How could Shakespeare, if he was an oppressed Catholic, be so essentially apolitical in his drama? As any touring actor knows, audience sensibilities can vary widely from town to town: one night an audience of urban intellectuals, the next a beer-swilling, blue-collar crowd. At some point, Shakespeare the young dramatist seems to have learned that tailoring the play to the playgoer is simply good business. Perhaps it is that very dexterity that helped his drama, first among his contemporaries, to transcend politics and reveal a universal compassion and humanity.
The play was done. The musicians were playing a dance and the mood had lightened. There was ale and William stood next to the tap, drinking and feeling out of place. Mary was across the courtyard, talking with her Arden relations. A young man came up to the tap next to William. He looked familiar.
“Is there aught left for a thirsty player?”
“Ay, ay,” William said, and stepped aside from the tap for the boy, whom he now recognized. “Fie, a pox upon me for my sight. Europa! Well done, well done! Your source I know well, yet ne’er have I seen the story upon the stage. Surpassing fair,” said William, and raised his cup.
“Thank you, my lord,” said the lad, bowing. “Richard Burbage, at your service.”
“To a lord your service may be, but not to me, for I am none,” William replied.
“May not service also be unto a lady? For so I am told.”
“Marry, and some might say ’tis the best service, though all here would put God first, I fear. But pray you, sirrah, do you call me a lady?”
“I know not what else to call you, for I know not your name.”
William told him and they poured another ale together.
“How comes it,” William asked, “that Leicester’s Men play thus with unbated swords in the matter of the Old Faith, when your patron the Earl wields a mace for the new?”
The young man shrugged. “These are matters for greater minds than mine. You might ask my father.” He nodded to the older man now approaching the tap: the player who had enacted Zeus and the Bull behind their masks. His clothes were neat but of an older style, and ragged around the edges. He wore a leather codpiece. “Father, this is William Shakespeare. My father, James Burbage. William here has a query — ”
“I heard, Richard.” He gave William a glance while he poured his beer. “Our patron Leicester is of the new faith, to be sure. In his company of players, there are many faiths: those who profess the new faith, those who openly profess the Old Faith, those who profess the new but practice the Old, and the lion’s share who are wanton sinners and have only the faith that they shall burn in hell for it. I myself am in some two of those categories.”
James Burbage turned and raised his cup, drained it, reloaded, and continued, “We may play wanton with many commandments, but to a man we obey the first commandment of the theater: Know Thy Audience. It is not difficult, in a Protestant house, for us to but move this wink here and that nod there, and of a sudden our Catholic screed becomes a Puritan parable of Zeus as Pope, raping innocent, devout Europe — and Elizabeth most personally — via his Papal Bull.”
“So you are troubled not by the crimes against our Catholic priests? Betrayal, injustice, hangings, beheadings?” William asked.
“This is the stuff our plays are made on. Without such suffering, we would have neither art nor commerce,” Burbage said.
“You cannot be so faithless, and so cruel.”
Burbage shifted. He lifted his codpiece. He scratched underneath it. Finally he said, “I’m old enough to remember, lad, that there were all those crimes of man against man under our last Sovereign — Bloody Mary, as some call her — and burnings beside. Many more died for their faith in her five years’ reign than in Elizabeth’s twenty-five. No faith, it seems, owns the market on butchery. Our butchery, at least, is but playacting. We show men as they are, as they were, as they could be. We are a glass, wherein men look and learn, mayhap, something of themselves. For performing that office, we need beg no forgiveness.”
“And yet,” said William, “you perform here, amongst this particular company, with seeming passion.”
“Seeming is our trade. And there’s profit in it, too. There is insatiable hunger in England for theater. In London especially. A man may make a pretty penny upon the stage, if he will but commit to London nine months a year.”
“And besides,” said young Richard Burbage, “who would not play with passion, who wishes to be a player? ’Tis the best of all possible worlds, to act, and dress up, and travel the country. We’ve just come from Coventry, and play Shrewsbury next.”
William was silent for a moment. The pretty servant girl came up to the tap, carrying a tray of empty mugs. “Pray you pardon, my lord,” she said.
William turned to look at the elder Burbage — but Burbage was looking at William.
“Master Shakespeare,” the girl clarified.
William turned, surprised. His father was Master Shakespeare. Yet he liked being called “my lord” by a curtsying girl with pillowy breasts. “Ay?” William said.
“My lord Arden has summoned you to a council, my lord.”
“Me?”
“Ay, my lord. This way.”
William looked at Mary, who had watched the exchange from nearby. She nodded to him with a proud smile.