Death of Kings (10 page)

But on the margins of this happy tale are some discontented and unhappy folk. There is no maker of melancholy like a wedding, your funeral is nothing to it. The steward Malvolio, like Narcissus,
loves only his own self and image. Feste the clown (played by Robert Armin), though he sings of love, seems not to seek it for himself. There is a knight, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, who is a fool
whether he is in or out of love. And then there is poor Antonio, who has rescued Sebastian from the ocean billows and who now companions his new friend with a dogged, selfless devotion. He is
sloughed off at the end when Sebastian finds a more attractive prospect in the shape of the fair Olivia. Who should blame Sebastian? Who would feel for Antonio?

Well, Antonio was my part, and I was determined to make something of it and him, not in a noisy passionate way, but quietly and modestly, which I considered to be the fellow’s nature.

I had three or four scenes to play, first with Sebastian and afterwards with Viola-Cesario, whom I mistake for her twin brother. Then I am arrested as an enemy to the state of Illyria; and,
although all is made straight again at the end, the happy amity between Antonio and Sebastian will never come again, for it has served its turn.

In the gaps and the intervals and nothingnesses that fill up a large part of any rehearsal – and, since these intervals are so much longer than the action, it seems as if the play is an
interruption of one’s leisure rather than the other way about – in such pauses, I say, I fell to talking, or arguing, about friendship with my fellow-player Jack Horner, he who had the
role of Sebastian.

Jack was a Londoner born and bred yet had the air of the country about him, being fresh-faced and flaxen-haired and guileless, as it appeared to me. Four years or so older than I, Jack possessed
a wife who was his reverse or antipodes (closed, secretive, dark-haired).

“Why don’t you think that this friendship can be disinterested, Jack?” I said, referring not to ourselves but to the relationship between the two individuals that we played.
“Doesn’t Antonio save and befriend Sebastian with no end in view, no end at all?”

“It is not a friendship between equals,” said Jack. “And so it is no true friendship.”

“You mean, because your Sebastian is well-born and my Antonio wears a sea-cap and is no gentleman, perhaps. Your definition is too narrow.”

“I mean that, in this case, the advantage is all to Sebastian. He is the only gainer. Antonio saves his life, Antonio gives Sebastian money and so on, and he receives nothing in
return.”

“Then it is more like love, which seeks for no reward,” I said. “After all, [
speaking in my character
] ‘Come what may, I do adore thee so.’”

“Love is not friendship.”

“Though each may speak the language of the other?”

“Those are fine words no doubt, Nick, whatever they mean. All I know is that I have a wife . . .”

(This I knew. Her I knew.)

“Yes, and so?” I said.

“I am not friends with my wife, I think. Indeed, I am not sure that a man can be friends with a woman in the way that men may be with each other. Though I suppose I love her – love
her not always or constantly, but sometimes.”

(This I also knew.)

“Yes,” I said, growing a little uncomfortable where we sat on the benches by the side of the great chamber, watching the bustle of activity and waiting for our cues.

“Love flares up, like that fire over there, and like a fire it will die down, it must die down,” said Jack. “But if you come to friendship, oh that is a much more even-handed
and steady business. Look at us, Nick. We are friends because neither of us has anything to offer or to take from the other. There is no advantage, you see.”

“Let us ask young Martin Hancock for his opinion,” I said, very glad of the interruption when the lad playing Viola-Cesario came to sit down next to us. This would be Martin
Hancock’s last season playing women’s parts. He was growing too tall and his voice was near to cracking in the ring, as Master WS puts it. In appearance he owned very few touches of his
‘brother’ Sebastian, having dark locks and looks. They were easily received as twins, however, by the audience, who will accept whatever they’re told to accept, good-natured
credulous creatures that they are. In short, Jack and Martin appeared quite dissimilar, sharing only a certain openness in expression. Even this, however, proceeded from different sources, for
Jack’s was a frank innocence and Martin’s was the calculated freshness of one who plays the boy. For though he was but a boy in years – and though in
Twelfth Night
he
played the chaste heroine – he was quick and ribald in his own attire, as it were. At the moment this boy player was wearing male disguise in order that might penetrate (as he would most
likely express it) Orsino and his court. He settled himself quite close to me on the bench.

“Well, Martin,” I said. “You may be able to help us in a question here.”

“At your pleasure, masters,” said Martin Hancock. “How can I serve you?”

“Jack Horner and I were talking about friendship. What is the nature of the friendship between Sebastian and Antonio? Can you speak from what you know of your twin brother in the
play?”

I must confess that I was talking to no particular purpose and only to prevent Jack reverting to the subject of his wife. That I addressed Martin more or less as an adult is not to be wondered
at. Keeping company with us all the day, sharing in our comedies, our tragedies and our bawdry, these boy apprentices grew up faster than ordinary lads. Also, the fact that they played above their
years and out of their sex – and were frequently the dealers-out or the recipients of the most impassioned words and gestures on stage – could not help but spill over into our daily
intercourse. Nevertheless, I should say here and now that we of the Chamberlain’s Company largely kept ourselves free from the dangerous taint of sodomy and those other unnatural practices
which the enemies of the stage charged us with. It is perhaps as well that this be made clear before you hear the clever quibbles of Master Martin, for they might lead you to think otherwise.

“It is plain as a pikestaff,” answered the knowing young Martin to my question about the two friends in
Twelfth Night.
“Antonio wishes to bolster with my
‘brother’ here.”

“Bolster? What kind of word is that?” said Jack.

“A perfectly good one,” said Martin. “As good a word as your name, Master Jack
Horner.
”

Like the boy that he still was in some ways, Martin delighted in naughty terms and general rudery. When he was not playing honest girls and chaste heroines he spent much time giggling with the
other Company boys. The fact that our fellow-player had a name, Horner, expressive of a capacity to make holes in other men’s best coats – in brief, to cuckold them – was to young
Master Martin a constant, sniggering pleasure. Believe me when I say that the irony of Jack Horner’s last name was not lost on me at that moment.

“Now justify yourself,” I said, severe as a schoolmaster, “in this business of Sebastian and Antonio, that is, him and me.”

“He gives Sebastian a purse full of crowns and ducats but it is not the purse – or the crowns – or the ducats – that he wishes the other to dandle with, I
think.”

“Horrid boy,” said Jack Horner, between splutters of laughter.

“Mere supposition,” I said with disapproval. I could sense my late father the parson peeping his head out at this point.

“And when he draws to defend me,” continued the boy, pleased with the reaction that he was getting, “when Antonio draws believing that he is protecting his beloved Sebastian,
do you think that it is really his
sword
he wants to unsheathe? After all, does not Sir Toby Belch later tell me to strip my sword ‘stark naked’, and we all know what
he
means – even though I am but a poor unfurnished girl in this department.”

“Hypothesis only, this business of the sword,” I said pointedly, feeling even more like a schoolmaster, one who has discovered a bright boy doing adept but crude drawings at the back
of the class.

“Horrid and clever boy,” said Jack. But in his voice there was a note of admiration that a mere lad should be so forward and fluent in filth.

“Oh very clever, Martin, but I do not like your construction of this matter,” I said. “I prefer you as the virginal Viola, thinking well of all men – and women too.
I’m sure Sebastian here prefers you in that way too.”

Jack said nothing so I assumed that he agreed. For myself, I found it hard to square the sweet-mouthed and courageous Viola with this naughty lad beside me. But then I should not have done;
after all, we are all players.

“Well, Nick,” said Jack, “out of the mouths of babes and lads . . . This love between my Sebastian and your Antonio is not as disinterested as you pretend. True, I get money
from you, to say nothing of being rescued from a stormy sea in the first place, but you . . . all the time you do have an end in view.”

“Your end, Master Jack,” said nasty Martin, “your . . . bottom.”

“Not so,” I said, feeling faintly indignant, and wanting Jack to object to this familiar handling. But still he said nothing. Perhaps I felt more indignant than the occasion
warranted because I noticed Master WS hoving into view. “It is higher than this. You must raise your eyes, both of you, and stop grubbing on the ground. With Antonio and Sebastian, I see it
as being like the friendship between Damon and Pythias in the old story. The one, you know, risked death for the other.”

“Good old Nick,” said Jack. “Ever ready to think well of us, and to clothe our lower impulses in a cleaner garb.”

Not so again, I thought rather than said, and I turned slightly away from him in shame as he clasped a fraternal arm about my shoulder. Fortunately, by this time Martin was required once more as
Viola-Cesario and so left us. Shortly afterwards Jack and I were due to appear together for our first scene.

As I have said, Master Shakespeare was the guider during rehearsals for this royal performance. He took no player’s part in the production (indeed, the last role I had seen him in had been
as the Ghost in
Hamlet)
but as the author he was obviously in the best position to oversee the fleshing-out of his words.

If I were asked about Master WS’s method in guiding us Chamberlain’s men in one of his own plays, I would find it difficult to answer. With someone like Dick Burbage, the business of
guiding – or, as one might term it, the direction – was firm and emphatic. If he was the tillerman and the players the vessel, then Burbage kept a strong, steady hand on the
boat’s progress. You would always be aware of his presence, sitting up aloft in the stern, one eye on the crew, the other on the waters ahead. But with Master WS it was different. To maintain
the analogy: if he was the tillerman, then he was one who did not make an exhibition of himself up there; indeed, he might sometimes seem to be absent altogether from his post (though I do not mean
to imply by this that he was negligent). Tiny, infrequent touches on the tiller seemed to suffice. And yet all went sailingly enough. I did not understand the trick of it.

After I had delivered my first lines as Antonio and had promised to follow Sebastian to the court of Duke Orsino of Illyria, perilous as it might be, because

Master WS drew me to one side as I exited from the playing area, which was marked out in chalk on the uneven boards of the great chamber.

“Nicholas, you have a moment?”

His large, open face tilted confidingly towards me as he placed a cupped hand under my right elbow. He ushered me towards a clear corner. I thought that he was going to say something about the
quality of my playing, either in compliment or complaint (though with Master WS the balance was always tilted most indulgently in favour of the former).

Anyone observing us must have thought that we were discussing something to do with the play. But it was not so, or at least only in the beginning.

“Nicholas, I heard what you said just now about friendship, about Damon and Pythias.”

“Oh, you did,” I said, as though half regretful at being overheard – when really I was not. In fact, I own up to wanting him to overhear me.

“I have often thought that the history of those two would make a good argument for a play.
The Two Friends from Syracuse.
What do you think? Or simply
Damon and Pythias.
The
one stood surety for the other and was ready to die in his place, when the tyrant Dionysius demanded it. Is that not true friendship?”

“But it ended happily, did it not?”

“Yes,” said WS. “Dionysius was so struck by Pythias’s readiness to lay down his life for his friend that he pardoned both of them.”

“Would that all rulers showed a like mercy,” I said piously – and emptily.

“We would surely say
merci
if they did,” said WS.

“What? Oh yes,” I said, catching the pun before it disappeared round the corner and out of sight. Even by WS’s standards it was a particularly feeble one – and, had I
been inclined to contest with him, I would have pointed out that one should not trespass outside one’s own tongue to make a play on words.

“In that case,” he continued, “a ruler’s mercy was prompted by the honourable friendship of two young men. Even a tyrant may be infected by goodness – though he
must catch it by stealth. It will not do to have designs on him.”

I said nothing, because I could think of nothing to say. When Master WS talked, one generally listened.

“I have always been moved by these ancient tales of friendship,” he said.

“Like Antonio and Sebastian in your
Twelfth Night?
” I said.

“Friendship as between Palamon and Arcite,” continued WS almost wistfully, and appearing not to notice that I had said anything. “Or Aeneas and Achates from Troy.
‘Fidus’ Achates, as Vergil calls him. Faithful Achates.”

“Yes . . .”