I stopped, frozen. There was a rumble of laughter from the audience, and a few blurry drunken shouts, and if I’d been reacting as myself, or perhaps if I’d been in my own world and time, I would have been thrown, and spoiled the scene. But I was altogether in Will Shakespeare’s time and dream, I was his Puck, and so I reacted as his Puck.
I paused, listening, and cocked my head first to one side and then to the other, as if to say: Did I hear something?
The girl called again, urgently—I could see her out of the corner of my eye, a round-faced pretty girl staring up at me, completely caught up in the play—“No, Puck, prithee—he is the wrong man!”
I listened puzzled again to the air, head cocked, and there was a ripple of laughter, different laughter this time, and then I shook my head firmly—No, of course, I didn’t hear anything, I’m dreaming it.—and I squeezed the juice on Lysander’s eyes. They really laughed then, a laugh made out of affection for the girl and amusement at me, and they applauded when I ran off.
Nick Tooley, white-painted and robed as Helena, ran onstage past me, to waken Lysander and further screw things up. And Will Shakespeare, who had been watching from the tiring-house door, caught me by the arm as I whirled past him—and then let go hastily, for fear of smudging Burbage’s paint. He was smiling. He said, “Th’art a true actor, sprite.”
I grinned at him, half out of breath. “Thank you.”
He looked me in the eye for one more moment, and it was bright but it was serious. “Promise me never to stop.”
“I promise,” I said. “I promise.”
And I never shall stop.
Then the mechanicals were milling around us, peering at the “plot” for their cue, hissing at the book-keeper to check their lines, and it was time for the scene where they are rehearsing their terrible little play in the wood, and Puck scares them all to death by changing the head on Bottom’s shoulders to the head of an ass.
“Bless thee, Bottom, bless thee—thou art translated!”
Quince says that—big laugh line—before he rushes away after the others.
Master Burbage had a terrific ass’s head. The oldest tireman, Luke, was a real whiz at special effects; put him in the twentieth century with computers to play with and he’d have made a lot of money in Hollywood. The head’s eyes rolled wildly, on command, and the ears went up and down and sideways. The groundlings loved it. They cheered and shrieked like little children.
The theater was full of shouts and laughter, the play was dancing along. By the time I reached Puck’s speech telling Oberon what has happened to Titania, I was high with delight and excitement. There we were, the two of us, at the heart of this happy gathering of three thousand people, at the heart of this fantastical play: together in the center of the stage, Will Shakespeare and me.
“My mistress with a monster is in love—”
Puck is on a high too, in that scene, really full of himself—until Demetrius comes on, pursuing Hermia, and Oberon says, “Stand close, this is the same Athenian.”
Puck stops still. Uh-oh. He may be in trouble. “This is the woman, but not this the man. . . .”
And when Oberon finds out the mistake—
“What hast thou done?” Master Shakespeare thundered at me, and for a moment it was terrifying to be attacked by that magnificent unearthly presence. But I remembered something he had said to me in rehearsal: “Puck is all mischief,” he had said. “He loves jokes, and causing trouble—he has no heart. Don’t let him feel, like you or me.”
So I let the thunder bounce off me, and was wary of Oberon, but not frightened. I was learning things at the back of my head, then, that I had no idea I was learning. Puck danced about, Puck didn’t give a darn about real human emotions.
“Lord, what fools these mortals be!”
Puck and Oberon, Oberon and Puck: together we watched and encouraged the lovers’ jangling confusions, and Queen Titania’s embarrassing love for an ass-headed clod, and then together, pulling the audience with us, we sorted everything out. It was wonderful, playing those scenes in such a theater, like telling a long involved family joke: all around us were friendly faces, intent, enjoying, shouting comments. Yes, they cracked nuts too, and popped bottles of ale open, and chomped on apples, but they came right along with us, all the way to the fairies’ dance—Will Shakespeare stepping stately and elegant with Thomas—? when Titania and Oberon come together again.
And that was our exit until the end of the play, and we had to slip out through one of the tiring-house exits to make way for the imposing entrance of Duke Theseus and Hippolyta—which, though I didn’t know it at the time, was the biggest gamble Burbage and Shakespeare had ever taken in their lives.
I saw them in the tiring-house, Theseus and Hippolyta, poised to go on, and the sight stopped me where I stood. Will Shakespeare was already motionless, watching, as John Heminges, who was Duke Theseus, swept toward the stage in a splendid purple velvet robe and held out his arm to Sam, the husky-voiced senior apprentice who was playing Hippolyta.
It was Sam who was the astounding sight. He wore a gleaming, wide-skirted dress of white satin, embroidered with hundreds of little pearls, and a great winglike embroidered collar rose like a halo behind his head. Above his white-painted, red-lipped face was an elaborate wig of bright red curls; he was the exact image of a portrait of Queen Elizabeth I that I’d seen reproduced on a poster at the new Globe Theatre in my own time.
And that, I realized, was exactly what Burbage and Shakespeare intended him to be. There was even the gold circlet of a crown amongst the red curls.
Shakespeare said softly, “Gloriana.”
I could see Sam’s hand shaking as he opened his fan. He straightened his back, and with his head proud and high, he swept out into the theater on Heminges’s arm. The audience gave a gasp, and voices whispered to and fro, sibilant, muttering. “The Queen . . . She’s like the Queen. . .”
Shakespeare was standing very still, listening.
And then they broke into cheers. Spontaneously, all of them, all at once. Perhaps it began as applause for the costume, for the audacity of the portrait, but it swelled at once into an impulsive upsurge of emotion. Those in the galleries, who had been sitting down, jumped to their feet, applauding; the groundlings shouted, “God Save the Queen!” and threw up their hats. They were all cheering their Queen with as much enthusiasm as if she’d been there in person to hear them.
And she was, of course, though none of them knew that. I looked at the curtain masking the Gentlemen’s Room, and half expected to see it flung aside by a jeweled royal hand, but there wasn’t a flicker of movement.
Instead, out on the stage, Sam in his queenly costume swept down in a deep curtsy to the entire theater, his hand still resting on Theseus’s arm. And then their scene began, Gloriana—the Queen—became Hippolyta, and the audience quieted down.
Beside me, Will Shakespeare let out a long, low sigh of relief.
The book-keeper said softly, “Was tha feared? Really?”
“I feared the serpent’s tongue. If they had hissed her, Burbage and I would be headed for the Tower. Headed and headless, like as not.”
“They love her,” said the book-keeper simply.
“They loved Essex, the other night.”
“But this goes deeper.”
The lovers came sailing past us and onto the stage, in their proper couples now.
Thomas was close by us, his eyes dark pools in the white Titania makeup. He said to Shakespeare, “You knew they’d not hiss her. You always know what they will do, always.”
“I throw the dice, Tom,” Will Shakespeare said. “I throw the dice.”
And pretty soon after that, Bottom and his fellow mechanicals were on, to perform their play before the court. It’s the funniest and best part of A Midsummer Night’s. Dream, that play—“the most lamentable comedy, and most cruel death, of Pyramus and Thisbe”—and we were all unashamedly crowded near the exit doors, peeking through to watch it. Master Burbage stu
mped and stamped about as Bottom/Pyramus, with ridiculous stiff gestures and roaring declamation.
“O grim-look’d night! O night with hue so black!
O night, which ever art when day is not!
O night, O night, alack alack alack—”
Shakespeare gave a little soft snort of laughter. “Ned Alleyn to the life,” he said.
Guiltily, Thomas giggled. I whispered to him, “Ned who?”
Thomas blinked at me. “Edward Alleyn, of the Admiral’s Men. Where do you live, Nat? Master Burbage’s great rival, until he retired—old Fustian Tamburlaine Alleyn.”
“Oh yes, of course,” I said hastily—and then luckily the theater exploded into laughter at Robert Armin’s entrance in his crudely female costume as Thisbe.
The play-within-the-play rollicked its way through to the staggering, throat-clutching death of the principals. Then there was a comical little clod-hopping dance called a bergomask, danced by two of the actors while another two played—badly—the tabor and drums; then, offstage, a stage-keeper tolled the strokes of midnight on a bell. Theseus broke up the evening, and I heard him speak my cue:
“Sweet friends, to bed.
A fortnight hold we this solemnity
In nightly revels and new jollity.”
And off they went and onto the empty stage I stepped, on tiptoe, in my glimmering green tights and my leafy-patterned body, with a broom in my hands, sweeping. I looked out at the audience.
“Now the hungry lion roars.
And the wolf behowls the moon. . .”
I could see the faces, all around me, intent now. They’d had done with laughing, they were caught in the last lingering magic of Shakespeare’s dream. And so was I. The musicians up in the stage gallery played soft haunting music, a thin white mist crept over the stage from the two entrances, and it all affected me as much as it did the audience. I forgot the frantic stage-keepers who would be puffing away with their bellows at the smoke buckets in the tiring-house. I spoke my speech to the audience, not a cheery speech, telling them this was night now, when out in the dark world, graves gaped open and spirits roved free—and I felt suddenly that a lot of the upturned faces below me in the yard, mouths half open, staring, really believed me. I half believed myself. But here, I told them—
“not a mouse
Shall disturb this hallow’d house.
I am sent with broom before
To sweep the dust behind the door.”
I turned, to shift their attention to Oberon and Titania moving slowly in with their band of small ethereal fairies, all now with rings of little lighted candles around their heads, to keep watch over the house while its humans slept.
At the back of the stage, Harry and Alex moved unobtrusively in, dressed in white, with three younger boys brought in for the sake of their voices. And I joined them as the whole magical group obeyed Oberon’s instruction to dance and sing “and bless this place.” I couldn’t tell you now the tune or words of the song we sang, but it was slow and soft, rather like a lullaby I’d know it if I heard it again, though I never have.
When we had woven our way about the stage, and the song was done, a single recorder played softly on in the background under Will Shakespeare’s last speech. He stood right in the center of the stage, holding a silver bowl of water, and each fairy came past him and dipped a hand ceremonially into the water as he spoke.
“With this field-dew consecrate
Every fairy take his gait
And each several chamber bless
Through this palace with sweet peace;
And the owner of it blest
Ever shall in safety rest.”
Very subtly, as he said those last two lines, he glanced up at the curtained Gentlemen’s Room, so that although nobody else would know he was giving his words to the Queen as a blessing, the Queen herself would know. I was so caught in admiration of the simple directness of it that I almost forgot the next two lines were his last, and my cue.
“Trip away; make no stay;
Meet me all by break of day.”
One by one they tiptoed gracefully away, dividing to go through the two doors. And there I was, left alone on the stage, holding a single candle that at the last moment I had picked like a flower from the headdress of the final departing fairy. Now it was just Puck and the audience, Puck speaking out to each of the three thousand faces all around him, and to the one great creature made out of those three thousand; Puck speaking in the voice of his author.
As Will Shakespeare had told me to do, I said my lines so firmly and clearly that I was almost shouting. I held up my candle, facing the audience on my left, and moved gradually around as I spoke, so that just for a moment every one of them would feel I was looking at him, or her.
“If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended.
That you have but slumber’d here
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding than a dream,
Gentles, do not reprehend:
If you pardon, we will mend.
And, as I am an honest Puck,
If we have unearned luck
Now to ’scape the serpent’s tongue,
We will make amends ere long;
Else the Puck a liar call.”
They were dead quiet, listening. With a quick breath, I blew out my candle, and stretched my arms wide to the whole audience.
“So, good night unto you all.
Give me your hands, if we befriends,
And Robin shall restore amends.”
For a second I stayed there motionless, until they started to clap and shout, and then I dropped the dead candle and threw myself into one big beautiful cartwheel upstage center, as the company all came running out of the side doors and downstage, to take their bows. Most plays ended with a final dance, but we’d already done ours.
Will Shakespeare reached out as he passed and grabbed my hand, holding it hard, pulling me with him, and we bowed together amongst the rest as the audience cheered and clapped. And that moment above all is what makes me say I shall never have a day like that again.
The musicians struck up cheerful music from the stage gallery, and the audience was still applauding as we all ran out offstage, laughing, thumping each other on the back. There seemed to be no thought of separate star calls, perhaps because there is no one star part in this play. In the tiring-house Master Burbage held up a hand, stood there a moment amongst us, listening, to gauge how long the noise might go on—then grinned and shouted, “Once more!” And back we went, to hear them roar their enthusiasm again. And again.
That third time, when we came back, six large soldiers were standing grouped in the tiring-house, armed and armored and very awesome. With them was the young lord who had visited Will Shakespeare’s house two days before. He wore a black velvet doublet and a black silk cloak, and he had pearls in his ears.
He took Shakespeare’s arm. “Will—this must be very-fast. Her Majesty wishes to see you and Master Burbage. Now, before she leaves.” He glanced down at me, and pointed his finger. “And the boy too.”
FIFTEEN
There was no time to be nervous. Before you could blink, the soldiers were around us, and we were moving through the crowded tiring-house and out to the nearest stairway leading up to the Gentlemen’s Room. More soldiers stood at every corner, out there; all the corridors and staircases of that part of the theater were cut off. We were an odd sight amongst all the armored breastplates, Richard Burbage in Bottom’s ribboned workman’s clothes, and Will Shakespeare and I in our glimmer and glitter and fantasy paint.
“Make way!” called the soldier in front of us. “Make way!”
The nameless lord in his black velvet was close beside us as we hurried along. I heard him say close to Burbage’s ear, “A master stroke, the Gloriana costume—a master stroke, my dear. Whose inspired idea might that have been?”
Burbage
said blandly, “Few things in the theater are one man’s idea, my lord.”
“As in politics—or at least one should make it seem so.” He gave a little snuffling chuckle. “Well, it was a lovely gamble, my dear, and your luck was in. It gave the lady great pleasure.”
And then we were there, in the entrance to the crowded little gallery, the air smelling more of perfume than of the garlicky, fusty body smell of the rest of the theater. It was lit by lanterns, because the curtains were still drawn across the front, keeping the gallery from the sight of the groundlings and other more prosperous folk still milling about in the yard below. Past the bending backs of my masters, as they bowed low, I saw the central seated figure, and could hardly take my eyes off her from that moment.
Queen Elizabeth I. She was an old lady. I had expected her to be tall and grand and beautiful, like Sam in his Gloriana costume, but she was not. Only the bright auburn curls of the wig were the same. Underneath it was a wrinkled white face that had lived a long time, with no eyebrows but thin, painted, curved lines, and bright, black eyes like beads, moving constantly, very alert. When she smiled at Burbage and Shakespeare—as she did at once, holding out her hand for them to kiss—she showed badly discolored teeth that would have given my dentist fits.
“Thank you for your Dream, gentlemen,” she said. “It is a favorite of mine, as you know.”
Will Shakespeare said, “Your Majesty is very kind.” The antennae on his Oberon head were quivering a little, and I longed to pull them off. They belonged on the stage, not here.
“A gentle play, a merry play,” said the Queen, who was sitting back unfazed by antennae, makeup or anything else. “Carrying no political historical baggage. You are a clever fellow, Will Shakespeare, but I have had my fill of the history of my forebears.”
Shakespeare said meekly, “The audiences do love a history, Your Majesty.”