Ruled Britannia (7 page)

Lope nodded approval. He hadn't thought the Englishman so pious. “I'm for London, then,” he said. “I hope to see you again, sir, and my thanks once more for setting my mind at rest.”

“My pleasure, sir.” Even before Lope was out the door, Phelippes returned to the ciphered message on which he'd been working.

 

W
HEN REHEARSALS WENT
well, they were a joy. Shakespeare took more pleasure in few things than in watching what had been only pictures and words in his mind take shape on the stage before his eyes. When things went not so well, as they did this morning . . . He clapped a hand to his forehead. “ 'Sdeath!” he shouted. “Mechanical salt-butter rogues! Boys, apes, braggarts, Jacks, milksops! You are not worth another word, else I'd call you knaves.”

Richard Burbage looked down his long nose at Shakespeare. He was the only player in Lord Westmorland's Men tall enough to do it. “Now
see here, Will, you've poor cause to blame us when you were the worst of the lot,” he boomed, turning his big, sonorous voice on Shakespeare alone instead of an audience.

He was right, too, as Shakespeare knew only too well. The poet gave the best defense he could: “My part's but a small one—”

“Ha!” Will Kemp broke in. “I never thought to hear a man admit as much.”

“Devils take you!” Shakespeare scowled at the clown. “Not recalling your own lines, you aim to step on mine.” He gathered himself. “If we play as we rehearsed, they'll pelt us with cabbages and turnips enough to make soup for a year.”

“We'll be better, come the afternoon. We always are.” Burbage had a wealthy man's confidence; the Theatre and the ground on which it stood belonged to his family. Though several years younger than Shakespeare, he had a prosperous man's double chin—partly concealed by his pointed beard—and the beginnings of an imposing belly.

“Not always,” Shakespeare said, remembering calamities he wished he could forget.

“Often enough,” Burbage said placidly. “There's no better company than ours, and all London knows it.” He eyes, deep-set under thick eyebrows, flashed. “But you, Will. You're the steadiest trouper we have, and you always know your lines.” He chuckled. “And so you ought, you having writ so many of 'em. But today? Never have I seen you so unapt, as if the very words were strange. Out on it! What hobgoblins prey on your mind?”

Shakespeare looked around the Theatre. Along with the company, the tireman and his assistants, the prompter, and the stagehands, a couple of dozen friends and wives and lovers milled about where the groundlings would throng in a few hours. Musicians peered down from their place a story above the tiring room. He had to talk to Burbage, but not before so many people. All he could do now was sigh and say, “When troubles come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.”

Burbage tossed his head like a horse troubled by flies. “Pretty. It tells naught, of course, but pretty nonetheless.”

“Give over, if you please,” Shakespeare said wearily. “I'm not bound to unburden myself before any but God, and you are not He.”

Kemp's eyes widened in well-mimed astonishment. “He's not? Don't tell him that, for I warrant he did not know't.”

A flush mounted to Burbage's cheeks and broad, high forehead. “Blaspheming toad.”

“Your servant, sir.” Kemp gave him a courtier's bow. Burbage snorted.

So did Shakespeare. The clown would mock anyone, and refused to let any insults stick to him. Shakespeare said, “Shall we try once more the scene that vexed us in especial, that in which Romeo comes between Mercutio and Tybalt fighting? We've given this tragedy often enough ere now, these past several years. We should do't better than we showed.”

“Too many lines from too many plays, all spinning round in our heads,” Kemp said. “ 'Tis a wonder we can speak a word some scribbling wretch did not pen for us.”

Shakespeare had rarely felt more wretched. As Mercutio, he crossed swords with Burbage's Tybalt. The other player had fought against the invading Spaniards, and actually used a blade; Shakespeare's swordplay belonged only to the stage. And Burbage fenced now as if out for blood; when the time came for him to run Mercutio through under Romeo's arm, he almost really did it.

“By God,” Shakespeare said, arising after he'd crumpled, “my death scene there came near to being my death scene in sooth.”

Burbage grinned a predatory grin. “Nothing less than you deserve, for havering at us before. Satisfies you now this scene?”

“It will serve,” Shakespeare said. “Still, I have somewhat to say to you on the subject of your swordplay.”
And on other things as well
, he thought. Those, though, would have to wait.

The other player chose to misunderstand him. Setting a hand on the hilt of his rapier, he said, “I am at your service.”

If they fought with swords in earnest, Shakespeare knew he was a dead man. What had Marlowe said about fanning quarrels?
Surely not Burbage
, Shakespeare thought,
not when we've worked together so long
. That such a thing could even occur to him was the measure of how many new worries he carried.
I'll be like Kit soon, seeing danger in every face
.

“Let it go, Dick,” Kemp said. “An you spit him like a chine of beef, what are you then? Why, naught but a ghost—a pretty ghost, I'll not deny, but nonetheless a ghost—left suddenly dumb for having slain the one who gave you words to speak.”

“There are other scribblers,” Burbage rumbled ominously. But then he must have decided he'd gone too far, for he added, “We, being the best of companies, do deserve that which we have: to wit, the best of poets.” He turned toward Shakespeare and clapped his big, scarred hands.

When the afternoon came, the play went well. Thinking about it afterwards, Shakespeare shook his head. The
performance
had gone well, but there was more to it than that. A couple of the gentlemen sitting at the side of the stage smoked their pipes so furiously, the thick tobacco fumes spoiled the view for the groundlings behind them. The rowdies, having paid their pennies, were convinced they were men as good as any others, and pelted the offenders with nuts and pebbles—one of them, flying high, incidentally hitting the boy playing Juliet just as he was about to wonder where Romeo was. They didn't quite have a riot, but Shakespeare had trouble figuring out why not.

“Ofttimes strange, but never dull,” he said in the tiring room. “Pass me that basin, Dick, if you'd be so kind.”

“I'll do't,” Burbage said. Shakespeare splashed water on his face and scrubbed hard with a towel to get rid of powder and rouge and paint. He looked in a mirror, then scrubbed some more. After the second try, he nodded. “There. Better. I have my own seeming once again.”

“I shouldn't be so proud of it, were I you,” Kemp said slyly.

“Were you I, you'd have a better seeming than you do,” Shakespeare retorted. People laughed louder than the joke deserved. The biter bit was always funny; Shakespeare had used the device to good effect in more than one play. Will Kemp bared his teeth in what might have been a smile. He found the joke hard to see.

“Magnificent, Master Will!” There stood Lieutenant Lope de Vega, a broad smile on his face. “Truly magnificent! . . . Is something wrong?”

He'd seen Shakespeare start, then. “No, nothing really,” Shakespeare answered, glad his actor's training gave his voice a property of easiness: for his was, without a doubt, a guilty start. “You did surprise me, coming up so sudden.”

“I am sorry for it,” the Spaniard said. “But this play—this play, sir, is splendid. This play is also closer to what someone—a man of genius, of course—might write in Spain than was
If You Like It
 . . . though that too was most excellent, I haste to add.”

“You praise me past my deserts,” Shakespeare said modestly, though the compliments warmed him. He'd never known a writer who disliked having others tell him how good he was. Some had trouble going on without hearing kind words at frequent intervals. Marlowe, for instance, bloomed like honeysuckles ripened by the sun at praise, but the icy fang of winter seemed to pierce his heart when his work met a sour reception—or, worse still, when it was ignored. He fed on plaudits, even
more than most players. Shakespeare knew he had the same disease himself, but a milder case.

And Lope shook his head. “Not at all, sir. You deserve more praises for this work than I have English to give you.” He gave Shakespeare several sentences of impassioned Spanish. Hearing that language in the tiring room made several people turn and mutter—the last thing Shakespeare wanted.

“I say again, sir, you are too generous,” he murmured. Lieutenant de Vega shook his head once more. He did, at least, return to English, though he kept talking about plays he'd seen in Madrid before the Armada sailed.
This work of mine likes him well, for its nearness to that which he knew before-time
, Shakespeare realized. That took some of the pleasure from the praise: what woman would want a man to say she was beautiful because she reminded him of his mother?

After some considerable time, de Vega said, “But I do go on, is't not so?”

“By no means,” Shakespeare lied. He couldn't quite leave that alone, though. “Did you write with celerity to match your speech, Master Lope, you'd astound the world with the plays that poured from your pen: you'd make yourself a very prodigy of words.”

“Were my duties less, my time to write were more,” the Spaniard answered, and Shakespeare thought he'd got away with it. But then de Vega reminded him that he was in fact Senior Lieutenant de Vega: “In aid of my duties, sir, a question—what acquaintance had you with Edward Kelley, that he should call to you when on his way to the fire?”

I never saw him before in my life
. That was what Shakespeare wanted to say. But a lie that at once declared itself a lie was worse than useless.
Marlowe was right, damn him. De Vega
is
a Spaniard first, a groundling and player and poet only second
. Picking his words with great care, the Englishman said, “I shared tavern talk with him a handful of times over a handful of years, no more.” Though the tiring room was chilly, sweat trickled down his sides from under his arms.

But Lope de Vega only nodded. “So I would have guessed. Whom would Kelley have known better, think you?”

Marlowe
, Shakespeare thought, and damned his fellow poet again. Aloud, though, he said only, “Not having known him well myself, I fear I cannot tell you.” He spread his hands in carefully simulated regret.

“Yes, I see.” Lope remained as polite as ever. Even so, he asked another question: “Well, in whose company were you with this rogue, then?”

“I pray your pardon, but I can't recall.” Shakespeare used his player's training to hold his voice steady. “I had not seen him for more than a year, perhaps for two, before we chanced to spy each the other in Tower Street.”

The Spaniard let it drop there. He went off to pay his respects to a pretty girl Shakespeare hadn't seen before, one who'd likely got past the tireman's assistants because she was so pretty. Whoever she was, de Vega's attentions made her giggle and simper and blush. Shakespeare could tell which actor she'd come to see—one of the hired men who played small parts, not a sharer—by the fellow's ever more unhappy expression. But the hired man had no weapon on his belt, while Lieutenant de Vega not only wore a rapier but, by the set of his body, knew what to do with it.

Not my concern
, Shakespeare thought. He felt a moment's shame—surely the Levite who'd passed by on the other side of the road must have had some similar notion go through his mind—but strangled it in its cradle. Catching Burbage's eye, he asked, “Shall we away?”

“Let's,” the other big man answered. With a theatrical swirl, Burbage wrapped his cloak around him: it had looked like rain all through the play, and, with day drawing to a close, the heavens were bound to start weeping soon.

A drunken groundling snored against the inner wall of the Theatre. “They'll need to drag him without ere closing for the night,” Shakespeare said as the two players walked past him.

Richard Burbage shrugged. “He's past reeling ripe—belike he's pickled enough to sleep there till the morrow, and save himself his penny for the new day's play.” But the idea of the man's getting off without paying that penny was enough to make him tell one of the gatekeepers outside the Theatre about the drunk. The man nodded and went off to deal with him.

Shakespeare skirted a puddle. Burbage, in stout boots, splashed through. It did begin to rain then, a hard, cold, nasty rain that made Shakespeare shiver. “This is the sort of weather that turns to sleet,” he said.

“Early in the year,” Burbage said, but then he shrugged again. “I shouldn't wonder if you have reason.”

They walked on. As the rain came down harder, more puddles formed in the mud of Shoreditch High Street. A woman lost her footing and, flailing her arms, fell on her backside. She screeched curses as
she struggled to her feet, dripping and filthy. “Would that Kemp had seen her there,” Shakespeare said. “He'd filch her fall for his own turns.”