Fools and Mortals

‘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.