Today is one I would live entirely in the past; not here, where my son-in-law to be — son of a bedlam pig, more like, or like the boar whose head he ate — made free both of my table and my daughter at our ‘family feast’.
To the past . . .
Those early days were good, though not yet the riches I had envisaged when I first walked from my home a player. Too often hedges were our beds, and cloaks our coverings; and for four days once turnips and sprouts picked from the fields our only sustenance, not from lack of audience, but from a spring flood that set us between two streams and no roof to keep us warm. Nor did I shine, as I had thought — and they had all expected too — at acting.
‘Speak it most trippingly upon the tongue,’ Richard urged.
‘But, hark,’ I said, in what I thought were hero’s tones, ‘what dawn doth break upon the east?’
‘Sounds more like the breaking of a clay pot,’ said Matthew.
‘Or breaking wind,’ said Rob and giggled.
I cuffed him, then held him at arm’s length, laughing as he tried to punch at me.
‘Speak the line again,’ ordered Richard.
‘But, hark, what dawn doth break upon the east?’ I uttered hopefully.
‘Better,’ said Matthew.
‘No, ’tis not,’ said Richard flatly. ‘Will, we must admit it. As king, as ghost, as aged father, prince or Caesar, you will carry all before you. Your tone is too lordly for aught else, nor do you have the talent to change it.’
‘You wish me to leave your company?’ I asked, forcing my voice to calmness. For even then I knew an actor must be able to be a king at breakfast, beggar at midday, and hero dancing for his supper.
‘What? By his Lordship’s stockings, we do not! Look, you,’ said Richard earnestly, ‘in you we have what other companies do not: a playwright who can craft words as cunningly as any goldsmith can a lady’s ring. You can make the clouds weep —’
‘Clouds already weep,’ said Rob.
‘Make crocodiles weep,’ said Richard crossly.
‘But crocodiles do weep too.’ Rob skipped out of the way of Richard’s hand.
‘Silence, brat! I’ll show you crocodile. Will, you must write your own parts that suit your manner and your voice.’
‘And write words for me,’ said Rob firmly. ‘I am a thousand times better actor than you all — even you, Richard! Cannot a boy have a full speech? Nor yet a girl?’
Ah, brave new world, I thought, that has such people in it. I gazed at these friends who were so new yet so much of my bone and marrow.
Richard laughed, then plucked a walnut from his satchel and cracked it. ‘What playwright would give a girl a speech? What should a girl say, beyond gossip and “yes” or “nay”?’
‘And mostly nay to you,’ said Matthew.
I thought of one girl who had said much, with words as finely wrought as any I could craft. I said nothing, but at that moment the plays I would write began to creep within my heart.
I was with my true kin now, and we tossed words into the air like jugglers’ clubs, some kept, some dropped into the mud; we bandied words, we fenced with them, rapier bright and just as piercing. My mind opened like a child’s who had been kept in a closet and then set free. Words danced like stars upon the pages kept in our big trunk. Not often good words then, I grant you. I wrote to please the yokels, and my groans and gasps of love were to please them too.
It was not until I reached London that I found an audience of subtlety and wit, that had been coaxed by the flame that was the Queen herself, more brilliant than any mind I have known. Although I say it only here, within this book that none will see, for now King James — not her son, nor even cousin — must be the best mind of the land, in plays as in all else.
And, in truth, His Majesty was a good patron. I worked well for him, and he worked well for me, though ’tis probably treason and lèse-majesté to say so. If Good Queen Bess disliked your words, she but banished you from her sight, and that were punishment enough, even without the loss of patronage and gold from a court performance. But a play must be writ now to fit our King’s demands. Each copy of The Tragedy of Gowrie is burnt, lest it turn men’s thoughts to plots His Majesty would have forgot . . .
Pah! I said I would write of happy times. And they were the gladdest times, those days before my eyes had seen London, even when the beds had fleas and our audience was more lice than men.
But if Richard, Matthew and Rob were my true family, I was still my father’s son, though unlike him I wrought coin instead of lost them. From the first day, I managed our affairs.
‘We play at the next guildhall,’ I told them, as we sat next to a brook and ate the mutton pies packed by my wife and mother, and drank their two fine skins of ale.
‘Guildhalls need paying,’ said Richard. ‘We can use the tavern for naught.’
‘Except a share of the takings,’ added Matthew, his teeth well into a fine pie.
‘Taverns get more custom from our playing. Why should we pay the tavern-keeper as well?’
‘Ay, custom you call it, and custom it is. We dance, the audience pay, and when the money-box is broken, the tavern-keeper has his third.’
‘A third! Then it is the guildhall for us. And two plays in the one day, so that if we do not make the guildhall fee with the first, we do with the second, as word of our magic spreads.’
Richard grinned. ‘Think you so much of these new words you give us?’
‘Ay,’ I said.
‘I like them.’ Rob attacked his fourth honey tart. ‘Master Shakespeare’s words give me shivers up my legs. And the audience stare as if a dragon’s spell has turned them into stone. Master Shakespeare, can you write a dragon?’
‘Why, of course —’
‘Nay, he will not,’ said Richard firmly. ‘Master Will must learn what can be staged and what cannot. How can players such as us clothe a dragon? Can ye dance, Will?’
‘A little.’
‘Ah, country dances. We must teach you London’s best when we are there, though we pay the price of a good teacher. The groundlings come to see more than words.’
‘You can’t see a word,’ began Rob.
‘You can if they are played well,’ said Richard. ‘You will learn, brat. The audience also come to see the dances that only gentry know, and rapier work new from Italy, and grand clothes, even if they are my Lord’s and Lady’s cast-offs and the landlady has spent all night mending the moth holes; even dancing bears if we can hire one cheap — whatever makes a spectacle.’
‘I see,’ I said, and in truth I did. My wife would sooner see a dancing bear than hear my words. But one day, I thought, I will write words that need no dancing bears.
But they were long, full years before I did it.
Dinner: a small pig, roasted; a boar’s head, stuffed (both sharest much in countenance with Thomas Quiney); saddle of mutton, roasted; pigeons, fried, with mushroom sauce; a plum pudding, boiled. Second course: partridges, roasted, with spinach; chickens, roasted, with sauce in the French manner; blancmange with apricots of the sun; whipped syllabub; and for subtleties, marzipan flowers in a host of colours; bread baked in the shape of a bride and groom — though I was glad to see the groom’s head swelled in the baking and his toes burnt black.
Bowels: unmoving once again.