‘Thank you, Weel, for your meelk.’
‘I never gave it so gladly, lady.’
‘Ah, you are kind, I sink.’
‘It’s the milk of human kindness, Jacqueline.’
‘We should share it, zen.’
And so we did.
‘Love me again, Weel!’
And I did.
‘And were proud of yourself?’ Francis was wearing his admonitory face.
Yes – and no. When I saw how Thomas Vautrollier looked at me next morning, I knew that he would not be anxious for me to spend one more night under the Splayed Eagle. From the splayed thighs of Jacklin he must have caught more than a whiff of hot Stratford sperm – and to speak true, the sight of that grey face with its rheumy reproachful eyes was more than I could bear. It was the Judas punishment and the old Adam was to blame. I had betrayed the host and fucked the hostess and tears would drown the wind. Therefore to horse – and let us not be dainty of leave-taking. In the chill dawn Jacklin would be Madame Vautrollier again, a bruised fruit. Besides I couldn’t bear to look at her over cold shoulder and small beer. Instead I hugged the night’s doings hard and hot between my thighs, and as I turned east into Cheapside, past the already buzzing stalls, and north up Gracious Street towards the Wall, heading across Moorfields for distant Shoreditch, my head was filled with her dark glories, dark lady with hair as black as goats, winding down the olive slopes of her shoulders, breath sweet as honey and quim like quince…And as I made my way up Bishopsgate and into Hog Lane, I pitied from the pits of my testicles all men who’d never had her and never would.
25
I made my way well beyond the city wall and Stinking Lane, where poppies blazed like whores’ lips in gangrenous gardens and settlements of shit, and I came through Moorfields to Shoreditch. Here flitted the theatrical shadows to which Richard Field had reluctantly directed me. Here certain actors lurked, he said, living out their brief barely respectable lives before the final bow – Beeston in Hog Lane, Burbage and Cowley in Holywell Street, and Dick Tarleton too, the king of comedy, the god of laughter.
A crippled beggar did me for a penny and directed me to a Hog Lane tenement that looked and smelled like a shithouse. I knocked several times, and after an age of listening to a rattling cough dragging itself like shackles to the door, found myself looking into the sad fat face of a derelict.
Tarleton the Great. Tarleton who was so famous, old Henry said, they used his picture as an alehouse sign and even stuck it on privies, inside and out, to help the constipated. You could lose control laughing. Better than senna, rhubarb, or purgative drug. If you heard helpless shrieks from within and uninhibited volleys of farts and splashes, you knew it was a Tarleton lav, and that somebody was emptying his all on the other side. They came out from the crapper weak and shaking.
Such were old Henry’s memories, and that was all right for the privy, he said. Not so funny when people pissed themselves in the playhouse, or shat themselves offstage, or even on the stage – the players were right in the firing line. Rehearsing with the fat bastard was no guarantee against fart-producing laughter, with potential for much worse. No one was iron-bowelled enough for sure, and a play with Tarleton in it rarely went off without a song and an accident. People used to laugh before he even came on stage. They came into the theatre grinning, paid their pennies smilingly, laughed just knowing he was about to come on. Then all the old joker had to do was peep from behind the curtain – and when they saw that fat face with the broad nose and squint, the mop of curls, the mischievous moustache and the twinkling eyes, they roared the place down and he hadn’t said a word. It was said that Tarleton could make an angel fart and that even the Virgin Mary listened in.
Most of what he came out with concerned either cuckoldry or excrement and he had an unmatched ability to extemporise upon these grand themes and to feed the appetites of audiences for quips about privies and pricks, with endless variations on farts and fannies, his particular favourites. Apart from the jigs and jests he had a few routines that everybody looked forward to and he brought these out on stage no matter what the play or part. Had he lived, I’d have seen Hamlet done up differently. My masters, the incredible antics of Mr Richard Tarleton and his dog, with many bawdy jests and jigs, including an appearance by Richard Burbage as the Prince of Denmark. Yes, the groundlings would have lapped that up, like Tarleton’s little pooch. He taught it to gobble what looked like its own turds. Maybe they were.
Once he staged a mock fight with the queen’s little dog, Perrico de Faldas, complete with longsword and staff, screaming blue murder and begging her gracious Majesty to take away her hound. Right in the spirit of the thing, her majesty bawled back in turn for her ushers to take away the knave, he was making her laugh so much she was pissing her petticoats. What could you really expect from a queen who cackled at such drolleries? If you’re a player you don’t expect a fortune, that’s for sure, from a queen who laughs at such a knave. But she didn’t look after her knave either. Poor Tarleton. Gasping his life out on his deathbed, he scratched a letter to Walsingham, imploring him for protection for his little son only six years old, as if you could have sucked an ounce of compassion from the flinty bones of old Walsher, that spyer-out of thoughts. Thou canst not say I did it! Thy bones are marrowless, thy blood is cold! Cold, cold, my dear. Tarleton’s death killed the Queen’s Men’s hearts and chaos came again.
When I looked into the face of the Hog Lane humorist that morning I knew at once I was looking at ruins. He had outlived himself. The pursy cheeks were so bloated, the eyes so black and swollen, it seemed impossible he could actually see out of that wreckage of a face. The chopped lips quivered and tried to part but stayed well stuck. Again he tried to say something, coughed horribly instead and a wave of sour small beer hit me, well garnished with onions and leeks. The breath smelled as old as the jokes. So this was what comic genius looked like at close quarters. I wanted the earth to gape but felt obliged to give him some garbage about the magic of the stage, and walking all the way from Stratford to answer the call of the theatre – that sort of speech. He too thought it was garbage. He would have winced if he could. Somewhere inside the folds of the soggy pastry that had been his face the memory of a muscle twitched, the two small eyes puckered like currants and the mouth started to form the uncertain outlines of an excuse. Bone weary, my boy, blinder of a head on me, a night with Bacchus, not so well these days I’m sad to say, shadow of my former, too early, friend, anyway, come back some other day, some sober October, afternoons preferred.
Much relieved, I was already on my way. But then the man’s innate good nature got the better of him and he turned round to ask me where was that again I’d said I’d come from? Bloody Jesus, I can barely slog to the bog these days. I reminded him and he shook his faded curls and showed me his back again. Then the fat head swivelled and two spent candles flickered somewhere inside the ruin. ‘Stratford?’ The cracked lips fluttered. ‘Stratford, did you say? Stratford? Jesus, yes, and oft upon the Avon, yes, I was there earlier this month, you say true. Tell me, young friend, did you ever see – ?’
‘The Seven Deadly Sins? I saw it, all right, Master Tarleton. Who hasn’t seen it! What did I think of it? Well to speak truth… What, you wrote it? Saw you in it, of course, but to think you’re the author! Nay, do not think I flatter.’
For what advancement may I hope from thee, that nothing hast but thy good spirits to feed and clothe thee?
An ageing actor craves an audience even of one, straining for the applause of a single pair of hands – nothing in the world sadder than an old player without a script. Minutes later I was swallowing his stale ale and listening to tales of how he’d played The Curtain and The Bell, and doubled clown and judge in The Famous Victories at the Bull in Bishopsgate. And out from the chest came the famous suit of russet, the buttoned cap and tabor, the sword and staff – accompanied by the inevitable chest of jokes, a bottomless wardrobe of words, not one of them without a beard. By this
time the armpit of a room had filled up with a crowd of elderly actors, the leavings of the Queen’s Men, rising beerily from pallets and drifting through the open door, all of them egging on the fat shattered comedian to acrobatics inappropriate to his age and condition, all endlessly repeating their eminently forgettable one-line appearances. Forgettable? They’d never heard of each other! It was a sorry spectacle. But they were all busy scratching one another’s backs and bidding a long farewell to all their greatness and all their imagined glories.
As morning wore into afternoon another barrel was brought up and broached, I wondered who was paying for all this beer and I felt a stab of panic when it struck me that perhaps I was. But it passed. And so did the beer, through half a dozen bladders. Meanwhile Tarleton was doing more falling down than getting up. Eventually he gave up on the getting up, his songs became slurred, his jokes jaded, and soon the curtains of sleep shut him off for a while. By evening, however, the company, having slumbered individually and severally, a much refreshed Dick held sway again over the tankards and trenchers and found fine and witty vein. A clever quipster, after all, it seemed to me, and well conceited, as I floated off again on a tide of ale, the distracted globe of my brain buzzing with the cries of players and my head roaring with Shoreditch.
I came to with the dawn light leaking in through broken shutters, revealing the various pools and spillages along the floor, on a level with my leaden head, some of them suspiciously yellow and green. For a minute – or an hour – I lay listening to the dawn chorus of grunts and snores, punctuated by the occasional anonymous fart. Then I noticed for the first time that Tarleton had had his dingy ceiling decorated with slapdash stars – suns and moons and planets painted roughly in between the beams. Even this dive was a stage, not unlike the world.
Levering myself painfully into a sitting position, I looked around.
There lay Tarleton, laced with his vomit, the sunken wreck of the Queen’s, a man at the very end of his trade – no, well past even that. Alas, poor Dick. How ill white hairs become a fool and jester. Not that the queen took time to remember the laughs when he lay poor and dying in this Hog Lane hovel not long afterwards, old Shoreditch Dick, nursed only by Em Ball, a local tart of terrible reputation. One that would do the deed with a hundred an hour though the hundred eyes of Argus were upon her, but who had more care, in the autumn of ’88, than all the court and its increasingly unsmiling queen.
Alas, for poor Tarleton, dead and buried in Shoreditch on the third day of September the year after I came up. The gravedigger who slung him in (a Dane called George) couldn’t stop laughing, I remember, in spite of the rain, as he shovelled back the soil on the fat comedian who’d made the queen of England wet herself – and he tossed aside a stray skull that he’d unearthed and forgotten to return to the grave beside the shrouded jester. It lay upside down and began to collect rainwater. I wondered how long the untanned Tarleton would keep out the wet. Not long, according to Danish George, who knew a pox-eaten corpse when he saw one – and this was another one that had scarce held the laying in. He dissolved in giggles.
‘Did you know him, sir? Did you ever see him on stage? I saw him many a time – at the Bull, it was. Laugh? He made us sore with laughing. I was right up at the front once, see? And he leaned over the stage and poured a flagon of ale all over my noodle. That made them laugh, all right. Jesus, what a mad bugger he was. Got away with blue murder, that he did, murder and buggery. But he’ll be like this same skull, sir, in a year from now, and which of us could tell them apart? To what base uses we may return, that’s my philosophy. And they say he shagged Em Ball till he grew too fat to fuck and his balls blew up with the dropsy, big as the bells of Shoreditch. And now my Lord Worm’s in the cold ground, never to prick no more. Farewell to you then, Tarleton, you fat fucker. They say he made a good end.’
But I’d said my farewells to Tarleton long before he died. When I woke up from that second night in London I’d already made my decision – the Queen’s Men were not for me. I smelled worse than wine and old leeks coming from poor old Dick, much worse than armpit and arse. I smelled the end of the Queen’s. Tarleton had jigged and jested his way through his career with a flourish that made him the dog’s bollocks, the nonpareil, but you can stand on one toe only so long before they want to see you go down and stay down.
The third morning in London, I left Hog Lane, well named, and its roomful of snorting old bores, went north over Finsbury, past Holywell, and came to the Theatre.
26
Ah, the Theatre! A place for viewing; a locus of life; a venue for all the multiplying miracles and villainies of nature that swarm upon this great stage of fools – with a seat reserved for the nobs, and farting room only for the groundlings. Well done, old Burbage, you took the drama off the streets and wagons, away from the piss-soaked cobbles and horseshit of innyards, out of the candied pomp of courts and halls, where we were but arse-licking grooms, out of the arenas of insolent Greece and haughty Rome – and set us up in our own solemn temple, where – he said – ye shall be as gods.
And so we were. And Burbage was the primum mobile. Burbage took the idea from his brother-in-law, John Brayne, a failed grocer who’d built a playhouse just outside Aldgate, at White Chapel, near the Red Lion, back in ’67. Brayne then became a failed playhouse owner. But nine years later he teamed up with James (Snug) Burbage, a failed joiner. Undeterred by failure, he used to say that ‘God himself was a joiner, and left the trade when he found better things to do. Nobody ever said Jesus was a bad carpenter but it wasn’t his tables and chairs that made him famous. And in a world where joiners get themselves resurrected,’ quipped Snuggie B., ‘anything can happen.’ Even the miracle of turning actors into idols. Into gods.
And Burbage did just that, and like God himself, split time, changed the calendar, in dramatic terms: before Burbage, after Burbage. Before Burbage the play took place on a borrowed stage and so became a borrowed thing in itself.
Burbage changed all that. The theatre now hung in space, resplendent, like a new planet in the morning. And the crowds flocked to it.
It was a grand scheme and needed hard cash. Burbage was out for profit, not for art. So Brayne put up the money, the joiner-grocer enterprise flourished and became the Holywell Theatre in St Leonard’s parish, where a Benedictine priory once stood, and where Snug himself turned out to be something of an actor, as rude mechanicals do. It took some vision. The site was just a patch of waste ground, rampant with weeds and strewn with dog-merds and bones. ‘To pay five ducats, five! I wouldn’t farm it – wouldn’t even fart on it,’ yelped Brayne, lifting his leg in derision, suiting the action to the word, and refusing at first to part with a penny.
But Burbage was stubborn and devious – he hadn’t got Leicester’s patronage for nothing. He not only extracted the cash out of the grocer but soon had him and his wife Margaret slaving away on the site and working their tails off without two groats to rub together for their pains. Meanwhile brother-in-law Burbage helped himself generously during construction. He also helped himself to more than his fair share of the takings when things were up and running, filching cash from the box by the use of a secret key, and sticking coins in his mouth and chest and even up his arse, to diddle his partner. An incorrigible crook, our Snug. There was a joke went round the companies, when the coins were being counted, if one happened to slip through your fingers and roll away under the table: You can have that one free, my friend – it’s just dropped out of Snuggie’s arse. Wags who wanted to wind him up would make a great show of sniffing the takings during counting, and with sleight of hand or with a little shuffling, produce coins miraculously from their various orifices, and this would sometimes lead to violence. Snug was a man with a temper.
At last the pot boiled over. Brayne found out about the thieving, Burbage punched him and called his wife a whoring bitch who diddled her pimps and stuffed her customers’ coins up her cunt. ‘And that holds a fucking sight more than the box!’ he roared.
This produced a riot. Burbage junior (Richard of famous name) beat up one of Brayne’s henchmen with a staff, and the grocer’s party fled the field, old Burbage yelling after them that if he saw as much as their backs again his boys would throw down their staves, take up pistols and pepper their legs with powder and hempseed. Then they’d paunch them and turn them into tripe. That was a famous fight. It took place on the Theatre stage itself, where Brayne ended up unconscious in the hell-hole, with old man Burbage having to be restrained from pissing in on him. ‘Better than Agincourt at the Globe,’ he cackled much later.
Brayne died but his widow kept up the feuding and led other skirmishes, only to be routed again by young Richard and a broomstick. Meanwhile Burbage grew to fair round belly with good capon lined, and bucketsful of beer. He’d made it. He got the better of the rival groups, Pembroke’s, Strange’s, the Lord Admiral’s, and worked it cunningly so that the Theatre never became the exclusive home to any one company. But Snuggie B. threatened to commit murder when a gentleman of means, Henry Lanman, opened up the Curtain at Moorfields, only two hundred yards to the south, in Curtain Close. ‘Lanman? Lanman? I’ll make him Lameman! I’ll change his fucking name for him!’ He needn’t have worried. Lanman never did as well as Burbage. He was a nob, no more, and neither actor nor tradesman. In time he had the sense to go in with Burbage, letting his Curtain operate as something of an easer to the Theatre. They sorely needed an easer – for the crowds.
Across the Finsbury footpath they came, in swarms and droves, to the great house of dreams, to see the stage drowned in blood and tears and watch them cleave the general ear with horrid speech, make mad the guilty and appal the free.
The crowds came on in a gathering wave, a fieldful of folk, summoned at two o’clock in the afternoon by a triple blast on the trumpet – all that was needed to send a thousand souls northwards to Satan’s chapel while hardly a handful of the faithful stuck it out at Paul’s Cross, though the bell had clappered for a full hour, beseeching those impious wretches to stay and save their souls. But why listen to a long-faced sermon on the Vices when you could see and hear them instead, watch them brought to life on stage, comic or tragic, according to Burbage’s bill for the day? So for two hours the play dulled the pain of living, by giving living some kind of sparkle, shape, and substance. Aimless, opaque, impalpable life, each day it slips through your fingers like the sea and you stand mystified on the shore. And night after night it sloshes round like wine in your tired brain. The play changed all that. The play was the ultimate flight from ordinariness and from the chaos of life. And for that hour or two of illusion they came running over the fields.
Will Page 24
