Shakespeare's Rebel (8 page)

Will rose and John did too, buckling on his sword belt. ‘What do you play?’

‘The first part of
Henry Four
.’

‘I knew that. But you within it?’

Shakespeare sighed. ‘I am doubling Westmorland and Bardolph. Old men’s roles. ’Tis what my fellow players consider me suited for.’ He tugged at his diminished forelock, laughed, as he followed the boy.

John fell into step. ‘And who arranges the fights?’

‘You do. That is, Burbage and Sly, as Hal and Hotspur, believe they mostly remember your moves.’

‘Mostly?’ He shuddered. ‘So do I get paid for them again?’

Will smiled. ‘You know you do not. As I do not get paid for the words. Fight arrangers and playwrights, John. We are fee’d, not waged.’

‘But you are a sharer in the company. It is different.’ They had halted by the half-opened door of the stable. Lines were being bellowed within. ‘I could look at them once, if you liked. Gratis, of course.’

‘You know I would like it. Would like you to do more than set the fights. But there are those within who do not.’

‘Those? You mean one. Kemp.’ John spat the word.

Shakespeare shrugged. ‘You punched him.’

‘Which he deserved.’

‘He often does. I’d punch him myself when he mangles my lines – were the oaf not twice my size and handy with his fists.’ Will grinned. ‘But on stage? During a performance?’

‘I had a speech,’ John grumbled, ‘an important one. He was above me on the platform, pretending that an invisible dog was biting his leg.’

‘But as we both know, man, when you punch someone, they stay punched.’ Will sighed. ‘He couldn’t jig for a week. Now I may dislike his cavorting but the mob doesn’t. Some come only to see him, more’s the pity. Our takings dropped.’ He shook his head. ‘You just said it: Dick, Gus, I – and Kemp – are sharers as well as players. That punch took money from all our purses.’

John grunted. It was an argument he’d had before, could not win. Though the company had formed a gauntlet to applaud him when he’d come offstage, he’d still found the tiring-house door closed to him when he returned the next day. Now he thought of it, that was the start of his last great debauch – the one before this one, one year back. Both had been prompted by disappointment. Then it had been theatre. This time it was love.

His friend must have noted the sadness in his eyes. ‘Do not despair, old friend. Time heals even old grudges. Or players leave.’ He glanced through the open door, at a shout. ‘And Kemp is not content. He does not like all these new words I keep giving him. He’s for a jig and a lewd tale, or he fears the audience will sleep.’

‘Still, the Queen loves his Falstaff, does she not? Isn’t that why she requested this piece tonight?’

Will looked back. ‘’Tis strange you say that. We thought the same. But the Master of the Revels revealed that it was not she who requested it. She asked for us to play what we will. Someone else called for
Henry the Fourth
.’

‘Who?’

Will lowered his voice. ‘The Secretary of State.’

‘Cecil?’ John frowned. ‘Strange indeed, when all know that Sir Robert hates plays and players. They offend his Puritan soul.’

‘So why this play now?’ Will shook his head, his words still given softly. ‘Indeed, the Master Secretary even sent a letter asking that certain aspects of the piece be . . . emphasised.’

John frowned. ‘Have a care, William. You’ll be writing in lines next.’ He smiled. ‘Though it could be profitable – advertising the wares of this linen merchant or that goldsmith – yet what price the liberty of the playhouse then?’

‘What liberty do we have now? Our betters dictate what we play, with every new work submitted to the Master of the Revels for approval.’ He stared above John’s head for a moment, his eyes narrowing. ‘I yearn to write something that will do more than entertain. To hold the mirror up to nature and show our nobles who they truly are.’ He glanced towards the palace. ‘Or perhaps who they could be.’

‘You already have done that, and oft,’ John said as softly as his friend.

‘Nay, only here and there. I would do it more. And I have something in mind. A play that would transcend . . .’ He broke off, his gaze returning to John. ‘For tonight? Aye, I believe there is meaning in Cecil’s choice, beyond the entertainment it gives. Something afoot in the realm. Perhaps you’ll be able to tell what that is, from your perch in the minstrels’ gallery. Speaking of ’ – he dug into his cloak’s pocket – ‘here’s a token. It shows you are one of us, and can sit above with the musicians.’

He passed over a brass token. John studied the stamp upon it – Atlas bearing the globe of the world upon his shoulders. It was the symbol of the new playhouse for which the company had just broken ground upon the south bank. Will continued, ‘We will speak later and you can tell me what you’ve observed.’ He smiled. ‘Just avoid Kemp, will you? We need him unpunched – for this one night at least.’

A line was shouted from within, in that way that showed a player had missed his entrance. ‘Mine,’ said Will. ‘I must go.’ He turned, turned back. ‘Here,’ he said, holding up another coin, silver this time. ‘I suspect your purse is as empty as your stomach. Buy yourself some food. You have some hours yet. Nay, do not demure.
Food
, John,’ he emphasised, pressing the coin into John’s palm.

It was a crown. It would buy a fair amount of food, not to mention an unshared bed for the night. It would also buy a single glass item . . . John shoved the thought away, replacing it with another that had hovered for a while in his still cloudy head, tangerine-tinged. He reached out, gripped his friend’s arm, delaying him. ‘William, do you know of anyone else who might be attending the revels tonight?’

‘Well, it is the last great festivity before Lent . . .’

John squeezed. ‘You know what I mean.
Whom
I mean.’

Will’s eyes narrowed, his voice dropping. ‘Indeed I do. And I cannot believe, now that he is both back in her favour, and recently appointed to command her majesty’s armies against the Irish rebels’ – he paused while John took in as news what he had heard as rumour – ‘that the Earl of Essex would miss this evening for the wide world.’

With that, his friend slipped into the stable, leaving John alone – and disturbed.

He’d known, of course. Though he’d never acknowledged them, reports had eventually reached even the lowest taverns where he’d seen out his debauch. Also he had a vague feeling that his visit to Peg Leg’s tavern to demand his sword the week before, though he could remember nothing of it, must have been connected to this news. He would want his sword if Robert Devereux was raising his war banner. Not to draw it beside the standard. To fight off any who would drag him into its shade.

John tucked coin and token into his doublet – players’ costumes, unlike workaday clothes, had pockets to hold properties that might be required upon the stage. He listened to the voices within – Will greeted, mocked, mocking in return; a short silence that ended when Will Kemp’s Falstaff gave Bardolph his cue for the third time: ‘Banish plump Jack and banish all the world!’

He turned away. He was the one banished from the world he loved, and it hurt. At least this night, though, he would see one Lawley upon a platform . . . and perhaps observe the mischief his friend had said was afoot within the court and so within the realm. Safely above it, certain of only one thing . . .

Whatever it was, he would never, ever again be drawn into the madness of Essex.

VI

Command Performance

It was a fine perch from which to view a play, sharing the minstrels’ gallery with the three musicians, revelling in returning warmth. By the end of the second act he even had to undo a button or two on the borrowed velvet doublet for the rising heat in the hall.

It was the flames. The banqueting hall of the palace was lit like midsummer’s day. A vast chandelier dangled above the platform, its candles glimmering off thousands of cut-glass facets. The spectators sat in three ranks along both sides, each raised dais studded with candelabra, while every column sported a rush torch in a sconce. The last court gathering before Lent had drawn the highest in the realm. They had spent enough on their clothes and, players in their own way, they would be seen.

Most light, however, was concentrated on the central dais that fronted the stage, bidding all eyes when the action slowed or when, as now, the principals resumed their places – for unlike in the playhouse, there were breaks between acts in the palace, for refreshments, for the renewal of candles . . . and for other necessities. Well, thought John, even if there are rushes upon the floor here as at the Rose, you can hardly expect the Queen of England to piss on them like any groundling.

As if summoned by his thought, she returned, in a rush, through an arras, laughing at something the man beside her – an ambassador, John guessed, he knew him not – had said. The court rose as she walked to her seat, and when she reached it, the two men who had hung back till that moment charged forward, elbowing aside the emissary in their haste to offer their hands.

As before the previous three acts, the court held its collective breath . . . until Elizabeth placed her fingers into the hand of the Earl of Essex and all there exhaled as one.

‘Twice,’ John muttered. Twice to Robert Devereux, and twice to Robert Cecil, with one act to go and suspense for the final judgement. Perhaps she will bring out a golden apple and award it, John thought. The Queen flattered herself a classical scholar and had oft been likened to Helen of Troy in many a sycophant’s ode.

‘Still beautiful, is she not?’ the musician beside him said, picking up his pipes.

‘Indeed,’ John replied, but thought, you need new spectacles, my friend. His own eyes were good enough to see white lead paint that had been put on by the trowelful, while the red curls of the wig were studded with gems to draw the eye away from a closer, lower scrutiny. Sixty-three years old, yet still wearing a dress slit near to her navel, the skin between no doubt pulled taut by her dressers, who smoothed its folds with powder.

She did not sit immediately, held Essex’s proffered hand, pulled the man close, bent to whisper in his ear. The smile on her face found echo on his. He placed his lips, turning her hand so he kissed her inner wrist. She snatched her hand away with a delighted cry of outrage, then sat, allowing the rest of the court, whispering like starlings now, to finally settle, and the play to recommence.

As Giles Tremlett, leader of the consort, tapped three times with his bow, then applied it to his viola, John switched his gaze from kissed to kisser. The Earl of Essex had aged too, in the two years since he’d last seen him. Even at this distance John could detect grey now amidst the red of that distinctive square-cut beard. ‘Cadiz style’ the earl had named it, after one of his very few military triumphs. Yet he had not changed its style on returning from the disaster of the following year, the failed raid on the Spanish treasure fleet near the Azores. Rumour had the Queen boxing his ears when he’d tried to blame everyone for the fiasco – even her! Rumour also whispered that he’d made to draw his sword on her after the blow, was only narrowly restrained from such treason. He had lived in disgrace on his impoverished estate ever since.

Yet here he is, John marvelled, acting the role rumour reassigned him: sweet Robin to her sweet Bess. Kissing the hand that had struck him. Striving again for favour against the man now limping back to his place on Elizabeth’s other side. What a contrast he provided to the gangling Essex. For Sir Robert Cecil was a crouchback, and the story was that Burbage had modelled his walk as Richard III on the diminutive Secretary of State, earning his enmity for the players ever since. Dressed entirely in sombrest black, he was a crow to Essex’s lilac-, yellow- and tangerine-swathed parrot. Yet tonight Cecil, for all his oft-expressed puritanical distaste of theatre, seemed to be enjoying himself, laughing loudly at Falstaff’s antics. While his rival, after the kissing of the Queen’s wrist, slumped into his chair and returned to the state in which he’d watched the previous three acts – a gloom that shrouded him like a one-man cloud. The Earl of Essex was barely looking as the music swelled and the first players marched out.

Melancholy again, Robbie? John wondered. What had set him off this time, now he was back in favour and had received what he always sought – the command of an army in war? And he was known to like the playhouses, oft accompanying his friend – and Will’s patron – the Earl of Southampton to them.

Perhaps it was this play? John knew it well, having appeared in the first staging at the Theatre, the Burbages’ playhouse, in ’97, after his return from imprisonment in Spain and his emergence from the Tower.
Briefly
appeared. After the reality of his ordeals, it had, he now realised, been a little early to be returning to a life of illusion. He had also been drinking too much in the joy of freedom. Both factors had led to his punching of Kemp. Truly, he did not regret the punch, only its consequence: exile from the world he loved as more than spectator.

One day, he thought, and returned his wandering mind – only somewhat restored by mutton pottage, maslin bread and an hour’s doze upon some hay – to the observations Will had set him. What
was
afoot here? Why Essex so gloomy, Cecil the cock of the walk?
The First Part of Henry the Fourth
was largely that mix of patricians speaking sentiments in verse and plebeians telling jokes in prose. Well balanced in the end, with the drunken sot Falstaff the centre of the laughter. Many of the knight’s flaws and several of his sayings John knew to be drawn from his own life, for his friend the playwright was a shameless pillager of both the times and the people around him. Yet there were politics too – especially in the contrast of the two ambitious young men. Essex had oft been likened to, had indeed been nicknamed, ‘the fiery Hotspur’. And tonight, in broad style, Dick Sly was speaking the role not with the usual blunt northern vowels but with more than a tinge of the Welsh borders that, notwithstanding his years at court, Essex had never quite eradicated from his speech. His renowned bravado was also mocked and the biggest laugh of the night so far had come on Prince Hal’s description of Hotspur: ‘He that kills me some six or seven Scots at a breakfast, washes his hands and says to his wife: “Fie upon this quiet life! I want work.” ’