Death of Kings (32 page)

I had the advantage of quite a few yards, and the advantage of knowing the playhouse better than he did (or so I assumed). I reached the tiring-house, slipped through the door, closed it behind
me, and ran to one of the stage entrances. I knew where I was going to conceal myself but required a few moments’ grace to reach it.

The stage was bare. The few properties from
A Merry Old World, My Masters
had been cleared straight after that afternoon’s performance. In front of me yawned the groundlings’
pit while the more expensive galleries were ranged in judgement above and to either side. It was very early evening but dark, especially under the overhang of the stage. If I’d had the
leisure to glance up I would have seen the stars and figures of the heavens, depicted on the underside of the canopy. But it was down on the ground, or the bare boards, that my gaze was
fastened.

There! Set more or less centrally in the stage was a trapdoor, wide enough for two men to enter at once. This was the counterpart of the ‘heavens’ up above, a universal hole to be
used when a grave was required or a hiding place for treasure or an entry into Hell or Purgatory. It also gave access to the large area beneath the stage where some of the properties were stored
and where, as in Master WS’s
Hamlet
, a ghost may stalk and talk. The trap swung back easily and silently on its greased hinges. A little ladder led into the deeper darkness below. I
half jumped, half slipped down the rungs, pulling the trap to behind me by the leathern strap nailed to its underside.

It was absolute night underneath the stage, appropriately enough since I had now descended into Purgatory – or worse. This was one Purgatory, however, which I hoped to make my salvation.
It was possible that the individual who was close on my heels would come rummaging about down here. Whether he opened up the trap-door depended on how well he knew the geography of the playhouse.
(And I could not at this time determine whether he was a real stranger to the premises or not.) He had the benefit of a lantern. Therefore I required a further hiding-place within my
hiding-place.

Not long after I’d arrived at the Globe, Jack Horner had been generous enough to guide me round the holes and corners of the place. It is strange how you can think you know a building and
then discover that you don’t know the half of it. One room he failed to show me – perhaps because even he wasn’t aware of it – was the tiny cupboard-like space into which
Isabella Horner had enticed me (there to introduce me to her holes and corners). But one area Jack’d proudly taken me into was the underworld below the stage. He particularly wished to show
off the largest of the properties stored down there.

“There. What do you think of that?” said Jack.

It was the middle of the day. Light spilled through the open trap and, in addition, Jack was carrying a lantern. Even so, all I could see was a black hole next to the ladder leading down from
the stage.

“What am I meant to be looking at?” I said. “There’s nothing to see.”

“Well, I suppose that’s right enough in a way, seeing nothing,” said Jack. “Look more close.”

I peered. The black hole into which I was looking was, I now realised, the empty middle section of a much larger wooden framework covered with painted canvas. This canvas was ornamented with
flames, with devils sporting horns, with writhing worms and dragons rampant. White-faced individuals stood packed into cauldrons set above crackling fires. Other hapless beings were being speared,
lanced and tridented by grinning demons.

“Why, it’s a hell-mouth,” I said.

“Did you ever see a hell-mouth like it?” said Jack proudly. “It’s the biggest in any London playhouse, they say. It only just fits through the trap.”

“Hell-mouth will always fit through the trap,” I said. “Where would we be without hell-mouth?”

This was true enough. There’s perhaps been a falling-off in recent years of plays where one or more of the characters go to hell. I suspect that the modern shareholder and the more
cultivated members of the audience consider such a purgatorial penalty to be a touch extreme, a trifle crude. Too reminiscent of those morality plays where hell is always lying underfoot, ready to
gape. Nevertheless, there’s nothing your average playgoer likes better than watching some wrongdoer dragged down into the sulphurous pit, via hell-mouth. Why, we were still playing Kit
Marlowe’s
Faustus
ten years after it first saw the light of day.

Any Company with a regard for its audience, and its profits, will ensure that it possesses a hell-mouth in good working order. They’re generally on wheels so that they can be positioned
above the trap. Now that I knew what I was looking at, I could see that the Chamberlain’s was indeed a fine example: sturdy, wide and with some detailed work in the pictures that adorned the
surround. There was a loving care in the painting, and it crossed my mind that there are many who take pleasure in the depiction of torment and misery (and I wondered too whether the craftsman who
wielded the brush round the mouth of hell had also clambered aloft to paint the ‘heavens’ on our canopy).

So, after this excursion round hell-mouth, you can guess where I chose to secrete myself under the Globe stage. Feeling forward with my hands, I entered the infernal portals silently and
willingly – unlike all those other souls who must be dragged through screaming. Once inside the little cave of wood and canvas, I felt oddly secure. Gauzy hangings, which fell from the roof
of the hell-mouth to give the illusion that a new arrival had been swallowed up, brushed against my exposed hands and face and draped themselves about my shoulders.

So I huddled down in the back of this comfortable little cavern and waited. If necessary, I was prepared to stay here until dawn broke, my fellows returned to the playhouse and safety arrived. I
listened out hard for the sounds of footsteps on the stage overhead and, at one point, thought I heard something. But nothing came of it. No one opened the trapdoor to see what lay beneath, no one
fumblingly descended the ladder, no one sought to penetrate the mouth where I lay, undigested.

The human mind is a strange thing, unaccountable in its workings. Though I’d been thoroughly frightened by the unseen stranger who’d pursued me through my workplace, I soon found my
position in the gullet of hell-mouth to be as tedious as it was comfortable. I discovered in myself a wish to be out and about in the world again. Perhaps this is the reason why a ghost chooses to
walk on earth: not
tedium vitae
but
tedium mortis.
I offer this only for consideration.

I had to hold myself back from strolling out of the underworld and clambering up to the surface of the Globe. Last time I’d come out of hiding the stranger had been waiting for me. Or had
he? Was it possible that I had imagined the whole thing – not the entry into the book-room, I was sure enough about that, but the subsequent chase along the passage. Had the oath and the
stumbling in the dark been my own?

I remained where I was for what seemed an eternity (apt enough considering my location!) but was probably a mere earthly half hour. Then I made a rapid exit from my hole, opened the trap,
briskly crossed the stage and retraced my route through the tiring-house and down the passage to the casement.

Quickly, before I had time to grow frightened once more, before anyone might have the opportunity to seize me by the ankle, I unfastened the window, swung my legs over the sill and dropped to
the ground. I took off like a hare down Brend’s Rents. Found a late ferry to Paul’s Wharf. Raced up to Clerkenwell. Arrived at the Priory to discover that the rehearsal hadn’t
even begun. Not even sure that my absence was noticed.

Also arrived at the Priory to discover that I’d lost the plot.

It hardly mattered, as it happened. Master Allison was quite apologetic when he told me that he did keep a spare copy in the Revels Office after all.

Some nights later we played
Twelfth Night
before her majesty at Whitehall. If that was an occasion to treasure, then what followed immediately afterwards was even more
memorable – though not treasurable – as you shall hear.

But first to the performance.

I noticed that as we drew nearer to the hour of our commencement, even the more seasoned members of the Chamberlain’s were exhibiting signs of excitement and fret. Strangely, I felt myself
growing calmer, although I’d been unable to eat anything since early that morning. The fiftieth check was made of the properties, the hundredth inspection carried out on our costumes, the
thousandth rehearsal of each man’s lines took place inside his own head.

We were to enact
Twelfth Night
in the Hall, a great room with many bays and buttresses and windows. I had never acted indoors before, although the many evenings of rehearsal at the Revels
Office had taken away my initial sense of the oddness of being under a roof and playing by candlelight. Wooden seating had been erected around the walls of the Hall in tiers, an arrangement that
was familiar enough although there was of course no equivalent to the playhouse pit in a royal palace.

There were other differences too. In the public theatres, we players are accustomed to being the cynosure of all eyes. (I say ‘we’ while really meaning the likes of Dick Burbage and
Robert Armin; it is those individuals on whom the gaze of both the general and the gentry is fastened from the moment of their first appearance.) But in the court theatre it is, as it must be,
otherwise. However brightly our stars shine, there will always be one who shines yet more brilliantly. And
She
will be found not on the stage but in the heart of her audience – as well
as in their hearts. There the monarch is as much on display, perhaps more so, than her players.

So as we players waited – and there is a point before the performance begins when the player seems like the still centre, while all about him is rush and dash – I cast frequent
glances at the imposing chair of state which was set up on a dais near the middle of the hall. This chair had a finely embroidered backcloth and a rich blue canopy. Earlier, I had daringly
approached it. There, on that seat, in little over an hour,
She
would station her sacred self. I was sometimes conscious of referring inwardly to the Queen as
She
, with a reverential
emphasis that was reminiscent of my friend Nell. I wondered how I’d recount this episode to her later, how I’d go about impressing her in bed with my great acquaintance. Would I catch
Nell’s habit of wrapping her majesty in a respectful indrawing of breath:
She
; or would I continue to allude to her casually in conversation: ‘oh her’?

In the playhouse we start sharpish at two o’clock after the trumpet has sounded, and any latecomer may struggle both to find a place to stand or sit in as well as having to catch up with
the plot. In the royal palace of Whitehall, by contrast, we were obliged to wait on our chiefest guest. Until
She
was established in her state, nothing could begin. I had heard that
Elizabeth was, in fact, prompt enough in attendance, though whether out of real interest in the drama or because of her innate graciousness I did not know. Since it was the evening of Shrove
Tuesday matters might be delayed because
She
first had to attend the usual banquet before arriving at the digestive of a drama. We players had been well enough supplied with food and drink
by the officers of the household, although never so amply as to suggest that we were anything other than servants. Even so, I was still too anxious to eat anything and contented myself with sipping
at a mug of ale.

On our improvised backstage, I wandered over to young Martin Hancock, he who played our heroine Viola-Cesario. He was deep in converse with Jack Horner, ‘her’ twin brother.

“So it is tomorrow,” Martin was saying.

“So they say.”

“Has she signed?”

“They say not,” said Jack.

“But must do soon?”

“For certain she must, if it is to be tomorrow.”

“What? Who?” I broke in.

“Why, don’t you know, Nick?” said Jack.

“Obviously I do – that’s why I’m asking,” I said.

There was an unaccustomed seriousness about these two, which I didn’t think was related to the imminent royal performance. Even Martin Hancock, now garbed as Viola, seemed to have forsaken
his normal hinting and winking style.

“They say tomorrow that he goes to it,” said Jack.

“
Who?
” I said with some impatience. But, as sometimes happens, the question had no sooner escaped my mouth than I realised what they were talking about. Jack’s reply
confirmed it.

“The Earl of Essex.”

“He is to be executed?”

“Yes, Master Nicholas,” said young Martin. “He must surely die.”

“Not a traitor’s death?” I said.

“No, she will not subject him to that, traitor though he be,” said Jack, casting his eyes in the direction of the stage area, in front of which was, as we all knew, the still vacant
chair of state. I shivered, wholly taken away in my mind from the warmth of the great Hall for an instant.

A common traitor’s death provided a public show at Tyburn, with the condemned man sliced open while still alive so that the hangman could draw out his guts and flourish them in front of
his tormented face. I had never seen the spectacle but was assured that the crowds spread about the scaffold would be the envy of any playhouse. But a well-born traitor enjoyed a less dreadful end:
Essex might expect the privacy of the block in the Tower, and the merciful quickness of the axe. For sure he would have no common eyes trained upon him.

“And Wriothesley?” I said.

Now it was Jack’s turn to ask who.

“Southampton, I mean,” I said, feigning casualness. “He is closely associated with the Earl of Essex, is he not?”

“I don’t know,” said Jack. “I don’t know what is to happen to him.”

“The friend of Master Shakespeare?” said Martin Hancock, nodding towards one of the rooms which led off the Hall. Moments earlier we’d seen Master WS (who wasn’t playing
in his own
Twelfth Nighi
) go in there with John Heminges as well as Edmund Tilney, the Master of the Revels, and a clutch of court officials, presumably to discuss some aspect of the
production.