Fools and Mortals

‘I might indeed,’ he agreed coldly. He wore a thick woollen cloak and a dark hat with an extravagant brim that shadowed his face. I look nothing like him. I am tall, thin-faced, and clean shaven, while he has a round, blunt face with a weak beard, full lips, and very dark eyes. My eyes are blue, his are secretive, shadowed, and always watching cautiously. I knew he would have preferred to walk on, ignoring me, but my sudden arrival in the ditch had forced him to acknowledge me and even talk to me. ‘Young Simon was excellent last night,’ he said, with false enthusiasm.

‘So he told me,’ I said, ‘often.’

He could not resist the smallest smile, a twitch that betrayed amusement and was immediately banished. ‘Dancing with the candle-stand?’ he went on, pretending not to have noticed my reply. ‘That was good.’ I knew he praised Simon Willoughby to annoy me.

‘Where is Simon?’ I asked. I would have expected Simon Willoughby to be with his apprentice master, John Heminges.

‘I …’ Heminges began, then just looked sheepish.

‘He’s smearing the sheets of some lordly bed,’ my brother said, as if the answer were obvious, ‘of course.’

‘He has friends in Westminster,’ John Heminges said, sounding embarrassed. He is a little younger than my brother, perhaps twenty-nine or thirty, but usually played older parts. He is a kind man who knows of the antagonism between my brother and I, and does his ineffectual best to relieve it.

My brother glanced at the sky. ‘I do believe it’s clearing. Not before time. But we can’t perform anything this afternoon, and that’s a pity.’ He gave me a sour smile. ‘It means no money for you today.’

‘We’re rehearsing, aren’t we?’ I asked.

‘You’re not paid for rehearsing,’ he said, ‘just for performing.’

‘We could stage The Dead Man’s Fortune?’ John Heminges put in, eager to stop our bickering.

‘Not without Augustine and Christopher,’ my brother said.

‘I suppose not, no, of course not. A pity! I like it.’

‘It’s a strange piece,’ my brother said, ‘but not without virtues. Two couples, and both the women enamoured of other men! Space there for some dance steps!’

‘We’re putting dances into it?’ Heminges asked, puzzled.

‘No, no, no, I mean scope for complications. Two women and four men. Too many men! Too many men!’ My brother had paused to gaze at the windmills across the Fields as he spoke. ‘Then there’s the love potion! An idea with possibilities, but all wrong, all wrong!’

‘Why wrong?’

‘Because the girls’ fathers concoct the potion. It should be the sorceress! What is the value of a sorceress if she doesn’t perform sorcery?’

‘She has a magic mirror,’ I pointed out. I knew because I played the sorceress.

‘Magic mirror!’ he said scornfully. He was striding on again, perhaps attempting to leave me behind. ‘Magic mirror!’ he said again. ‘That’s a mountebank’s trick. Magic lies in the …’ he paused, then decided that whatever he had been about to say would be wasted on me. ‘Not that it signifies! We can’t perform the play without Augustine and Christopher.’

‘How’s the Verona play?’ Heminges asked.

If I had dared ask that same question I would have been ignored, but my brother liked Heminges. Even so he was reluctant to answer in front of me. ‘Almost finished,’ he said vaguely, ‘almost.’ I knew he was writing a play set in Verona, a city in Italy, and that he had been forced to interrupt the writing to devise a wedding play for our patron, Lord Hunsdon. He had grumbled about the interruption.

‘You still like it?’ Heminges asked, oblivious to my brother’s irritation.

‘I’d like it more if I could finish it,’ he said savagely, ‘but Lord Hunsdon wants a wedding play, so damn Verona.’ We walked on in silence. To our right, beyond the scummed ditch and a brick wall, lay the Curtain, a playhouse built to rival ours. A blue flag flew from the staff on the Curtain’s high roof announcing that there would be an entertainment that afternoon. ‘Another beast show,’ my brother said derisively. There had been no plays at the Curtain for months, and it seemed there would be no play at the Theatre this afternoon either. We had nothing to perform until other players learned Augustine and Christopher’s parts. We could have performed the play we had presented to the Queen, except we had done it too often in the past month. Perform a play too often, and the audience is liable to pelt the stage with empty ale bottles.

We came to the wooden bridge that crossed the sewer ditch and which led to a crude gap in the long brick wall. Beyond the gap was the Theatre, our playhouse, a great wooden turret as tall as a church steeple. It had been James Burbage’s idea to build the playhouse, and his idea to make the bridge and pierce the wall, which meant playgoers did not have to walk up muddy Bishopsgate to reach us, but instead could leave the city through Cripplegate and stroll across Finsbury Fields. So many folk made that journey that there was now a broad and muddy path running diagonally across the open ground. ‘Does that cloak belong to the company?’ my brother asked as we crossed the bridge.

‘Yes.’

‘Make sure it’s returned to the tiring room,’ he said snidely, then stopped in the wall’s gap. He let John Heminges walk ahead, and then, for the first time since we had met at the ditch’s edge, looked up into my eyes. He had to look up because I was a full head taller. ‘You are going to stay with the company?’ he asked.

‘I can’t afford to,’ I said. ‘I owe rent. You’re not giving me enough work.’

‘Then stop spending your evenings in the Falcon,’ was his answer. I thought he would say no more because he walked on, but after two paces he turned back to me. ‘You’ll get more work,’ he said brusquely. ‘With Augustine sick and his boy sweating? We have to replace them.’

‘You won’t give me Augustine’s parts,’ I said, ‘and I’m too old to play girls.’

‘You’ll play what we ask you to play. We need you, at least through the winter.’

‘You need me!’ I threw that back into his face. ‘Then pay me more.’

He ignored the demand. ‘We begin today by rehearsing Hester,’ he said coldly, ‘we’ll only be working on Augustine and Christopher’s scenes. Tomorrow we’ll perform Hester, and we’ll play the Comedy on Saturday. I expect you to be here.’

I shrugged. In Hester and Ahasuerus I played Uashti, and in the Comedy I was Emilia. I knew all the lines. ‘You pay William Sly twice what you pay me,’ I said, ‘and my parts are just as large as his.’

‘Maybe because he’s twice as good as you? Besides, you’re my brother,’ he said, as if that explained everything. ‘Just stay through the winter, and after that? Do what you will. Leave the company and starve, if that’s what you want.’ He walked on towards the playhouse.

And I spat after him. Brotherly love.

George Bryan paced to the front of the stage, where he bowed so low that he almost lost his balance. ‘Noble Prince,’ he said when he recovered his footing, ‘according as I am bound, I will do you service till death me do confound.’

Isaiah Humble, the bookkeeper, coughed to attract attention. ‘Sorry! It’s “till death me confound”. There’s no “do”. Sorry!’

‘It’s better with the “do”,’ my brother said mildly.

‘It’s crapulous shit with or without the “do”,’ Alan Rust said, ‘but if George wants to say “do”, Master Humble, then he says “do”.’

‘Sorry,’ Isaiah said from his stool at the back of the stage.

‘You were right to correct him,’ my brother consoled him, ‘it’s your job.’

‘Sorry, though.’

George swept off his hat and bowed again. ‘Something, something, something,’ he said, ‘till death me do confound.’ George Bryan, a nervous and worried man who somehow always appeared confident and decisive when the playhouse was full, had replaced the sick Augustine Phillips. The rehearsal was to bind him and Simon Willoughby, who had replaced Christopher Beeston, into the play.

John Heminges acknowledged George’s second bow with a languid wave of a hand. ‘For a season we will, to our solace, into our orchard or some other place.’

Will Kemp bounded onto the stage with a mighty leap. ‘He that will drink wine,’ he bellowed, ‘and hath never a vine, must send or go to France. And if he do not he must needs shrink!’ On the word shrink he crouched, looked alarmed, and clutched his codpiece, which sent Simon Willoughby into a fit of giggling.

‘Do we go to the orchard?’ George interrupted Will Kemp to ask.

‘The orchard, yes,’ Isaiah said, ‘or some other place. That’s what it says in the text, “orchard or some other place”.’ He waved the prompt copy. ‘Sorry, Will.’

‘I’d like to know if it is the orchard.’

‘Why?’ Alan Rust asked belligerently.