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‘Um …’
‘Christ on his silver-painted cross! If I ever hear the word “um” on this stage I will kill! I will kill! What’s your goddamned line?’
‘“Proceed, Solinus, to procure my fall and by the doom of death end woes and all.”’
‘End our woes. Christ grant us that blessing! And to whom are you speaking? Pray tell me?’
‘The duke.’
‘The duke! So why are you wandering like a constipated goose to the front of the goddamned stage? The duke is there!’ He pointed to my brother, who was standing on the right-hand side of the stage.
‘The speech …’ Pallant began weakly.
‘I’ve read the goddamned speech,’ Rust snarled. ‘It took a week of my life, but I read it! God in His feather-stuffed bed, man! There isn’t time to watch you waddle as well as listen to the endless stuff. Say the words to the duke! This is a goddamned play, not a bleeding sermon in Saint Paul’s. It needs life, man, life! Start again.’
Alan Rust was new to the company. He had been playing with Lord Pembroke’s men, and James Burbage and my brother had persuaded the other Sharers to let Rust join us. ‘He’s very good,’ my brother had explained to the company, ‘and the audiences like him. He’s also very good at staging. Have you noticed?’
‘No,’ Will Kemp said. He alone among the Sharers had opposed Rust, suspecting that the newcomer had a character as forceful as his own. Kemp had been out-voted, and so Rust was here to tell us what to do on the stage; where to move, how to say the words, how to do all the things that previously the Sharers had squabbled about. They still squabbled, of course, but Rust had imposed some order on the chaos.
‘Jesus on his jakes,’ Rust now shouted at Robert Pallant, ‘what in Christ’s name are you doing?’
‘Going towards the duke,’ Pallant said hopefully.
‘You move like a constipated nun! If you’re moving,’ Rust spoke from the yard where the groundlings stood to watch the plays, ‘then for Christ’s sake move! And talk at the same time! You can do that, can’t you? Go back to the duke’s last line. What is it?’ he demanded of my brother, who played Duke Solinus.
‘“Well, Syracusian, say in brief …”’ my brother began.
‘In brief? Jesus in a rainstorm! Brief? The speech is longer than the book of Genesis! And you,’ he pointed at me, ‘what are you smiling at?’
‘Simon Willoughby just farted,’ I said.
‘At least that’s more interesting than Egeon’s speech,’ Rust said.
‘I did not fart!’ Simon squealed. The rest of us wore our usual clothes, but little Simon had put on a long skirt for the rehearsal. He flounced towards the front of the stage. ‘I did not!’
‘Can we proceed, gentlemen?’ Rust asked sourly.
So we did, but slowly. I was sitting at the edge of the stage because I would not be needed for some time. I was playing Emilia, wife to Egeon. It was not a large part, my words scarcely filled a sheet of paper, but we had not performed the Comedy for some weeks, and I had forgotten many of the lines. ‘“Most mighty duke,”’ I kept saying to myself, trying to relearn the words, ‘“behold a man much wronged!”’
‘Go and mutter somewhere else,’ Rust snarled at me, ‘somewhere I can’t hear you.’
I went to the lower gallery, where I had talked with James Burbage. There were at least a score of people already in the gallery because the Sharers never minded folk watching the rehearsals. There were the girlfriends of some of the players, two boyfriends, and a happy gaggle of girls from the Dolphin. The Dolphin is a fine tavern which sells ale, food, and whores, and the girls earned a few pence more by selling hazelnuts to the groundlings before each performance, and then earned shillings by climbing to the galleries and selling themselves. Three of them were now giggling on the front bench, and they gave me coy looks as I settled just behind and above them. Jeremiah, the sour old soldier who guarded the front door, was fond of the girls, and had given them each a small bag of hazelnuts that they cracked under their heels while Robert Pallant laboriously told the story of his shipwreck.
The tale had always seemed most unlikely to me. Egeon, the merchant, had been at sea with his wife, his twin sons, and twin boy servants, when the ship had hit a rock and they had all been thrown into the stormy waves, and the wife, one son, and one servant had drifted one way, while Egeon, with the other son and servant, had drifted the other. It took Pallant forever to tell the story. I closed my eyes, and a moment later a voice said, ‘Open your mouth.’
‘Hello, Alice,’ I said, without opening my eyes.
‘Nut for you,’ she said. I opened my mouth, and she put a hazelnut on my tongue. ‘Are you a girl again?’ she asked.
‘I’m a woman. An abbess.’
She tucked her arm through mine and nestled into me. ‘Can’t see you as an abbess,’ she said. It was chilly, but at least it was not raining. ‘But you do look lovely as a girl,’ she went on.
‘Thank you,’ I said, as ungratefully as I could.
‘You should come and work with us.’
‘I’d like that,’ I said, ‘but what happens when some bastard lifts my skirts?’
‘Just roll over, of course,’ she said.
‘Your hands will be tied behind your back,’ Rust shouted at poor Pallant, ‘so don’t gesture!’
‘Does he find his wife again?’ Alice asked me.
‘I’m his wife,’ I said, ‘and yes. He finds me at the end of the play.’
‘But you’re an abbess! How could an abbess be married? They were nuns, weren’t they?’
‘It’s a long story,’ I said.
‘But he does find her?’
‘He does,’ I said, ‘and his long lost son too.’
‘Oh good! I was worried.’
She was sixteen, perhaps fifteen or maybe seventeen, a slight girl from Huntingdonshire, with very fair hair, a narrow face, squirrel eyes, and a weak chin, but somehow the parts added up to a delicate beauty. She could play an elf, I thought, or a fairy, except the surest way to rouse the fury of the Puritans was to put a girl on the stage. They already accused us of being the devil’s playthings, purveyors of evil and the spawn of Satan, and if we did not have the protection of the Queen and of the nobility, we would have been whipped out of town on hurdles long ago.
‘It’s so sad,’ Alice said.
‘What’s sad?’
‘That he was shipwrecked and lost his wife.’
‘It’s poxy stupid,’ I said. ‘If they’d all drifted, they’d have drifted in the same direction.’
‘But it didn’t happen that way,’ she protested. ‘Poor old man.’
‘Why don’t you go home?’ I asked her.
‘To the Dolphin?’
‘No, to Huntingdon.’
‘And milk cows? Churn butter?’ she sounded wistful. ‘I was shipwrecked. So were you.’
‘By my bastard brother,’ I said vengefully.
‘By my bastard lover,’ she echoed. She had been seduced by a charming rogue, a man who wandered the country selling buttons and combs and needles, and he had enticed her with a vision of a happily married life in London, and the silly girl had believed every word only to find herself sold to the Dolphin, in which she was half fortunate because it was a kindly house run by Mother Harwood, who had taken a liking to the waif-like Alice. I liked her too.
Hoofbeats sounded in the outer yard, but I gave them no thought. I knew we were expecting a cartload of timber to make repairs to the forestage, and I assumed the wood had arrived. I closed my eyes again, trying to remember my second line, then Alice uttered a small squeal. ‘Oooh, I don’t like them!’ she said and I opened my eyes.
The Percies had come.
There were five Pursuivants. They strutted through the entrance tunnel, all dressed in black, with the Queen’s badge on their black sleeves, and all with swords sheathed in black scabbards. Two stayed in the yard, while three vaulted up onto the stage and walked towards the tiring room. ‘What the hell are you doing?’ Alan Rust demanded.
They ignored him, going instead into the tiring room. The two remaining Percies stood in the yard’s centre, and Rust turned on them. ‘What are you doing?’
‘The Queen’s business,’ one snarled.
They turned to look around the Theatre, and I saw the two men were twins. I remember thinking how strange it was that we were rehearsing a play about two sets of twins and here was the real thing. And there was something about the pair that made me dislike them from the first. They were young, perhaps a year or two older than me, and they were cocky. They were not tall, yet everything about them seemed too big; big rumps, big noses, big chins, with bushy black hair bulging under their black velvet caps, and brawny muscles plump under their black hose and sleeves. They looked to me like bulbous graceless bullies, each armed with a sword and a sneer. Alice shuddered. ‘They look horrible,’ she said. ‘Like bullocks! Can you imagine them …’
‘I’d rather not,’ I said.
‘Me too,’ Alice said fervently, and made the sign of the cross.
‘For Christ’s sake,’ I hissed at her, ‘don’t do that! Not in front of Percies.’
‘I keep forgetting. At home, see, we had to do it.’
‘Then stop doing it here!’
‘They’re horrible,’ Alice whispered, as the twins turned back to stare at the girls from the Dolphin. They sauntered towards us. ‘Show us your tits, ladies,’ one said, grinning.
‘They’re not ladies, brother,’ the other said, ‘they’re meat.’
‘Show us your tits, meat!’
‘I’m leaving,’ Alice muttered.
The girls fled through the back, and the two young men laughed. The players, all but my brother and Will Kemp, had retreated to the edges of the stage, unsure what to do. Kemp stood at the stage’s centre, while my brother had followed the Percies into the tiring room. The twins strolled towards the stage and saw Simon Willoughby in his long skirt. ‘He’s a pretty boy, brother.’
‘Isn’t he?’
‘Are you a player?’ one of them demanded of Simon.
‘Show us your duckies, pretty boy,’ the other one said, and they both laughed.
‘Give us a treat, boy!’
‘What,’ Will Kemp demanded belligerently, ‘are you doing here?’
‘Our duty,’ one of the twins answered.
‘The Queen’s duty,’ the other one said.
‘This playhouse,’ Rust said grandly, ‘lies under the protection of the Lord Chamberlain.’
‘Oh, I’m terrified,’ one of the twins said.
‘God help me,’ the other said, then looked at Simon, ‘come on, boy, show us your bubbies!’
‘Leave!’ Kemp bellowed from the stage.
‘He’s so frightening!’ One of the twins pretended to be scared by hunching his shoulders and shivering. ‘You want to make us leave?’ he demanded.
‘Oh, I will!’ Alan said.
One of the twins drew his sword. ‘Then try,’ he sneered.
Alan Rust snapped his fingers, and one of the men who had been guarding the prisoner Egeon understood what the snap meant and tossed Rust a sword. Rust, who was standing close to the bulbous twins, pointed the blade at their smirking faces. ‘This,’ he snarled, ‘is a playhouse. It is not a farmyard. If you wish to spew your dung, do it elsewhere. Go to your unmannered homes and tell your mother she is a whore for birthing you.’
‘God damn you,’ the twin with the drawn sword said, but then, just before any fight could begin, the right-hand door opened and two of the three Percies who had evidently searched the tiring room came back onto the stage. One was carrying clothes heaped in his arms, while the second had a bag, which he flourished towards the twins. ‘Baubles!’ he said. ‘Baubles and beads! Romish rubbish.’
‘They are costumes,’ Will Kemp snarled, ‘costumes and properties.’
‘And this?’ the Pursuivant took a chalice from the bag.
‘Or this?’ His companion held up a white rochet, heavily trimmed with lace.
‘A costume, you fool!’ Kemp protested.
‘Everything you need to say a Romish mass,’ the Pursuivant said.
‘Show me the nightgown!’ the twin whose sword was still scabbarded demanded, and the Percy tossed down the rochet. ‘Oh pretty,’ the twin said. ‘Is this what papists wear to vomit their filth?’
‘Give it back,’ Alan Rust demanded, slightly raising his borrowed sword.
‘Are you threatening me?’ the twin with the drawn blade asked.
‘Yes,’ Rust said.
‘Maybe we should arrest him,’ the twin said, and lunged his blade at Alan.
And that was a mistake.
It was a mistake because one of the first skills any actor learns is how to use a sword. The audience love combats. They see enough fights, God knows, in the streets, but those fights are almost always between enraged oafs who hack and slash until, usually within seconds, one of them has a broken pate or a pierced belly and is flat on his back. What the groundlings admire is a man who can fight skilfully, and some of our loudest applause happens when Richard Burbage and Henry Condell are clashing blades. The audience gasp at their grace, at the speed of their blades, and even though they know the fight is not real, they know the skill is very real. My brother had insisted I take fencing lessons, which I did, because if I had any hope of assuming a man’s part in a play I needed to be able to fight. Alan Rust had learned long before, he had been an attraction with Lord Pembroke’s men, and though what he had learned was how to pretend a fight, he could only do that because he really could fight, and the twins were about to receive a lesson.
Because by the time the second twin had pulled his blade from its scabbard, Alan Rust had already disarmed the first, twisting his sword elegantly around the first clumsy thrust and wrenching his blade wide and fast to rip the young man’s weapon away. He brought the sword back, parried the second twin’s cut, lunged into that twin’s belly to drive him backwards, and then cut left again so that the tip of the sword threatened the first twin’s face. ‘Drop the rochet, you vile turd,’ Rust said, speaking to one twin while threatening the other, and using the voice he might have employed to play a tyrant king; a voice that seemed to emerge from the bowels of the earth, ‘unless you want your brother to lose an eye?’
‘Arrest him!’ one of the twins called to the Pursuivants. His voice was pitched too high, too desperate.
Just then the last of the Pursuivants came from the tiring room, his arms piled with papers. They were our play scripts that had been locked in the big chest on the upper floor. ‘We have what we want,’ he called to his companions, then frowned when he saw the discomfited twins. ‘What …’ he began.
‘You have nothing,’ my brother interrupted him. He looked angrier than I had ever seen him, yet he kept his voice calm.
For a heartbeat or two no one moved. Then Richard Burbage and Henry Condell both drew their swords, the blades scraping on the throats of their scabbards. ‘Not the scripts,’ Burbage said.
