Two of the people I am most keen to talk to are John Heminges and Henry Condell, Shakespeare’s fellow actors and business associates—the two men responsible for publishing the First Folio of his collected plays seven years after his death. Without their endeavours it is unlikely that his plays would have survived.

I have been invited to Condell’s house in the rural village of Fulham. It is a moonless winter evening and a light snow has just begun to fall. The door is opened by a girl who takes my coat, shakes off the powdery snow and shows me into the parlour where the two old luvvies are seated on a settee by a sea-coal fire. The best armchair is occupied by a fat black cat who meets my look with a scornful glare so I make do with a joint-stool on the other side of the fire.

The sideboard bears a promising display of small cakes, crab-apples, nuts and comfits which I am duly offered.

‘Here, this’ll warm you up,’ says Heminges, handing me a pewter pot of malmsey. Taking the poker from the fire he thrusts it into the wine to make it sizzle then sprinkles it with a generous pinch of nutmeg. Mmm, delicious . . . a couple of these could see me to bed quite early.

‘Now,’ says Henry, his little black eyes gleaming with enthusiasm, ‘you wanted to talk to us about our dear friend, Will Shakespeare . . .’

‘Well, first of all, I want to thank you for the absolutely amazing job you did collecting, editing and publishing his plays. It’s a horrifying thought that without you they may have been lost forever.’

‘It was a labour of love,’ says Heminges. ‘A hard slog, but it had to be done—took us six years in all; about three years to collect and edit all the scripts and then the publishing was delayed for a time. But the year Will died, Ben Jonson published his own plays and called them his “works”, and everyone scoffed at him. He was putting his plays up there alongside the classics. In those days nobody collected play scripts—they were just words for actors to play with, not to be taken seriously like poetry, essays, sermons and so on. But we thought, “If Ben Jonson’s done it, we’ve got to do the same for Will.”’

‘Scripts did exist, of course,’ says Condell. ‘After we’d got full use out of them, we’d publish them in quarto size and sell them in St Paul’s, or the White Hart in Fleet Street, or Carter Lane or wherever the printer’s shop happened to be. But while we were still performing them they were kept under lock and key. That didn’t stop piracy, though. Actors were always running off to printers with bits of scripts they’d stolen or cobbled together from memory. They were absolutely shocking, weren’t they, Jack?’

Heminges nods sadly.

‘So when we published the Folio we were right upfront,’ continues Condell. ‘We said it was to keep the memory of so worthy a friend and fellow as was our Shakespeare. We wished he had been alive to oversee the publishing himself; but since it had been ordained otherwise, whereas before readers had been abused with stolen, surreptitious copies, maimed and deformed by the frauds and stealths of injurious impostors, we now offered his plays cured and perfect in their limbs.’

‘You see, up till then,’ says Heminges, ‘printers were publishing all sorts of rubbishy collections of plays and poems and sticking “by W. Shakespeare” on the front to ensure good sales. It was scandalous, but there’s no law against it. In fact, Will was one of the first to have his name on the front of a published play script. Before him no one much cared who wrote it; the plays were anonymous, which makes it a bit hard sometimes, looking back on it, to remember who wrote what.’

‘I remember Ben Jonson getting very shirty when Sir Thomas Bodley opened his great new library in Oxford,’ chuckles Condell, ‘to house all the world’s greatest books. But he didn’t want any play scripts—Shakespeare or Jonson or anyone. They were just rubbish, he said. I think that’s what spurred Ben on to publish his “works” and claim the high ground for drama . . . But eventually old Bodley bought our First Folio. It sold well—a thousand copies at a pound a pop.’

‘Given the size of the task,’ I say, ‘you did a great job—so few mistakes.’

‘Well, we have to thank Ted Knight for a lot of that—he was the bookkeeper for the King’s Men and had a great eye for detail. We had good compositors too, but there are a few obscure passages here and there, and no doubt some mistakes when we had no access to the originals but were going by the quartos. Where we did have Will’s originals it was no problem because his mind and hand went together, and what he thought he uttered with that easiness that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers.’

‘You both first met Shakespeare in the theatre, I presume?’

‘That’s right,’ says Heminges. ‘I was a member of Lord Strange’s Men when young Will joined the troupe. We were touring a lot with Kit Marlowe’s plays—Ned Alleyn was playing most of the leads. It was a tough time for me because Rebecca and I had four kids by then (we had twelve eventually—well, twelve who survived, anyway). Then when the Lord Chamberlain’s troupe was formed we both joined that, and that’s when I met Harry here.’

‘That’s correct,’ rejoins Condell, ‘and I first acted with Will in Ben’s Every Man in His Humour—a big hit.’

‘You have children too?’ I ask.

‘Yes, nine surviving,’ says Condell.

‘So what plays did Shakespeare write for Lord Strange’s company?’

‘Oh, some beauties!’ exclaims Condell. ‘He gave us his Two Gentlemen of Verona, his Taming of the Shrew, his Henry VI plays and Richard III (we had Dickie Burbage with us by then because Ned Alleyn had joined the Admiral’s Men at the Rose). And then he finished off Titus Andronicus, which George Peele had started but was a bit of a mess. And that turned out to be the hit of the season! It’s on record that half the population of London came to see Titus.’

‘So by 1594 you were all members of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men?’

‘My word yes!’ enthuses Heminges. ‘Nine great years; and then of course we became the King’s Men in 1603 when King James took us over.’

‘And what would you say was your favourite role in all that time?’ I ask him.

‘Well, it’d be hard to go past Falstaff. I was the original Falstaff but later Will Kemp took it over and I must say he made it his own. He was amazing, wasn’t he, Harry?’

‘Unforgettable,’ agrees Condell. ‘The greatest clown since Dickie Tarlton. His Dogberry was an absolute classic. And of course he was famous for the jigs he devised for the end of each show.’

‘The jig was a kind of dance?’

‘Yes, but it was more than that. Kemp was a great dancer of course, and at first the jig was just a solo sort of song-and-dance act. But Tarlton and Will Kemp developed it into a kind of little comic opera for a number of characters with bawdy words sung to popular ballad tunes. They were very funny and pretty dirty. All over London you could hear whores and soldiers singing the filthy words of Kemp’s jigs.’

‘And were all jigs like that?’

‘No, not necessarily. Sometimes, after a tragedy like Julius Caesar, the jig would be more solemn and stately—but the audience always expected a dance of some sort.’

‘Did Kemp stay with you all the way through?’

‘No. He joined the Chamberlain’s same time as we did and when we opened the Globe in 1599 he bought shares in it. But he wasn’t what you’d call a great company man, was he, Jack? A bit of an individualist—so he sold his shares and took a bet that he could do a morris dance all the way from London to Norwich. And he did! Took him nine days, but he made it.’

‘He came back to the Chamberlain’s for a while later on,’ says Heminges, ‘but Will’s comedy had changed by then. He wasn’t writing those broad clown roles anymore because after Kemp left, Bob Armin took his place. He was only thirty but he was a much more subtle sort of comic—sharp and witty, a bit melancholy. Will wrote Feste in Twelfth Night for him (he was a lovely singer) as well as Touchstone and the Fool in King Lear, which was the greatest of all his roles, eh, Harry?’

‘Yes, indeed,’ sighs Condell. ‘Oh, we had a great bunch of actors. Here, Jack, pile some more coals on the fire and give the gentleman some more of that mulled wine.’

‘Tell me about some of the other actors in the company . . .’

‘Oh, there were so many—Will Slye (a great Osric), Dick Cowley (Verges to Kemp’s Dogberry), Gus Phillips (lovely fellow and a great musician), Jack Lowin who played Harry the Eighth, that little William Ostler who married your daughter, Jack.’

‘Yes, Thomasina made a bad match there! He died stony broke and she and I had a nasty court case wrangling over his shares in the Globe.’

‘And of course dear old Sinklo,’ laughs Condell. ‘His name was John Sincler but we all called him Sinklo. You look at some of the scripts and Will has written “Sinklo” instead of the character’s name, just as he sometimes wrote “Kemp” or “Nick” because he was always thinking of the actor rather than the character. Ah, that Sinklo was a funny bugger—you only had to look at him, it’d make you laugh. He was as thin as a rake so Will wrote all the skinny parts for him: Doctor Pinch, Shadow, Slender, Starveling, Feeble, Andrew Aguecheek—dear old Sinklo. Where is he now, I wonder?’

‘Oh, dead, Harry . . . these seven years or more.’

‘No, don’t tell me! Sinklo dead? It can’t be . . .’

‘Well, he was getting on, Harry.’

‘Oh, of course, he was old; he couldn’t choose but be old . . . Well, poor old Sinklo, dead! What do you know?’

‘You talk of all those wonderful actors at the Globe, but before that you were all at the theatre in Shoreditch, weren’t you?’

‘Yes, that was the home of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. But we lost it in 1598.’

‘What happened?’

‘Well,’ explains Heminges. ‘You see we only had a lease until 1597. Then Jim and Dickie Burbage tried to renew it, but Giles Allen, the bastard, refused. First of all he wanted to double the rent (stuff that!) and then he wanted to pull down the theatre and repossess the land. And of course the authorities were in his pocket.

‘We were in a right fix. Without a theatre we’d be well and truly buggered. Then one of the Burbage boys—I think it was Cuthbert—hit on a smart idea. Giles Allen might have owned the land but he didn’t own the theatre. So we decided to pull it down and take it elsewhere!’ Here Jack slaps his knee and bursts into gusts of wheezy laughter.

Harry cackles along with him and wipes away tears of mirth. ‘Oh Jesu, Jesu, the mad days that we have seen! How did we get away with it?’ Wheezing and chuckling, they take the opportunity to top up the pewter mugs.

‘So,’ resumes Heminges, ‘just before Christmas 1598, we all met secretly one night at the theatre: ourselves, the Burbage boys and a dozen workmen. We’d brought along Peter Street, the original architect of the theatre, and he supervised us as we dismantled it and started transporting it across the river. It all took a couple of weeks of course and Giles Allen turned up spitting and fuming. But he couldn’t do a thing about it; we were covered by the fine print in the contract. Christ, he was ropable!’ Here they both cackle again and take a few more pulls at the pewter mugs.

‘And then Peter Street helped us assemble the new theatre on the South Bank, in the Liberty of the Clink outside the city’s jurisdiction,’ concludes Harry.

‘We called the new theatre the Globe,’ says Jack triumphantly, ‘because our motto was “All the World’s a Stage”! And we formed a syndicate of sharers who put the money up for expenses and split the profits. Will was a sharer, of course, as were we and the Burbage boys, Will Kemp and four others of the original Chamberlain’s Men. We played all the main roles, employed the hired men for the smaller roles and apprenticed the boy actors.’

‘And how about these boy actors—where did they come from?’

‘Well, most of them were apprenticed to actor-sharers in the companies for two to three years,’ says Condell. ‘During that time their master had to fully maintain them and teach them; acting, dancing, swordplay and so on. Other boys came to us from the various children’s companies—the Chapel Royal, Paul’s Children, the Children of the Queen’s Revels and others.’

‘The children’s companies were very fashionable on and off,’ says Heminges. ‘At times they posed a serious threat to us. You see, up until the 1580s when the University Wits started making their mark, the adult companies were a pretty crude, rough-and-tumble lot. All right for inn yards and the provinces, but you couldn’t take them to court. The Queen would much rather watch refined performances by well-trained boys from the schools of Westminster and Eton, or else the choirboys of Paul’s, Windsor and the Chapel Royal.

‘But after Jim Burbage (Dick’s father) built the theatre and companies started to grow—first Leicester’s, then the Admiral’s and the Queen’s Men—the competition from the children’s companies started to fade away. But fifteen years later it all blew up again and the kids were performing not only at court but at the Blackfriars as well, mocking and abusing the adult players. It didn’t affect either of us or Will Shakespeare directly, but Will does have a go at the boys’ companies in Hamlet. He points out that it’s pretty short-sighted of them to abuse the professional players, because as soon as their voices break, they’ll be looking for jobs themselves.’

‘He was right, you know,’ says Heminges. ‘Most of the kids had to give it up, but a few joined our company.’

‘Some of them were wonderful,’ Harry enthuses. ‘Who were those two marvellous boys Will always used as a double act, Jack? You know, one was tall and fair and the other short and dark, kind of swarthy . . . Come on, you remember . . .’

‘Certainly I do,’ says Heminges. ‘The tall fair one was my apprentice, Alexander Cook, we used to call him Sander. And the little one was Nick Tooley, Dick Burbage’s apprentice. Normally the boys’ names weren’t written down. Backstage, you see, we had these plots pasted up to tell you what scene came next and who was in it. We wrote the men’s names in full, but for the bit parts and the boys we just used nicknames or initials. But Sander and Nick, I’ll never forget those two . . .’

‘They were very funny in the Dream,’ says Harry. ‘Sander was Helena (“you painted maypole”) and Nick was Hermia (“you dwarf! You nutmeg!”). Then they played Rosalind and Celia (“The woman low and browner than her brother”) . . . Oh, and what else? Olivia and Maria, Desdemona and Emilia, Portia and Nerissa (“A little scrubby boy”) and then, of course, Nick went on to play Cleopatra. Now there’s a role for you! Ah, those two boys were simply the best . . .’

‘What clever actors they were . . .’ says Jack. ‘Naturally if they hadn’t been that good, Will wouldn’t have bothered writing such great roles for them; he couldn’t have! He stretched them, all right, play by play, but my golly they rose to the occasion.’

‘Did Will Shakespeare have an apprentice too?’ I ask.

‘Indeed he did,’ sighs Heminges. ‘His own younger brother, poor Edmund.’

‘Why poor Edmund?’

‘He died of the plague,’ says Harry. ‘He lodged with Will but stayed behind in London one time that Will went back to Stratford to escape the pestilence. Wasn’t a great success as an actor, Ed; and he had a bastard child who died the year before he did.’

‘Will was very cut up about it,’ rejoins Heminges. ‘Ordered a grand funeral in Southwark, just a short walk from the Globe. Pulled some strings to have him buried inside the church, which was usually not allowed for actors.’

‘I remember that funeral well,’ says Condell. ‘Bloody freezing day—thirty-first of December 1607. Of course the whole company went and Will paid extra for the tolling of the great bell. Cost him twenty shillings.’

‘So what was a normal day’s work for an actor? Did you work hard?’

‘Worked our socks off,’ says Jack. ‘Rehearse for four hours every morning (except Sunday of course), perform every afternoon from three till five or six, grab some supper, then home to learn lines for tomorrow because sometimes we’d be doing three different plays in the same week. There wasn’t much time for mucking about. Discipline was strict: you’d be fined for being late for rehearsal, for being hung-over or for ducking across the road to the pub in your costume. And we had to keep up constant practice in dancing, tumbling and sword fighting. The audience was very discriminating and a sword fight had to be the real thing, naturally—so we lost a couple of people along the way.’

‘Ah, but we were close, you know,’ chimes in Harry. ‘We looked after each other’s families and we took good care of our apprentices. We were a very happy bunch—“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.” That’s what Will was talking about; not soldiers, but a band of actors putting on a play! And it was all so exciting: the competition between the actors and the writers—Ned Alleyn slugging it out with Dick Burbage, Marlowe and Jonson going head to head with Shakespeare . . . All these great plays and great characters being performed for the first time, audiences not knowing what was coming next, all the sly hints and hidden messages about the court, the government and so on, seeing what you could get away with. It’s no wonder the playhouses were always packed. It was a glorious time to be an actor.’

‘And what was it like performing at court? Was that a thrill too?’

‘Oh my word, yes,’ says Jack. ‘We’d pack all our props and costumes into barges, then up the river to Greenwich. If our costumes looked too tatty for the court, the Lord Chamberlain would dig us out some better ones from the Royal Wardrobe. Same with armour or weapons. Things you’d get away with at the Globe might get sneered at in court. They’d go to a lot of trouble to decorate the chamber and the Queen sat at one end on a dais with the court all around her. At the other end of the hall our musicians were above us in the musicians’ gallery. The Queen had a very sharp wit and enjoyed wordplay. She loved gossip too, so Will filled the plays with topical jokes and skits on particular courtiers, especially in Twelfth Night. She enjoyed his little flatteries too: in A Midsummer Night’s Dream he recalls her visit to Kenilworth. Will was only a lad, but he was there with his father who was Mayor of Stratford at the time. Lord Leicester had turned on a spectacular welcome for her: a mermaid on a dolphin’s back rose out of the lake and Cupid fired a love arrow at the Queen. Will remembered that and has Oberon say to Puck: “I heard a mermaid on a dolphin’s back . . . I might see young Cupid’s fiery shaft/ Quench’d in the chaste beams of the watery moon/And the imperial votaress passed on/In maiden meditation, fancy free . . .”’

‘He used it again in Twelfth Night,’ Harry butts in: ‘“Arion on the dolphin’s back . . .” It must have made quite an impression.’

‘The old Queen loved flattery but she loved bawdy humour too,’ Jack resumes. ‘. . . I remember one time she had to ask Dickie Tarlton to leave the stage because she was laughing too much . . .’

‘Of course we really came into our own after she died and King Jamie took us over as the King’s Men. We performed for Eliza about three times a year but for Jamie we performed at least fourteen times a year. Compared to the tight-fisted Old Lady, King Jamie was extravagantly generous; I remember the first time we performed for him—it was at the Pembrokes’ place in Wiltshire—he gave the company thirty pounds! An absolute fortune!’

‘Maybe,’ says Heminges gravely. ‘But even though he had us perform more frequently, I’m not sure how much of a theatre-lover he was. It was his wife, Queen Anne, who was the real enthusiast. Jamie had a short attention span and probably preferred the masques that Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones put together for him: they were shorter and less intellectually challenging. He was a bit of a buffoon, wasn’t he, Harry? His tongue seemed too big for his mouth and he lolled about, scratching his balls and looking distracted—funny bugger.’

‘So what with performing at court and playing the Globe, you were pretty flat out?’

‘Not just that,’ says Jack. ‘Whenever the court went on progress through the countryside or to escape the plague, we could be sent for at any time to get our arses up there quick-smart—His or Her Majesty fancied a play.’

‘Speaking of the plague, what happened to the company when the theatres were closed down, as they so frequently were?’

‘Oh it was a nightmare,’ says Harry. ‘Pack up everything into carts and off into the provinces, trying to set up dates and persuade the city fathers to let us perform. Those of us who had horses were the lucky ones; for most of the company it was foot-slogging all day and helping to push the carts. Hearing we were from London, some towns would try to keep us out in case we were carrying the plague. And we were always worried about those we left behind in town. Poor Rob Browne left his wife and kids in Shoreditch. They were touched by the plague and were boarded up inside the house and they all died. People had no idea how to cope. They killed the cats and dogs thinking maybe they were the plague carriers, but of course the real carriers were the rats, and they simply flourished with all the cats and dogs out of the way! Oh God, they were miserable times.’

‘Will took the smart way out,’ observes Heminges. ‘That time the plague hit us back in 1593, Will opted out of London altogether and settled himself in the country for a while and wrote Venus and Adonis. It was such a huge success that Will was tempted for a while to chuck the theatre and devote himself to being a gentleman poet. But he decided eventually that it wasn’t the life for him—hobnobbing with courtiers, fawning on patrons, acting as their secretaries like John Donne and Ed Spenser did.

‘Will preferred the comradeship of the theatre. The audience—they were his real patrons. He wanted his independence and to make his own way. He liked living in the rough part of town (Southwark had the biggest number of prisons, pubs, theatres and brothels in London, you know)—it was colourful, lively, full of weird odds and sods . . . Much more fun than hanging around some nobleman’s establishment as a servant. He loved actors. People sometimes think we’re a shallow lot—up ourselves, showy or precious. But somehow being part of a theatre company, you learn how to rub along, you learn how to tolerate people’s weaknesses, you have to depend on each other and really strong bonds are formed—wouldn’t you say, Harry?’

‘Yes, I reckon so,’ responds Condell. ‘And working together on really great material—well, it sort of ups your faith in human nature.’

‘If there was such a camaraderie at the Globe, it must have been pretty traumatic when it burned down.’

‘Oh God, it was terrible!’ laments Jack. ‘No one got hurt but we did lose a few props and costumes. Luckily we saved all our scripts—they were our prize possessions. Within two hours the whole theatre was ashes. Biggest fire since St Paul’s. The whole of London turned out to watch and the next day the town was full of ballads, one of them mocking “poor old stuttering Heminges”! Well, wouldn’t you be crying and stuttering watching your theatre burn down?’

‘There, let it go, Jack,’ says Harry, patting his shoulder. ‘Stuff ’em. It was all a long time ago, and we did rebuild the Globe in just twelve months, even bigger and better than before—cost us a tidy fourteen hundred pounds, too.’

‘But Will took no real interest,’ says Jack. ‘He was moving on by then, spending more time back in Stratford. I think he’d pretty well written all he had to say. He kept his hand in, of course. Collaborated on a few pieces like Two Noble Kinsmen and Cardenio with Jack Fletcher. He seemed to be devoting more time to his domestic affairs and property business, tying up loose ends. Maybe he felt the light thickening towards the close of day.’

‘How would you sum him up as a person?’

Jack scratches his head and stares into the fire. ‘Well, it’s hard, you know, to sum up anyone . . . . Harry and I knew Will for nigh on thirty years, acted with him, travelled with him, worked with him day and night. He wasn’t a tearaway like Kit Marlowe or a raconteur like Ben Jonson. I suppose you could say he was mild-mannered, diplomatic, watchful; pleasant but not boisterous company. Not exactly close-fisted but prudent with his money—very clever with money . . . There was something enigmatic about him. I think he lived through his characters. He entered right into them, because above all he was an actor.’

‘What kind of roles did he play?’

‘Mostly the kings and dukes, nobility.’

‘He was very graceful and light on his feet. Well-modulated voice. John Davies remarked that if he hadn’t been an actor he could have passed himself off for a king in real life! But he was good at character parts too—old men like Adam in As You Like It.’

I say, ‘Some people claim the plays must have been written by a nobleman—someone like the Earl of Oxford—with a good education and a knowledge of life at court.’

Harry almost chokes on his mulled wine and Heminges scoffs in derision. ‘Oxford! That useless fop! He was the one who went into voluntary exile after farting as he bowed to the Queen, remember, Harry?’

‘Indeed I do,’ laughs Harry. ‘He stayed away seven years and when he came back the Queen greeted him with, “Welcome my lord; we have forgot the fart.”’

They both collapse in mirth for a bit and then Harry splutters, ‘These bloody aristocrats . . . They write the odd little poem or playlet and waft it nonchalantly in front of you with, “I say, Condell, old chap, cast your professional eye over this and see what you think of it . . .” Of course you tell them it’s bloody marvellous and they put it on in one of their private chambers, acting the parts themselves, but it’s stuff that wouldn’t last a minute on the stage of the Globe.’

‘As to good education,’ says Heminges, ‘I doubt any aristocrat got as good a classical education as we grammar-school boys! We got it flogged into us eleven hours a day, six days a week. We needed it more than they did, because we had to have a profession.’

‘And when it comes to life at court,’ chimes in Harry, ‘we had a good dose of that, let me tell you. Always at the Queen’s or King’s beck and call, performing days at a time wherever they wanted us to be; and when we were made Grooms of the Chamber we had to hang about at a loose end hour after hour to be part of some boring ceremony. But it gave us a good chance to observe courtiers and their behaviour. Will couldn’t stomach them—characters like Osric and Monsieur Le Beau; he sticks it right up them . . .’

‘Besides,’ says Heminges, ‘Will’s pictures of court life are not much different to anyone else’s. Pretty standard stuff—stereotypical. It’s his rustics and pub characters, his artisans, common soldiers and petty crooks who are really authentic—and no aristocrat could have written them!’

‘Certainly not Oxford!’ sneers Harry. ‘He was dead by 1604 before the last dozen or so plays were written.’

‘How about Francis Bacon—could he have written the plays?’

‘Bacon? A dry old stick,’ scoffs Heminges. ‘A moralist, an essayist. He never liked the theatre. In fact he was one of our interrogators when we got in the soup for staging Richard II just before Essex’s attempted coup! He never even liked the English language, for Christ’s sake! Wrote all his stuff in Latin or else wrote it in English first and then translated it into Latin. He reckoned that English would be the death of literature. Now tell me,’ he says solemnly, laying a hand on my knee, ‘does that sound like Shakespeare?’ Again the two old actors enjoy a fit of wheezing merriment and a resort to the pint-pot.

‘No,’ says Harry, recovering and wiping the tears from his eyes. ‘What people have to realise is that playwriting is a profession . . . A play’s not something some amateur tosses off in his spare time. You practise it daily, working with actors on the floor, you collaborate, you develop your craft. Will was a good listener. He took note of audience reaction and was always cutting and revising. He knew us, the actors, intimately and wrote roles according to our individual capacities. Ben Jonson remarked what a worker he was and noted that a good playwright is not just born, but made. Will kept raising the bar, pushing himself and us. His plays get tougher, more demanding, more experimental—there aren’t two alike. He was intensely competitive both artistically and commercially. He was determined to rule the roost.’

‘That’s right,’ affirms Jack. ‘Theatre has no room for aristocratic amateurs—except as audience members. And don’t forget that Will’s poems are all dedicated to aristocratic patrons. What nobleman would have needed a patron? Such nonsense, really. People don’t use their heads . . .’

It’s getting late and my eyelids are feeling heavy. We all gaze into the dying embers of the fire and the only sound is the heavy snoring of the fat black cat on the best armchair.

At length Harry murmurs, ‘And is poor Sinklo dead?’

‘Dead . . . dead . . .’

I open my eyes to find that the two old ghosts have faded or wafted like wisps of smoke up the chimney . . .

Harry Condell died in 1627 and John Heminges three years later.

Harry left his shares in the Globe to his widow. Jack acquired ‘greate lyveing, wealth and power’, owning a quarter of the shares in both the Globe and Blackfriars theatres.

Harry and Jack were buried side by side in the lovely old church of St Mary Aldonbury, but it was destroyed by the Great Fire of London in 1666. Rebuilt by Sir Christopher Wren, it was obliterated by German bombs in 1942.

In 1946 Winston Churchill made a gift of the church to the USA and it was transported stone by stone to Fulton, Missouri, where it now stands in the grounds of Westminster College.

As to the dust of Jack and Harry—where that rests is anybody’s guess.

A man’s life of any worth is a continual allegory—and very few eyes can see the mystery of his life—a life like the scriptures, figurative . . . Shakespeare led a life of Allegory; his works are the comments on it.

John Keats