Mistress Shakespeare (35 page)

My insides cartwheeled. For a price Anne Hathaway was giving up emotional claims to her husband. “I see,” was all I could manage and that in a shaky whisper.

“I hope you do. I was so guilt-ridden about Hamnet’s loss. She was afraid I would blame her, while I thought the opposite. My girls were glad to have me stay a bit, and I came to know them not as children, but as blossoming young women whom I shall return to see when I can—them and my elderly parents in any Stratford house, small or spacious.”

Did
he know his daughters? I wondered. I should tell him of Susannah’s visit, but I could not bear to break the bond between us.

“But the Burbages said you haven’t been able to write,” I countered. “You must write, for therein lies your future and your fortune.”

“I had trouble writing there—without you. Anne, though I will no doubt go back again, the mother of my children and I have decided to live quite separate lives now, as if we haven’t done so all these years. But I knew I could write again when I saw you, only I wanted to choose the time and place—to see if—if you would take me back one more time—one last time, as it were. Losing someone so dear to me, I realized how precious you are. I was told you had moved here and I was coming to call before Ellen Burbage said I’d find you here in the theatre with my friends.”

He crushed me to him so hard I almost couldn’t breathe. Strangely, then, I saw in my mind’s eye his Susannah’s pinched face and heard her voice telling me to stay away from him. But I could no more do that than stop breathing—and if he didn’t loose me just a bit, that’s what I’d do.

Despite the Burbages’ pain and the possibility I’d have no place to live again, despite all the dear ones I’d lost and Will’s griefs too, here was our home and happiness.

 

 

 

Like an invading army,
we were going to steal the Theatre from Shoreditch: we planned to tear it down, move it across the river to Southwark and rechristen it as the Globe!

Three days after Christmas in 1598, in this dangerous endeavor, I joined Will, the Burbage brothers, Richard and Cuthbert, and their elderly mother, for their father had died last year. Other key players of the Lord Chamberlain’s company came too, John Heminges, Will Kemp, Augustine Phillips and Thomas Pope, for without a theatre, they would have to split up and work for others, and they’d become fast friends.

It was bitter cold and snowing heavily; the Thames, our escape route, was starting to ice up. But we were undaunted because we were desperate. The Burbages had been forced to give up use of the Blackfriars Theatre and had managed to lease it to the Children of the Chapel Royal company, though, as owners, they kept the building itself. That, at least, meant I didn’t have to move again. As for the Theatre, the lease had run out and the landlord, Giles Allen, intended to dismantle the playhouse and keep the valuable timber, despite the fact that the lease stated that the Burbages could “take down any building they had erected.” At least we stood on legal if not safe ground.

Unannounced during the holiday season, with a dozen workmen headed by our hired carpenter, Peter Street, we approached the Theatre just after the gray dawn birthed a thick white sky. Besides carting in wrecking tools in our hired wagons, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men carried daggers and swords at the ready, lest we meet with opposition.

Though we’d hired two barges, I’d contacted many of the wherrymen Maud and I had sold scented cushions to years ago. They too would be lined up along the wharf to take piles of timber and our band of bold people across to Southwark. There, when the rough weather abated, we would erect the Globe playhouse close to that shifty Henslowe’s Rose—and then another battle would begin.

“Ho, he’s got armed guards there—two of them, at least, damn his hide,” Richard whispered to us and motioned us back. “Kemp, go on up and distract them while Will and I sneak around behind so we can scare them off or tie them up without a fight.”

My stomach knotted, but I knew better than to protest that Will, their precious playwright, could be harmed, for he hated being coddled. Lately, he’d been pouring out plays, amazingly light comedies like
Much Ado About Nothing
and
As You Like It
, though both of those reflected moments of great personal loss. He’d even agreed to do a humorous work requested by the queen,
The Merry Wives of Windsor
, because she favored the boisterous character of Falstaff from an early history play and wanted to “see him fall in love.”

I’d held my breath to see what Will would come up with for Her Majesty, though he seemed only hell-bent on making money for himself and his fellows. He’d spent a tidy sum also to apply for a Shakespeare coat-of-arms to please his father and Anne Hathaway and to buy what he called New Place for his family in Stratford. Though it needed repairs, it was a fine, large home that had once belonged to the town’s most prominent family, the Cloptons. The bridge had been built by them and so named, and they also left a spacious country home outside of Stratford. It was as if Will were paying Anne off. At least, things between him and me had seldom been better, though we knew not to outright live together.

I alone knew he still had black moments of the soul from missing his son. He’d recently read me a scene he was adding to his history play,
King John
, a poignant speech that read, I recall, in part:

 

However hard he worked to forget his woes, the ghost of Will’s child was ever with him, the spectre of one loved and lost.

Then too, he sometimes stumbled over his own feet in the street when he saw a boy who reminded him of Hamnet. In writing more sonnets, he seemed obsessed with the youth his son could have become. Will had vowed to me that he would dedicate all his sonnets to W.H.—Will’s Hamnet—if he ever got them published. He’d also shared with me some earlier, angry sonnets he’d written, referring to me as the Dark Lady, from times he was jealous of me with other men. This included his patron the Earl of Southampton, who’d been out of the country for years, fighting foreign wars with his friend Lord Essex—both of whom slid in and out of favor at court for their hot-tempered ways. Right now, I could only pray we did not have a domestic war with hot tempers clashing here in the snow in Shoreditch.

Still, I couldn’t help myself from trying to keep Will safe. “Richard,” I whispered as Kemp strolled toward the two guards, “Will’s hand’s been cramping again, and if he hurts it—”

“Just so he doesn’t hurt his head,” he whispered back, “for I know you are his sounding board and his right hand indeed. Stay back with my mother so neither of you is harmed.”

The feisty Ellen Burbage and I were to keep the men fed from the supply wagon and to paint numbers on the dismantled timbers so the Globe could more easily be rebuilt from them. When Richard and Will sneaked around and took the guards’ weapons, I stayed back, but I did manage to trip one of the men who scrambled away and began throwing stones.

Flushed with success with the oaf sprawled at my feet, I took a bow as the entire group of men—even to the carpenter’s assistants—stopped and applauded me. Kemp swaggered over to sit on the lout and later ran him off, though we thought the guards might try to summon help. Without constables in this area, we had no fear of being stopped by the authorities, so it was only a question of Giles Allen coming in with hired hands to fight us.

Despite tearing down the building in which we had all invested our time, hopes and dreams, we were a happy, hardworking crew. Will winked at me as he passed, dipping out a mug of cider from a pot we had heated over a fire.

“The Globe’s a much better name,” he told me, as if we’d been discussing it just now again. “The works we enact there will encompass all of mankind and every place. England, Italy, Denmark—I have an idea for one set on a magical island in the New World . . . Brrr, I shall make it a hot, tropical setting.”

His voice trailed off in the noise as timbers were wrenched apart and piled in the wagons that clattered down to the river. But by noon the first day, despite the thickening snow, Philip Henslowe showed up with a sputtering Giles Allen in tow.

“I’ll sue you!” Allen, a short, fat man, shouted at Richard Burbage before Henslowe could speak. Allen shook his fist; he was red as a pippin from either his ire or the cold weather. “You’re beating down the grass under all this snow, and that’s yet my property. I’ll sue for that!”

Everyone laughed at that threat, even Henslowe.

“I don’t believe,” Will said to Allen, “that even clown Kemp could have come up with a better line to lift our spirits. Sued over bent grass—that’s a good one. I hope you won’t sue me if I use it in a comedy someday.”

“However,” Henslowe shouted, wiping the smile from his face and pointing his finger to enter the fray, “all of you merry men—and women too—will regret it, if you try to put this—this ramshackle place near my Rose. We don’t need two theatres there.”

“Quite right,” Will replied. “We need but one there, which is what will be left after we open our doors. One will conquer, I promise you—perhaps the one with all the new plays.”

“Leave off and just plain leave, Henslowe!” Richard added, coming forward with a wrecking claw in his hands. “You took us for a pretty penny when we tried to get our pawned costumes back and kept some for your own actors, so now we’ll just get some of that money back, eh? Keep working, men!”

And work they did—we all did. We had never been more exhausted or cold—or felt so renewed and hot with happiness. That time we joined hands and hearts to birth the Globe—but for when little Kate came into the world—was one of the best days of my life.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

“Anne, come down here, will you?”
Richard Burbage cried, windmilling his arm as I checked the top tier of gallery seats at the Globe to be sure their cushions were all accounted for. I looked over the railing at him. He stood at the edge of the stage, which thrust out into the pit where up to a thousand standing groundlings could pack in for a penny, while a total of two thousand cushioned seats were in the three elevated galleries.

“What’s amiss?” I called down. Since I stood in a shaft of sun from the thatch-edged roof opening, I had to squint to see him well. Despite the sunshine, it was winter, so the breeze off the river was brisk. His voice carried well; the cries of seagulls soaring overhead did not mute his words.

“Ned Kinnon can’t be found, and we’ll need a book holder in an hour. You know the play well enough, and we’re in over our heads, putting it together this fast.”

I instantly began to sweat, and not just at the idea of managing the backstage for this impromptu performance of one of Will’s previous plays,
King Richard II
. Like all his work, I knew it well and had even written part of it from his dictation when his hand spasms were bad. But this whole idea of a special presentation for the earls of Essex and Southampton when the city might explode around them in rebellion scared me stiff.

“Will you do it?” Richard asked. “We’ll make a mess of it without a prompter. As King Richard of this group of actors, I command it of you.”

I smiled at his lame jest, nodded and hurried down the stairs. The forty-shillings payment the earls had offered was not to be sniffed at, however much of a success the Globe and Will’s plays had been these last two years. Will was a full partner in the company of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, who had built and operated this renamed and reborn theatre. The Burbage family held half the shares; others, including Will—actually with some of my money invested too—each owned one-tenth of the endeavor.

Profits were up but costs were too, and we never knew when the plague of the Black Death or the plague of Puritans could close London’s theatres. Now I feared the rumored Essex rebellion might come down on our heads and harm the company’s good standing with the queen.

Will and I had had a terrible row over that three days ago when his longtime patron Southampton had requested a privy performance of this play for Essex and his friends.

“You know they want it played because of the abdication scene!” I had protested. “Essex and his rabble—”

“Southampton’s hardly rabble!” he’d insisted. “Of all people, you know that. You’ve seen the interior of his coach, his country home. You’ve worn his cousin’s costly clothes, enjoyed his hospitality and company, even privily.”

I had frowned at his mocking tone, crossed my arms over my breasts and glared at him, daring him to go off into one of his jealous rages again, for my spleen was up too. And he knew full well there had been nothing sexual between Southampton and me. He was just in a foul mood, maybe worried his patron would get in trouble, bucking the queen. After what had happened to his uncle Arden years ago, I could understand that, but he’d been impossible lately, as if he were going through some middle-aged rebellion or crisis.

I’d leaned against the wall as if steadying myself to take him on. The solid old house where we had faced each other stood on the corner of the new Globe property. The Lord Chamberlain’s Men used it for additional prop storage and the overflow of their tiring room costumes and wigs. Will used it to write and sleep in sometimes, but he also stayed with me at Blackfriars off and on besides keeping a rented room with the Mountjoy family, wig makers, in Silver Street. Will’s favorite brother, Edmund, now twenty-one, had come to town to try his hand at acting, and Will had put him up on Silver Street. Will had told Edmund he must make his reputation on his own, not at the Globe where Will and Richard ran everything, so the boy had obtained a job at the Curtain north of town. Edmund had created all sorts of new concerns for us, but I shall address those later.