Ruled Britannia (17 page)

News of the play on King Philip's life raced through the company like wildfire.
Who will stop the vent of hearing when loud rumor speaks?
Shakespeare thought with sour amusement.
He, from the orient to the drooping west, doth unfold the acts commenced on this ball of earth, stuffing the ears with false reports
. He wished this report were false.

Will Kemp sidled up to him, still carrying the skull he'd use while playing the gravedigger come the afternoon performance. “You'll give me some words wherewith to make 'em laugh, is't not so?” he said, working the jawbone wired to the skull so that it seemed to do the talking.

“Be still, old bones,” Shakespeare said.

Kemp tossed the skull in the air and caught it upside down. That only made its empty-eyed leer more appalling. “Philip's such a pompous, praying, prating pig, any play which hath him in't will need somewhat of leavening, lest it prove too heavy for digestion.” The clown's voice became a high, wheedling whine.

“Here is the first I've heard you care a fig for the words I do give
you,” Shakespeare said tartly. “It were better that those who play own clowns speak no more than is set down for them.”

Kemp's flexible face twisted into an expression so preposterous, even Shakespeare couldn't help smiling. “But Master William, my dove, my pet, my chick, my poppet,” the clown cooed, “the pith of't it is, as I've said aforetimes, the groundlings laugh louder for my words than for yours.”

“I pith on you and the groundlings both.” Shakespeare stood with his legs spraddled wide, as if easing himself. Will Kemp gaped at him.
Forestalled, by God!
Shakespeare thought.
You were about to make your own pissy quibble, and looked not for the like from me
. He added, “The Devil take your laughs when they flaw the shape of
my
play, as
I've
said before. Hear you me now?”

“I hear.” Kemp looked angry, angry and ugly. He started to say something more, then spun on his heel instead—for a big, bulky man, he moved, when he chose, with astounding grace—and stalked away.

Another caring more for himself than aught else
. Shakespeare sighed. It was either sigh or weep from despair.
Someone will sell us to the Spaniards. Sure as Pilate's men nailed Jesu to the rood, someone will think first of thirty pieces of silver and not of all of England. Someone—but who?

He wouldn't be burned alive, not for treason, or most of him wouldn't. They would haul him to Tower Hill on a hurdle, and hang him till he was almost dead. Then they'd cut him down and draw him as if he were a sheep in a shambles. They'd throw his guts into the fire while he watched, if he was unlucky enough to keep life in him yet. That done, they would quarter him and display his head and severed limbs on London Bridge and elsewhere around the city to dissuade others from such thoughts and deeds.

He shuddered. That was English law; Elizabeth had used Catholics who plotted against her thus. For all he knew, the Spaniards had worse punishments for traitors.

Somebody tapped him on the shoulder. He jumped and almost screamed. “I humbly do beseech you of your pardon, Master Shakespeare,” Jack Hungerford said. “I meant not to startle you.”

“My thoughts were . . . elsewhere,” Shakespeare said shakily, and the tireman nodded. Shakespeare gathered himself. “What would you?”

“Why, I'd ready you for your turn on stage, of course,” Hungerford replied, his eyes plainly asking,
How far off were your wits?
“The hour draws nigh, you know.”

“I'll come with you.” Shakespeare followed him as he'd lately followed too many men from whom he sooner would have fled.

Back in the tiring room, Hungerford was all brisk efficiency. He powdered Shakespeare's face and hands with ground chalk, then smeared black grease under his eyes for a skull-like effect. “Here, see yourself,” he said, and pressed a glass into Shakespeare's hand.

Shakespeare studied the streaky image the mirror gave back. “Am I more haggard than I was before?” he murmured.

Hungerford, perhaps fortunately, paid him no attention. The tireman was rummaging through the company's robes to find a smoke-gray one shot through with silver thread. “You'll have a care with this down under stage,” he said severely. “ 'Tis the sole habiliment we have fit for a royal spook. Smutch it, and the cleaning costs us dear.”

“I'll mind me of't.”

“Good. Good. You'd better.” Like any tireman worth his salt, Jack Hungerford cared more for his clothes and other properties than for the players who wore them. He thrust a polished pewter crown at Shakespeare. “See how't glisters like silver? There's not a ghost in all the world can match the Prince's father for finery.”

“I've no doubt you're right, Master Hungerford.” Shakespeare set the crown on his head. It was too small. He'd been playing the ghost ever since he wrote the tragedy, and had yet to persuade the tireman to get a crown that fit him.

Hungerford handed him a bowl full of shredded, crumpled paper. “Do you remember to set this alight just afore the trap door opens. 'Twill make a fine smoke wherewith to amaze the groundlings.”

“I shall remember,” Shakespeare promised gravely. “Do you recall in turn, I have played the role before. Do you further recall, I am he who devised it.”

The tireman only sniffed, as a mother might when her son insisted he was a grown man. However much he insisted, she would never believe it, not in her heart. Hungerford never believed players knew anything. The more they said they did, the less he believed it, too.

A rising buzz came from out front: the day's audience, hurrying into the Theatre. When Shakespeare stood to go to his place under the stage and await his cue to rise through the trap door, Jack Hungerford grabbed the bowl full of paper scraps and set it in his hand before he could reach for it. “See you? You would have forgotten it,” Hungerford said, triumph in his voice.

What point to quarreling with him? Shakespeare had bigger worries, swarms of them. “If you'd have it so, so it is for you,” he said wearily. The tireman stirred, about to speak again. Shakespeare spoke first: “By my halidom, Master Jack, I'll not forget me the candle to light it with.”

Hungerford nodded. By his expression, he couldn't decide whether Shakespeare had merely called him by his Christian name or had called him
a
Jack, a saucy, paltry, silly fellow. Since Shakespeare had intended that he wonder, the poet was well enough pleased.

He did make a point of remembering the candle. Hungerford would never have let him live it down had he forgotten after their skirmish. He also made a point of carrying it carefully, so he didn't have to come back and start it burning again.
Not out, brief candle
, he thought.
Light this fool the way through dusty gloom
.

He had to walk doubled over; had the stage been high enough to let him straighten up, it would have been too high to let the standing groundlings see the action on it. He peered out at the crowd through chinks and knotholes. He couldn't see much—the men and women in front blocked his view of those farther back. His ears told him more than his eyes could. It sounded like a full house, or something close, and it sounded like an enthusiastic one.

“It'll like thee well, Lucy,” said a man standing close enough to Shakespeare for his voice to be distinct among the multitude. “The Prince of Denmark, he feigns he's mad, so—”

“Go to, Hal!” Lucy broke in. “I've not seen it afore, and I shan't thank thee for spoiling the devisings.”

God bless you, Lucy. You're a woman of sense
, Shakespeare thought. He knew too many playwrights who were too fond of boasting of their machinations. He thought them fond in the other sense of the word, for their plays seemed insipid to him when he knew ahead of time everything that happened.

Footsteps on the boards above his head. Words heard dimly through thick wooden planks: the sentinels Bernardo and Francisco, talking of the night. Shakespeare hurried over to the little platform under the trap door. He lit the papers. They caught at once, and began filling the space under the stage with smoke. It tickled his nose and his throat. He fought against a cough.

Horatio and Marcellus came on. Francisco left, his boots thumping. Shakespeare cocked his head to one side, listening for his cue. His chalky fingers closed on the trap-door latch. Bernardo raised his voice
to make sure the waiting ghost heard: “. . . Where now it burns, Marcellus and myself, the bell then beating one—”

Shakespeare loosed the latch. Down swung the trap door. He'd made sure the hinges were well oiled, so they didn't squeal. Up he popped through the door, with a fine cloud of smoke around him. A woman shrieked, which made two more cry out in sympathy. If one screamed, others always followed. And he was good enough to make that first one scream.

He had no lines here, or in his next couple of appearances. He had but to stand, looking ominous and menacing, till his cue to stalk off, and then go below once more. One of the tireman's helpers crawled out to bring him another bowl full of bits of paper and a fresh candle. “You nigh gasted them out of their hose, Master Shakespeare,” he whispered.

“Good,” Shakespeare whispered back. “Get thee gone.” The tireman's helper went back the way he'd come. Shakespeare crouched in the smoke under the stage, fuming a little himself.
I'd best know how to frighten them with the ghost
, he thought.
If not I, then who?
He had failed once or twice: he'd been bad, or the audience had been bad, or who could say what had gone wrong? He didn't dwell on the failures. Every player had them, in every role. But he'd made the most of the part far more often.
And so I shall again today
.

He hadn't long to brood. The ghost appeared again in the first scene, and again vanished without a word. Then he appeared once more in the fourth scene of the first act. He was once more silent, but he beckoned to Burbage as the astonished Prince of Denmark.

The fifth scene was his. He had to vanish once more at the end of the fourth, then come back up on stage through a trap door closer to the tiring room. And he had his lines, urging the Prince to action against his murderous uncle. Shakespeare spoke them in a rumbling, echoing voice that might indeed have come from beyond the grave. Gasps and a couple of muffled squeals told him his words and looks were striking home. He remembered to use the gesture Burbage had liked during the rehearsal. The other player beamed. Shakespeare wasn't sure it really added anything, but it pleased Burbage and it didn't hurt.

“Adieu, adieu, adieu!” Shakespeare said. “Remember me.” He stretched the words out into something close to a wail, then sank through the trap door. By that time, the space under the stage was so full of smoke, it wasn't far from the sulphurous and tormenting flames to which the ghost said he must render himself up. He had a few lines from
below later in the scene, and then an appearance in the third act, where the Prince could see him but his mother could not. After that, eyes stinging, he retreated to the tiring room. “Have a care with the robe, Master Will, do,” Jack Hungerford said. “Here, sit you down. I'll get it off you.” Once the robe was safe, he added, “Well played. I've rarely seen you better in the part.”

“For which I thank you.” Shakespeare rubbed his streaming eyes. “ 'Swounds, give me a bowl of water, that I may wash away the smoke.” He coughed. Now he could, without marring the play.

“You'll take off the chalk with water, but not the black,” the tireman warned. “I have a cake of soap for that.”

“Give it me, but plain water first.”

Shakespeare was drying his face on a grimy towel when Burbage took advantage of a scene where he wasn't on stage to go back and clasp his hand. Pointing to Shakespeare, he started to laugh. “With your paint half off and all besmeared, your aspect is more fearful now than ever before the groundlings.”

“I believe't.” Shakespeare turned to the tireman. “Where's that soap, Master Hungerford?”

He washed again, then dried himself once more. “Better,” Burbage said. “And the specter was as fine as you've ever given him.” He imitated the gesture he'd urged Shakespeare to use. “Saw you how the audience clung to your every word thereafter, you having drawn them into the action thus?”

Shakespeare had seen no such thing, but he didn't feel like arguing. Things
had
gone well, no matter why. That would do. “They did seem pleased,” he said.

“As they had reason to be. And now I needs must dash—I'm before 'em again in a moment.” Burbage clapped Shakespeare on the shoulder, then hurried back toward the stage.

In his shirt and hose, Shakespeare watched the rest of
The Prince of Denmark
from the wings. In his present mood, a scene just past pleased him most: the one where the Prince admonished the players to speak trippingly and warned the clowns against making up their own lines. He stood for every poet ever born.

After the play ended, Shakespeare came out in his own person to take his bows. He used the gesture he'd made while playing opposite the Prince to show the audience who he was. And Richard Burbage, always generous, waved to him and called out to the crowd, “Behold
the man whose play you saw!” That got him more applause. He bowed deeply.