Shakespeare's Rebel (55 page)

Then he told her. And when he had finished, and she’d still said yes, and just after they kissed, he raised his face into the now fast-falling snow and howled like a mastiff in a bear pit.

XLI

The Prince

The Globe playhouse. 2 April 1601

He’d thought himself too old a dog to be caught by such a trick.

How had it happened that he, John Lawley – an actor since he was younger than Ned – had been snared like any other groundling by such conjuring? When he knew the guile and the dodge of it – the artifice behind each gesture, the effort under the effortlessness of the players’ every speech? He had always been able to distil the alchemy of the whole into its separate elements: verse and action, costume, music and scenery and the tricks by which the best players in the world took inked words from a page and sent them into the world as feeling.

He knew precisely what it was they did. He had done it often enough himself. Yet this day and from the very beginning – when a man upon a battlement hissed in terror, ‘Who’s there?’ – John knew that this was different from anything he’d ever experienced, upon a platform, or before one.

It was the first performance of
The Tragedy of Hamlet
.

He had chosen not to read any of it, though Will had offered. He had considered only what he needed for his work. The players, Dickon Burbage and Bill Sly, had brought their characters to the fight and he left those to them. His desire was only to see the play as everyone else did, experience it as they did, for the first time.

Hard though it was, he looked away now from the stage, down to the people in the pit, along the centre gallery where he and Tess sat, above to the others. Three thousand of his fellow Londoners crammed into this thatched O under a spring sun which, due to the specific siting of the platform, warmed sections of them as it traversed the sky while leaving the platform largely in shade and the players upon it shadows within that shade. They’d come for entertainment, sure; but they’d come also for release after a month of Lenten restriction.

And the Lord Chamberlain’s Men gave them that, with he and Tess as freed as any there. Caught by a ghost story, held by a family story, moved by a love story, by ambitions thwarted and obligations unfulfilled. Disturbed by a revenge drama that would not follow the customary course. Disturbed above all by this man standing there and asking them all – truly asking them, not telling them – why me? Why should I? What does it mean? What does my life matter, my duty, my honour, when I am this pitiable fellow, crawling between silent heaven and a noisy earth?

It helped that the man asking the questions was Richard Burbage. Yet a Burbage different than John had ever seen him, allowing that velvet voice to be shredded by the fate thrust upon him. It helped that the questions were framed by the playwright in a way he’d been seeking to frame them for years, experience, skill and his life combining now like alchemy, turning all the metals to gold.

Only for the brief moment when George Bryan began to speak the gravedigger’s lines that Will had offered to him did John wish he’d accepted and was a part of it – until he remembered he was. For he was bound like everyone else upon the scaffold, above it, before it; a congregation caught in holiness, in devilry – and in something else too.

For there
were
fathers and sons, whatever the playwright had denied. The day quaked with them: Will’s, for he acted the prince’s dead parent; John’s, for Ned entered, upon the stage and into the spirit, as caught and held as any. He’d known his boy to have some skills. He’d taught him some of them. Yet this, today, was beyond all tricks and practice; and when Burbage made an extraordinary speech questioning his very existence, that John could not remember a word of afterwards, only the feeling of desolation that it left, and when that desolation was doubled as Hamlet spurned his lover, spurned John’s son, he felt again that rare prickle in his eyes. And he was not alone, it seemed. For the duration of the speech and scene, beyond it, those in the pit, in the galleries, barely moved, scarcely breathed. No bottle of ale popped, no cockle shell crunched under shifting feet.

It was not all sadness, though. This was a play by players – and about players too. A stage above a stage. And if Kemp’s foolery was gone, the prince’s bitter wit set the audience on a roar, undercutting the tragedy, releasing them for a moment only to enmesh them ever deeper.

On the platform, in the playhouse, there was rapt attention on a girl sent mad. Ned did not shed any tears – and so everyone else did. Resting his head upon his arms, John stared at his son, trying to discern with what bricks Ned had built the portrait, the props under the structure . . . and could not. His son had done what fine players did – taken the life he had seen, then released it as something newly discovered. He had become a fine player himself.

And for those who sought it, there were politics too – not least the scheming counsellor who sought to control everything. And when he died for his schemes, John smiled, hearing the audience gasp – for the style of the scene was a late addition to the piece Will had been working on so long, one as recent as two weeks before and the Earl of Essex’s attainder at Westminster Hall. All London had heard the story – how Cecil had hidden to overhear proceedings . . . behind an arras. How he had burst forth to counter one of Essex’s allegations. And after the gasp, many in the theatre that day cheered the stage fate of the eavesdropper, stabbed behind his arras.

A father and a child died – there, that day in London, that day in the realm, that day in everyone’s lives. All who’d lost them did so again; and when both these were buried hugger-mugger, with rituals curtailed, as the Church in England demanded, many there felt that loss of ritual keenly, and mourned again.

They needed release. And so the skilful playwright gave it to them. Gave them a fight.

Tess gripped him now, as the challenge for the fencing match was announced. She knew what had taken him early each morning from their bed this last week since the players returned, with both Burbage and Sly prepared to work harder on this part of the play than usual. She knew that even John’s fights followed a customary pattern, designed largely to thrill. But mere custom would not serve here.

John leaned again upon the rail, the spectator gone now, the participant engaged.

As the weapons were carried out, a thrill ran through the audience. Bill Sly’s Laertes, in breastplate and steel gauntlet, chose a rapier – the audience hissing because all knew he’d already anointed it with poison to make certain his revenge – then added a dagger. Burbage’s Hamlet made a show of studying what was on offer – before crossing to Marcellus with a cry of delight and drawing forth the man’s backsword.

‘This likes me well,’ he said.

Tess reached to squeeze John’s arm. ‘Is this what I think?’ she asked. ‘The hero fights with sword and buckler against the villain’s rapier and dagger?’

‘Is he the hero? Does he fight a villain?’ John shrugged. ‘Aye, he’ll fight the English against the foreigner. Native tradition against alien import. The old against the new . . .’

‘ . . . my lord of Essex against all who brought him down,’ she finished for him, then looked at him hard. ‘Oh, John. Even in a fight, do you and Will play at politics?’

‘Nay, love, it is just a fight. Mark it.’

She did, along with the audience. There was surprise, and not just in the choice of weapons. The old play of Hamlet did not end with a bout of fencing but with bloody vengeance. All bent to it, eyes wide.

The players made him proud, were better than they’d ever been. And if there was the drama of the play within the fight, with its double-cross and poisonings, there were also the pure skills themselves. Old principles trumped the new techniques, backsword and buckler overcame rapier and dagger. Chivalry vanquished the modern – and yet succumbed anyway, as nobility will, to treachery.

The fight was over. The stage was covered with bodies. Hamlet summoned up the strength to say, with his dying breath, ‘The rest is silence.’ And John slumped back, as spent as if he had fought.

From one scaffold to another, he thought. It was not Robert Devereux who lay dead – his head was near picked clean of flesh by the crows on London Bridge not a quarter of a mile away. Those few who knew him as well as John did also knew that he had not the capacities and intellect of Shakespeare’s Prince of Denmark. And yet? When a conqueror came at the end and claimed the throne, his words, almost the last of the play, honoured the recently slain. Both of them.

For he was likely, had he been put on,
To have been proved most royal.

A sigh ran through the playhouse at that. The bodies were removed, the play ending in loud shot. Yet if the audience was hoping for a jig to conclude, they were mistaken. Kemp’s days were gone. A new age was upon them.

Through the curtains came Shakespeare. Still dressed as the father’s ghost – Hamlet’s, his own, all dead fathers – he held something white against his belly. Yet it was only when he laid it down, and as slowly departed, that all there saw what it was.

The skull. A skull spiked on London Bridge. Everyman’s skull, resting now at the centre of a scaffold.

The Spoon and Alderman was crammed that night, though the doors were closed to the public and held by a large Irishman of soldierly bearing, one Captain St Lawrence. On John’s suggestion, he’d been the first man hired by the new landlady – a former lady-in-waiting to the Queen.

Sarah had left the royal circle, lured by a note John had sent her – in a moment of inspiration prompted by the guilt of a memory: his deceiving shake of the head when he had sent her back to Cecil with word that Essex would not rise. She had swiftly gathered enough gold to put a down payment on the inn, its brewery and furnishings – acquired how, only she knew best, though John suspected that a certain Master Secretary had supplied much of it, recognising the potential for information to be obtained from a popular inn, especially one frequented by those shapers of opinion, the players.

He watched Sarah now, paused at a table; Burbage had his lute out, wooing her with a song. The tune ended, roars and applause greeting it, love’s object departing to fetch more ales. She was not losing out in her first night in trade by not admitting all, for the place was filled with the denizens of the Globe, their friends and family. Sarah would learn what many a publican knew – actors drank more than almost anyone else, so to draw a regular crowd from the playhouse was to guarantee a profit. He watched her circle with tankards on her arm. Saw her pass Burbage a leathern bottle. Knowing what was in it, John licked his lips.

‘Look.’ Tess had appeared at his elbow and took it, pointing. Ned was in a corner, playing hazard. He was on point, and rolling. He must have hit it, for he let out a cry of triumph, and snatched up the winnings. ‘As in the father, so the son?’ she enquired.

‘Mercy on him, I hope not.’

‘Nay, sir, but have you fared so very poorly?’

He looked at her, smiled, shook his head. Taking all in all, and especially after these last two years – which, on consideration, were no more nor less hazardous than any other pair in his life – indeed he had not.

He turned again to study the crowd; noted the quips exchanged, the bursts of laughter, the detailed discussion of moments in the performance. They were remaking the play here, stitching together the whole from each man’s experience – and woman’s too, for wives and lovers were also there, adding what they’d seen and felt. It was already being woven into memory, the first performance, changing it from what it was, which could not be truly known, and certainly never recaptured. It was both the joy and the sadness of the art, the passing play. Yet there was joy in that too – for the next time they ventured it, something new would again be born. Different, perhaps as exciting, perhaps even more so.

He sighed. And then? he wondered. There would other plays. Will had some left in him, John suspected; while in this tavern he had the finest company of actors to play whatever he next chose to write.

Tess was studying him. ‘Join them, my love,’ she said. ‘Enjoy the night.’

John looked around. He knew almost everyone there, would be welcomed in any circle. But he was outside them all now. Despite his fight, he was not truly part of the ritual nor its aftermath. ‘Sweet,’ he said, ‘the tide will soon be turning. Shall we upon it?’

‘Will you say your farewells?’

‘Nay. I hate them. Always have.’

‘To Ned at least?’

‘What is left to say? Borrow the speech of Gus Phillips tonight: “To thine own self be true”?’ He shook his head. ‘He is playing that. And living it. You say goodbye from us both. Tell him we will see him when we return at Michaelmas to collect our rent. I will await you outside.’

‘As you command . . . husband,’ she said with a smile, and moved away.

He watched her thread between the players, many bowing as she passed. Even when she was mistress here, she’d had the ways of a lady. And now she was one . . .

Smiling, John took one last look around the room, then went to the door. St Lawrence had a headlock on a large drunk and looked like he was happy in the work. John slipped past the fracas. He truly did hate farewells, and he was still bruised from the slaps of gratitude the Irishman had already given him.

It was crowded upon the street, so he stepped into the shadow of the alley to watch and wait. The pace in Southwark scarcely slackened, but on the first day after Lent, whorehouses, cockpits and gambling hells were packed with a frenzied crowd, and every tavern, inn and ordinary was fuelling the excess.

Smoke wreathed his nostrils. He looked up, saw a swirling circle of it pass from the alley. The gentle voice confirmed all. ‘Will you miss it, do you think?’

The only man who needed his farewell was behind him. ‘Now and again, surely,’ he said, not turning, ‘Yet not often nor for long, I suspect.’

Shakespeare emerged and passed the pipe across. John took it, sending his own rolling coil out upon the still night air. For a time that was all they did – smoking, refilling, competing, pluming the night with intertwining circles. Until Will spoke. ‘I could not leave it. I have taken new rooms here now, hard by.’ He lifted his face into the air, like a hound, scenting. ‘All the better to fill my senses with it.’