Fools and Mortals

The trumpeter sounded his flourish more often, each cascade of notes being greeted by a cheer from the gathering crowd. ‘Remind me what jig we’re doing today?’ Henry Condell asked.

‘Jeremiah,’ Will Kemp answered.

‘Again?’

‘They like it,’ Will said aggressively.

George Bryan was shivering in a corner of the room. Not shivering with cold, but nervousness. One leg twitched uncontrollably. He was blinking, biting his lip, trying to say his lines in a low voice, but stuttering instead. George was always terrified before a play, though once on the stage he appeared the soul of confidence. Richard Burbage was stretching in another corner, loosening his arms and legs for the acrobatics to come, while Simon Willoughby, resplendent in an ivory-panelled skirt and with his hair piled high and hung with glass rubies, swirled back and forth in the tiring room’s centre until Alan Rust growled at him to be still, whereupon Simon sulkily retreated to the back of the room, sat on a barrel, and picked his nose. My brother came down the stairs, evidently from the office where the money boxes were taken to be emptied. ‘Seven lordlings on the stage,’ he said happily. It cost sixpence to sit at the stage’s edge, so the Sharers had just earned three shillings and sixpence from seven hard stools. I was lucky to earn three shillings and sixpence in a week, and soon, when the winter weather closed the playhouse down for days at a time, I would be lucky to earn a shilling.

Jean, our seamstress, shaved me. It was my second shave that day, and this one, with cold water, stung as she scraped my chin, upper lip, cheeks, and then my hairline to heighten my forehead. She used tweezers to shape my eyebrows, then told me to tip my head back. ‘I hate this,’ I said.

‘Don’t be a fusspot, Richard!’ She dipped a sliver of wood into a small pot. ‘And don’t blink!’ She held the sliver over my right eye. A drop of liquid fell into my eye, and I blinked. It stung. ‘Now the other one,’ she said.

‘They call it deadly nightshade,’ I said.

‘You’re being silly. It’s just juice of belladonna.’ She shook a second drop into my left eye. ‘There. All done.’ The belladonna, besides stinging and making my vision blurry for a time, dilated my pupils so that my eyes seemed larger. I kept them closed as Jean covered my face, neck, and upper chest with ceruse, the paste that made my skin look white as snow. ‘Now the black,’ she said happily, and used a finger to smear a paste of pig’s fat and soot around my eyes. ‘You look lovely!’

I growled, and she laughed. She took another pot from her capacious bag and leaned close. ‘Cochineal, darling, don’t tell Simon.’

‘Why not?’

‘I gave him madder because it’s cheaper,’ she whispered, then smeared my lips with her finger, leaving them red as cherries. I was no longer Richard, I was Uashti, Queen of Persia.

‘Give us a kiss!’ Henry Condell called to me.

‘Dear sweet God,’ George Bryan muttered, and bent his head between his knees. I thought he was going to vomit, but he sat up and took a deep breath. ‘Dear sweet God,’ he said again. We all ignored him, we had seen and heard it before, and knew he would play as well as ever. My brother held a breastplate to his chest and let Richard Burbage buckle the straps.

‘There should be a helmet too,’ my brother said, shrugging to make the newly buckled breastplate comfortable. ‘Where’s the helmet?’

‘In the fur chest,’ Jean called, ‘by the back door.’

‘What’s it doing there?’

‘Keeping warm.’

I climbed the wooden stairs to the upper room where most of the costumes and the smaller pieces of stage furniture were stored, and where the musicians were tuning their instruments. ‘You look lovely, Richard,’ Philip, who was the chief musician, greeted me.

‘Put your lute up your arse,’ I told him, ‘and give it a twist.’ We were friends.

‘Give us a kiss first.’

‘Then give it another twist,’ I finished. I peered through the balcony door. The musicians would play on the balcony that afternoon, and a tabour player was already standing there. ‘Nice big audience,’ he told me, then tapped his drumsticks on the tabour’s skin, provoking a cheer from the crowd below.

I turned back into the room and climbed the ladder to the tower roof. I was clumsy in my long dark skirts, but I hoisted them up and slowly mounted the rungs. ‘I can see your arse!’ Philip called.

‘You lucky musician,’ I said, then clambered through the trapdoor onto the platform, where Will Tawyer the trumpeter stood.

Will grinned at me. ‘I was waiting for you,’ he said. Will knew I would join him, because climbing to the rickety platform before a performance was my superstition. Every time I played in the Theatre I had to climb the tower. There was no reason I knew of, except a firm belief that I would play badly if I did not struggle up the ladder in my heavy and cumbersome skirts. All the players had their superstitions. John Heminges wore a hare’s foot on a silver chain, George Bryan, in between his shivering and twitching, would reach up to touch a beam in the tiring room ceiling, Will Kemp would force a kiss on Jean, the seamstress, while Richard Burbage would draw his sword and kiss the blade. My brother tried to pretend he had no ritual, but when he thought no one was looking, he made the sign of the cross. He was no papist, but when he was challenged by Will Kemp, who accused him of kissing the filthy arse of the Great Whore of Babylon, my brother had just laughed. ‘I do it,’ he explained, ‘because it was the very first thing I ever did on a stage. At least, the very first thing that I was paid to do on a stage.’

‘And what part was that?’

‘Cardinal Pandulph.’

‘You were in that piece of crap?’

My brother nodded. ‘First play I ever performed. At least as a paid player. The Troublesome Reign of King John, and Cardinal Pandulph was forever crossing himself. It signifies nothing.’

‘It signifies Rome!’

‘And does your kissing Jean signify love for her?’

‘God forbid!’

‘You could do worse,’ my brother had said, ‘she works hard.’

‘Too hard!’ Jean had overheard the conversation. ‘I need someone to help me. One woman can’t do everything.’

‘She can try,’ Will Kemp growled.

‘Bleeding animal,’ Jean said under her breath.

The superstitions, whether it was climbing the tower, making the sign of the cross, or kissing the seamstress, were hardly meaningless, because we all believed that they kept the devils away from the playhouse; the devils that made us forget our words or brought us a sullen audience or made the trapdoor in the stage stick, which it sometimes did after damp weather.

I stood for a moment longer on the tower’s platform. A breeze gusted, fretting the red-crossed flag on its pole above us. I looked south and saw there was no flag and no trumpeter on the Curtain playhouse, which meant they were not even presenting a beast show on this fine afternoon. Beyond the empty playhouse, the city was dark beneath its ever-present smoke. I flinched as Will Tawyer blew another fanfare to rouse the groundlings, who dutifully cheered the sound. ‘That woke them up,’ Will said happily.

‘It woke me up too,’ I said. I stared north, past the tower of Saint Leonard’s church, to the green hills beyond the village of Shoreditch where cloud shadows raced across woods and hedges. The noise of the audience rose from the yard and galleries. The playhouse was almost full, which meant the Sharers would have six or seven pounds in coins this day, and I would be paid a shilling.

I clambered down the ladder. ‘Do you have a ritual?’ I asked Phil.

‘A ritual?’

‘Something you must do before every performance?’

‘I look up your skirts!’

‘Besides that.’

He grinned. ‘I kiss Robert’s crumhorn.’

‘Really?’

Robert, Phil’s friend, raised the instrument, which looked like a shepherd’s short crook. ‘He kisses it,’ he said, ‘and I blow it.’

The other musicians laughed. I laughed too, then went down the stairs and saw Isaiah Humble, the bookkeeper, pinning a paper by the right-hand stage door. ‘Your entrances and exits, masters,’ he called, as he always did. We all knew our entrances, but it was comforting to know the list was there. It was even more comforting to see Pickles, the playhouse’s bad-tempered cat, waiting by the same door. Everyone using that door had to touch Pickles to keep the demons at bay and if Pickles lashed out with a spiteful claw and drew blood, that was regarded as an especially good omen.

‘I need a piss,’ Thomas Pope said. He always needed a piss before a play.

‘Piss in your breeches,’ Will Kemp growled, as he also always did.