Mask of Night (6 page)

You stand there regarding the black waxed coat, the mask with its bird-like protuberance, the white cane fashioned from willow. Your costume, like a player’s. It was not a simple matter to obtain the garment. You consulted books. You discovered how they did things in foreign cities. Then, you had the items made up to your own specifications, pretending they were meant for another.

Now you fold up this precious gear inside a cap-case before you go on your way, clutching your bag, capering over the meadows.

A little dog . . . an old witch.

L
ife picked up when we left London. For one thing the weather brightened and we travelled in sunny spirits. Indeed, the moment that the plaguey city dropped behind us over the horizon – together with its smoke, smut and smells – there was a general lifting of the Company’s mood. True, some of those who’d abandoned wives and children were a little thoughtful during the first night’s stop but even they, I noticed, forgot their worries as we covered more miles or, if they didn’t forget their worries, they concealed them better. We travelled on foot, juniors and seniors alike, while the property wagon was pulled by our good old Flanders draught horse, named Flem either on account of his breed or the wheezing sounds he made, or both.

I suppose this lighter mood was because we of the Chamberlain’s were going about our lawful trade once more, while the only thing that London had to offer us at present was a constraint on that trade or its complete cessation. We had the prospect of gainful employment, of appreciative audiences and new surroundings. What player wouldn’t be glad and excited?

The city of Oxford was our destination and we reached it after five overnight stops, coming up from the south through Wallingford and Abingdon and averaging twelve or so miles a day. I’ve walked faster as well as further in a single day but we were in no great hurry to arrive, and the journey had a touch of holiday about it.

Oxford! This great city of learning was unknown to me, but several of my fellows were familiar with it and talked of its fine old buildings and quick-witted young inhabitants. Although there was a tradition of playing, at least among the students, no playhouse had yet been erected. In fact, some ancient regulation actually forbade students to attend public performances of plays, although I imagined they would pay as much attention to that as young people pay to most regulations.

Anyway we were due to perform a medley of dramatic pieces – titles to be announced – in the yard of a tavern situated in the town centre. The Golden Cross was a handsome inn approached via a large courtyard with a gallery running round it. This would certainly do as a makeshift theatre. Temporary seats for the gentry were easily installed in the gallery and the penny-payers could stand on the cobblestones in the yard. We would play on an elaborate dais at the inner end, while a handful of small storage rooms could be used for dressing areas and places to stow the effects, & cetera.

There were other benefits in our change of place. The Oxford authorities may have regarded players as vagabonds but they were reputedly less concerned about the lenten laws than their London counterparts, perhaps because the Puritans were not so powerful in the university city. In addition there would be no Privy Council breathing down our necks, on the lookout for seditious material.

However, apart from performing in front of the good citizens of Oxford, we had another commission to carry out, as I discovered after our arrival there. The only other time I’d been on tour was in the midsummer of 1601, almost two years before. Then a group from the Chamberlain’s had journeyed to Instede House in Wiltshire to stage
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
in celebration of a noble wedding. The play had come off well enough but the wedding had not come off at all. Murder and other tragedies intervened and everyone was caught up in the affair, like it or not.
*

Now, our current business in Oxfordshire also had to do with a prospective marriage but the circumstances of this one were very different from those surrounding the Instede match (or non-match).

A mile or so beyond the northern boundary of the city lies the village of Whittingham, and between the village and the old city walls live two families, almost side by side. They are neighbours without being particularly neighbourly. The Constants and the Sadlers are not grand people – or not very grand anyway – but they are proud and prickly. They are proud of their name and their possessions. They are prickly over any attempt to diminish either. As with many neighbours there has been a falling-out over land. Or, more precisely, over a useless strip of marsh which is too sodden to graze on, too brackish to drink from and not deep enough to keep fish in. This patch of land doesn’t even lie between their two houses but at some distance, to the south-east of the city in Cowley Marsh. The dispute over the title to this bit of bog goes back generations.

This quarrel has never flared into real violence although each side has taken the other to law again and again. To no one’s benefit except the lawyers’ since the families have spent a hundred times more in court than the patch of land is worth. Generally an uneasy peace exists between the Constants and the Sadlers but they have never quite been on comfortable terms. In the bad old days there was nearly a duel between the heads of the two families, the winner to take possession of the bog (with the loser probably left to rot in it – those were the bad old days, after all). But good sense prevailed or cowardice or fear of the law, and the dispute has grumbled on ever since although with periods of truce.

The oldest son in the Sadler household is a student called William. Among the Constants there is a daughter called Sarah. They hadn’t seen each other for many years, William Sadler and Sarah Constant, not since they played together as children during one of the truces between the two families. Well, when the oldest son and the oldest daughter met for the first time since childhood on neutral ground, the almost inevitable happened. Whatever the coolness between their elders, William and Sarah had been drawn to one another; had apparently continued to meet as often as they could although in secret, knowing that their parents might be displeased; had liked, loved, & cetera; had determined to marry; had even thought of elopement; but had finally confessed their mutual feelings to their mothers and fathers.

Now, this story of old feuding families and young lovers, one from each side, may sound familiar to you. It’s probably happened often enough in history, and William Shakespeare used it in his tragical story of
Romeo and Juliet
, one of the Chamberlain’s Company’s most successful pieces. Our audiences can’t get enough of attractive youth just as they can’t get enough of doom and destruction. When you put both together you’re guaranteed a crowd-pleaser. But they say that life imitates art, and it was in the attempt to avert a real tragedy, if only in potential, that we were preparing to don our costumes and put on a private performance of the tale of the young lovers.

I heard all of this – the story of the Constants and Sadlers – from an authoritative source. It was told to me by William Shakespeare himself soon after the Chamberlain’s Company had arrived in Oxford.

We junior and middling players had installed ourselves in the Golden Cross Inn, where we were to perform and where we were also being accommodated at half-rates for the duration. Our lodgings were nothing special, being a couple of large chambers at the rear of the inn, set aside for groups. But the welcome was warm. The landlord, a man called Owen Meredith, had greeted us in person. Some of the more senior members of the Company had made their own arrangements, having friends in the town and even in the colleges.

It was early evening. Dusk was thickening. I had wandered out into the town for a brief look around this great centre of scholarship, this famous Athens of England – without, to be honest, seeing any marks of higher intelligence or nobler thought in the faces of people than I was used to seeing in London (that is, not much) – when I ran across Master Shakespeare, looking all trim in a silk doublet. He had not accompanied us from London to Oxford but had travelled down instead from Stratford-on-Avon where he lives, or rather where his family does.

WS invited me to join him for a drink as night fell. So now we, William Shakespeare and Nicholas Revill, were sitting and drinking together in a tavern, not the Golden Cross Inn but another one on the same side of the wide street known as Cornmarket, in fact bang next door to the Golden Cross. Shakespeare told me he was lodging in this place, which was called simply the Tavern, as if the man who’d baptized it had simply run out of invention. The Tavern, a solid house on two floors with twin gables, wasn’t so different from other similar establishments on Cornmarket and seemed to me to have nothing much to recommend it over the Golden Cross (where we might at least have got cheaper drinks). I wasn’t sure why Shakespeare had chosen to drink here, let alone to sleep in one of their beds. However, when your company is requested by a man who is both your employer and a senior shareholder in your work-place, you usually fall in with his wishes.

While we sipped at our pint pots – WS being as deliberate, as careful a drinker as yours truly – he told me about the Constant and Sadler families, and about the young lovers, Sarah and William. Since his tone implied personal knowledge, I asked how he had come across them.

“We have a friend in common, Hugh Fern, who is a physician in this town. He was brought up in Warwick but he moved to Oxford about the same time as I quit Stratford for London. Once he wanted to act but he turned doctor instead. It was in his house that William Sadler and Sarah Constant first met, that is met for the first time since they were children. You could say that Doctor Fern brought them together.”

“Did he mean to bring them together?” I said, slightly surprised that WS had chosen to impart all this information, not just about the feuding families and the physician called Hugh Fern but also, in a glancing way, about himself. I don’t think I’d ever heard him say anything about his personal circumstances before.

“Mean to bring them together? Well, I suppose Hugh is a little like Cupid,” said Shakespeare.

“He had Venus for a mother?”

“His mother was rather plain, God rest her,” said Shakespeare. “No, Hugh is like Cupid in looks. I don’t think he’d be offended if I said that, no. He has plump enough cheeks, and a mischievous glance sometimes, and he used to hunt with bow and arrow when he was young. We used to hunt together. Shooting harts with horns rather than
hearts
with an ‘e’ . . . ”

He paused to see whether I’d got the joke but, being familiar with his style of humour, I just made a grimace, so he carried on, “Of course we were not permitted to shoot harts or anything else.”

He paused to see how I was taking this admission that he’d once poached deer. I was a little surprised but struggled not to show it (and so most likely did show it).

“Anyway,” continued the poacher turned playwright, “when it comes to people in love or those who might be, only a fool would attempt to bring them together, and Hugh Fern’s no fool. He has Sarah Constant’s best interests at heart too for he is Sarah’s sponsor, her godfather.”

I waited for WS to enlighten me as to why it was foolish to make matches for would-be lovers – since I was always ready to gather up the crumbs of wisdom dropped from his table, even if I could have left his puns to grow cold up there – but we were interrupted by the appearance of a doleful man, who stood looking down at us.

“Master Shakespeare,” said this person. His voice matched his appearance, subdued and gloomy. “What are you doing here?”

“I am a guest of yours, staying in one of your rooms,” said WS. “And if you mean what are we doing now, then we are innocently drinking, John Davenant. How are you?”

“Could be worse.”

But his look seemed to say, not much worse.

“Business is good,” said WS.

The tavern called the Tavern was full, and there were plenty of clamouring customers and much coming-and-going by the drawers and pot-boys, but this gentleman shrugged his shoulders.

“Could be better,” he said.

“Landlords are like farmers,” said WS to me. “They would find fault with a summer in paradise.”

“I heard your company of players was in town, my wife told me,” said Davenant, who I assumed was the owner of this place. “My beds are no worse than my beer. If
you’re
staying here why doesn’t the rest of your Company stay here?”

“Oh, your beds are more than good enough for me, Jack. But when it comes to the whole Company, it’s because we are playing
next
to here,” said Shakespeare, jerking his thumb in the direction of the Golden Cross further up Cornmarket. “We stay where we play, if it’s possible.”

“You’ll draw all my trade,” said this dolorous host.

“Nonsense, Jack. You know perfectly well that for every citizen who loves plays there’s another one who can’t stand them.”

“So?” said Davenant.

“So,” said Shakespeare, “all the regulars who normally go to the Cross and can’t abide plays will come a few yards down the road to you. And they’ll drink your beer and wine, and drink it all the faster because they won’t be distracted by somebody spouting verse.”

“Miserable sods,” said Davenant. I wasn’t sure whether he was describing those citizens who didn’t like plays and would therefore come flocking to his inn or the Chamberlain’s players who had chosen not to lodge with him. In fact the description best fitted himself.

“I promise you, Jack, that when we come back to Oxford, we’ll put up with you.”

“Put up with me, that is good of you,” said Davenant, but he seemed slightly mollified by the promise.

“This is Nicholas Revill,” said WS, perhaps to divert the conversation into a different channel. “Nicholas, this is John Davenant, whose fame is spread far and wide throughout Oxfordshire.”

I muttered something about his being famous for being a tavern host, no doubt, but WS was quick to correct me.