Shakespeare's Scribe

“
There is something you might do for me,”
Mr. Shakespeare said.

“
Name it,” I said, assuming he meant for me to fetch him more brandy or the like
.

“
Have you ever taken dictation
?”

“
Dictation
?
You mean, writing down the spoken word
?”

“
Exactly
.”

“
Well … aye. Dr. Bright often asked me …” I paused. Now that I had a clearer sense of right and wrong, it embarrassed me to admit my past transgressions. “‘A was a clergyman as well as a doctor, you ken, and ‘a had me visit neighboring churches and copy down the sermons of other rectors
.”

Mr. Shakespeare seemed more amused than disapproving. “Steal them, in other words
?”

“
Aye
.”

“
And then Simon Bass had you steal my play.” He shook his head. “You've had ill luck in masters
.”

“
Until now,” I said
.

“Blackwood creates an amiably atmospheric world of rogues and players, villainy and virtue.”

—
The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books

OTHER PUFFIN BOOKS YOU MAY ENJOY

Brady
   Jean Fritz

Caleb's Choice
   G. Clifton Wisler

The Devil's Arithmetic
   Jane Yolen

The Ghost in the Tokaido Inn
   Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler

Jip: His Story
   Katherine Paterson

The Shakespeare Stealer
   Gary Blackwood

Tales from Shakespeare
   Shakespeare/Lamb

AUTHOR'S NOTE

Several readers of
The Shakespeare Stealer
, the book to which this is a sequel, have mentioned that they had some trouble sorting out what was fact from what was fiction. (I hope that means I made everything in the book seem real and not that it all sounded totally made up!) This time I'll try to make things easier by giving you, the reader, a better notion before you begin of which parts are a result of research and which are a product of the imagination.

There really was a Dr. Timothy Bright, and he really did devise a system of “swift writing.” In fact, that bit of information, stumbled upon purely by accident, was the seed from which
The Shakespeare Stealer
and its sequel grew. The passages of charactery in the books are as much like Dr. Bright's shorthand as I can make them.

With the exception of Widge and Jamie Redshaw, nearly all the characters who make up the Lord Chamberlain's Men are based on William Shakespeare's actual fellow players. Some, such as Alexander Cooke, we know nothing about except the name. Others, such as Richard Burbage and Robert Armin, were so well known that it's possible to get some idea from sixteenth-century sources of what they were like, at least onstage. William Shakespeare did have a younger brother, Edmund.

Salathiel Pavy was a member of the Children of the Chapel in reality, too, and was known for his ability to play old men's parts convincingly. All the plays mentioned in the book, whether written by Shakespeare or by someone else, were actual works of the period.

The bubonic plague was, of course, all too real. Spread in two ways—by fleas that fed on infected rats, then on humans, and by bacteria in the air—it had wiped out, by various estimates, one-fourth to one-half of the population of Europe in the fourteenth century, and regularly made a comeback. During the worst outbreaks, all public gatherings were banned. The epidemic described here actually reached its peak in the following year, 1603.

Shakespeare's

Scribe

Table of Contents

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About the Author

1

A
cting seems, on the face of it, a simple enough matter. It is, after all, but an elaborate form of lying—pretending to be someone you are not, committing to memory words set down by someone else and passing them off as your own.

I was an admirable liar. I had even lied myself into the most successful company of players in London, the Lord Chamberlain's Men. It stood to reason that I would be an admirable actor as well.

But I had since discovered that there is far more to performing than merely mouthing words in a lifelike fashion. A lad who aspires to be a player must be able to sing as sweetly as a nightingale, dance as gracefully as the Queen, change garments as swiftly as the wind changes, sword-fight as skillfully as a soldier, die as satisfyingly as a martyr, and learn an astonishingly large number of lines in a distressingly short time. And if he is less than competent at any of these skills, then he must be adept at dodging a variety of missiles aimed at him by an audience that is as easily displeased as it is pleased.

I have also heard it said that, to be a successful player, one must be at least partly insane. I have no doubt that this is true. What person in his right mind would willingly endure so many demands for so little reward?

Certainly anyone who found himself behind the stage at the Globe Theatre just before a performance would have readily subscribed to the insanity theory. In fact, a first-time visitor might well imagine that, rather than entering a playhouse, he had stumbled by mistake into Bedlam, London's asylum for the mentally deranged.

In my early days at the Globe, all the hurly-burly that preceded a performance had been overwhelming for a country boy like me. And even after a year's apprenticeship, it could still be unnerving if the level of activity was frantic enough—as it was, for example, on the afternoon when we opened a new production of
Richard III
, one of Mr. Shakespeare's early plays.

Several of the players were pacing about like caged cats, muttering their lines ferociously and somehow managing to avoid colliding with one another or with our dancing and singing master, who was practicing an intricate dance step. Mr. Pope, my mentor, was berating the man who was trying desperately to strap the old fellow into a boiled-leather breastplate that seemed to have grown too small to contain Mr. Pope's ample belly.

Mr. Heminges, the company's manager, was hastily repairing the curtain that concealed the alcove at the rear of the stage. It had been torn nearly from its hooks by our clod-footed hired man, Jack, as he struggled to put one of the heavy wooden royal thrones in its proper place. Meanwhile he and Sam, one of our apprentices, were attempting to wrestle the other throne down the stairs; the throne appeared to be winning.

“C-careful, gentlemen!” called Mr. Heminges. “D-don't d-damage the arms!”

“Which ones?” groaned Sam. “Ours or the throne's?”

I and my fellow prentice and closest companion, Sander Cooke, were in the relatively calm reaches of the tiring-room, getting into our costumes. The chaos outside did not concern me overly. I had learned that, like Mr. Heminges's stuttering, all trace of it would vanish once we were upon the stage. Then Mr. Shakespeare strode into the room, bearing a fistful of crumpled papers, which he held out to me. “Can you copy these out in the form of sides, Widge?”

Because of my skill with a pen, it was my job to copy out the sides, or partial scripts from which each actor learned his lines. I smoothed out one of the pages and peered at Mr. Shakespeare's deformed handwriting. “Aye,” I said. Under my breath I added, “An I can manage to decipher them.” The others in the company were fond of poking fun at the system of swift writing I had learned from my first master, Dr. Timothy Bright, calling it “scribble-hand,” but in truth it was scarcely more difficult to read than Mr. Shakespeare's scrawl.

I was about to tuck the pages inside my wallet, but Mr. Shakespeare waved an urgent hand at me. “No, no, it's to be done at once.”