Fools and Mortals

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.’

‘We do what, my lord?’ my brother asked in amazement.

We are players. We pretend, and by pretending, we persuade. If a man were to ask me whether I had stolen his purse I would give him a look of such shocked innocence that even before I offered a reply he would know the answer, and all the while his purse would be concealed in my doublet.

Yet at that moment we had no need to pretend. I doubt many of us knew what his lordship meant by ‘A Conference’, and so most of us just looked puzzled or worried. My brother plainly knew, but he also looked puzzled, even disbelieving. If we had been pretending at that moment then it would have been the most convincing performance ever given at the Theatre, more than sufficient to persuade the Lord Chamberlain that we were innocent of whatever sin he had levelled at us. My brother, frowning, shook his head. ‘My lord,’ he bowed low, ‘we do no such thing!’

James Burbage must have known what ‘A Conference’ was because he also bowed, and then, as he straightened, spread his hands. ‘Search the playhouse, my lord.’

‘Ha!’ Lord Hunsdon treated that invitation with the derision it deserved. ‘You’ll have hidden the copies by now. You take me for a fool?’

My brother spoke earnestly. ‘We do not possess a copy, my lord, nor have we ever possessed one.’

His lordship smiled suddenly. ‘Master Shakespeare, I don’t give the quills off a duck’s arse if you do have one. Just hide the damned thing well. Have you read it?’

My brother hesitated, then nodded. ‘Yes, my lord.’

‘So have I. But if Piggy Price’s men do find a copy here, you’ll all end up in the Marshalsea. All of you! My cousin,’ he meant the Queen, ‘will tolerate much, but she cannot abide that book.’

The Marshalsea is a prison south of the Thames, not far from the Rose playhouse, which is home to the Lord Admiral’s men with whom our company have a friendly rivalry. ‘My lord,’ my brother still spoke slowly and carefully, ‘we have never harboured a copy.’

‘I can’t see why you should.’ Lord Hunsdon was suddenly cheerful again. ‘It’s none of your damned business, is it? Fairies and lovers are your business, eh?’

‘Indeed they are, my lord.’

Lord Hunsdon clicked his fingers, and the thin retainer unbuckled his satchel and took out a sheaf of papers. ‘I like it,’ Lord Hunsdon said, though not entirely convincingly.

‘Thank you, my lord,’ my brother responded cautiously.

‘I didn’t read it all,’ his lordship said, taking the papers from the thin man, ‘but I liked what I read. Especially that business at the end. Pyramid and Thimble. Very good!’

‘Thank you,’ my brother said faintly.

‘But my wife read it. She says it’s a marvel. A marvel!’

My brother looked lost for words.

‘And it’s her ladyship’s opinion that counts,’ Lord Hunsdon went on. ‘I’d have preferred a few fights myself, maybe a stabbing or two, a slit throat perhaps? But I suppose blood and weddings don’t mix?’

‘They are ill-suited, my lord,’ my brother managed to say, taking the offered pages from his lordship.

‘But there is one thing. My wife noticed that it doesn’t have a title yet.’

‘I was thinking …’ my brother began, then hesitated.

‘Yes? Well?’

‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream, my lord.’

‘A midsummer night’s what?’ Lord Hunsdon asked, frowning. ‘But the bloody wedding will be in midwinter. In February!’

‘Precisely so, my lord.’

There was a pause, then Lord Hunsdon burst out laughing. ‘I like it! Upon my soul, I do. It’s all bloody nonsense, isn’t it?’

‘Nonsense, my lord?’ my brother enquired delicately.

‘Fairies! Pyramids and thimbles! That fellow turning into a donkey!’

‘Oh yes, all nonsense, my lord,’ my brother said. ‘Of course.’ He bowed again.

‘But the womenfolk like nonsense, so it’s fit for a wedding. Fit for a wedding! If that bloody man Price troubles you again without cause, let me know. I’ll happily strangle the bastard.’ His lordship waved genially, then turned and walked from the playhouse, followed by his retainers.

And my brother was laughing.

‘It is nonsense,’ my brother said. As ever, when he talked to me, he sounded distant. When I had run away from home and had first found him in London, he had greeted me with a bitter chill that had not changed over the years. ‘His lordship was right. What we do is nonsense,’ he said now.

‘Nonsense?’

‘We do not work, we play. We are players. We have a playhouse.’ He spoke to me as if I were a small child who had annoyed him with my question. It was the day after Lord Hunsdon’s visit to the Theatre, and my brother had sent me a message asking me to go to his lodgings, which were then in Wormwood Street, just inside the Bishopsgate. He was sitting at his table beneath the window, writing; his quill scratching swiftly across a piece of paper. ‘Other people,’ he went on, though he did not look at me, ‘other people work. They dig ditches, they saw wood, they lay stone, they plough fields. They hedge, they sew, they milk, they churn, they spin, they draw water, they work. Even Lord Hunsdon works. He was a soldier. Now he has heavy responsibilities to the Queen. Almost everyone works, brother, except us. We play.’ He slid one piece of paper aside and took a clean sheet from a pile beside his table. I tried to see what he was writing, but he hunched forward and hid it with his shoulder.

I waited for him to tell me why I had been summoned, but he went on writing, saying nothing. ‘So what’s a conference?’ I asked him.

‘A conference is commonly an occasion where people confer together.’

‘I mean the one Lord Hunsdon mentioned.’

He sighed in exasperation, then reached over and took the top volume from a small pile of books. The book had no cover, it was just pages sewn together. ‘That,’ he said, holding it towards me, ‘is A Conference.’

I carried the book to the second window, where the light would allow me to read. The book’s title was A Conference About the Next Succession to the Crowne of Ingland, and the date was printed as MDXCIIII. ‘It’s new,’ I said.

‘Recent,’ he corrected me pedantically.

‘Published by R. Doleman,’ I read aloud.

‘Of whom no one has heard,’ my brother said, writing again, ‘but he is undoubtedly a Roman Catholic.’

‘So it’s seditious?’

‘It suggests,’ he paused to dip the quill into his inkpot, drained the nib on the pot’s rim, then started writing again, ‘it suggests that we, the people of England, have the right to choose our own monarch, and that we should choose Princess Isabella of Spain, who, naturally, would insist that England again becomes a Roman Catholic country.’

‘We should choose a monarch?’ I asked, astonished at the thought.

‘The writer is provocative,’ he said, ‘and the Queen is enraged. She has not named any successor, and all talk of the succession turns her into a shrieking fury. That book is banned. Give it back.’

I dutifully gave it back. ‘And you’d go to jail if they found the book?’

‘By “they”,’ he said acidly, ‘I assume you mean the Pursuivants. Yes. That would please you, wouldn’t it?’

‘No.’

‘I am touched, brother,’ he said acidly, ‘touched.’

‘Why would someone lie and say we had copies of the book at the Theatre?’ I asked.

He turned and gave me a look of exasperation, as if my question was stupid. ‘We have enemies,’ he said, looking back to the page he was writing. ‘The Puritans preach against us, the city council would like to close the playhouse, and our own landlord hates us.’

‘He hates us?’

‘Gyles Allen has seen the light. He has become a Puritan. He now regrets leasing the land for use as a playhouse and wishes to evict us. He cannot, because the law is on our side for once. But either he, or one of our other enemies, informed against us.’

‘But it wasn’t true!’

‘Of course the accusation wasn’t true. Truth does not matter in matters of faith, only belief. We are being harassed.’

I thought he would say more, but he went back to his writing. A red kite sailed past the window and settled on the ridge of a nearby tiled roof. I watched the bird, but it did not move. My brother’s quill scratched. ‘What are you writing?’ I asked.

‘A letter.’

‘So the new play is finished?’ I asked.

‘You heard as much from Lord Hunsdon.’ Scratch scratch.

‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream?’

‘Your memory works. Good.’

‘In which I’ll play a man?’ I asked suspiciously.

His answer was to sigh again, then look through a heap of paper to find one sheet, which he wordlessly passed to me. Then he started writing again.

The page was a list of parts and players. Peter Quince was written at the top, and next to it was my brother’s name. The rest looked like this: