by Ann Swinfen
‘But I refer to the river, of course, and the night. Look, the clouds are clearing and the stars come out, looking as though they have been cut from candle flames and sprinkled over the dome of heaven.’
‘Aye,’ I said, wryly, ‘it is become a beautiful night. And, aye, she is beautiful. Do not try to divert me with fine words, Will.’
‘I know you mean me well, Kit, and I shall be careful. But I am become as a moth, and may singe my wings a little.’
‘Take care it is no more than a little.’
Simon joined us by the window. ‘Some are beginning to leave. What say you two? Shall we find a boat? I am told a whole fleet has been bidden to await us at the stairs.’
‘I am happy to leave,’ I said. ‘Too much food and too much sugar!’
‘Look,’ Simon said, ‘they are lighting torches all along the path to the watergate.’
I turned back to the window. The torches set up amongst the pleached limes added to the strange illusory sense of the evening, as if by passing through the flaming tunnel we would pass from one world into another.
‘Will?’ Simon said.
‘I’ll stay awhile,’ he said, his eyes on Aemilia still. ‘But I’ll not delay you.’
Simon grinned at me and raised his eyebrows. He too must have noticed Will with Aemilia.
We gave our thanks to our host with many bows and pretty speeches, then descended to the garden again. When we reached the path to the watergate, I saw that the torches were placed apart at a safe distance, but the wind which had blown away the rain clouds was causing the flames to stream out like comets’ tails, scattering sparks amongst the dry leaves on the ground. I stamped out one with my boot, thankful that I no longer walked on paper-thin soles.
There was indeed a fine cluster of wherries at the watergate, so we were soon launched on the river, where the cool air, like a splash of water in my face, dowsed my feeling of unreality and brought me back to the workaday world.
The tide was on the ebb, so with the tide and the river current we swept past the other great houses north on the Strand and Lambeth Palace on the south bank. The round shapes of the bull baiting and bear baiting in Southwark were dark against the sky, but there were lighted windows on both sides of the river.
It seemed the wherries had been paid for by Lord Hunsdon, so we climbed out of the boat at St Mary Overy with our purses no lighter. Bessie’s improved playing on the hurdy-gurdy flowed out of the whorehouse, punctuated with shouts and laughter. There was a light showing at a downstairs window at our own lodgings.
Before Simon and I could climb the stairs, Goodwife Atkins waylaid us.
‘That lad Eddi from the hospital has brought a message for you,’ she said, handing me a folded paper. ‘He’s still here if you want to send an answer. Having a bite to eat in my kitchen. I don’t believe they feed them enough at the hospital.’
I was aware that Eddi, like all the staff at St Thomas’s, would be very well fed, for Superintendent Ailmer knew that he should keep his employees strong and healthy in order to run a successful hospital. Still, growing boys are always hungry.
‘Wait a moment, Simon,’ I said. ‘They may need me for an emergency. You will have to fetch Rikki from my room.’
‘No need,’ said Goodwife Atkins. ‘I brought him down, for he was crying, left alone.’
And there he was, wagging an apologetic tail.
I slipped my penknife from its sheath and lifted the seal. The message was short, but changed my life.
My greetings to you, Dr Alvarez.
(He had never called me Kit.)
I have received word from Dr Wattis that he wishes to resign from his post at St Thomas’s, having found a more lucrative and less arduous position elsewhere. He will not be returning. I have spoken to the governors, who authorise me to offer you your former position again, with a small increase in your remuneration. If you are willing to accept this offer, will you please inform me immediately, and report for work tomorrow morning?
Your obdnt servant,
Roger Ailmer, Superintendent
I looked up and smiled at Simon. The dark autumn evening was suddenly brighter.
‘I am back at St Thomas’s,’ I said. ‘They want me to return.’
He shook his head in mock sorrow. ‘No longer a member of Lord Strange’s Men? Copyist extraordinary?’
I laughed. ‘Only when you are in desperate need.’
I bent down to rub Rikki behind his ears, but in truth to hide the tears in my eyes. ‘We’re back at St Thomas’s, lad,’ I said.
When I straightened up, I saw that Simon was smiling at me affectionately. He threw his arms round me and hugged me.
‘A fine ending to our evening,’ he said.
‘Not an ending,’ I said. ‘A new beginning.’
Historical Note
It was a cutthroat business, the theatrical world of Elizabethan London. The purpose-built playhouses of the period could hold as many as two thousand people. Although London was unimaginably large compared with all other English towns at the time, and larger than all European towns apart from Paris and Naples, its population was only around 200,000. Therefore, to run a successful business and fill their playhouses, the players’ companies had to tempt the London playgoers to return again and again, preferably more than once a week.
The inevitable result was that a constant supply of new plays was needed. A professional company would stage around twenty new plays each season, together with about twenty plays which had proved popular in previous years. The feats of memory on the part of the actors were prodigious. There were hack writers, turning out unmemorable plays which died rapidly. There were the ‘university wits’, who wrote clever plays – sometimes obscure, sometimes scurrilous – but most of them had died young by the early 1590s.
Then there were the two giants – William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe. We know that plays were stolen, including theirs. Those feats of memory could be employed to ‘record’ a play performed by one company, which would then be performed illegally by a rival. Sometimes a player might move from one company to another, taken the memorised play with him.
Despite their immense popularity with the London public, as well as with the Queen and the Court, the playhouses were under constant attack by the city authorities and rampant preachers. They were places of ill-repute, the haunt of whores, pickpockets, and tricksters. The crowded conditions were a breeding ground for disease. Above all, the plays themselves were dangerous, pernicious things, apt to stir up trouble and feed the common man with subversive ideas.
Whenever epidemics of disease broke out in London, the theatres were closed. All theatres were shut down after a riot on 12 June, 1592, in Southwark was alleged to have begun at a playhouse. Apart from these closures ordered by the Common Council of London or the Privy Council, the regular means of control and censorship was in the hands of the Master of the Revels, the only person who could license a play for performance. For much of the Elizabethan period, the office was held by Sir Edmund Tilney, who scrutinised every play for any insults to the Queen or the nobility, and above all for any trace of heresy, blasphemy, or treason.
All of these aspects of the world of Elizabethan theatre lie behind The Play’s the Thing. Another strand draws on events of ten years later. I have imagined that what happens here was a form of dress rehearsal for what the Earl of Essex attempted in 1601. It was also convenient that the supposed date of the plays I Henry VI by Shakespeare and Edward II by Marlowe (both concerned with the overthrow of kings) was 1591, a time when the atmosphere in London was uneasy, almost paranoid. After the death of Sir Francis Walsingham there was a struggle for supremacy between the Earl of Essex and the Cecils (Lord Burghley and his son Sir Robert Cecil). With Walsingham’s intelligence service gone, the government must have felt extremely vulnerable. Moreover, with the Queen now past child-bearing and refusing to name an heir, many were nervous about the future. It was an atmosphere apt to trigger fears of rebell
ion.
Law enforcement at the time was somewhat piecemeal. Every parish throughout England (including London) elected parish constables who were responsible for controlling and reporting crime. These men were amateurs, ordinary untrained citizens, serving unpaid for a year. Shakespeare himself makes fun of them. There was also the Watch, who patrolled the streets at night, armed, carrying a lantern, and accompanied by a dog. They checked that premises were locked, arrested vagrants and criminals, and called out the hours with their ‘All’s Well’ (if it was). In addition, anyone could summon the ‘hue and cry’, a gathering of all able-bodied citizens to pursue and capture someone seen committing a crime.
In London, the city was run from the Guildhall, under the Lord Mayor, the Sheriffs, and the Common Council, with its subsidiary body the Court of Aldermen (made up of the aldermen from all the twenty-six city wards). The Guildhall employed a large number of city clerks, officials, and specialist servants, including a number of sergeants. The coroner’s office was located in the Guildhall, and the coroner plays a considerable part in The Play’s the Thing. Unfortunately, the names of the coroners from this period do not survive. However, a survey of the history and function of the coroner, written some two hundred years later, states that the Lord Mayor of London was, ex officio, the coroner. Given the heavy burden of duties carried by the Lord Mayor, it is likely that he may well have delegated this task to a suitable deputy on occasion. However, I have assumed that in this case the current Lord Mayor, Sir Rowland Heyward, undertook to act himself.
A coroner’s inquest was required by law in any instance of unlawful killing. A famous case was the inquest held after the death of Marlowe in 1593. I needed to ascertain the exact details of a Tudor inquest, and in this I have been given enormous support and encouragement by Nicholas Rheinberg, Senior Coroner for Cheshire, who has hunted out details I could never have found for myself, for which I am most grateful.
Did this particular conspiracy take place? Perhaps not. But it might have done.
Praise for Ann Swinfen’s Novels
‘an absorbing and intricate tapestry of family history and private memories … warm, generous, healing and hopeful’
Victoria Glendinning
‘I very much admired the pace of the story. The changes of place and time and the echoes and repetitions – things lost and found, and meetings and partings’
Penelope Fitzgerald
‘I enjoyed this serious, scrupulous novel … a novel of character … [and] a suspense story in which present and past mysteries are gradually explained’
Jessica Mann, Sunday Telegraph
'The author … has written a powerful new tale of passion and heartbreak ... What a marvellous storyteller Ann Swinfen is – she has a wonderful ear for dialogue and she brings her characters vividly to life.'
Publishing News
‘Her writing …[paints] an amazingly detailed and vibrant picture of flesh and blood human beings, not only the symbols many of them have become…but real and believable and understandable.’
Helen Brown, Courier and Advertiser
‘She writes with passion and the book, her fourth, is shot through with brilliant description and scholarship...[it] is a timely reminder of the harsh realities, and the daily humiliations, of the Roman occupation of First Century Israel. You can almost smell the dust and blood.’
Peter Rhodes, Express and Star
The Author
Ann Swinfen spent her childhood partly in England and partly on the east coast of America. She was educated at Somerville College, Oxford, where she read Classics and Mathematics and married a fellow undergraduate, the historian David Swinfen. While bringing up their five children and studying for a postgraduate MSc in Mathematics and a BA and PhD in English Literature, she had a variety of jobs, including university lecturer, translator, freelance journalist and software designer. She served for nine years on the governing council of the Open University and for five years worked as a manager and editor in the technical author division of an international computer company, but gave up her full-time job to concentrate on her writing, while continuing part-time university teaching in English Literature. In 1995 she founded Dundee Book Events, a voluntary organisation promoting books and authors to the general public.
Her first three novels, The Anniversary, The Travellers, and A Running Tide, all with a contemporary setting but also an historical resonance, were published by Random House, with translations into Dutch and German. The Testament of Mariam marked something of a departure. Set in the first century, it recounts, from an unusual perspective, one of the most famous and yet ambiguous stories in human history. At the same time it explores life under a foreign occupying force, in lands still torn by conflict to this day. Her second historical novel, Flood, takes place in the fenlands of East Anglia during the seventeenth century, where the local people fought desperately to save their land from greedy and unscrupulous speculators. The next novel in the Fenland Series, Betrayal, continues the story of the search for legal redress and security for the embattled villagers. This Rough Ocean is a novel based on the real-life experiences of the Swinfen family during the 1640s, at the time of the English Civil War, when John Swynfen was imprisoned for opposing the killing of the king, and his wife Anne had to fight for the survival of her children and dependents.
Currently the author is working on a late sixteenth century series, featuring a young Marrano physician who is recruited as a code-breaker and spy in Walsingham’s secret service. The first book in the series is The Secret World of Christoval Alvarez, the second is The Enterprise of England, the third is The Portuguese Affair, the fourth is Bartholomew Fair, the fifth is Suffer the Little Children, the sixth is Voyage to Muscovy and the seventh is The Play’s the Thing.
She now lives in Broughty Ferry, on the northeast coast of Scotland, with her husband, formerly vice-principal of the University of Dundee, and a rescue cat.
www.annswinfen.com
