Will looked around. Labourers were still close. When he spoke again, his voice too was gentle. ‘The play is called The Tragedy of Hamlet, John. Hamlet. Different father, different son. It is, in the end, but a play.’ A smile came again. ‘And one that could use you. I had thought, if you returned to us in time, to offer you a role. There is a scene where a certain gravedigger opines on fate and the world. I thought of you when I wrote it.’ He looked more closely. ‘Come, John, where is your delight? You ever have pressed me about joining us again upon the scaffold.’
Two thoughts jabbed him, equally keen: the lure of a return to his old life, with all its joys, dangled before him now; and the one that was conjured by his friend’s last word. He felt them both, jostling in his guts. He took a breath, another, then shook his head. ‘Nay. I thank you for it, truly. But my life . . . has changed. I have to change it further. And yet . . .’ Words had passed upon that other scaffold. They came back to him now. ‘And yet I would help you in this – I would set the fight for you, one last time. I have . . . an idea for it.’
‘What idea?’
‘Nay, let me show you when the players return. It is something you will desire, I think. It is . . . in keeping with the times.’ John smiled. ‘And as a parting gift, I will not even seek a wage for it. I will give you my labours for free.’
Shakespeare laughed. ‘Well, Burbage would be thrilled at that. All this’ – he nodded at the work around them – ‘is expensive. Consider yourself hired. I will pay you in whisky.’
‘No, my friend,’ he replied softly, ‘you will not.’
The two friends stared at each other for a moment. Then John remembered why he had come. ‘I heard Tess was here.’
‘Aye. She is in the tiring house. She insisted on sewing Ned’s new costumes herself.’ He shook his head. ‘I know not what you did to him, but he is changed. As a boy. As a player. And your lady now makes for him a garb fit for madness.’
‘Then, with your leave, I will to her.’ John reached and took his friend’s hand. ‘I have more news for you, William. But it must await the hour.’ He looked to the stage. The exit upon it led to the tiring house. ‘And the event.’
‘Find me later at my lodgings.’ Will smiled. ‘Good fortune, fellow.’
John left the playwright to his stares, climbed upon the platform, walked to the door, looked in. The room was filled with seamstresses, chattering, sewing. It took a moment to spot her, because she was almost hidden in a far corner, and silent.
He crossed to her. ‘A word, lady, if you will.’
She looked up, and he was pleased to see that same relief in finding him safe, usually present after an absence, still there; pleased more that it did not fleet as fast as it had before. ‘John,’ she said, slipping the needle into the material she worked on, laying it down. She stood, still smiling, and stepped towards him – stopping when she noted that every noise in the room had ceased and all the seamstresses regarded them.
John stepped back. ‘Come, lady – shall we walk?’
They did, out on to Maiden Lane, between the Globe and the bear pit – the mastiffs howling as they passed by – and thence into Paris Gardens. The bowling lawns were covered in fresh snow and no man sported there. The fall had ceased, though clouds still loured, yet with the wind abated, they were warm enough as they made fresh tracks across the virgin white, crossing to the river in slow and squeaking steps. She took his arm, and he was content with that, and with the silence. Grateful indeed, for he was not sure how to begin.
So she did. ‘Where were you since the fall of the house?’
‘I thought it best to disappear. I went to Stepfather Lawley, in Shropshire.’
‘Ah. And you returned . . . ?’
‘Two days since. I would have anyway but I was summoned. By . . . by my lord of Essex.’
She halted them. ‘You were with him?’
‘Even unto the end.’
He said it, staring across the water. She pulled his arm tighter. ‘I am sorry for it.’
‘And I. Yet, truly, it could not have ended any other way. It was his fate. He found it in the end.’
‘Found it?’ She stared to the north bank too, as unseeing. ‘Was it chosen for him by God, or did he choose for himself?’
‘I do not know. Both perhaps? Neither?’ He sighed. ‘I will leave that to the priests and the playwrights to wrestle out between them.’
‘Indeed, John? Put a bottle of whisky on the table and I reckon you will out-expound any priest, out-soliloquise any scribbler.’
She was smiling now. He was not as he turned to her. ‘Lady, you know I do not seek that distillation all the time, though it oft calls to me. I think . . . I think it is this place that makes me answer. The playhouse. The taverns. Perhaps away from it I will find solace in other things.’
Her eyebrows – no longer plucked to a line, he noticed – rose. ‘You are thinking of leaving Southwark? I thought you had coin down on a plot in the corner of St Mary Overies?’
‘If I stay, I think it will be my bed soon enough.’
‘But the Globe? I cannot believe you would forsake the stage. It is the life you love.’
‘Once.’ He looked away, downriver. He could just make out, over the gables of the bridge, the pennants atop the White Tower. ‘But I have seen another life, ended on a different kind of platform. Look here!’ he cried, squeezing his doublet where red stains besmirched it. ‘I do not think . . . I would not find it . . . so easy to play again.’ Tears came, flooding his eyes in the instant, running in hot streams down his cheeks. ‘Sweet Christ!’
‘Oh John, John.’ She stepped close, took him into her arms.
He leaned on her and she held him up. He had not wept in decades. Perhaps that was why the reservoir was so full.
At last he subsided, gently shrugged free of her, stepped away. When he looked again, she had an eyebrow raised, a slight smile on her face. ‘I thought it was the woman’s role to woo with tears. Yet you have mastered it.’
He wiped an edge of cloak across his face. ‘I do not woo. Not that way.’
‘What way then?’
He hesitated. ‘None,’ he said at last.
‘Ah, you would woo by seeming not to?’
‘Nay, Tess.’ He reached, took her hand. ‘I know not seeming. A year in the Tower, a minute on a scaffold, it has taken all my seeming away. Everything else is false.’
‘You think so now. You will think differently in two weeks when Will offers you a run of roles.’
‘He offered me one, not one bell since. I turned him down.’ He shook his head. ‘It hurts me to say it. But I am done with it. That life is over.’
‘Truly? Then you will need another position.’ She looked keenly into his eyes. ‘What say you then, sir, to assuming the role of protector of the most popular inn within the Bishop of Winchester’s Liberty of Southwark?’
Now he laughed. ‘Tess? Are you offering me a job? In a tavern? Me?’
‘It is not a tavern, sirrah. It is the finest of inns, as well you know.’ Her smile left. ‘And I think . . . I think I am offering you more than that.’
‘Tess . . .’
‘Nay, sir, do not speak. Let me have my say.’ She glanced upstream, her brow creased. ‘We spoke before of fate. What is governed, what is chosen. I wonder now at Sir Samuel’s fate, to die over there at Essex House that day. His death saving me from . . . well, not just being his second wife while the first yet lived . . .’ She looked at him, went on a little more sharply. ‘Yes, sir, I found that out when I went to claim the body and found it being claimed before me – something you chose not to send me word of!’
‘I knew you’d discover it,’ he protested. ‘The news from me would have seemed . . . opportunistic.’
‘Well.’ She settled. ‘His fate saved me from mine, at least. The one I’d certainly chosen. To be a lady? I do not think I could return to being a lady now.’ She laughed. ‘To speak truth, I do not think I was much of a lady even when
I thought I was. My precipitous surrender to you would seem to show that.’ She looked skywards, to flakes falling gently again. ‘But to be married to a man universally known as Despair? God a mercy!’ She shuddered. ‘In Finchley?’ Her gaze returned from the skies, to him. ‘When the man I love lives in Southwark?’
Her eyelashes had snowflakes on them. He didn’t think he had seen anything more beautiful. ‘Tess . . .’
He stepped to her. But she raised a palm to him, held him off. ‘Nay, sir. A moment more and then you may put my lips to a better use – if you still desire to. For you may wish to run instead.’ She cleared her throat. ‘I know there is risk in you being the landlord of an inn. But if you fall . . . well, at least you will fall close by. And when you stand – which is, as you say, most of the time – well then, sir, you will stand by me.’ She nodded, then added, briskly, ‘There, sir. I am done. What say you?’
Her hand dropped, no longer resisting him. Yet he did not enter in. ‘Lady, are you proposing to me?’
She reached, took his hand. ‘Do you know, sir – I believe I am. If you will have me.’
Then he did step in. ‘Before I say aye or nay, there is something I have to tell you. However, since you have decided you can no longer be a lady, I give you leave to retract your offer. There were no witnesses to our hand-fasting.’
Then he told her. And when he had finished, and she’d still said yes, and just after they kissed, he raised his face into the now fast-falling snow and howled like a mastiff in a bear pit.
XLI
The Prince
The Globe playhouse. 2 April 1601
He’d thought himself too old a dog to be caught by such a trick.
How had it happened that he, John Lawley – an actor since he was younger than Ned – had been snared like any other groundling by such conjuring? When he knew the guile and the dodge of it – the artifice behind each gesture, the effort under the effortlessness of the players’ every speech? He had always been able to distil the alchemy of the whole into its separate elements: verse and action, costume, music and scenery and the tricks by which the best players in the world took inked words from a page and sent them into the world as feeling.
He knew precisely what it was they did. He had done it often enough himself. Yet this day and from the very beginning – when a man upon a battlement hissed in terror, ‘Who’s there?’ – John knew that this was different from anything he’d ever experienced, upon a platform, or before one.
It was the first performance of The Tragedy of Hamlet.
He had chosen not to read any of it, though Will had offered. He had considered only what he needed for his work. The players, Dickon Burbage and Bill Sly, had brought their characters to the fight and he left those to them. His desire was only to see the play as everyone else did, experience it as they did, for the first time.
Hard though it was, he looked away now from the stage, down to the people in the pit, along the centre gallery where he and Tess sat, above to the others. Three thousand of his fellow Londoners crammed into this thatched O under a spring sun which, due to the specific siting of the platform, warmed sections of them as it traversed the sky while leaving the platform largely in shade and the players upon it shadows within that shade. They’d come for entertainment, sure; but they’d come also for release after a month of Lenten restriction.
And the Lord Chamberlain’s Men gave them that, with he and Tess as freed as any there. Caught by a ghost story, held by a family story, moved by a love story, by ambitions thwarted and obligations unfulfilled. Disturbed by a revenge drama that would not follow the customary course. Disturbed above all by this man standing there and asking them all – truly asking them, not telling them – why me? Why should I? What does it mean? What does my life matter, my duty, my honour, when I am this pitiable fellow, crawling between silent heaven and a noisy earth?
It helped that the man asking the questions was Richard Burbage. Yet a Burbage different than John had ever seen him, allowing that velvet voice to be shredded by the fate thrust upon him. It helped that the questions were framed by the playwright in a way he’d been seeking to frame them for years, experience, skill and his life combining now like alchemy, turning all the metals to gold.
Only for the brief moment when George Bryan began to speak the gravedigger’s lines that Will had offered to him did John wish he’d accepted and was a part of it – until he remembered he was. For he was bound like everyone else upon the scaffold, above it, before it; a congregation caught in holiness, in devilry – and in something else too.
For there were fathers and sons, whatever the playwright had denied. The day quaked with them: Will’s, for he acted the prince’s dead parent; John’s, for Ned entered, upon the stage and into the spirit, as caught and held as any. He’d known his boy to have some skills. He’d taught him some of them. Yet this, today, was beyond all tricks and practice; and when Burbage made an extraordinary speech questioning his very existence, that John could not remember a word of afterwards, only the feeling of desolation that it left, and when that desolation was doubled as Hamlet spurned his lover, spurned John’s son, he felt again that rare prickle in his eyes. And he was not alone, it seemed. For the duration of the speech and scene, beyond it, those in the pit, in the galleries, barely moved, scarcely breathed. No bottle of ale popped, no cockle shell crunched under shifting feet.
It was not all sadness, though. This was a play by players – and about players too. A stage above a stage. And if Kemp’s foolery was gone, the prince’s bitter wit set the audience on a roar, undercutting the tragedy, releasing them for a moment only to enmesh them ever deeper.
On the platform, in the playhouse, there was rapt attention on a girl sent mad. Ned did not shed any tears – and so everyone else did. Resting his head upon his arms, John stared at his son, trying to discern with what bricks Ned had built the portrait, the props under the structure . . . and could not. His son had done what fine players did – taken the life he had seen, then released it as something newly discovered. He had become a fine player himself.
And for those who sought it, there were politics too – not least the scheming counsellor who sought to control everything. And when he died for his schemes, John smiled, hearing the audience gasp – for the style of the scene was a late addition to the piece Will had been working on so long, one as recent as two weeks before and the Earl of Essex’s attainder at Westminster Hall. All London had heard the story – how Cecil had hidden to overhear proceedings . . . behind an arras. How he had burst forth to counter one of Essex’s allegations. And after the gasp, many in the theatre that day cheered the stage fate of the eavesdropper, stabbed behind his arras.
A father and a child died – there, that day in London, that day in the realm, that day in everyone’s lives. All who’d lost them did so again; and when both these were buried hugger-mugger, with rituals curtailed, as the Church in England demanded, many there felt that loss of ritual keenly, and mourned again.
They needed release. And so the skilful playwright gave it to them. Gave them a fight.
Tess gripped him now, as the challenge for the fencing match was announced. She knew what had taken him early each morning from their bed this last week since the players returned, with both Burbage and Sly prepared to work harder on this part of the play than usual. She knew that even John’s fights followed a customary pattern, designed largely to thrill. But mere custom would not serve here.
John leaned again upon the rail, the spectator gone now, the participant engaged.
As the weapons were carried out, a thrill ran through the audience. Bill Sly’s Laertes, in breastplate and steel gauntlet, chose a rapier – the audience hissing because all knew he’d already anointed it with poison to make certain his revenge – then added a dagger. Burbage’s Hamlet made a show of studying what was on offer – before crossing to Marcellus with a cry of delight and drawing forth the man’s backsword.
‘This likes me well,’ he said.<
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Tess reached to squeeze John’s arm. ‘Is this what I think?’ she asked. ‘The hero fights with sword and buckler against the villain’s rapier and dagger?’
‘Is he the hero? Does he fight a villain?’ John shrugged. ‘Aye, he’ll fight the English against the foreigner. Native tradition against alien import. The old against the new . . .’
‘ . . . my lord of Essex against all who brought him down,’ she finished for him, then looked at him hard. ‘Oh, John. Even in a fight, do you and Will play at politics?’
‘Nay, love, it is just a fight. Mark it.’
She did, along with the audience. There was surprise, and not just in the choice of weapons. The old play of Hamlet did not end with a bout of fencing but with bloody vengeance. All bent to it, eyes wide.
The players made him proud, were better than they’d ever been. And if there was the drama of the play within the fight, with its double-cross and poisonings, there were also the pure skills themselves. Old principles trumped the new techniques, backsword and buckler overcame rapier and dagger. Chivalry vanquished the modern – and yet succumbed anyway, as nobility will, to treachery.
The fight was over. The stage was covered with bodies. Hamlet summoned up the strength to say, with his dying breath, ‘The rest is silence.’ And John slumped back, as spent as if he had fought.
From one scaffold to another, he thought. It was not Robert Devereux who lay dead – his head was near picked clean of flesh by the crows on London Bridge not a quarter of a mile away. Those few who knew him as well as John did also knew that he had not the capacities and intellect of Shakespeare’s Prince of Denmark. And yet? When a conqueror came at the end and claimed the throne, his words, almost the last of the play, honoured the recently slain. Both of them.
For he was likely, had he been put on,
To have been proved most royal.
A sigh ran through the playhouse at that. The bodies were removed, the play ending in loud shot. Yet if the audience was hoping for a jig to conclude, they were mistaken. Kemp’s days were gone. A new age was upon them.