Sleep of Death

ACT 1

‘You know the play?’

This was said with surprise. Players aren’t supposed to know plays, players are only supposed to know their parts.

‘I’ve seen it,’ I said. ‘Last month. You were magnificent. No flattery. I have said that to many others since then, before I am saying it to you now.’

Nerves were twisting my speech. What was intended as genuine compliment came out as clumsy buttering-up. And pompous, as well as patronising, considering I was talking to a man old enough to be my father.

Master Burbage shrugged but was graceful enough to smile.

‘I’ve played with the Admiral’s Men,’ I said, to change the subject. ‘Nottingham’s, I should say.’

‘The Admiral’s will do. That’s what they were on this side of the river. How do they do in the north of the town?’

‘Well enough,’ I said.

‘Tactful, Master Revill,’ said Burbage. ‘The audiences are different over there, more respectable — and more respectful — than our Southwark spectators. But the Admiral’s Men ran away when we appeared south of the river, essentially they ran away, although Henslowe would claim that it was purely commercial.’

‘Everything is commercial with Master Henslowe,’ I said.

‘All bearpits and brothel business, his enemies say,’ said Burbage.

‘Henslowe sees plays and playhouses as a good investment, nothing more. At least, that was my impression,’ I said, eager to make a good impression myself, and to cancel out something of the clumsiness of my earlier remarks. I didn’t really know how Henslowe saw things, but there was nothing wrong with running him down to curry favour with a business rival.

‘What is the most important part of the playhouse?’ said Burbage.

I hesitated before replying. This was undoubtedly what they call a ‘trick’ question, designed to catch out the young and naive. What is the most important part of the playhouse? The author? No; everyone knows that the author doesn’t matter. The flattering thing would be to refer to the company; no company, no play. The obvious answer would be to say the stage — no stage, no play either. A clever response might be to mention the seats, for though many spectators are happy to hand over their pennies and stand by the stage and smoke, the better classes pay more for their seats and the even better classes pay yet more for private boxes. With seating comes a discriminating audience, and a more sedate one. Instead, I plumped not for the flattering or the obvious or the clever answer, but the shrewd one. As I thought.

‘The tiring-house,’ I said, gesturing vaguely. We were sitting in a room adjoining the tiring-house.

For where would the players be without their place to change in, and to shelter between appearances? The tiring-house is where reality and illusion meet in perpetual conflict, or so I would go on to claim if Master Burbage was good enough to ask my reasons. The tiring-house is a magical cave of unending transformations, where a player becomes a king in the flick of a costume, and a king may become a beggar when he turns his cloak inside out and smirches his face. I waited for Burbage’s approval, to begin my rhetorical flight.

‘If you don’t mind my saying so, Master Revill,’ said Burbage, ‘that is a very stupid answer.’

‘The stage, I should have said.’

‘The part that matters,’ said Burbage, ‘is wherever the money is taken. That is the centre of the playhouse. That is why I would never join those who sneer at Master Henslowe for the way he makes his money, or how much money he makes or for his attitude to the making of money. In the playhouse, before you can make anything else, you must make money.’

Burbage’s reputation was unspotted. It was hard to think of him trading in whores and chained bears. He was happily married, wasn’t he, with a large number of children?

‘People cross the river in droves every day,’ said Burbage. ‘They come to see us, of course they come to see us. But they come also to see the bears and the bulls in the pits. They come to visit the stews and taste a different meat from what they get at home. In short, they want to see animals being tormented, men and women both, and the men, they want to exercise their pricks across the water. And sometimes they visit plays before or afterwards. The same people. So that is why I have never taken exception to the way in which Henslowe and Alleyn choose to make their money.’

‘I wasn’t,’ I began, ‘I didn’t mean. .’

‘Players are so contemptible,’ said Burbage, in a narrow fluting voice that had an echo of the pulpit in it, ‘that we might as well be whores. We show off what we have and people pay to watch us. What do they call us, “caterpillars of the commonwealth”, “painted sepulchres”?’

‘Puritans say that,’ I said.

‘Not only them. It is a commonly held view. Even so, we are crawling very slowly towards respectability, very slowly indeed. Why are you on stage then, in this despised popular business?’

‘I like showing off,’ I said without thinking. ‘I like being watched, I suppose,’ I said, more slowly.

‘Good, Master Revill,’ said Burbage. ‘I like that. Remind me of what you appeared in with the Admiral’s.’

‘I was in Robert, Earl of Huntingdon and a thing called Look About You. Small parts. .’

‘We must all start somewhere,’ said Burbage.

I said nothing; I had already said too much. A man slipped across the background of the room, and glanced curiously in my direction for a moment. He looked like Master Burbage, the same tapering beard, a similar brown gaze. I wondered if it was Cuthbert, brother to Richard Burbage and the one who managed the business. Burbage craned round in his chair and nodded, and then the man was gone. I must have looked a query.

‘Our author,’ he said. ‘He is the Ghost.’

Indeed there was something ghost-like about the other man’s manner of slipping into and then out of the room, something almost insinuating. Not Cuthbert Burbage therefore.

‘He is the Ghost in the play in question, the one we were talking about.’

‘I remember the ghost appearing, on the battlements,’ I said. “Angels and ministers of grace defend us!” I said.

‘Yes, it is a good beginning,’ said Burbage. ‘I cannot think when our, ah, congregation has fallen so quiet so soon at the start of things.’

‘And the ghost appears in the bedchamber too,’ I said, eager to show off my knowledge.

‘Indeed he does,’ said Burbage.

‘But only to Prince Hamlet, the Queen can’t see him. I wondered why that was.’

‘You’ll have to ask our author, even though I fear you’ll soon find yourself — like the rest of us — too busy for that sort of speculation,’ said Burbage. ‘To business. We may need you for two weeks. That is the time Jack Wilson is likely to be away. His mother is dying in Norwich and not quickly, he has been informed. He left early this morning.’

‘I will take on all his parts?’

‘Let me see. You’ll do the townsman in A City Pleasure and Cinna in Julius Caesar-’

‘Cinna the conspirator?’ I interrupted. Here was a part with a little weight.

‘Not Cinna the conspirator but Cinna the poet,’ said Burbage. ‘You appear and are promptly killed by mistake, to show the indiscriminate bloodlust of the mob. You will do the cobbler at the beginning of the same play and Clitus or Strato at the end, I forget which. The Roman play is two weeks away, when you will also have the part of Maximus in Love’s Sacrifice. Despite the name the part is rather small, I’m afraid. Now this week, you are to be a clownish countryman in A Somerset Tragedy — you can do the voice?’

‘Why, zur, ’tis where I was born. Zummerzet is the place of my naivety, you might say.’

‘Good,’ said Burbage. ‘Then at some point you must be a French count and an Italian Machiavel — but not in the same play.’

He raised a hand slightly as if to prevent my showing my mastery of a French or Italian accent.

‘And of course you will appear in the play about the Prince of Denmark this afternoon.’

‘As. .?’

‘Don’t worry, Master Revill, your parts are very small, you may grasp them in twenty minutes. You will appear in the dumb-show as the poisoner, and then again as the nephew to the King-’

I felt a tightness in my chest. My eyes swam.

‘But that is your. . I mean. . you are. .’

The nephew to the King! Everyone knows that is the principal part in the play! Master Burbage’s part. He wasn’t seriously expecting me to take his role, and anyway how could I? The scroll containing the lines would run across the floor of the room we were sitting in and then all the way up the wall to the ceiling! Hardly to be learned in twenty minutes even if I prided myself on the speed with which I could seize on a part. I was about to say something of all this when Burbage caught my panicked expression.

‘Ah I see,’ said Burbage. ‘No no, I don’t mean that nephew to the King, I mean the nephew to the King in the play inside the play. As such you are only required to come out, look dark, and rub your hands in glee. Essentially, you are repeating the process you enacted in the dumb-show a few moments earlier.’

‘I have lines?’

‘You unburden yourself of a handful of couplets and of the poison which you are carrying. You can play this badly because the murderer is intended to be gloating and obvious. In fact, the worse you play this part of nephew to the player King, the better. It takes skill to play badly. Deliberately badly.’

‘Oh,’ I said, obscurely disappointed, but also relieved.

‘Then you are interrupted by the King, the real King. He is naturally disturbed by what he sees on stage, on the stage which we are to imagine on the real stage, that is.’

‘I understand,’ I said, and I did, now that memories of the earlier performance I’d seen were returning crisper and clearer.

‘It doesn’t matter whether you understand or not,’ said Burbage. ‘You’re only a player. You take part but that doesn’t mean you have to know what’s going on.’

‘And what else do I have?’

‘An ambassador from England comes on at the end, you will recall. Ties up a few loose ends, tells us that a couple of people have been put to death, expresses general amazement at the scene of carnage which he’s stumbled into. I suggest you put on the kind of look you wore just now when you thought you were taking my part.’

‘At the end I don’t have the last word, do I? I don’t remember the ending of the play clearly.’

‘That is probably because you were rapt by the beauty or the wit of my own dying words as Hamlet. The last word of all goes to Fortinbras. He’s going to be the next King of Denmark.’

‘Ah yes,’ I said.

‘Fortinbras writes finis to our tragedy,’ said Burbage.

‘I would like to have the last word one day.’

‘Master Revill, when did you arrive from your Zummerzet?’

‘About two years ago, Master Burbage.’

‘I didn’t hear it in your voice until you did your, ah, imitation. I can detect it now.’

‘We’re not all bumpkins even if we do come from the provinces.’

‘No, though some of us ride in on our high horses. I was born here, but our author is from Warwickshire. He rarely goes back. And the companies you’ve played with, again?’

‘The Admiral’s. . and. . Derby’s once.’

‘At the Boar’s Head?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’ve filled in during sickness, unavoidable absence, that kind of thing — but no doubt you’re looking for a company which you can permanently attach yourself to?’

‘Yes.’

‘Nothing is permanent in this business, Master Revill. We could be closed down like that.’ He clicked his fingers. ‘Plague, the Council, commercial failure, anything could drive us out onto the road and into your bumpkin provinces.’

‘I want only to act,’ I said.

‘Well, Master Revill, let me say that the Chamberlain’s Men are pleased to have you for the next week or three, or until Wilson returns from attending on his poor dying mother. Now to terms. One shilling a day is your pay. Which also happens to be the fine if you are late for rehearsal, while it is two shillings for non-attendance at rehearsal, and three entire shillings if you are late and out of costume when you should be ready for the actual performance. Larger fines, very much larger fines, if you remove a costume from this playhouse. Remember that costumes are worth more than players and plays put together. Some of our congregation come only to see the costumes. And if you lose your part by dropping it in the street or leaving it in the tavern or by some whore’s bed you will not only be drawn and quartered but your goods forfeit. You will doubtless know this from your short time with the Admiral’s, but I always like to be clear where I stand with new players.’

‘I understand, Master Burbage.’

‘Good. Now go to the tire-man for your costumes, and then to Master Allison our bookman for your parts. Just tell him you’re doing Jack Wilson’s. He’ll understand. And before you leave this morning check the plot in there.’ He nodded towards the tiring-house. ‘You won’t appear as nephew to the player-King till half past three or thereabouts this afternoon, and we start at two, so you have plenty of time before you come on, not just for your lines today but for the townsman in A City Pleasure. And you might as well take a look at what you’re doing in Somerset Tragedy while you’re about it. Leave the French count and the Machiavel for today. We’re hearsing Pleasure on Tuesday, and you can try out your Zummerzet voice on Thursday when we’re running through the Tragedy of that county. All clear? If it’s not, get the details from Allison.’

‘Thank you, Master Burbage. I would like to say how grateful I am to be given the chance to work with the finest-’

‘Yes yes, Master Revill. We’re only players, remember, caterpillars of the commonwealth — though I suppose some caterpillars are finer than others.’

‘You are the Queen’s caterpillars,’ I said, referring to the well-known favour enjoyed by the Chamberlain’s Men at court.

‘And we shall see if you are Master of the Revels, Master Revill,’ said Burbage, referring to the well-known civil servant who made a packet out of licensing plays.

Richard Burbage hoisted himself from his chair. Son of a carpenter, wasn’t he? Well, there were good enough precedents for that. There was certainly something solid, something oak-like about him.

I visited the tire-man and was kitted out with Wilson’s gear, one thing that was villainous and another thing with a showy but leftover feel to it. From the bookkeeper I received half a dozen puny scrolls giving me my lines for that afternoon and for the rest of the week. From the plot hanging up in the tiring-house for the day’s business I ascertained that I joined in a dumb-show as a poisoner, and then appeared a few moments afterwards as one ‘Lucianus, nephew to the King’, for which I was required to carry a flask (containing poison) and, presumably, a face with black looks. All as Master Burbage had said, and all as my returning memory of the tragedy of the Prince of Denmark told me. Later, much later when almost all were dead and gone, I was cued to enter the court of Elsinore with news from England of even more death. So I was a porter of death and a messenger of death, I thought neatly, trying to make a pattern out of my little roles, and then I considered that I enjoyed this good fortune only because Master Wilson was attending to a dying mother in Norfolk. But in Julius Caesar I was myself destined to die, playing the part of the unfortunate Cinna, the poet torn in pieces by the mob for his bad verses. The other plays I didn’t know, though Love’s Sacrifice and A Somerset Tragedy by their very titles carried the promise of death dealt with an open hand.

I left the Globe, almost skipping on this fine, late summer morning. I was only sorry that Dick Burbage had not wanted to hear out my stammering gratitude. For grateful I was. Outside the playhouse in Brend’s Rents, the alley behind, I glanced up at its sides, sheer white like the chalk cliff of a gorge. Like a palace, like a cathedral or a castle — this playhouse was all these to me, a place of authority and splendour. I remembered my first glimpse of it on arriving in London, fresh and green from Zummerzet. The Globe shimmered in a heat haze on the south side of the river, unmatched for height or amplitude by any building in the neighbourhood. The flag was flying and the trumpet reached my eager ears even across the great stretch of London’s water, and I knew that playing was about to begin, and I wished myself, at any cost, to be one among that company. When you are near this great edifice you can see a polygon, but so multi-sided is it that, from a distance, it appears to be a fine shining ring. It is, in truth, a magic ring, in which any apparition may be conjured for the delight and the edification of what Master Burbage called the congregation. The Globe playhouse was, to me, as fabulous as Troy.

Later after my arrival, when I had been in London a few weeks and was mixing with my playing kind, I learned the extraordinary story of the construction of the Globe, how Burbage and his brother, together with the other shareholders, had-

‘I’ll fucking have you!’

I broke from my recollections. Someone was shouting at me. An instant more and the same someone had smashed into me. A great sweaty face was pushed into mine, foul breath shoving over the sill of his lower lip. I fell down on my back, and the great oaf tumbled on top me and panted there as if he really was fucking having me. After a time he levered himself off. From his costume I recognised a waterman. I would have known him for one anyway, partly because every third man in this borough of Southwark makes his living on the river, partly because he had that look, half sea-dog, half hang-dog, which most of them’ve got and which they claim comes from having served with Drake or Frobisher or the Lord High Duck or some other sea-worthy sea worthy — but mostly I would’ve known him for a waterman because of the flood of cursing that gushed out of his filthy lips the moment he had righted himself.

‘Fucking arse-wipe — bloody fucking shite — Jesus Christ — where the fuck’s the fucking fucker gone. .’

All of this was accompanied with gusts of sour air, heaves of his great chest and rollings of eyes that did not quite swivel together, so I had the unpleasant sensation that he was looking simultaneously at, before and behind me.

‘Where’d he fucking go? Why’d you let him get away, you shitting turd?’

I took a couple of deep breaths and stepped back from my panting assailant. What was going on? Instinctively I grabbed for my purse. When you come across a fracas in the street, there’s a fair chance that it is a put-up job, and that the tusslers are waiting for a ring of spectators to form before the third man or woman tiptoes round the outside and relieves the more agog of whatever valuables weigh them down. When this unofficial subscription has been raised, the fight will suddenly end with a handshake and the participants magically evaporate. My purse, however, had not gone. Most likely, if the oaf had wanted to get it off me he would have done so when we were tangled on the dusty ground. Looking at his fists, which hung down like bags of meat, I thought that if he’d asked me to surrender my purse I probably would have done so with only a token protest. After all, what was money? Other things were more important, like — Jesus! — my parts in the Globe plays. My hands flew back to where I’d tucked the scrolls under my shirt, near the heart. Still there. I breathed a quick and silent prayer of gratitude to the patron saint of players (one Genesius).

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I said, brushing at my clothes, and growing more angry, even as the hulk opposite me seemed to be sailing into calmer waters. ‘In fact, I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, to adopt your terminology.’

Three or four people had stopped in the street, drawn by the prospect of trouble. The large boatman had stepped back a pace or so, and I mistook the look of bovine stupidity that was now begining to usurp his angry features for sheepishness. ‘And another thing,’ I said, foolishly deciding to demonstrate my intellectual superiority. ‘What did you call me. . shitting turd I think it was?’

‘So what if I did, you arse-wipe.’

‘Interesting example of pleonasm is that shitting turd,’ I said as nonchalantly as I could manage. ‘Pleonast, are you?’

Both of the boatman’s eyes trained themselves on me more or less at once. I had said the wrong thing, been stupid by being clever at the expense of a no-wit. He took a step towards me and I stepped back. Unfortunately that was as far as I could go. Now the boatman had me between his sweaty self and a flinty wall. A few more people had assembled in the hope of seeing violence done to one who was young and blameless.

‘What’s a fucking pleenast when it’s at home?’

He had his arm rammed across my throat so that, even if I had wanted to correct the way he said the word, I couldn’t have spoken. His beard, which was as clotted as a bunch of seaweed, tickled my face. I made ineffectual attempts to push him off but he pressed himself against me, and I smelt on him a mixture of riveriness and fishitude and it was not agreeable.

‘I said, you bum-sucker, what’s a pleenast?’

There was a real danger that if I didn’t answer, he was going to crush me as completely as a fallen mast would have. But it was all I could do to drag air through a dented windpipe, let alone produce any explanation. The fine summer morning was flecked with orange spots and there was a roaring in my ears.

‘Pleenast — pleenast? Fucking tell me. I’ll give you pleenast!’

I had time to think that this was perhaps the first occasion in the history of the world that anyone had died for the sake of a little word from the Greek, and time also to consider that if I were to have my life over again then I would learn not to be so foolishly clever as to try to impress those who are, by nature, unimpressible. And I had time to think that this business of dying took too long, as the half-circle of white faces looking at this spectacle merged into a blur.

‘It’s a compliment,’ came a voice close to one of my roaring ears. ‘Let him go, boatman. It’s a compliment. Let him go, I say.’

After a moment the pressure on my throat was lifted. I was too busy forcing air inside myself to pay much attention to the exchange which followed, but was able to reconstruct it afterwards.

‘When you’ve released him I’ll tell you what he is unable to tell you himself. That’s better.’

‘All right, you tell me then. What’s a pleenast?’

There was still aggression and injury in what the boatman was saying to the newcomer but, even in my preoccupied condition, I was aware of a retreat in the man’s tone, as well as an absence of fucking, shiting and arse-wiping.

‘Pleonasm,’ said the individual who had interrupted my throttling, ‘is a rhetorical figure by which more words than are strictly necessary are used to express meaning. For example, if I said that you were a fine boatman as well as a good boatman and an excellent one, then I would have committed a pleonasm.’

‘Fine. . good. . excellent,’ said the boatman, half to himself. I noticed that the number of people about us had grown, rather than the dribbling away of a crowd which usually occurs when the promise of violence has not been fulfilled. They too were listening to the explanation of a pleonasm. Something about the man’s calm and certain speech drew them, just as it pacified the boatman. I glanced at my rescuer. I’d seen him somewhere recently.

‘I think that what this young man meant by calling you a pleonast is that you are a person of linguistic means — that you have a full share of that wealth of language which is available to all Englishmen whatever their class — in short you know a lot of words and it pleases you to express yourself in full — even at the risk of some repetition.’

I struggled for the irony in this speech, because I was afraid that if I could detect it then the boatman would pick it up too, but not a tremor of insincerity, not a streak of piss-taking, did I hear in the other man’s tones. He appeared to mean what he was saying.

‘I’ll say what I fucking like,’ said the boatman, but in a docile fashion.

‘To be accused of having too many words is a fine thing,’ said the other. Then I realised that it was the man who had slipped unobtrusively past Master Burbage and me as we were talking by the tiring-house, the man who played the Ghost in the drama of the Prince of Denmark, ‘our author’, Master William Shakespeare. Well, he’d certainly saved my bacon.

‘He got in my way, didn’t he,’ said the boatman to the playwright, his beard wagging in justification. ‘My fare did a fucking runner, saving your reverence. I’d no sooner touched the bank than the bugger was out my boat and up the stairs like a parson’s fart, gone before you can sniff it. So what d’you expect a poor boatman to do? It may be only a couple of pennies to a gentleman like yourself but to me and Bet and our five kids it’s our fucking dinner. Me, I can’t afford to let a fare get away like that, the bastard. So I took off in hot pursuit and this bloke got between me and my quarry. And he fell down and I fell down on top of him and then he accused me of that — plea-nasty — what was it?’

‘Pleonasm,’ said our author.

‘That one. So what am I expected to do, go home to my Bet and our six kids and tell her that I was rooked out of threepence by some cunt who was too slippery for me? Jesus, I tell you, I’d be in the doghouse from Tuesday to Doomsday.’

The crowd had begun to disperse, recognising the man’s whinge, no doubt, and expecting him to whip out a wooden leg gained in the sea battle of El Dago as a means of enforcing their sympathy.

‘Just now you said five ki-’ I started to say before the playwright threw a warning glance at me. His brown eyes didn’t look so benevolent, but when he turned back to the boatman he spoke softly, almost kindly.

‘I know how hard it is to earn even a modest living in these times,’ he said. ‘I know how our business depends on you boatmen. Without you, I think we would not be here.’

Our author spoke the truth. There was a constant traffic to our side of the river, for the playhouses, the bears and the whores, and the single Thames bridge was convenient only for the few who lived either side of it.

‘What business would that be, sir?’

‘The play business.’

‘Beg pardon, sir, I took you for a gentleman.’

Now it was my turn to take offence. Despite my having just recovered breath and wits, despite my having escaped death by a hair’s width, I was ready to take up arms on behalf of my calling. But our author smiled as if he agreed with the boatman — and the common opinion was with him, it must be said — that the playhouse was no place for a gentleman to work.

‘Tell me who was the first gentleman, boatman,’ he said.

‘I’m not educated in the way of answering questions of that sort, kind or shape, sir.’

Our ferryman might have no respect for players in general but he seemed prepared to make an exception for the playwright.

‘Then I shall tell you, master boatman. It was Adam was the first gentleman,’ he said.

‘That’s my name!’ said the boatman, as eager as a child.

‘A happy coincidence. Your ancestor and my ancestor Adam, Adam, was a gentleman, for he bore arms. You know it is the right of a gentleman to bear arms?’

‘Most infalliably, sir,’ said the boatman, now thoroughly mollified.

‘Adam ’ad arms, one might say,’ said the playwright, who appeared more pleased with his words than the circumstances justified.

‘How’s that, sir?’

‘The Scripture tells us that he digged — and could he dig without arms?’

The playwright seemed over-amused at what I considered to be only a mediocre joke. A stale one too. I was sure I’d heard it somewhere before. But whatever I thought, the words seemed to work some kind of magic on the boatman. His mouth cracked open to reveal teeth like boat-ribs, while gurgles of laughter sounded like water in the bilges.

‘Very good, sir. . dig. . yes, how could he. . without arms. . very good.’

‘Now, Adam, take this for your lost custom, and as a mark of my general respect for your profession.’

The boatman’s grin remained. He didn’t glance at the coins; long practice made him familiar with weight, size, number, amount. Oh, he knew a gentleman when he saw one.

‘Thank you, sir. And I’m sorry if I crashed into you. . sir.’ It cost him an effort to speak to me in almost the same tone that he managed with our author. ‘I’ll remember what it was you said. What was it again?’

‘Oh, pleonasm,’ I mumbled, thoroughly embarrassed now and wanting to be shot of him and the whole business.

‘Pleenasm,’ said Adam, and then to my rescuer, ‘And if you ever need a boatman for something special, sir, you just bear your old Adam in mind.’

‘We should all bear our old Adam in mind,’ said the playwright.

‘Adam Gibbons you will ask for. On either bank they know my name and face,’ said the boatman, and he lumbered round and headed off in the direction of the river.

‘On either bank they know my name and face,’ repeated the playwright, giving the words a tum-ti-tum lilt. Then, ‘Well, Master Revill, you have come to us from the Admiral’s. I can never get used to calling them Nottingham’s Men.’

‘I, yes, I. . thank you for helping me just then. If you hadn’t come along. . I don’t know what would have happened.’

The playwright shrugged and turned to go. I was taken aback: he already knew the name of an insignificant jobbing actor, as well as the company I had briefly been associated with. Also, I felt that he would have been fully entitled to lecture me on the perils of crossing swords, or paddles, with a runaway boatman. He could at least have called me a foolish young man. Yet he said nothing. I was almost disappointed.

Unwilling to have him leave me so abruptly, I caught up with him in a couple of strides. This area around the theatre was criss-crossed with ditches, a little stirred by the tidal slop of the river. Because the bridges across them were narrow, hardly more than a few pieces of planking, I was compelled to hover at my rescuer’s shoulder as we traversed one little inlet after another.

‘You appear this afternoon?’ I said, more to make conversation than anything else. Speaking was a little painful after the boatman’s assault. I visualised a red weal across my throat.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You have Jack Wilson’s parts, don’t you? He makes a good ambassador in my thing today but he has not quite the look for the poisoner in the play, I mean the play inside the play. There is something a little straightforward about Wilson — although perhaps that is the best guise for a poisoner.’

‘King Claudius seems straightforward enough, sort of a hail-fellow-well-met sort and he’s a poisoner,’ I said, my words tumbling over themselves in my eagerness to impress the playwright.

‘You know the play?’

The same words, the same intonation as Master Burbage’s. Evidently, it was surprising that a mere player should show himself capable of judging characters rather than merely being them.

‘I saw it a couple of months ago.’

I would have gone on to say something to the playwright about how magnificent he’d been in the part of the Ghost, but the fact was that, although I remembered the Ghost, I couldn’t remember him as the Ghost, if you see what I mean.

The playwright glanced at me, and seemed to approve.

‘You have more of the saturnine in your face than Wilson. Remember that you must grimace.’

‘Master Burbage said that I should play, as it were, badly.’

Master WS appeared amused. ‘That’s typical of Dick, I think. I’m not sure I’d give anyone the licence to play badly, as it were, or in any other way — but it’s true that I have made Hamlet say something about “damnable faces”, so perhaps he is right.’

‘And then I am Cinna in your Caesar,’ I said.

‘Which Cinna? The conspirator?’

‘The poet, I believe.’

‘Torn for his bad verses. Alas, poor Cinna. Of course we are all poor sinners.’

It was a moment before I grasped the pun, which the playwright stressed in case I missed it. As with the joke to the boatman about Adam and his arms, I have to confess that I found his sense of humour a bit. . well. . obvious.

‘Like Orpheus,’ I said, trying to elevate the conversation.

‘Who is like Orpheus?’

‘Your poet Cinna. Torn to pieces by the mob, just as Orpheus was torn to pieces by the Thracian Maenads.’

The reference, intended to show my nimbleness of mind and range of learning, did not appear to leave its mark upon the playwright.

‘I suppose so,’ he said. Then, ‘You are lodging near here?’

‘Yes, in Ship Street,’ I said. In fact, we were walking in the opposite direction to that in which my squalid accommodation lay. I was so reluctant to leave my rescuer’s company that I pretended to be sharing his destination.

‘Then you will need to go the other way.’

‘What — oh God, how stupid!’ I clapped my hand to my head in showy forgetfulness. ‘Yes it’s the other way.’

The playwright stopped on the far side of a little ditch. Behind him was the Bear Garden. Outside was the usual crowd of loiterers and ne’er-do-wells. Somehow, I was on the opposite bank of the slimy channel.

‘Till this afternoon,’ he said.

‘You’re the Ghost,’ I said, but he’d gone already.

‘Tell Nell,’ said Nell.

‘They’re quite small parts really,’ I said.

‘Not like this part, Nick,’ she said. ‘This one is growing larger by the second.’

‘That’s nice,’ I said, distracted by what she was doing, but more excited, to be honest, about my afternoon at the Globe. ‘As Master Burbage says, we’ve all got to start somewhere.’

‘Master Burbage? Dick or Cuth?’

‘Dick. You don’t mean to say that they come to you,’ I said, genuinely shocked.

‘It’s a funny thing about that company, the Chamberlain’s, or most of the older ones at any rate,’ said Nell. ‘They’re different from the other companies we’ve had round here.’

‘What’s funny? Tell me, and just stop that for a moment.’

You can see how serious I was about my new company, that I would stop Nell just as she was getting properly started on me, so as to listen attentively to any scrap of whore’s gossip about the Chamberlain’s Men.

‘They’re pretty well all married, and every one of them’s got hundreds of brats — that Heminges for instance had a dozen or more when he last looked — and normally that’s a sure-fire combination, marriage and kids’ll drive anyone into the stews. But not the Chamberlain’s. They’re either henpecked or limp from so much fatherhood, or — I suppose it’s remotely possible-’

‘What?’

‘Can it be? That they actually love their wives?’

‘Uxorious,’ I said.

‘What’s that mean when it’s at home, clever dick?’ said Nell.

‘Forget it,’ I said. ‘I’ve already been in enough trouble over words today. All right, you can go on with what you were doing earlier.’

‘When did you become a paying customer, Master Revill? I will go on, but on condition you do this. See?’

‘Oh that’s how you do it? Here?’

‘Clever boy. Ah. And while you’re doing that you can tell Nell about your triumphs on the stage.’

‘I’m a poisoner in a sort of play within the play, if you see what I mean. .’

‘No. You’ll have to go back to the beginning.’

‘Are you comfortable?’

‘Bugger comfort, get on with the job.’

‘It’s about this Prince, see, and he’s the Prince of Denmark-’

‘Hamlet?’

‘Yes, and he’s pissed off because his father who was King has just snuffed it, and he hasn’t been made King. The man who is now King is the late King’s brother. Hamlet’s uncle. What pisses Hamlet off even more is that the man who’s mounted the throne has also mounted his mother. Hamlet’s mother, that is. His uncle has married his late father’s widow and has gained the throne of Denmark. What makes it worse still is that only a few weeks have gone under the bridge between the death of husband number one and the marriage to number two. There’s a joke about them using the leftover food from the wake for the nuptials. Economising at Elsinore. Is that too fast for you?’

‘It’s good, Nick. Get on with the story.’

‘I meant the story. So for the first half hour Hamlet mopes around until the ghost of his father tips up on the battlements one nippy night, in fact on several nights in succession, and tells his son that he didn’t die as a result of a snake-bite in his orchard — which was the story that’d been spread around — no, the serpent that took his life now wears his crown and warms his wife, sort of thing. And then ghost tells him to revenge his murder.’

‘Out with his sword and into his uncle? End of play?’ said Nell.

‘We’ve hardly started,’ I said.

‘I hope so,’ she said.

‘I meant the story. Hamlet, you see, is a thinker, not a doer, and although he rages against his uncle and vows instant vengeance he doesn’t actually do anything. He wonders whether the ghost was actually the spirit of his father.’

‘Who else could it have been?’ said Nell, her breath coming slightly short. For myself, I was finding the narrative a useful distraction from an early (and, one might say, a dishonourable) discharge.

‘A devil maybe. Out to trick Hamlet. A devil in the guise of his father spinning some cock-and-bull tale about a murder so as to provoke the Prince into killing a totally innocent man.’

‘Sounds like a lot of trouble to go to for that.’

‘Hamlet is thinking, but he’s not thinking straight. He’s looking for reasons to avoid killing his uncle, maybe.’

‘So the ghost is a real ghost,’ said Nell. ‘My mother saw a ghost once.’

‘The ghost is real — and Claudius is guilty as sin — move down a bit.’

‘Claudius? Like this?’

‘Uncle, King, murderer, adulterer. Yes, that’s good.’

‘Oh, him.’

‘Do you want to change round yet?’

‘In a moment. When you’ve reached the end. Of the play.’

‘Luckily for Hamlet, who should fetch up in the Elsinore castle at this moment but a company of players. And he has the bright idea of getting them to do a play which will mirror the way his father died and be performed in front of an unsuspecting Claudius. This play inside the play’ll have a King and a Queen in it-’

‘Like most plays.’

‘-and the Queen will swear undying love to the King, et cetera. But then the poisoner steps out and knocks off said King. That’s me, poisoner. I have six lines — “Thoughts black, hands apt, drugs fit and time agreeing” — you get the idea.’

‘Put one of your apt hands right here — now.’

‘This is the twist. The poisoner — me — is announced as Lucianus, nephew to the King.’

‘When it should be the brother?’

‘Precisely.’

‘That’s deep, Nick.’

‘Good. This is a cleverness on the part of our author which I haven’t yet fathomed. Anyway, the play inside the play works because just after my entry Claudius storms off in rage. Oh! He has seen something to stir his conscience. He kneels down to pray. Hamlet comes in. Ah! Hamlet won’t kill him because he wants to catch his uncle when he’s gambling or pissed or in flagrante-’

‘In what?’

‘In this. Though, now I come to think of it, that’s a bit strange — because if Hamlet was catching the King in flagrante then he’d be catching his mother at it too, and I’m not sure that he’d want that. .’

‘Dirty boy. Him. . and you too.’

‘Claudius gets in a state, and sends Hamlet to England. Yes! This is after Hamlet’s killed a wise old fool of a councillor who was eavesdropping behind an arras on Hamlet and his mother — in the Queen’s bedchamber.’

‘What was Hamlet doing in his mother’s bedroom? Not in flag. . what’s that word?’

‘Flagrante. No, he was just giving his mother a real ear-bashing. .’

‘That’s all right then.’

‘So our hero gets shoved off to England in the company of a couple of old schoolfriends or snakes — you sure you don’t want to change round yet?’

‘Get on with it.’

‘And of course he’s right not to trust them because they’re carrying a warrant for Hamlet’s execution the moment they reach the English court. Oh Nell! But Hamlet never makes England. On the way his ship’s attacked by pirates and he is carried off after a daring single-handed boarding of the pirate boat-’

‘The groundlings enjoy a good fight.’

‘We don’t see the fight. Just hear about it in a letter. This is where Burbage is economising. Anyway pirates aren’t important, they’re a device to get Hamlet back to Denmark while his schoolfriends go sailing on.’

‘What happens to them?’

‘Chopped.’

‘Ah!’

‘Oh!’

‘Finish it, Nick.’

‘This is where I come in. Literally. I come in and I say what’s happened to the schoolfriends at the end. But before my appearance one or two other things have occurred — entailing the complete destruction of the Danish royal court.’

‘Get on with it. I don’t mean the story.’

‘Nearly at the end — don’t think I can hang on for you to turn round this time — in brief — Hamlet returns — the son of the councillor he killed is revenge-mad — will do anything — specially since his sister who Hamlet fancied — has gone round the bend — because of old man’s death — King Claudius sets up duel between Hamlet and this Laertes — to make sure nothing goes wrong he — he — oh Nell — Laertes puts poison on the tip of his sword — sword — sword — Jesus, that’s good — and the King drops poison — into goblet of wine — Hamlet’s meant to drink out of — all goes wrong — Jesus yes — Queen drinks out of goblet — drops down dead — Laertes gets stabbed own sword — but Hamlet stabbed too — before Hamlet drop dead he kill King poison sword poison goblet poetic justice all wrapped up very neat — ohNellohyesNell. .’

‘Oh Nick.’

‘Nell.’

‘But you haven’t come yet, come on, I mean.’

‘Oh that. I forgot that for an instant. You are a lovely oblivion. Let me get my breath back. That’s better. But I do appear at the last moment, see, and almost the final words in the play belong to me. As the ambassador from England I stride on stage, diplomatically but confidently, to tell Claudius that his commandment has been fulfilled to the letter. The young men bearing the warrant are dead. Hamlet, you see, switched their names for his while they were on the boat. All this doesn’t make such an impression because at my feet are a dead King, a dead Queen, a dead Laertes and of course a dead Hamlet. “The sight is dismal”.’

‘That’s nice, Nick.’

‘It’s a grim story.’

‘Your arm round me like this.’

‘Funny thing is the spectators are cheerful enough when it’s all finished and we are in the Company, too. I’ve noticed before, people’s spirits are often lifted by a tragedy — while our comedies can leave them thoughtful, even disgruntled.’

Nell grunted something herself but she was already halfway to sleep. Hard day for her too. I wondered how many clients she’d entertained, and, as usual, struggled to stifle the thought. With her snuggled into me, and the evening light slanting on the panelled wood above my bed, I was glad to have some time to myself. I went over the afternoon in the playhouse again, like someone savouring a meal in retrospect. Naturally, I could not claim the lion’s share of anything in the way of lines, attention, applause. Rather than being the lion, I was the whelp. Still, the whelp remembers, and dreams of the day when he will take his rightful place at the feast.

While I was waiting in the tiring-house, much earlier than necessary, I’d seen our author dressed as the Ghost, that is, wearing armour — for Hamlet’s father’s spirit is in arms to signify that there is something rotten in the state of Denmark. I had it in mind to thank him again for saving me from the boatman that morning but he looked at me vaguely as if he were already making his transition to an incorporeal state. I went back to studying my lines for A City Pleasure: here I had a part of substance (at least eighty lines) as a man about town, and I was grateful that there’d be a rehearsal the next morning for we had to play the very next afternoon. Jobbing actors have frequently to step into sick or absent men’s shoes, and their first acquaintance with the play might be when they find themselves in front of three hundred groundlings impatient for the Company clown or tragedian.

So, to taste again my beginnings, my first course, with the Chamberlain’s Men.

My very first appearance in the tragedy of the Prince of Denmark is in the dumb-show that precedes the play inside the play, as Master Burbage termed it. I am the fellow that mimes the removal of the crown of the sleeping ‘King’ and pours poison in his ear; voicelessly, I condole with the widowed ‘Queen’; without a word, I make ardent love to her. I put expression into my action: the grasping hand that fondles the crown is the hand that tilts the imagined phial over the sleeper and the same hand that reaches towards the breast area of the flaxen-haired apprentice boy who is playing the player ‘Queen’. My hand is, I feel, a speaking hand. As this takes place I observe that Claudius and Gertrude are chatting together, while on the other side of the stage Hamlet is all eyes. I realise that Claudius must not understand too soon what is happening. And I see how tidily our author has, as it were, comprised all audiences in this royal audience: one half is always more interested in its own affairs even as the other forgets itself in the action. I do not notice this at the time but only as I think about it afterwards, lying in my bed next to my whore Nell. Then the riches of this play are laid open for me, right after Nell has laid herself open for me, and my unsleeping brain at once wants to throw a bridge across these two kinds of understanding or knowing. . but I can make nothing of this at the moment.

After the dumb-show I reappear as Lucianus, nephew to the ‘King’. And this is something else that baffles me, that I should play the nephew. But none of this matters because I am upstaged by the King Claudius rushing off, crying out for light. And we ‘players’ are about to slink away because it is evident that we have displeased the King (the real King, that is), and then my lord Hamlet wrings our hands and claps our shoulders because we have pleased him greatly. And this is the fortune of the player in little! Up and down like a bucket in a well. Today a Claudius, tomorrow a Cassius, that’s the way of it. In the tiring-house once more, after I’ve conned A City Pleasure I make a pretence of studying my part in A Somerset Tragedy. Here I am a rustic boor. But I am really observing my fellows in the Chamberlain’s Company, and learning to put names to faces: Master Phillips, for example, or Cowley or Gough or Pope.

And before I know it I am out again as the ambassador from England, come with the news that Hamlet’s old schoolfriends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead. But, as I’d said to Nell, this doesn’t go for much when rather more significant characters have bitten the dust. This time I am upstaged by Hamlet’s one genuine friend, Horatio, who informs the newcomer Fortinbras that he alone has the truth to tell. And now Fortinbras, who writes finis to the play, takes charge of everything, including the throne of Denmark. His first and last royal act is to order a military funeral for Hamlet. Then, like in most plays, we end with a little dance so that everyone goes off happy to their next diversion. The sun is shining behind the tower and tiring-house which throw their shadows across the groundlings and the lower seats. Hats bob, tobacco smoke weaves its way upwards, limbs are flexed in time with us as we jig on stage. The spectators make their dispositions.

Nell stirred and rolled away from me slightly. I took advantage of this to get up for a piss in the jerry in the corner of the room. Sometimes after I’d been with Nell I washed my equipment in wine — there was no insult to her in it, she’d told me herself of this method of prophylaxis. Once I’d tried vinegar, but once only. Hard pissing being also recommended as a defence against the perils of venery — and in the absence of a jug of white wine — I pushed the stream out with all the force I could muster. Then, bare-assed as Adam, I went to stand by the window.

My room was on the third floor of Mistress Ransom’s. She was a pale, crabbed woman and kept a filthy establishment whose only merit was its cheapness. By contrast the brothel where Nell toiled was quite spick and span. Mistress Ransom claimed to be scandalised by the proximity of the whore-houses, playhouses and taverns, and went round with a how-I’ve-come-down-in-the-world air. She kept her nose canted up. This enabled her to overlook the filth underfoot and also indicated that she was somehow gazing at a higher social shelf from which she’d been dislodged by a brutish world. When she discovered I was a parson’s son, she could hardly wait to offer me a room. She was a little disappointed when I added that I was a player. In atonement, I made the mistake of hinting that my father’d left me a little fortune (said in such a way as to suggest that little was large) and that I was only toying with the stage. I wanted to ingratiate myself; I needed a cheap room. The fortune my father had left me was little indeed and now almost exhausted.

Mistress Ransom overcame her objections to players, however, within a day or two of my arrival. She loosed her daughter on me. Where old Ransom was pale, young Ransom was on fire. Young Ransom had perhaps twenty nine years to her debit. Her flaming red hair was matched by her flaring face. The bumps and lumps on it flickered like embers. The husband of Mistress Ransom was dead, I was given to understand, though I suspected he had merely decamped. Dead or fled, he must have had a fiery trade, as cook, baker or smith, and stamped its impress on his daughter. Little Ransom, who was twice her mother’s size, came to my room on various pretences:

i) to see if I needed anything;

ii) to know if I would take supper with her and her mother that night (an invitation, she was careful to tell me, not extended to any old lodger);

iii) to find out whether I’d recovered from the runs after said supper;

iv) to tell me the house was haunted (it was — by her);

v) to request a light (for her candle had blown out on the stairs and she was left darkling);

vi) to ask me to investigate the curious noise in the corner of her chamber.

On each successive visit she revealed a little more of herself by a careless disarray of day- or nightwear, beginning with scarlet shoulders and proceeding by way of ruddy breasts to hints of the fiery pit down below. I knew that it was her mother who had set her on, because the daughter kept me in conversation at my door as her eyes swung about, waiting for the ordeal to be over. Give him five minutes trying to catch sight of your nipples, Mistress Ransom had said, and see if he doesn’t succumb to those ripening blackberries. She was too genteel or too unpoetic to express it like that, but there would be an understanding between mother and daughter as the former artfully rearranged the latter’s stays, ties and laces before sending her up the stairs. Alas, the goods that she was displaying had lain much too long in the sun. I pitied Little Ransom, saw her as a sacrificial cow to her mother’s matrimonial plans, but a cow nonetheless.

The crisis came when I went to her chamber to investigate that curious sound in the corner. Before I could even get near the dark (and silent) corner, she launched herself on me, hugely afire, and I went down before the smoke, flame and stench of her cannon. But, like Falstaff at the battle of Shrewsbury in our author’s play of Henry IV, I considered that discretion was the better part of valour. I played dead, or asphyxiated. I lay limp. Poor little Ransom lay on top of me like an army that has overrun its adversary, only to find that the enemy has disappeared. She needed some trophy to take back to her mother to prove that she had indeed occupied my position. A consummation devoutly to be wished. A promise of marriage made in hot breath and blood. But all her rummaging and groping couldn’t produce a spark, and at length she was forced to retire, whole and unwounded. We avoided each other’s eyes. I was still sorry for her, and angry at the mother who I knew had set her on. I made one or two references to Madam Ransom, and stews and houses of ill-repute, in her hearing. She got the point. The daughter’s attentions ceased. But I earned the mother’s undying hostility, and if it hadn’t been for the fact that she needed the couple of shillings rent a week she would have booted me into the street.

And now I gazed down into Ship Street, suddenly melancholy. Post coitu omne animale triste est. . as the poet says. The evening sun rested on the roofs opposite, and caused me to squint. If I had craned out I would have been able to see the river, but I was Adam-naked and anyway saw the river frequently enough. Down below I could just glimpse my landlady taking the evening air, with her nose tilted up, as if she were too good for this world, possibly too good for any world. Lounging in the street opposite was Nat the Animal Man, so called because he made a tiny living from dropping into taverns and imitating a horse’s whinny, a cat’s purrs. For a penny he would do you a tormented bear surrounded by the yapping dogs in the pit, the climax to the whole battle proceeding from one man’s mouth. I have even heard him mimic the strange cry of the camel which one pays to see in that house on London Bridge.

I stepped back from the window and felt Nell’s hand on my shoulder and her breasts in the small of my back. She rubbed herself against me, then squatted down to pee in the jordan. What our author might have termed the Old Adam I felt rise at what I saw, and no doubt at the aroma too of our mingled wastes. And when Nell saw what I felt, my hoisted sail, a pleased expression tugged at her full lips. The object of many men’s lust, and of the affection of a few, she reserved her love for me or so I thought. I put this down partly to my natural attractiveness but also to the fact that she came from the same part of the country as I. We were country lad and lass in London, both engaged in diverting the citizenry with our arts. I returned to my bed, a little small to accommodate the both of us but so much the better for any purpose apart from sleep. Too late I saw what Nell was about to do.

‘No!’

‘What’s wrong? No one can see.’

It was true that she was standing near the window without a stitch on. The lower part of her body was shadowed. The declining sun set her fair hair ablaze. Probably she could have been seen from the houses over the way. I wasn’t bothered about that. Her left arm was extended over the edge of the window. She was holding the jordan, delicately tipping its contents into the street. Sleepiness or the mistaken belief that no one was down below had caused her not to check or shout the customary warning. I heard the dribble of the emptying pot, I saw the golden liquid catch the evening light. I heard the noise of my landlady. The shriek as she felt the wet descent, the scream as she realised what it was. I shut my eyes. I heard a donkey’s bray, and realised after a moment that it was Nat the Animal Man, taking pleasure in Mistress Ransom’s discomfiture, and most probably in mine as well, after his own fashion.

A City Pleasure, which was composed by one Master Edgar Boscombe (a name not previously known to me as one of the literary adornments of our stage), is a simple business. You know the story, or one similar to it. A young man from the provinces comes to London with his sister, looking for pleasure and edification. They are duped and gulled, but retain a curious integrity. The pleasure of the city is to ride them until they drop. They return home, sadder, wiser and poorer — only to discover that they never were brother and sister. They may marry; and they will marry. That was as much as I gathered from my eighty-five-line acquaintance with the drama. Unlike Hamlet I had never seen A City Pleasure through as a spectator. I played John Southwold, a citizen with ambitions to become an alderman and therefore I had to talk pompously and unplainly. There was no love lost between the players’ companies and the City authorities, who were as much our enemies as the Puritans, and would have closed us down if their writ ran on this side of the river. So we seized any opportunity to take the piss, and I played the would-be alderman with satisfied self-importance.

The congregation in the afternoon was large, though not as large as for Master WS’s Hamlet the previous day. I was preoccupied. My excitement at becoming one of the Chamberlain’s Men, even if only temporarily, was overshadowed by the pressing need to find fresh accommodation. After Nell had emptied our piss over Mistress Ransom last fine evening, the landlady appeared at my door, still dripping and distinctly out of sorts. Nell was hiding under the bedcovers. Gallantly, I took the blame, along with my notice to quit. So it was goodbye to my pale landlady and her fiery daughter. For that relief, much thanks.

I could hardly put up with Nell at her place of work (videlicet a brothel), although she offered this, slightly reluctantly and in a spirit of contrition. There were, she said, holes and corners in Holland’s Leaguer where I might shelter for a few days. But I did not, in truth, like to enquire too closely into the manner in which Nell earned her keep, and to be near her daily busy self would turn me into the hungry innkeeper forced always to see his meat eaten by others.

The problem of where I was to lay my head was solved, however, and most strangely, in the following way.

I made three appearances in A City Pleasure, two of them early on, and it was after the second of these that I was approached in the tiring-house by a member of our Company, Master Robert Mink.

‘Master Revill? Are you on again soon?’

I shook my head. I wasn’t due on for the better part of an hour, to judge from the rudiments of my part I’d gleaned in that morning’s rehearsal. In fact, I thought the gaps between my appearances unduly protracted, yet at all times I was mindful of what Seneca the tragedian said: ‘It is with life as it is with a play — it matters not how long the action is spun out, but how good the acting is.’ Master Mink’s chins nodded at my head-shake. He was a fat man, yet surprisingly nimble. I had seen him moments before on the stage show the young couple who were not brother and sister how to cut a London caper. Now he pushed in my direction a piece of paper which was pincered between forefinger and thumb.

‘Good. I have to enter again in a moment. Would you do me a favour, Nick?’

As a temporary member of the Company I wasn’t in a position to refuse. I looked helpful.

‘There’s a lady in one of the boxes I wish to communicate with, but not to speak to. I wonder whether you’d be so kind as to convey this note to her. It’s the seventh box along on the right. She will be the only lady there.’

Costumed as I was, I made my way up the stairs to the galleries, wondering about the contents of the sealed note. Yet not really wondering at all. Despite what Nell had said about the restraint and the marital constancy of the Chamberlain’s Men, there are always a few in any company who liked to spread their favours freely, and Master Mink had the air of one who basked in the assurance that women liked him. That is, he was fat and courtly.

The passage round the back of the gallery was empty. The doors to the boxes were shut. The quality resided here. From behind the first one came a clink of glasses and a giggle. Obviously there were other pleasures in the city than that provided by the drama unfolding down below on stage. I was taking care to count my doors, not wanting to enter in on the wrong woman, or man, when from the fourth or fifth door along two figures suddenly burst out. A fellow in a leather jerkin and loose breeches collided with the opposite wall of the narrow little passage and then cannoned into me. Being barged into was becoming a regular occurrence, and I had my dignity as a player to consider. I stuck my foot out and he fell sprawling. Behind him was another man in a short black cloak, and wearing a tall black hat.

‘Get him! Hold him!’ he hissed.

Obligingly I knelt in the small of the big fellow’s back. He groaned but made no effort to get away. Black Cloak knelt down beside me and ran his hands over the fallen man’s jerkin.

‘Ah, I thought so.’

He held up a necklace that, to my inexperienced eye, looked valuable.

‘Ungrateful bastard, Jacob,’ he said slowly and deliberately to the man who was face down on the floor. ‘And after the kindness of Sir Thomas and his lady towards you.’

The other made a gurgling sound but still said nothing. Black Cloak looked at me and my evident costume. He had a long nose which was as sharp as a razor.

‘You’re a player?’

‘I have a message to deliver.’ I was still holding Master Mink’s billet doux.

‘Never mind that. Sir Thomas will want to thank you in person for stopping this fellow from getting away.’

He urged the man to his feet, tugging at his arm. I took the other and, like a couple of constables, we escorted him back along the passage. He was a lumbering individual, with a scrawny beard, almost a head taller than I. As we neared the door of the box from which these two had so abruptly exited, Black Cloak reached up and cuffed him about the head. This seemed unnecessary since he was as docile and cowed as a whipped bear. We crowded through the entrance to the box. Two men were sitting watching the stage. Beside them sat an attractive woman with an oval face and golden hair that reminded me a little of my whore Nell’s. The dress of these individuals showed their wealth: the woman, for example, was wearing a jewel-encrusted farthingale and a low decolletage that uncovered a fine cleavage, a mode that was usually the sign of an unmarried woman. Seeing them watching the play down below, I was reminded that I was part of A City Pleasure, and no part at all of whatever was occurring among these spectators. I must return to the tiring-room within a few minutes. I cursed Master Mink for sending me to deliver the note now stuffed into a pocket. The older of the two men in the box glanced in our direction but he appeared little concerned with whatever had taken place in the box or outside in the corridor.

‘Now, Sir Thomas, he is here,’ said Black Cloak to the older of the seated men, pushing forward the bear-like fellow into the centre of the little room. At the same time he flourished the necklace in a way that I can only describe as theatrical. The woman’s hand went slowly, almost in a caress, up to her throat.

‘I saw Jacob slip this from my lady’s white neck’ — he waved the pearl necklace so that it looked like a stream of milk — ‘oh so closely while all of you were attending to the play. He’s a cunning one. He possesses subtle pickers and stealers for all his size. I saw it all from where I was standing behind you. How did he think that he would get away with it?’

In demonstration, Black Cloak seized the right hand of the larger man in his left and held it up to display to the others. I had the impression that, if he could, he would have detached each of the large man’s blunt fingers and passed them around in proof of what he was saying. Yet I could see nothing delicate in these fingers that were supposed to have stolen. I stood, uneasily, at the rear of the box, puzzled because the large man made no attempt to wrest his hand away from the other’s grasp. Nor did he speak. He merely hung, crestfallen, in the centre of this little group.

‘He saw that I had witnessed all of it,’ continued the man in the black cloak. ‘My eyes are everywhere, you know, in your service, Sir Thomas. He tried to get away. I followed him out and, by good fortune, this gentleman was coming along the passage. Our friend Jacob bumped into him and fell. I overcame him and recovered the necklace.’

Again he flourished the milky chain. The whole report was delivered in a clipped, dry style as if Black Cloak were recounting some military skirmish in which he had been modestly victorious.

‘This gentleman is one of the players,’ he added.

I bowed slightly, and gave my name. Whatever the circumstances, I saw no reason why these good folk should not be acquainted with Master Nick Revill.

None of the three occupants of the box had yet spoken. Now the one who had been addressed as Sir Thomas stood up and came forward. I was aware of the play proceeding below, the buzz of voices, the answering laughter and noises of approval from the groundlings. These boxes were designed for privacy and whatever drama was taking place here would not touch on the absorbed attention of the rest of the audience.

‘This is a sorry state of affairs, Jacob,’ said Sir Thomas, ‘and after I had kept you in my household.’

He was, like Black Cloak, shorter than Jacob and had to look up into the thief’s face. But he had an air of authority and spoke with easy assurance. I wasn’t able to judge the expression on Jacob’s face but I saw the shake of his head.

‘What’s the matter, Jacob?’ said Sir Thomas. ‘Are you trying to deny what Master Adrian is saying? Much better to come clean over this business now.’

The big man continued to move his head slowly from side to side, and I understood then that he was dumb. Bear-like not only in size and the colouring of hair and beard, but also in his inability to articulate his predicament. The man with the black cloak, who was apparently called Adrian, glanced at me, as if wanting a confirmation of everything which he had described. I knew that I should have to return to the stage within a few minutes. Although I couldn’t have said exactly how I knew it, I knew too that Adrian was lying. Everything he’d said from beginning to end was false. There was something glib in his speech, and in the way he had protested too much. If he had been on stage, one would have perceived immediately that within this figure — with his black clothing, his showy gestures and his overstatement — lurked the villain. Most probably, it was he who had taken the necklace, and the hulking Jacob who’d pursued him through the door, rather than the other way about. The passage was so narrow and the two men so close that such a confusion between pursuer and pursued might have occured. Then, when the large man collided with me, Adrian — seeing it was all up with the robbery and needing a story to channel suspicion from himself — spotted his opportunity. He pretended to find the stolen item in the other’s jerkin, having placed it there during his rummaging.

All this I saw in an instant, and yet I had not a shred of proof.

We must have made an odd tableau, standing or seated as if all six of us were blocked for the stage and waiting for someone to tell us what to do next. Although Adrian, whom I supposed to be some kind of steward in this household, had named another and lower servant as a thief, it did not seem to me as though the others were ready to act on his accusation. I noticed that the woman was looking at Jacob more in bafflement than anger. Her hand remained at her neck. The necklace dangled from Adrian’s grasp, as if reluctant to be loosed. For some reason, this confirmed his guilt in my eyes. For certain, it was he who had filched the necklace; if Adrian had recovered it from Jacob’s clothing, as he had mimed doing outside the box, he would by now have handed it back to the lady. There is a taint in stolen goods and no honest man will hold on to them. Sir Thomas turned to the second man who had remained seated. He was younger, a pale-faced individual dressed in black.

‘What do you think, William?’

‘I think that this gentleman from the players could say more if he wished.’

He looked steadily at me. Sir Thomas nodded.

‘No doubt. You have heard what Adrian has told us, Master. . forgive me, you said your name was. .?’

‘Nicholas Revill.’

‘Master Revill. Is this how it appeared to you?’

‘I saw what I saw. These two men exited from your box in some confusion. One stumbled into me, the other recovered that necklace from him. I think.’

Jacob now turned towards me. His large brown eyes were blank; he expected no favours from me or from anybody. His helpless air would have moved a savage to pity. And it may be, too, that a dumb man will remind a player of the treasury of his tongue, and cause him to thank God for giving him all his faculties complete. Adrian’s razor nose quivered. He continued to hold up the necklace as damning evidence of the other servant’s guilt. Rings glittered on his fingers.

‘Well, Jacob,’ said Sir Thomas. ‘I fear I have no alternative but to to have you escorted to the Clink.’

The Clink is one of half a dozen or so prisons in Southwark. Our lawlesslessness is well provided for.

‘No,’ I said.

There was a pause while everyone swallowed the enormity of my contradicting Sir Thomas.

‘No?’ he said.

‘I mean,’ I added hastily, ‘that Jacob did not steal this lady’s necklace.’

Like Caesar, I had crossed the Rubicon. No stepping back. I was about to be exposed as a fool, and a malicious fool at that.

‘Explain, if you would,’ said Sir Thomas.

‘Master Adrian, give me your hand if you please.’

I spoke with all the assurance of the budding alderman that I played in A City Pleasure. Thinking of which, I glanced down towards the stage. Well, this too was a kind of act. Hurry.

The steward with the black cloak glanced at Sir Thomas, who shrugged, but in such a way as to indicate that Adrian should comply. Adrian held out his left hand, raising his eyes heavenward. He was a good player, perhaps a more subtle villain than I had at first assumed, but I was the better player, and, knowing this, I felt a sudden gust of certainty sweep through me. I gestured at the other hand, the one grasping the necklace. Even now unwilling to lay down the string of pearls, he transferred it to his left. I took his free palm between mine. It was a narrow, dry hand, and that must signify something. . everything that we have signifies, everything is pregnant with indication. And now I was about to draw conclusions from this hand or, rather, from its accessories.

He wore several rings. From under one of them I slid something out. I walked over to where the woman sat by the rail of the box, no longer even pretending to watch the play.

‘Forgive me, my lady,’ I said. I pulled taut what I held in my hand. It was a thread of hair. I placed it near her ladyship’s golden, unbonneted head, trying to angle the single thread so that it caught the light. The hair was a match, or close enough for my purposes. The four men — Sir Thomas, the younger William, bear-like Jacob, and the sharp-nosed Adrian — held me with their eyes as attentively as if I were an alchemist who had just effected that magical transformation of base material into gold.

‘This was under the ring on his middle finger,’ I said. ‘As you can see, it is from my lady’s head.’

I left the connection for them to make.

‘This is absurd, a piece of playing,’ said Adrian. ‘What is he saying? He is saying nothing.’

He still held the necklace, but I think that he would have been willing enough to get rid of it now.

William spoke. ‘This gentleman from the players is saying, I believe, that you removed the necklace, and as you did so a hair from my mother’s head was caught between the ring and your finger.’

William’s words clarified slightly the relationship between the occupants of the box. Even so, the lady hardly looked old enough to have a son in his twenties. From my vantage point, a little to one side and above where she sat, I saw nothing but a head of gold untarnished by the years. Unlike many ladies of rank — unlike, for instance, our beloved Queen (whom I saw three days after I arrived in London, and from a mere eight yards off) — she wore no wig but rested content and justified in what Nature provided. Furthermore, her partly uncovered breasts were full and smooth and white. If she was William’s mother, then presumably Sir Thomas was his father.

‘Do you know what happened, Alice?’ said Sir Thomas, appealing to her.

‘I am not sure. I felt nothing.’ Her voice was low and resonant. ‘But this should be simple enough to prove. Let Jacob steal the necklace again. If he can take it once then he can surely take it twice. Give it to me, Adrian.’

The steward, who now appeared to wish himself anywhere but in this box in the playhouse, returned the necklace to Lady Alice. Swiftly she reclasped it around the white pillar of her neck. Now she was the centre of the scene, and we five men mere bystanders.

‘I am looking at this play once more, this — what’s it called. .?’

‘A City Pleasure,’ I said.

‘I am absorbed in A City Pleasure. I am all ears and eyes on the stage. The back of my neck is bare, save for the necklace, and I am quite undefended. You may do what you please with me.’

She still spoke softly, but as she described what she was doing she suited the word to the action and, becoming a rapt spectator, bent her head slightly forward to expose the upswept golden hair and the contrasting snowy white skin and the clasp of the necklace.

‘Now, Jacob,’ she said in a tone that was almost kindly. ‘You must remove this necklace from my neck. You must try your best.’

Sir Thomas pushed gently at the hapless Jacob who, until this point, had been standing in the centre of the box. Slow and worried as he was, he nevertheless understood what he had to do. He shuffled a couple of paces forward to where my lady Alice was leaning over the balustrade. She gave no sign of being aware of anything except the play unfolding below. Jacob stretched out his arms, then seemed to realise that this was more a job for dexterity than force. He looked at his large hands, and tried to flex his fingers but they were quivering so much that he could get no control over them. These great paws, covered on the backs with reddish hair, approached the pale column of his mistress’s neck, and he had the wit to realise that this was a kind of sacrilege, as well as the simplicity not to be able to conceal it. In the middle of her bare nape glowed the intricate clasp that secured the pearl necklace.

I glanced at the others. Sir Thomas was watching his ungainly servant advance on Lady Alice. Her son, the black-suited William, who had still not risen from his seat in the other corner of the box, was dividing his attention between the tremulous thief and Adrian. The latter had positioned himself near to the door. The steward caught my eye and shot me a look as sharp as his nose. It was apparent that he held me responsible for this little scene, even though this part had been his mistress’s suggestion. His own version of events would have seen Jacob safely on his way to the Clink by now.

Jacob’s hands arrived at Lady Alice’s neck. They were shaking uncontrollably. For all her self-control, the woman tensed as she felt his fingers scraping and scrabbling at the clasp. After a few moments Jacob turned to look at his master, Sir Thomas. I do not think that I have ever seen such a combination of helplessness and entreaty. He made some strangulated sound in his throat. But speech here was quite unnecessary. All of our actions speak, and his dumbness was pitifully eloquent. Sir Thomas nodded, and Jacob let his huge hands drop to his sides.

Nobody spoke. It was quite evident to every person in that little room that Jacob could never have taken Lady Alice’s necklace. For one thing, he was far too clumsy, barely capable of undoing the catch even had it been around his own neck and his hands absolutely steady. Certainly, he could not have performed the trick without her noticing. But a stronger reason was that his every movement, his every gesture, showed that he lived with a respect that amounted almost to reverence for this man and woman, his master and mistress. We had all witnessed how his hands shook as they drew close to her neck, how reluctantly his feet had dragged across the oak flooring of the box. He was attempting to be a thief only at the command of Sir Thomas and the Lady Alice. If they’d told him to leap out of the box into the area where the groundlings stood below, he most likely would have obeyed. Nor was this a matter of acting. He was too stupid to act, but he was also — and this I saw suddenly — too good to act anything. Jacob was simply what he was, a single man and nothing more. For the rest of us in that box I cannot speak; we might all have been players, and even the poorest of players is a double man.

The silence was broken by Adrian. (I mean the silence in our little box, for all the time during this interlude the buzz and hum of stage business floated up to our unlistening ears.) But before he spoke, he smiled. A little lop-sided grin. Like Jacob he had a kind of wit, in his case the wit to realise that he was cornered.

‘Player is clever,’ he said. ‘Player knows his business, as I hope I know mine.’

I felt chilled, even though the afternoon was warm and I was sweating in my heavy town costume. But there was guilt in his words and in his crooked smiling face. Now Sir Thomas spoke, but with a peculiar reluctance which I attributed to the difficult task which confronted him.

‘Adrian, this is not the first time in which you have been detected in some malpractice. Coming at this particular time of difficulty, when we have looked to you for integrity, what you have attempted to do — to your lady Alice, to poor Jacob — is unforgivable. I am mindful of the good service you have performed for this family over the years, and for that reason I will not set the law on you.’

He paused, and I had time to be surprised at his leniency.

‘But you will leave our company and this box now, and if ever I or any member of my household discovers you within our precincts again, then I will not hesitate to turn you over to justice.’

‘There are things I could say,’ said Adrian. ‘To you, Sir Thomas, and you Lady Alice and even to young William, but this is not the time or the place. To the gentleman player here’ — the way in which he spoke indicated that such a description was for him a contradiction in terms — ‘I wish that he may always have such, ah, easy spectators for his performances, such eyes that are quick to believe, such ears as are quick to trust. His presence you are unable to bar me from. I can have him before me at any time by paying a penny and standing with the common people.’

He slid from the box, with his short black cloak and his black hat somehow seeming to swell, an exit performed with as much relish as if he were taking the devil’s part in some old Morality Play.

‘Are you all right, my dear?’ said Sir Thomas, turning attentively towards Lady Alice.

‘Perfectly,’ she replied.

Sir Thomas patted Jacob on the shoulder in an avuncular way. This bear of a man appeared hardly to have recovered from the sacrilege of attempting to slip the pearls from his mistress’s neck.

‘I must thank you, Master Revill, for your part in exposing Adrian. It is of course obvious now that Jacob could never have taken my wife’s necklace, but sometimes we need the obvious pointed out to us. Thank you.’

I inclined my head slightly, grateful at his gratitude. Sir Thomas went to the door of the box, perhaps to check that the steward really had gone. Lady Alice beckoned me to her side. Her voice dropped even lower so that I had to bend forward to hear her. No hardship because I was only inches from the snowy slope of her breasts.

‘I must thank you too,’ she whispered. ‘And I believe you have something to deliver to me.’

I suddenly remembered the note from Master Robert Mink which had brought me up to the gallery in the first place. So this was the lady it was intended for! I fumbled in a pocket of my costume and passed it across. This was half secret and half open business. Her son, who had remained sitting in the opposite corner of the box, most likely saw the transfer. He had made no comment so far on what had transpired.

‘Are you due to appear again?’ he said. ‘I mean in this piece down below? Your part is surely not yet concluded.’

‘Jesus God!’

For the sake of the drama that had been staged in Sir Thomas’s box I had forgotten the real drama in which I was appearing on the Globe stage. Jesus, perhaps I’d missed my cue. I thought of Master’s Burbage’s three-shilling fine. I thought more feelingly of the disgrace — the unprofessionalism — of missing one’s entrance. My very brief career with the Chamberlain’s Men rolled up and vanished before my eyes.

But I made it. I returned to the tiring-room moments before my final entry as the would-be alderman in A City Pleasure. Fresh from my private triumph in the box of Sir Thomas and his Lady, I gave my all. I was the foolish townsman John Southwold, who showed, by the absurdity of his language and gestures, that the hapless brother and sister (who weren’t brother and sister) would be better off away from the falsity of the city. Only in a rural setting does virtue flourish. I have observed, by the way, that although many of our poets and satirists are ready to attack the town for its blackness and corruption, and to praise the country for its Arcadian innocence, few indeed of those same poets and satirists are willing to live up to their words and exchange the taint of corruption for the fruit of innocence. In short, they show no great desire to go out to grass.

My part in A City Pleasure was not that large but I flatter myself that my performance, with its little twists and flourishes, went down well with the groundlings (who always enjoy laughing at their betters) as well as with the quality (who are pleased enough to watch some upstart guyed upon the stage). Robert Mink looked at me afterwards in a puzzled way. No doubt he was wondering just why I had been absent on his errand for so long. But I merely nodded; I had done what he requested and saw no reason to unravel the confused business that had occurred in the gallery box. If he was friendly with Lady Alice — as the note presumably signified — then he would find out about everything soon enough, if she chose to tell him.

Later, sitting in the Goat amp; Monkey, I pondered on my role not just in the drama on stage but in the business in Sir Thomas’s box. I considered that I had tilted the scales in favour of justice. True, I had my thumb in the pan. A little ‘unfair’ but. . There was no doubting that Adrian the steward was a nasty piece of work, while Jacob was a good-hearted, loyal and simple fellow. It is not often that right prevails. As for the steward’s threats, I had no fear of those. I felt protected, secure. I had won the approval and thanks of a wealthy man and his wife, Sir Thomas and Lady Alice Eliot. I was, albeit temporarily, a member of the most prestigious company of players in London. My Nell provided for me free, and lovingly, what other men had to pay for, lovelessly. I was energetic, and as near being immortal as a sound head, lungs and limbs can make you at the age of twenty six.

This is the moment when fortune crouches lower as she prepares to pounce.

‘How did you do it?’

It was William Eliot, Lady Alice’s son. He slipped onto the bench beside me.

‘Do what?’

‘The trick with the hair. Dextrous.’

‘Ah,’ I said, and was glad to be given time to think by a tapster’s interruption asking what we wanted.

‘Tell me,’ said William, after he had ordered a tankard for himself and another for me. ‘It doesn’t matter now, and Adrian was obviously guilty. So the right thing has occurred by indirection.’

He was echoing my own thoughts.

‘Do you, for example, carry around a stock of head-hair for just such an eventuality? It certainly wasn’t one of your own. Yours is coal-black.’

‘It was from your mother’s youthful head.’

‘The others may have been fooled,’ said William, ‘but I was sitting closer and the thread of hair you were holding was not hers. I know my mother’s hair well. Quite a different tint.’

‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘The hair wasn’t your mother’s. It belonged. . to someone else. There were a few threads on my shirt under the costume I was wearing. I noticed them by chance as I was changing into it this afternoon. I suppose I didn’t remove them because the thought of having some threads of this person’s hair about me was pleasing. Nobody could see them. I’m not sure that I thought about it at all. But it was chance, pure good fortune, that the colour was close to your mother’s.’

‘Then you pretended to discover it under one of the steward’s rings, took it over to where my mother was sitting — and invited us all to jump to the wrong conclusion?’

‘As you said yourself, the steward was guilty,’ I said, a little uneasily. ‘After all he admitted it, as good as admitted it.’

‘Yes, yes. I don’t quarrel with my uncle dismissing him. Adrian is more fortunate than he deserves to be. He might be in jail. I was curious how you came to produce a hair that came from somewhere else, from someone else — and now you’ve told me.’

‘Now I’ve told you.’

‘It was a sleight of hand.’

‘Only a trick,’ I said, anxious to move the conversation on, perhaps anxious to rid myself of this superior young man’s company.

‘And I am interested too in the justice of tricking the truth out of someone.’

‘I imagine that those men in the Tower who have a confession wrung out of them on the rack would rather be “tricked” into the truth, as you put it, if they were given the choice.’

‘I don’t doubt it,’ said William. ‘I am more concerned with the idea in the abstract.’

‘Oh, the abstract.’

‘Suppose that there is a fixed quantity of truth, and that every word of ours, every action, great or little, adds to or subtracts from this quantity. This pile of truth. This truth-mountain. Our steward has been dishonest, he has stolen from my mother and then attempted to pass the blame for the crime onto Jacob. This cluster of false words and actions obviously represents a great subtraction from our truth-mountain. A veritable weight. But then you come along, and to establish what has occurred you pass a little falsehood among the rest of us. You pretend that a thread of hair from your sister-’

‘Hardly my sister!’ I protested, irritated at the man’s high-handed manner.

‘No, of course not. I must have been thinking of that play we saw this afternoon, where the brother and sister turn out not to be be brother and sister after all. What a transparent device to produce a happy ending! I do not think we shall hearing too much more of the author of that. Who was he again?’

‘A Master Edgar Boscombe, I believe.’

‘I prefer Master Shakespeare myself. His plots are much closer to truth, however ridiculous they seem on the surface. Also he shares my given name. What was I saying? Oh yes. The hair that was secreted about your person. Well, if it didn’t derive from your sister, it was from your wife or your mistress, it doesn’t matter which. I don’t think it was a boy’s hair.’

He waited an instant for me to respond. I said nothing.

‘You do not look like a lover of boys, even though you are a player. My point is this. Your action in pretending that it was Lady Alice’s, my mother’s, also represents a tiny subtraction from the great mountain of truth.’

‘And you’re making a mountain out of a molehill,’ I said. ‘What I did was to commit a little falsehood in order to secure a greater truth.’

‘Ah, so you are simultaneously taking away and adding to the truth-mountain,’ said William. ‘I wonder, is that possible? I enjoy speculating on these things.’

‘Very Jesuitical,’ I sneered, then looked round to make sure no one was within earshot. It was not a good idea to use that word in a public place. But Master William Eliot seemed in no way discomposed. Thoughtfully, he drained off the last of his drink.

‘Anyway, I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I said. ‘I’m just a player.’

‘A simple man and so on.’

Somehow he managed to turn everything into a jibe or a sly insult. I determined not to rise to it.

‘If you like. You said just now that Sir Thomas was your uncle?’

‘Yes.’

‘But he’s married to the Lady Alice?’

‘My father is dead. After my father died, my uncle married my mother. This happened quite recently, as you may have been able to tell from his attentive manner towards her in the playhouse box.’

The tapster came across again to take our orders, and one of those natural pauses ensued while the tankards were brought. I took the opportunity of examining William as he sipped at his beer. He was a tall, thin man, about my age or a little older. (Which would put his beautiful mother in at least in her mid-forties, assuming that she had borne him early.) He had an inward-looking, melancholic air about him. His clothes were a fashionable black.

‘You are in mourning for your father?’ I asked.

‘’Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,

Nor customary suits of solemn black. .’ he began.

‘. . I have that within which passes show -

These but the trappings and the suits of woe.’ I concluded.

We laughed in recognition.

‘You know the play?’ he said.

‘I was in the play yesterday. Small parts, you understand.’

‘This is for my father in a sense,’ said William, indicating his black clothing, ‘because he did die recently. But I don’t believe I bear my uncle any grudge for marrying my mother, and I don’t despise my mother for choosing another husband, though one can never quite plumb the depths of one’s own mind in matters like these. My uncle is a good and shrewd man, I think. He is certainly a shrewd one. And a lenient one too, as you saw this afternoon when he allowed Adrian the steward to go scot-free. My mother is a woman who knows her own mind. She is also a handsome woman. If she wishes to marry soon after the death of a first husband, what more natural than that she should turn to that man’s brother? They are not unalike, my father and my uncle. No, I don’t brood on my mother’s remarriage. I am not Prince Hamlet.’

But the little flood of words, the most this young man had yet spoken, showed that he had brooded, was still brooding over this very matter. Anyone who eagerly denies something, with a mass of accompanying reasons, concedes the case against him, all unawares. And also William Eliot’s air, his dress, his professed pleasure in speculation, everything about him might have lead one to think that he was modelling himself on that famous character, the Prince of Denmark.

‘And yet. .’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Master Revill, I understand that you have nowhere to lodge at the moment, is that right?’

I was disconcerted. William Eliot had obviously been talking to someone. One of the Chamberlain’s Company?

‘I had a disagreement with my landlady over. . something. She has given me notice.’

‘I’m going to make you a proposition,’ said William. ‘But first I must tell you something that happened a few months ago, if you are willing to listen to a story.’

I nodded but said nothing.

‘A man went into his walled garden one afternoon. He was in the habit of going there to sleep on warm days. He alone possessed the key to the door that opened into this walled garden. It was his retreat, his sanctuary, a place where he could think or rest undisturbed. There was nothing unusual in these afternoon absences. When he did not reappear in the house by nightfall of this same day, however, his wife and their son and the servants began to grow worried. They called from the outer part of the garden, they rattled at the locked door. No response. Eventually one of the servants was sent over the wall on a ladder. What the servant found in the twilight caused the wife to order the door broken down. When the household — by now most of them were assembled — poured though the narrow entrance to the walled garden they found the head of the household dead in his hammock. The body was almost cold. He had apparently lain there since the early afternoon. There were no marks of violence, no signs of foul play. He had died naturally. What does this remind you of?’

‘It’s obvious enough,’ I said.

‘Well?’

‘It’s what happens before the beginning of the play of Hamlet. Hamlet’s father, old Hamlet, dies in his orchard one afternoon. The story’s put around that it was as a result of a snake-bite. But the Ghost tells the Prince that he was poisoned — and that the murderer is now on the throne of Denmark and married to Hamlet’s mother.’

‘I said that Master Shakespeare’s plots were closer to the truth,’ said William. ‘What I’ve just described to you is the manner of my father’s death. Asleep, one afternoon, in his garden, in his house, on the other side of the river, his death apparently a natural one.’

‘Jesus,’ I said. ‘And then to have your mother remarry — and to your uncle. All this really happened, what you’re saying?’

‘It’s easy enough to check it if you don’t believe me. My mother or my uncle or any member of the household will confirm it. There was even a ballad made on the subject of my father’s passing, how death comes for rich and poor alike or some such profundity.’

‘It stretches belief that your family’s history should mimic so exactly the action of a play,’ I said.

‘Yes. It is disturbing to find that nature is so short of material that it is forced to hold up the mirror to art, if I may vary one of the Prince of Denmark’s own observations,’ said William languidly. ‘But consider these things, consider them separately. Then they are less surprising. My father was several years older than my mother. He had not been in the best of health. One might ask, why should he die then and there, one fine spring afternoon in a hammock in his private garden? But, to look at it another way, why shouldn’t he? As good a time as any other. Death is not always the thief who comes in the night.’

‘You sound very, ah, unmoved about this,’ I said.

‘I have thought long and hard about it. I have tried to be dispassionate. Then, I examine the sequel to this. My mother sincerely grieves, I think, at my father’s death. That was no playing, such as Hamlet complains of when he calls his mother Gertrude a hypocrite. My uncle Sir Thomas too showed grief, though in a manly way. He is not a Claudius, surely, full of fine words as he secretly clutches the knife. Each of them, widow and brother, naturally turned to the other for consolation. Consolation soon — very soon — changed to love. Again, what’s exceptional about that? We are told in Leviticus that if brothers dwell together and one of them dies then the widow should not be married outside the family to a stranger.’

‘That is the case when the wife has not produced a son,’ I said. ‘Then the brother should perform the duties of a husband. But in this situation there was at least one son, you.’

William glanced at me in surprise.

‘My father was a parson,’ I said. ‘Whether I wanted to or not, I soaked up Bible learning every day of the week.’

‘There is no great gap between pulpit and stage. That’s why they’re always at each other’s throats.’

I was beginning to warm to this fellow, for all his airs.

‘My father wouldn’t thank you for saying so. Like our City fathers, he held that the playhouse was the root of all abomination.’

‘And so you are drawn to it. Does he know how his son earns a living?’

‘My father is dead. My mother also. The plague-beast struck at Bristol a couple of years ago, and one of its tails or legs swept through our little parish.’

‘And now you are a player. Well, whether the words of Leviticus about the marriages of widows and brothers apply or don’t apply, I’m sure that it is not so unusual for two people in such circumstances to find themselves attracted to each other.’

He said this as if he were talking about my mother and father.

‘Probably not.’

‘So, you see, these events taken separately — a death and a remarriage — are nothing out of the ordinary.’

‘But you don’t actually think that?’

‘To be more precise, I don’t feel it. Without being able to say why, I don’t feel that all’s right with the world.’

‘There’s a simple way of clearing this up,’ I said. ‘When did your father die?’

‘The first week in May.’

‘And the first performance of Hamlet was in June, I think.’

I struggled to remember when I’d seen the tragedy of the Prince of Denmark. It was a successful play and so had received more than a couple of performances; and now it had been revived in the autumn. My first appearance with the Chamberlain’s Men had been on the previous day in this very production. But I was fairly sure that my first sight of it as a spectator had been in early summer. High white clouds scudding above the open playhouse. A sense of freshness in the air, even among the groundlings. Standing at the back I’d pulled my hat lower to shade my gaze from the afternoon sun as I witnessed the destruction of the royal court at Elsinore (little dreaming that I would myself be appearing within a few months on that very stage as the emissary from England, come to announce the deaths of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to unhearing ears!). Yes, this was in June.

‘It was June,’ I said. ‘I remember.’

‘Well?’

‘Your father’s death took place before the play of Hamlet ever appeared on the Globe stage. You’re not suggesting that our author got the idea for his play from what happened to your father?’

‘Of course not,’ said William Eliot. ‘I’d never accuse any playwright of making up ideas or borrowing from reality. They’d be justifiably insulted. Anyway, every educated person knows that there’s an older version of your author’s Hamlet, some crude stuff that’s been around for years. And that rough version probably had an even rougher version preceding it. And one before that, and so on.’

‘So it’s not a case of nature holding up the mirror to art, as you wittily put it,’ I persisted. ‘Your father’s death occurred before the play was first performed. But it’s not the other way round either. The play was not composed so far in advance of your father’s death as to indicate that the author might have “borrowed” from reality, even assuming that he’d be prepared to do anything so indelicate. The two things, the play writing and the death, must have been occurring more or less simultaneously. Why, he must have been at work on Hamlet in April or even during May itself if it was first staged in June.’

‘He writes fast.’

‘No more than average,’ I said, pretending to a knowledge of our author’s compositional habits. But what I said applied to any playwright worth his salt. We had no patience with any author who laboured for weeks and then produced a few paltry scenes.

‘So there’s no connection between the events of the play and my father’s death, you think,’ said William.

‘Just coincidence,’ I said with a confidence that I didn’t feel.

‘You’re probably right,’ he said. Then after a pause, ‘You remember that I had a proposition to put to you?’

‘Yes.’

He broke off to order another drink for each of us, and, when our hands were full and our mouths refreshed once more, said, ‘You’ve nowhere to lodge presently?’

‘You know already of the difference of opinion with my landlady, apparently.’

‘I can offer you quarters in my house, that is in my mother’s and stepfather’s house. It’s on the other side of river, not so convenient for the Globe perhaps, but in a rather better neighbourhood.’

‘I like it here,’ I said. ‘This is the players’ district.’

And it was true. Southwark was near to being lawless territory, outside the writ of the City authorities. Our one respectable building was the Bishop of Winchester’s Palace. Otherwise we were all stews, playhouses and thieves’ kitchens, together with an array of prisons from the Clink to the Marshalsea — the ultimate destination for many of our folk. Southwark residents tended towards the unrespectable: coney-catchers and bully boys, whores and veterans. . and yet somehow I, the country parson’s son, felt in my element down here in a way that I hadn’t when I lodged north of the river.

‘I didn’t mean permanent quarters,’ said William. ‘I can see that there are advantages to living near your workplace. Though you’re only temporarily with the Chamberlain’s Men, I understand. There’s a man who is off visiting his dying mother, is there not?’

Who had he been talking to?

‘I’m not interested in your offer,’ I said. ‘I prefer to find my own accommodation.’

‘No offence, Master Revill. I have an ulterior motive in asking you to take a room in my house. I’m not in the business of looking after players who have been thrown out of their lodgings for covering their landladies with piss.’

A smile took the offence out of his words. But I was busy wondering if he knew Nell.

‘Master Eliot, get to the point.’

‘I would like you to help me find the murderer of my father.’

I began to think that my new acquaintance shared more than clothing and a fashionable melancholy with that figure who had swept the London stage, the lord Hamlet. Master William Eliot, like the Prince, had a trace of madness in him.

‘I thought there was nothing suspicious in his death.’

‘Outwardly, no.’

‘When you break it down into a series of events there is nothing particularly remarkable about it. Isn’t that what you said — or something like it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well then?’

‘Master Revill, when you see a play you watch as one scene succeeds another, and you will perhaps not at first understand how the scenes are linked, or that the play with all its disparate parts is nevertheless a whole — sometimes a ragged, clumsy whole — but still something complete unto itself. Whether the play is well-made or ill-made there is connection, there is a plan, a plot.’

‘You should not confuse a play with real life. If there is a plot down here in this world, it is not likely to be discerned by us poor mortals,’ I said, and then realised I was echoing the kind of thing my father would have uttered on Sunday (and the rest of the week).

‘Surely you can see,’ said William, ‘that someone has already created that confusion? My father’s death in some of its details, my mother’s remarriage to my uncle and so on — all of this has been revealed on the stage not a few hundred yards from where we are sitting. You say coincidence, but I say coincidence is simply a word for what we don’t yet understand. And if there is a plot behind Master Shakespeare’s work, which there is certainly is, then why should there not be a plot behind what has happened to the Eliot family?’

I made no answer. There was some flaw in his argument but I was unable to identify it.

‘So what am I supposed to do?’

‘Accept my offer of lodgings. You would be received into the house as a friend who has done the Eliot family a favour and who is in need of accommodation for the time being. I can speak for my mother and I believe I can speak for my uncle in this respect. You will of course need to cross the river daily for your work at the Globe. But while you are in my mother’s house, watch and listen.’

‘Watch, listen? For what?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Goodbye, Master Eliot. This is chasing shadows.’

I made to rise, but half-heartedly.

‘Please wait.’

He held me gently but firmly by the upper arm until I resumed my place beside him on the bench.

‘If I were not being honest with you, I would claim to have seen something in those shadows. But I cannot say, I cannot see, if there is anything there or not. And that is tormenting me.’

He spoke evenly, but the grip of his hand on my arm and the rigid set of his mouth showed that he was in earnest.

‘You are casting me as Horatio,’ I said.

‘Hamlet’s friend.’ He laughed, but without much mirth. ‘Then you accept?’

‘I don’t know. You must say what I am to look for.’

‘Everything and nothing. I am an interested spectator, a biased one. I need a neutral pair of eyes to see whether there really is anything out of place.’

‘Out of place? How will I recognise what’s out of place in your house, for God’s sake?’

‘You will know what you are looking for when you find it.’

‘Very cryptic, Master Eliot.’

‘William.’

‘It is still cryptic, whatever you prefer to be called. But do your clever words actually mean anything?’

‘That is the very question I would ask about my father’s death. What does it signify?’

‘And why me?’

‘Because you showed quickness and dexterity when you accused the steward of theft this afternoon. More important, you were right to act as you did. Because you are a player, and have a sense of the divide between what men say and what they are. And because you know the play.’

‘That play?’

‘Yes, the play about a father’s death and a mother’s remarriage. Don’t worry that I’m confusing what really happened with what is presented daily on the playhouse boards. But the connection is a. . pregnant one.’

‘Very well,’ I said. ‘But suppose there is nothing for me to find or suppose that I am a less percipient spectator than you give me credit for? You must understand that nothing may come of this pregnancy.’

‘I hope it won’t,’ he said. I did not believe him. He wished, as all of us do, to discover the worst. He continued, ‘As I said, I respect my uncle and I love my mother. I wish them well in their new life. Though they were married so soon after my father’s death. .’

Having made the arrangements for my reception into his mother’s house and after a few more inconsequential exchanges, William Eliot left me sitting in the Goat amp; Monkey, bemused at this latest shift in my fortune. I couldn’t deny that his offer of lodging was opportune. It would save me the cost of my rent, a not insignificant part of a jobbing player’s insignificant wages. Putting up in one of the grand houses on the north bank would be a dozen times more comfortable than anything I could afford across the water here in Southwark. Most of all, it would be an introduction to people of wealth and influence — and if one is a poor and youngish player making one’s way in the capital then that is something not to be sniffed at.

And I was curious. The story that William Eliot had recounted was so queerly parallel to events in our author’s latest play that, sceptical as I was, I could not help being affected by what he said. My own argument, supported by dates and times as well as by common sense, was that there could be no link between what had happened in a private garden on the other side of the river Thames and the imagined events in an orchard in Elsinore in the Kingdom of Denmark. If dramatic logic or the parallel were followed, then Sir Thomas Eliot would turn out to be a murderer, the Lady Alice an adulteress possibly complicit in the death of her husband, and — before the action was concluded — her son William would himself have carried out a fair few killings.

Absurd. .

My thoughts were interrupted by a series of repeated screams a few feet from my face.

‘Jesus, Nat, you startled me.’

It was the man who made his living by mimicking animals for a penny in taverns or the street.

‘What are you? I don’t recognise that.’

He was a small grubby man and he now held out an equally small grubby hand. I handed over a penny.

‘Laughing hyena.’

‘Never heard of it.’

‘Its cries are like laughter, sir. Hear me now.’

Encouraged by the penny, he gave several more screeches in which, I suppose, there might just have been detected a species of maniacal, mirthless amusement.

And, looking back, that was a justified commentary on the predicament into which I was about to sink myself.