Shakespeare's Spy

La Voisin stared into the ball for a long while. Finally she spoke, in a tone so bleak and ominous that it made me shudder. “I see,” she said, “that you will come into a fortune.”

Sam’s face took on a look of surprise and indignation. “That’s the same thing you told
me
!”

“Not so,” said La Voisin. “What I said was, ‘You will receive more money than you imagine.’”

“That’s the same thing, isn’t it?” When the cunning woman made no reply, he fished out another coin and clapped it into her palm. “Tell mine again.”

“As you wish.” While she peered into the ball, I sat weighing the words she had directed at me. A fortune? How could I possibly come into a fortune? I could hardly inherit it. My mother had died in the poorhouse, and I had no notion who my father was.

La Voisin lifted her head but said nothing. “Well?” Sam prompted her.

“You are certain you wish to hear it?”

“Of course. What is it? What did you see?”

The cunning woman turned toward him, and I caught for the first time a glimpse of her visage. The skin of her face was as thickly covered with warts as a pox’s victim’s is with scars. “I see that you will turn traitor.”

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O
f all the dozens of tasks a fledgling actor is called upon to perform, surely the two most difficult are dying and falling in love.

As a prentice with the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, I was called upon to do both, sometimes on a daily basis. Not in earnest, of course; I was expected only to approximate them. This is not as simple as it may sound. I could feign sadness well enough, or fear, or loneliness, for growing up an orphan as I did, I had known more than my share of such things. But my experience with love and death was more limited. Though I did my best to persuade the audience that my groans of mortal agony and my melancholy, heartbroken sighs were real, they always seemed to me to lack a certain conviction.

Most of the stories we acted out were rife with romance, but in our ordinary lives it was sadly absent, and no wonder. Since women were not permitted to appear upon the stage, all the parts were played by men and boys. As a result, I seldom came
in contact with anyone of the fairer gender, aside from Goodwife Willingson—who kept house for my mentor, Mr. Pope—and Tetty, a young orphan girl who lived with us.

Foul murders and duels to the death were also an important part of our repertoire. But, though we spent several hours each day hacking at one another with stage swords, either in practice or in performance, our lives were seldom truly in peril. Unless he fell victim to the plague, the worst a player could ordinarily expect was that he would misjudge his position and tumble off the edge of the stage, into the arms of the groundlings.

But Fate cares little about our expectations. In the winter of 1602, the Lord Admiral’s company were performing
Palamon and Arcyte
at the royal court when the stage, hastily built and loaded down with heavy scenery, suddenly collapsed. Five of the actors were injured and three were crushed to death.

Now, if the truth be told, there was no love lost between our company and theirs; in fact, in the ongoing struggle for ascendancy in the world of London theatre, the Admiral’s Men were our chief rivals. Still, not one of us would have wished such a calamity upon them. Though they might be the enemy, they were also fellow players, and we were saddened and sobered by the tragedy—especially when we considered that we might easily have been its victims, instead. Only a week before, we had presented Mr. Shakespeare’s play
The Merry Wives of Windsor
upon those same treacherous boards.

Fortunately for the Admiral’s Men—though not for us—all their principal players were spared, and within a fortnight they were once again competing with us for the playgoers’ pennies—and there were far fewer pennies than usual to go around that winter.

Ordinarily we played outdoors at the Globe Theatre right up until Yuletide, when we peformed at Whitehall for the queen and her court. But this year, winter had forgotten its cue and come on early. The groundlings were a hardy lot, willing to stand uncomplaining in the drizzling rain and the baking sun for hours on end, asking only to be rewarded with a bit of fine ranting, a reasonable number of laughs, and, from time to time, a limb or two being lopped off and a few guts spilled upon the stage. But we could hardly expect them to risk having their ears and toes bitten by frost for the sake of art.

So in the middle of December we had forsaken the Globe and begun performing indoors, in the long gallery at the Cross Keys Inn. Though the audience was grateful, we players were not. The Cross Keys lay on the north side of the Thames, a long, cold walk from Southwark, where most of the company lived. The smaller confines of the inn meant smaller profits as well; no matter how tightly we packed them in, we could accommodate only half the number of playgoers that the Globe held.

In January, the royal court made a move of its own, from the damp, drafty palace at Whitehall to warmer quarters upriver at Richmond. It was there that we gave our second command performance of the season for the queen.

We were always a bit anxious when appearing before Her Majesty. After all, it was mainly thanks to her that the London theatre managed to flourish as it did. Without her support and protection, we would be at the mercy of the Puritans, who insisted that the stage was a breeding ground of sin. If something about the play displeased her—and, according to her master of revels, she had lately become even more difficult to please than usual—she might be more inclined to listen to the mounting protests of the Square Toes, and let them close us down.

We had worried very little about how
Merry Wives
would be received, for it was an old favorite of Her Majesty’s. In fact, Mr. Shakespeare once told me that he had written it at her behest. After seeing
Henry IV
, she was so taken with the character of Sir John Falstaff that she insisted he must have a play of his own.

Our second show,
All’s Well That Ends Well
, had no such favorable history. Mr. Shakespeare had composed it only the previous summer, while we were on tour to escape the plague. Thanks to a broken arm, he had been forced to dictate most of it; I had put the words on paper for him, using my system of swift writing. Though the script had been approved by Mr. Tilney, the master of revels, and given a trial run at the Globe, the queen would be seeing it for the first time.

For my part, I was seeing the palace at Richmond for the first time. A year earlier, I had performed in the banquet room at Whitehall, playing Ophelia in
Hamlet
, and been awed by its magnificence. The great hall at Richmond was even larger and more lavish. When we entered, Sam, the youngest of the prentices, gave a low whistle. My other companion, Sal Pavy, glanced about with a rather bored expression, as though he were wholly accustomed to playing such places.

“Widge.” Sam elbowed me and pointed upward. I followed his gaze. The entire ceiling was covered in great billows of muslin, painted with fanciful figures representing the constellations of the night sky. “I hope they fastened that up there really well,” said Sam. “If it lets go, we’ll all be smothered.”

Perhaps,” I said. “But I’m more concerned about the stage.” Mr. Tilney’s men had constructed a platform for us at one end of the hall. The three-foot-high trestles that supported it looked far too flimsy and widely spaced to suit me, especially
considering the amount of furniture, properties, and painted backdrops the Office of Revels felt was necessary for the production. “I don’t ken why we must ha’ so much stuff. We did well enough at the Globe wi’ naught but a few chairs.”

Sam shrugged. “Perhaps royal folk don’t have much imagination.”

“Well, I like it,” put in Sal Pavy, rather haughtily. “We always had elaborate sets at Blackfriars.”

Sam groaned and rolled his eyes. Sal Pavy had said this same sort of thing so often about the theatre at Blackfriars, where he had belonged to the company called the Children of the Chapel, that it had become a standard jest. Sam would surely have had some choice comment to offer had not Mr. Armin, our fencing master, called out just then, “If you’re quite done gawking, gentlemen, there are costume trunks to be carried in.”

One thing I had learned about royalty, in my few brief encounters with them, was that they kept later hours than us ordinary wights. Because our stage was in the banquet hall, we could not begin our performance until after supper—a meal that did not commence until eight o’clock or so, and might drag on for hours.