lord Hunsdon said. ‘I have business in Hampstead, and thought I might as well look at the place you fellows lurk.’ He turned to stare at the Theatre’s high galleries. ‘It reminds me of an inn yard.’
‘Very like, my lord,’ my brother agreed.
‘So this is a playhouse, eh?’ His lordship looked around with evident interest, gazing from the galleries to the stage’s high canopy supported by its twin pillars. ‘You think they’ll last?’
‘Last, my lord?’
‘There were no such things when I was a young man. Not one! Now there’s what? Three of them? Four?’
‘I think they’ll last, my lord. They’re popular.’
‘But not with the Puritans,
eh? They’d have us all singing psalms instead of watching plays. Like those bloody Percies.’
My brother stiffened at the mention of the Pursuivants. ‘We managed to avoid blooding them, my lord.’
‘A pity,’ Lord Hunsdon said with a grin. Simon Willoughby, wearing a skirt over his hose, had fetched a chair from the tiring house and jumped off the stage to offer it, but the courtesy only provoked a scowl from Lord Hunsdon. ‘I’m not a bloody cripple, boy.’ He looked back to my brother. ‘There’s a disgusting man called Price. George Price. He’s the chief Pursuivant, and a pig in human form. Heard of him?’
‘I have heard of him, my lord, yes. But I don’t know him.’ My brother was doing all the talking for the company. Even Will Kemp, who was usually so voluble, was stunned into silence by the Lord Chamberlain’s arrival.
‘He’s an eager little bugger, our Piggy Price,’ Lord Hunsdon said. ‘He’s a Puritan, of course, which makes him tiresome. I don’t mind the bloody man finding Jesuits, but I’ll be damned if he’ll interfere with my retainers. Which you are.’
‘We have that honour, my lord.’
‘You’re unpaid retainers too, the best sort!’ Lord Hunsdon gave a bark of laughter. ‘I told the bloody man to leave you alone.’
‘I’m grateful to your lordship.’
‘Which he might or might not do. They’re an insolent pack of curs, the Percies. I suppose insolence goes with the office, eh?’
‘It frequently does, my lord,’ my brother said.
‘And the Queen likes her Pursuivants,’ the Lord Chamberlain continued. ‘She doesn’t want some bloody Jesuit slitting her throat, which is understandable, and Piggy Price is damned good at sniffing the buggers out. He’s valued by Her Majesty. I told him to leave you alone, but the moment he smells sedition he’ll let loose the dogs, and if they succeed in finding it then even I can’t protect you.’
‘Sedition, my lord?’ my brother sounded puzzled.
‘You heard me, Master Shakespeare. Sedition.’
‘We’re players, my lord, not plotters.’
‘He claimed you’re harbouring copies of A Conference.’ The accusation was hard and sharp, spoken in a quite different tone to his lordship’s previous remarks. ‘He has been informed, reliably he tells me, that you distribute copies of the damned book to your audiences.’