Death of Kings

by Philip Gooden

  “Then why isn’t Master Burbage here or Master Shakespeare?’

  My bowels gave a further lurch or twist to hear these names, especially the latter.

  “Forgive me,” said Augustine Phillips, “but they are busy and, as I say, I have been deputed to speak for the Company. Let me hear your proposal once more and, if you please, do not be coy about naming plays and times.”

  “Very well. It is Shakespeare’s Richard II that we mean to have done.”

  “Ah,” said the other, with no great surprise as it seemed to me. Then, echoing my own words to Sir Robert Cecil, “It is a fusty piece.”

  “Very fresh and to our purposes, I think,” said Merrick.

  “Not performed for some few years.”

  Again, almost the very words I had used. I shivered at the coincidence, even though it was warm in the Book-keeper’s room and I was sweating with the fear of discovery – and of other things besides which I couldn’t have put a name to.

  “And now King Richard’s time is come again. The year, the week, the very day.”

  In Sir Gelli’s response there was a species of fervour. I had a sudden flicker of memory from my Somerset childhood and saw myself, alone, on a country track and hearing a far-off rumble of thunder, and picking up my pace to get home.

  “What week, what day?”

  “Master Phillips, you must surely understand that I cannot be precise here though in my opinion it will be soon.”

  “Because if we are to stage a play, even a fusty, time-warped piece, we must have a little warning. A morning of rehearsal at least. There may be costumes to be looked at.”

  “Of course. You will have sufficient time to prepare, at least a day’s warning. If I cannot yet be precise it is because there are many things still uncertain, many things still to be weighed.”

  “This is to be a private performance?”

  “Not at all, Master Phillips. It will be open to all. That is the point. You are to advertise it in your usual way, with notices and a fanfare and so on. We wish the people of London to see King Richard.”

  “And Henry Bolingbroke, the usurper.”

  “We only wish the play to be seen as it is, with nothing added, nothing omitted – that is important, nothing omitted.”

  “And what do we gain from this, in the Chamberlain’s?”

  “Oh, now you come to money. I thought that you performed and then were paid.”

  “Only a fool plays blind,” said Master Phillips.

  “We offer you forty shillings.”

  “Forty shillings extraordinary?”

  “I do not understand players’ talk.”

  “I mean, forty shillings in addition to whatever the gatherers take at the door – from the people of London who you think are so eager to see this stale piece.”

  “You may charge what you please at the door. You may charge whatever your audience will bear. I tell you only what you will receive from us.”

  “And in return, you wish for the best seats?”

  “Some of them perhaps. But it may be more to the advantage of my – party – that we are scattered through the playhouse. Some in the twopenny seats, some in the threepenny ones and so on.”

  “And some even standing with the penny-knaves?”

  “There too. We want to, ah, take the measure of things.”

  “Is this all that you offer the Company? Forty shillings is welcome enough but it is no great reward in itself.”

  “There may be other rewards to come.”

  “As?”

  “Rewards . . . such as memory and gratitude . . . and even obligation.”

  “Airy rewards,” said Augustine Phillips.

  I could almost see the other man bristle and bridle at this. Master Phillips quickly continued, “Well, perhaps those unseen rewards may be the most valuable of all.”

  “They could be,” said Merrick. “Time will tell, but we are confident. Have we not right and justice on our side?”

  “I am not sure what you mean. You have asked us only to stage an old play about a dead king.”

  “Which you will do?”

  “Provided we have sufficient warning, yes. I think I may speak for the Company in saying yes.”

  I was surprised that Augustine Phillips should agree to Sir Gelli’s request. The forty shillings was not so much, and the less tangible rewards were certainly ‘airy’. It was at this moment, as I was wondering at the readiness with which he’d committed the Company to what must surely be (at the least) a dubious course, that disaster struck.

  I was sitting awkwardly on the floor, limbs tense, face set, ears straining at the thin partition, and attempting all the while to scribble down the secret words which came from the other side. As their dialogue seemed to be drawing to an end, so the discomfort of my position began to tell and I straightened my left leg with sufficient force to strike the treasure chest full of plays. The stick with which I had propped up the lid fell with a clatter on the floor and the lid thumped back into place.

  The talking immediately ceased in the next room and there was the sound of a chair scraping on bare boards. Then came Augustine Phillips’ even tones.

  “Be calm, Sir Gelli.”

  “You said we were private.”

  “A rat or a cat only.”

  “A rat with two legs perhaps. Let me see.”

  The door of Burbage’s office creaked open.

  “Wait, Sir Gelli.”

  But already there were steps in the passage outside the Book-keeper’s room. The latch was lifted.

  “What’s in here?”

  “This is Master Allison’s room.”

  “Who is he? Would you move?”

  “He is our Book-keeper.”

  “Would you stand aside please, Master Philips.” A pause, while I had time to notice Augustine Phillips’ apparent reluctance to let this intruder into one of the playhouse’s private rooms. Then from closer at hand, “Where is he?”

  My heart near leaped out of my chest because I imagined that Merrick was looking for me. But the reply showed that he meant Allison. “Evidently not here,” said Master Phillips. He tsk-tsk’ed. “And he has not put away his scripts, I observe.”

  From my position behind the great trunk I sensed, rather than saw, Phillips come forward to examine the disordered piles of paper that lay around. Surely my heart was banging loud enough to be heard by him.

  “I must have a word with Master Allison. He should not leave these about.”

  “What is in these other rooms off here?”

  “Offices of the playhouse.”

  “Show me.”

  “Sir Gelli, it was a cat or a rat.”

  “No doubt, but I would like to be sure.”

  Master Philips sighed. After a moment, the door to Allison’s room was shut and I heard the other rooms in this quarter of the playhouse being opened for Merrick’s inspection. I waited several minutes to see whether the two men would return to Burbage’s chamber but their business was apparently concluded. Then I slid slowly out from the narrow space between the trunk and the wall. It was a wonder that Master Phillips had not seen me, even though the natural light in the Book-keeper’s room was poor and the February afternoon beyond the little glazed window was all dirty and dulled over with cloud. I thanked Providence that I had not yet lit a candle to read the plays by.

  After another few minutes I concluded that I was safe and that if anyone were to enter the Book-keeper’s room now they would not think there was anything odd or suspicious in my presence. Therefore I lit the candle and settled to the task of sorting and listing the plays in the trunk. But my hands were unsteady and my mind distracted by the conversation between Augustine Phillips and Sir Gelli Merrick, and with what I knew I had to do next. Also, I was troubled with a strange sense that I had been abandoned by my fellows. As Master Phillips had said to his visitor, it was a quiet afternoon. It seemed that the Globe was a near-empty shell and that I huddled in one of its tiny compartments,
bent over fading papers, lit by an uncertain candle. Some time later Master Allison came in to see how I was doing, and I took a little heart from that. I did not tell him of my discoveries of the morning and the afternoon.

  After a time I left the Globe, freighted down with a dangerous cargo of paper. For all that it weighed next to nothing, either item was heavy enough to have driven me, and others, onto the rocks. In addition to the first few pages of The Courtesan of Venice by Anonymous, I had a scrawled transcription of the Phillips-Merrick talk. These were documents that I would have to guard as carefully as the playhouse scrolls which contained my parts. More carefully, in fact, for there was no playing here. Everyone – Master Richard Milford, Master Augustine Phillips, Sir Gelli Merrick (and the horde of unseen conspirators behind him) – every one of these individuals was in deadly earnest.

  My difficult day, one in which I had been privy to two unwelcome discoveries, was about to give way to a yet more troubling evening. I was making for the Bridge to cross over into Clerkenwell for another Twelfth Night rehearsal in the Office of the Revels and considering that one could over-rehearse a play. Passing The Knight of the Carpet ale-house, I heard an owl’s forlorn hoot surprisingly close at hand. Then a voice hissed at me out of the shadows.

  “Master Revill.”

  My instinct was to run. I was tired of night encounters in the street. Then I put the hooting and the half-familiar voice together.

  “Nat, is it?”

  “The very same, sir.”

  I was almost relieved, to have found a friend in the night. Not that Nat the Animal Man was exactly a friend, but you understand what I mean. This small, dirty, disreputable creature took halfpennies or liquor from the drinkers of the Goat and other hostelries by mimicking the cries of beasts both wild and tamed. He could do the roar of the lion or the bray of the camel, as well as the whole discourse of the farmyard. For a little more money or drink he would enact a full-scale fight from the bear-pit. I have even heard him present a panoply of grotesque creatures like the amphisbaena and the hippogriff, whose names he can scarcely pronounce but whose outlandish screams and hisses he claims to have been taught by a traveller from the East. But personally I do not believe that such a traveller ever existed.

  “No custom tonight, Nat?”

  I sensed rather than saw him come closer to me, a bundle of clothing, a ragged four-limbed bird.

  “No, sir. No one seems interested tonight. And just when I have some animals fresh in last week.”

  “That old hippogriff again?”

  “No sir, these are new and one of them is a beast with five heads and ten tongues, they say, and it makes a great noise. I have the sound off most infallible but the name of it has slipped my mind.”

  “How do you know its sound, Nat, if you have never met the beast?” I asked, as I sometimes do, to catch him out.

  “A traveller who has been to far Cathay taught it me, sir,” he said, as he usually does.

  “And where is this far Cathay? I should like to visit it myself.”

  “I forget, sir. It is either three days’ ride away or on the other side of this great world.”

  “And the rest of the animals? You said you had other fresh sounds?” I asked, to humour him.

  “Only the goose in the farmyard. You may be surprised I have never done the goose in the farmyard before. And the noise of the fox too as he closes on him when the goose is least suspecting.”

  Something about the way Nat the Animal Man said these last words caused the hairs on the nape of my neck to bristle.

  “But the fox, he makes no sound.”

  “You’re a sharp one, sir. There are some who will pay for silence, though.”

  “Are you after a goose tonight?” I asked.

  “Like I said, there is no custom,” he said. “But I have something for you, sir, if you will open your ears.”

  “I am not certain that I wish to hear.”

  “Have you heard the bird of ill-omen, sir?”

  “The bird of ill-omen? No, what sound does it make? Be-ware, be-ware, be-ware.”

  “Very good. You will soon supplant me in my trade, sir.”

  “Only if my fortunes turn Turk with me.”

  “This bird can talk,” said Nat, “a thing sometimes found among feathered creatures. And it has a message for you.”

  “Watch-out, watch-out, I suppose.”

  There is something desperate about joking with someone you can’t see, and even as I jested I had an uncomfortable idea that this conversation was heading in an unwelcome direction. Perhaps I was trying to deflect Nat from his course.

  “A penny will prompt it, sir.”

  I held out a halfpenny and Nat’s hand, doubtless dirty, seemingly taloned like a bird’s, folded round it in the darkness and without acknowledgement.

  “The bird of ill-omen. Spell it backward, sir. Omen. Spell it back.”

  “I didn’t know you could read, Nat.”

  “If a bird may talk, why should an Animal Man not read?”

  “Omen backwards is nemo. That is the message?”

  “That is the messenger.”

  I produced another halfpenny. The same palm opened and shut. Then he opened his chops and, in a kind of caw, uttered these words.

  “Hartstreetmidnight – Hartstreetmidnight – Hartstreetmidnight.”

  “I hear you,” I said.

  I heard all too well, and saw also that there was no limit to the net that Robert Cecil or his minions were able to weave about the honest citizens of London.

  We were in the great chamber at the Office of the Master of the Revels. The February night was kept at bay with a roaring fire, and a blaze of candles, lamps and candelabra, but the warmest item of all was the buzz of human activity. We were in the midst of our preparations for the royal Twelfth Night. All was ordered bustle. Sir Edmund Tilney, the Revel Master in person, was darting about, consulting with the Burbage brothers, with Master Shakespeare, with Master Phillips and other senior members of the Company. Old Heminges, who was responsible for the financial side of such performances, was much in request. We lesser figures of the Chamberlain’s waited on the pleasure of our elders, studying the scrolls which contained our parts and which by this time we knew backwards, talking quietly and joking, straightening seams and brushing imagined motes and flecks off our clothing.

  Every so often the Tire-man or one of his assistants would separate himself from the principal players and wander over to look us up and down, then press back a fold here or tighten a loose point there, and all the while with pursed lips as if to say, “For God’s sake, man, don’t you know that the Queen’s real interest is in our costumes?” And then Master Allison would come among us and check for the twentieth time that we knew our exits and entrances and what (if anything) we were supposed to carry on or take off stage with us. All of this worked well enough when we played at what I might term our home, the Globe Theatre. But now that we were transplanted to the grander surroundings of the Clerkenwell Priory in anticipation of the even greater grandeur of Whitehall Palace, everything which was plain and straight before had to be crumpled and rumpled – if only in order to be smoothed out once more.

  The one man who did not seem troubled with the forthcoming performance was Master WS. Though he was acting as the ‘guider’ for this production, he did not come over and tell us how to stand and how to deliver our lines. He did not appear to worry himself over whether we had memorised the words but took it for granted that, as proper proud players, we would do our duty. And yet there were other matters weighing on Master Shakespeare’s mind, as I was soon to discover.

  Meantime I should say a little about my own role in Twelfth Night, and about the play in general.

  This comedy is a light and happy piece but also a sad one in places – and indeed there can be no true comedy without some heaviness. As it is in the beginning, when shipwrecked Viola is cast up on the coast of Illyria, believing that her twin brother Sebastian is drowned. Wh
ere Illyria is I am not sure but it is not so far from Messina, for that is the birthplace of Viola and Sebastian. And Messina is in the Kingdom of Sicily. And the Kingdom of Sicily is . . .

  Enough geography! Back to the story.

  Viola takes man’s disguise and the name Cesario for protection (but really in order that Master WS may make the most of the confusion which inevitably follows). Our disguised Viola joins the court of Duke Orsino, ruler of Illyria and would-be lover of the Countess Olivia. The Duke sends disguised Cesario to woo the Countess on his behalf – all too successfully. Olivia falls for a him who is not a he. Meanwhile, Cesario, the he who is a she, has fallen in love with Orsino. Each of these three loves another and is loved in turn by the third. How to satisfy the sexes? How to resolve this iron triangle and make it into a pliant square? Master WS, conjurer that he is, now calls up Viola’s twin brother Sebastian, who has after all survived the shipwreck and the surges. This gentleman is easily confused – of course! – with his sister in her male disguise. Eventually all is well: Orsino is paired off with Viola, now out of man’s attire and her adopted name, while Sebastian is delighted with the beauteous Olivia. We end with weddings in abundance.

  But on the margins of this happy tale are some discontented and unhappy folk. There is no maker of melancholy like a wedding, your funeral is nothing to it. The steward Malvolio, like Narcissus, loves only his own self and image. Feste the clown (played by Robert Armin), though he sings of love, seems not to seek it for himself. There is a knight, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, who is a fool whether he is in or out of love. And then there is poor Antonio, who has rescued Sebastian from the ocean billows and who now companions his new friend with a dogged, selfless devotion. He is sloughed off at the end when Sebastian finds a more attractive prospect in the shape of the fair Olivia. Who should blame Sebastian? Who would feel for Antonio?

  Well, Antonio was my part, and I was determined to make something of it and him, not in a noisy passionate way, but quietly and modestly, which I considered to be the fellow’s nature.

  I had three or four scenes to play, first with Sebastian and afterwards with Viola-Cesario, whom I mistake for her twin brother. Then I am arrested as an enemy to the state of Illyria; and, although all is made straight again at the end, the happy amity between Antonio and Sebastian will never come again, for it has served its turn.