Master of the Revels

by Nicole Galland

  Andrew North no sooner had a pottle of ale in hand than he left off his jig-revolutionizing chat with Ned and began to sing, to all assembled, “My Bonny Lass She Smileth”—again with the fa la la la la la’s. He coaxed me to harmonize with him. This instantly made me one of the boys, and I thanked him. He suggested I express my gratitude by treating him to a gill of brandy-wine, to wash down the ale; Ned slipped me the cash for it. Then John Lowin ordered North to stop singing madrigals and challenged him to a game of hazard (that’s dice), while other players set up for landsknecht (cards). I’m a pretty mean poker player, but I had no money for gaming, so when Ned edged me toward a small side table, I let him sit me down with a bowl of ale (violet ale = not as vile as you’d think).

  He wanted to impress me with tales of his misspent youth, and tbh he is pretty cute, so I was happy to listen.

  Turns out Ned’s been with the company nearly as long as his brother. He’d started as a young apprentice. The week before he’d completed his apprenticeship, all the London theatres were simultaneously raided by the Queen’s army, and thousands of men in the audiences were impressed into military service. But the players themselves were all spared. They “performed for Her Majesty’s pleasure,” which required them to remain near Her Majesty—i.e., not on a battlefield. Will immediately put Ned on the books to keep him out of the army, although in fact he was rarely onstage. The shareholders considered him family, and for years he’d been content to be everyone’s right-hand man.

  “But now I’m of a mind either to throw myself back into personating,” he continued, “or perhaps rather to become a playwright. I am taking a mathematical approach to determine which.”

  “Are you?” I asked, wishing I could have been as practical as that before I took on beaucoup student debt.

  “Yes. A playwright’s fee is about six pounds per play, while a hired actor may expect some six shillings eight pence per week, but only when he has work—”

  “Lad!” cried Andrew North, staggering ruddy-cheeked in our direction. “Lad! Give us a harmony! I’ve a new song, just learned it now while playing dice, just the sort I’ll wager you like. Come on, then!”

  He grabbed me by the wrist, pulled me to standing, and dragged me to the middle of the room, where a table had been pushed aside to give us a performance space.

  “It’s another Tom Morley,” Andrew said, grabbing a full bowl of ale from Hal Condell and shoving it at me so energetically I had to take it, just to hold it at arm’s length before it slopped all over my borrowed clothes. “Here you go, wet those pipes first.”

  The tavern was still at a roar and most people took no notice of us, but perhaps one man out of ten had gathered around, mostly because Condell, Heminge, and Andrew himself were all gesturing them to.

  “Now. The words are these, I’ll sing ’em and you can harmonize. Will you buy a fine dog with a hole in his head? Mark that?”

  “Will you buy a fine dog with a hole in his head?” I echoed, giving Ned a help me look. Ned grinned and waved as if from a great distance.

  “Perfect, lad. That line, three times in a row. And then the chorus goes like this: dildo dildo dildo.”

  “Thomas Morley, man,” I guffawed to the ceiling beams. “Such a lyricist!”

  With a loud and awful thwang, the iron chandelier we stood beneath shuddered, lurched, and plummeted.

  Smacking patrons out of the way like bowling pins, Ned Shakespeare dove toward us so fast he looked like a CGI superhero. He shoved Andrew to one side and me to the other and kept running so that the chandelier, when it landed, caught the back of his left boot and ripped a hole in Andrew’s jerkin.

  “Holy Mother of God!” Andrew shrieked above the general shouts of alarm. There followed a moment of shocked silence, and then everyone began to speak at once: some voices complaining of what bad repair the tavern kept its lighting trees; some calling it an act of sabotage; some marveling at Ned’s speed and dexterity; others huzzahing what good fun that was and asking for a repeat.

  “We’re leaving now and heading home,” Ned said into my ear, his hand tight around my wrist. “In case that was no accident.”

  I went without argument, my pulse fluttering. “You think it was somehow Gráinne?” I asked.

  “You speak my very thoughts, but does she know you to look at you?”

  “More than that: Why would she even think to be looking for me? I don’t think she knows I exist.”

  By the time we returned to Silver Street, Will was abed. We had agreed, en route, not to mention this to him. He was already unenthusiastic about my presence, and anything that might be construed as trouble risked his terminating his welcome to me. By the next day, we were sure, the King’s Men would have written it off as a “wild night out.”

  The morning weather was drizzle. I slogged through it to the Revels, looking over my shoulder every few moments as if I had a nervous tic. Upstairs in the office, the Master thanked me for my inventorying of the day before, pleased with my thoroughness and the neatness of my script.

  “What shall my labors be today, then, sir?” I asked brightly, hoping he would keep me by him. If that chandelier had, inexplicably, been aimed at me, I felt safer near a figure of authority like Tilney. I hate to admit this, but his Alpha-Male Patriarchy vibe suddenly felt reassuring.

  He glanced around the room, which looked almost as if it had been ransacked, it was in such disarray. “I would have you do to these papers what you have done to the props. Give order to this room.”

  Huzzah! A good development! That put me in striking distance of the script. “What manner of order, sir?”

  He gestured over his shoulder at a wall of tall cabinets. “Whatever is on the table here, and on the floor near the table, belongs largely in those cabinets, but I lack the time to order it myself, and none of my clerks have a head for it. Place each paper in its proper receptacle.”

  So I was to be a file clerk. That suited me, for the Macbeth promptbook was on the table, and now I had cause to be close to it—and to Tilney himself—all day. (Also: I was itching to do some origami, and I was betting some of those paper bits were expendable.)

  For a couple of hours, I bent to my task. Examining the arrangement of drawers in the cabinets, I saw how best to organize the papers that were littering the room, and I assiduously did this. Despite still being shaken from the chandelier “accident” of the night before, I got my clerical high on. I sectioned the leaves into receipts and bills; letters of praise or complaint; invitations to various court events; calendar and diary pages that had been misplaced; sketches for scenery and props; sketches upon sketches of costumes and formal dress; lists of plays performed at Whitehall, at Hampton Court, at Greenwich; individual pages plucked from scripts, with Tilney’s upright penmanship crowded into the margins; budget proposals; bids from hosiers, tailors, basket-makers, drapers, embroiderers, chandlers, furriers, armorers, ironmongers, wire-mongers, carvers; and finally, a letter of complaint from a pair of huntsmen who owned a fox that had once been let loose in Hampton Court as part of a masque.

  As I created these piles, Tilney bent to a task of his own. He opened the promptbook of Macbeth, unrolled a small scroll that had been tucked into his belt, and took a few clean leaves of paper from a stack on one corner of the desk. Wetting his quill with ink, he began to copy a page from Macbeth. But sometimes, he referred to whatever was written in the little scroll rather than the script.

  That scroll must contain Gráinne’s spell, the one that the triplet witches said (one night only) in my twenty-first-century production of Macbeth, which started a campfire in the audience. He was replacing Shakespeare’s inert nursery rhymes with Gráinne’s deadly magic right in front of me. I pretended not to notice, but my hands started to shake. If that scroll came from Gráinne, was it possible she was still in London? Maybe even in the building?

  I backed up slowly until I was against one of the wall chests, just so I had something solid at my back. She must be here, or nearb
y. Did she know about me? How could I extract useful intel from Tilney without arousing his suspicion?

  When the Master had finished copying, he folded the original page of Will’s script and slipped it into a drawer. From a circlet of keys that hung from his belt, he selected one by feel, without even glancing at it. He used this key to lock the drawer. (Believing Will’s nonsense to be real witchcraft, he must be securing it to use as evidence against Will if the need arose. Why he’d want to get his most moneymaking playwright into trouble is beyond me.)

  Once he had inserted the page containing Gráinne’s spells into Macbeth, Tilney closed the manuscript. He selected another key by feel and unlocked a small metal box on one corner of the table. From this, he removed a round seal, about a thumb’s length across. There was a stout candle on the table; over this he melted an amber-colored wax and drippled a few drops onto the title page. He pressed the seal of the Revels Office into it. Then—of even greater significance than the seal, which anyone could pinch—he signed his own name, with an elaborate personal flourish beneath it.

  This manuscript, sitting so benignly on his desk, was now the approved playbook of Macbeth, for all time. And it contained real, destructive magic spells. Well, shit. I was batting 0 for 2.

  While I continued to organize and sort—or rather, pretend to organize and sort, while my mind raced through options for undoing what had just happened—Tilney was in and out of the office, an efficient, energetic senior citizen who looked forever just a touch displeased about everything.

  Now having reason to suspect Gráinne was nearby, I was less efficient when he wasn’t in the room, because I startled at every noise. Footsteps in the corridors. Swallows squabbling as they built their nests under the eaves. Distant thumps from ground-floor workshops.

  When Tilney was present, he received sundry visitors, all of whom I eyed covertly and suspiciously, wondering if they were Gráinne-adjacent, if they had been in the Peacock last night, if they suspected who I was. They were mostly vendors or craftsmen of objects he needed for the next masques and concerts: lace-makers, hatmakers, glovers, cobblers, dressmakers, silk merchants—all of them with a man or two carrying their wares to show off. Tilney examined them, haggled, made purchases. He also received a messenger from the Queen, who expressed a desire for a masque on Midsummer Eve, to the theme of “agricultural abundance.” She wanted the costumes to suggest sunshine and butterflies. She wanted flowers. She wanted verses about the pollinating bees as the spirit of our Lord propagating a love of Good Things in all of our souls, but—off the record—she fancied that perhaps this message could be expressed with a certain amount of debauchery, although that was not the term used. She wanted Ben Jonson to write it. Queen Anne loved Ben Jonson. Because of all his elaborate scenery and costumes.

  So all in all, let me say: Tilney never had a moment’s break and a lot of his work was pretty tedious. It was not a glamorous way to be a Master of anything.

  When he had a moment to consider me, he looked pleased by my efforts and was finally disposed to be cheerful toward me. I had deliberately worked my way toward the center of the table, where the manuscript still sat. The next time Tilney left the room, I positioned myself near the script and awaited his return. Until I figured out the Tristan sitch, I could at least save Macbeth.

  I heard the brisk stride of his heels outside the door and contrived to be swiveling toward the manuscript as the door pushed opened. I timed it well, and Tilney reentered just in time to witness Robin Shakespeare noticing, apparently for the first time, that Cousin Will’s new play was on the table. Robin Shakespeare was so distracted by this discovery that Tilney’s return to the room took Robin Shakespeare by surprise.

  “Oh! Beg your pardon, sir, but such a pleasure it gives me to see Will’s latest. I do think ’tis the best yet.”

  “’Tis an affecting piece,” he allowed.

  “Indeed! Such a mix of tragedy and drama and comedy. You know my favorite bit? The witches . . .” I reached for the manuscript, throwing it open and leafing through it to the final witch scene. “Ah, here ’tis. I’ll tell you why I love this bit . . . ‘Double, double . . .’ Sir? These are not the words he wrote.” I scanned the page. “Whence came these rhymes? ‘Scorch their minds and raze the rubble’ and all that follows?” I looked at the page, and the page after, counterfeiting concern. “And ’tisn’t Will’s hand at all, sir, but a forger’s hand on this page. Sir”—I gave him a look of distress—“this page is none of Will’s, some rascal has rewritten it.”

  Tilney made an impatient gesture. “’Tisn’t a forger but mine own hand. Those are reforms I have made to it.”

  “Forgive my presumption, but why would you change it, sir?”

  “I do not forgive your presumption, it is no concern of yours, boy.” But he was studying me.

  I released my grip on the manuscript. “Those lines were very dear to him and he spent much time perfecting them. I must assume you made this change at the request of a courtier. Or perhaps His Majesty?”

  He was incredulous that an inferior questioned his actions. Truly incredulous—his confusion outweighed his anger. I steeled myself for a rebuke or even a blow. But after staring for a moment, he said, almost like a chastising father, “And why might His Majesty care what is writ in the nonsense verses of a play?”

  “Well, sir, His Majesty is famous for having routed out Scottish witches.”

  “I am aware of His Majesty’s strong feelings on the subject. He wrote a book about it.”

  “Indeed, and my cousin is well versed in the King’s sentiments on the matter. He wrote those very verses particularly for His Majesty. These words here are not the words he wrote, I know that surely, for he read me his original rhymes at his own table. He wrote, ‘Fire burn and cauldron bubble,’ and so on. Unless you were given instructions from a superior to change them for some reason, in service to the King, sir, then whatever reasons you had for changing them . . . I would look to whoever bade you change them and seek the reason why. For I believe you have been tricked, sir. To what end, I know not, but I think such trickery does not bode well for you.”

  Something stirred, troubled, beneath that shellacked exterior. I thought I was convincing him. But he stared hard at me for what felt like a week and then shook his head. “I was warned you might try this,” he said.

  My surprise was not feigned now. “Sir?”

  “The cause of this amendment is no concern of yours, but those who required it warned me that you, Robin Shakespeare, might strive to undo it.”

  I was astonished. “Who would that be, sir? None even know I work for you! ’Tis but my second morning here.”

  “You are very impertinent,” he said shortly. “Stand away from the desk and trouble me with no more foolishness.”

  “Pardon, sir, but I’ve done naught to take offense from.”

  “’Tis not your place to determine that, ’tis mine. If you implore me again you shall be instantly dismissed. Were you not a Shakespeare, you would be gone already. If you have sought employment here merely to interfere with this matter, both you and your esteemed cousin shall learn the price of my displeasure.”

  Blanching, I apologized and tried to return to sorting papers, although my hands were shaking so badly that papers rustled when I held them. That fucking Irish witch had not only won him over—she’d figured out who I was. She or some crony surely loosed that chandelier last night. This had all felt swashbuckling, like a Renaissance faire on steroids, until now. Now I just wanted to keep my head down.

  To prevent this report from going on forever, here’s tl;dr on the rest of the script DEDE, which was more productive.

  Since talking to Tilney got no results, I decided to fix the script myself. I had a good mental map of the place by the end of my second day, so I was able to sneak in under cover of night and rewrite those pages to the original, by candlelight, without Tilney knowing. I removed Gráinne’s lines (“scorch their minds,” etc.) and reinserted Shakespe
are’s (“fire burn,” etc.). I got in and out of the Revels Office without incident.

  Since Gráinne clearly has it out for me, it seemed safer to get out of there. Can I get Sent back to a little later on in time to save Tristan, without having to hang out back then, at risk of her?

  It is super weird that Tristan isn’t anywhere. I can’t quite get my brain around that. He’s already left here, but he hasn’t arrived there yet. It’s kind of a mind-fuck.

  “The Song of Edmund and Robin; or, Mend Thy Words”

  By Edmund Shakespeare, penned 13 April 1606

  I.

  Behold the story of a maid in peril

  Whose eyes were blue-green as the blue-green beryl.

  Her mission ’twas to over-write some verses

  That otherwise had once been witches’ curses.

  For this was she disguiséd as a lad,

  But still with countenance that made him glad

  Who was her boon companion, naméd Ned.

  And at the time of night that’s calléd “dead”

  Did they conspire to scale the walls of Revels

  Thus to rid the world of verbal devils.

  A lantern did they carry, made of horn,

  And door-unlocking tools young Ned had borne

  From miscreant behaviour in his youth

  That we will not dwell on here, forsooth.

  O! this narrator has near forgot to mention

  One choice element of their ascension:

  They had agreed that, were they to be caught,

  They’d feign activity of actions naught:

  That is, to counterfeit an act of love unlawful

  ’Twixt man and youth. The punishment is awful,

  Thus sodomites must e’er seek furtive greeting

  To avoid the scourge of the law’s harshest meting.