Master of the Revels

by Nicole Galland

  Forwarded email:

  From: Melisande Stokes

  To: Mei East-Oda

  Subject: Rebecca

  Hello, Mei, hope this finds you well.

  I know you’re planning to come back east for Easter. I’m sorry to triangulate here, but if your mother invites you—or the girls—to come home sooner than that for a visit, please put it off. There have been some unexpected developments here—nothing big, just protocol concerns, which as you know I’m not free to discuss—and if you came here now you’d get caught up with some work issues instead of having the nice family visit that I’m sure you all want. I’m heading out of town for a while and I don’t have time for a convo with Rebecca before I go, but please trust me when I say your mom’s a little distracted and needs a little space right now. I’m sure it will all be settled by Easter. Hope to see you then!

  Regards,

  Mel Stokes

  AFTER MID-ACTION REPORT

  DOER: Robin Lyons

  THEATER: Jacobean England

  OPERATION: (1) De-magic Macbeth, and then (2) save Tristan!

  DEDE: (1) Macbeth performed with non-magic spells—NEW PLAN—and then (2) prevent Gráinne from attacking Tristan on opening night

  DTAP: 1606 London, April

  STRAND: 1 (Since it’s the same DEDE with a new MO, I’m calling it Strand 1, New Plan)

  Note: I know, I know, I shouldn’t come back mid-DEDE. But it’s Sabbath there today, meaning no rehearsal, while meanwhile GRÁINNE IS STILL GUNNING FOR ME. So it seemed safest to get my ass out of there for a bit. Might as well come home, have a shower, and write down stuff to date so my next report is less of a data dump.

  To save time, Erzsébet Sent me directly into the Silver Street lodgings, at sunup the morning after I’d snuck into the Revels Office to rewrite the script. This was also the day Macbeth rehearsals were to begin. Will and Ned were both asleep—Ned looked so relaxed, to be lying on an actual mattress for a change, and tbh super cute and kinda hot, but I recognize that’s off topic.

  After I had oriented myself, I grabbed the largest of Ned’s shirts off a peg and pulled it on. I startled both men by ahem-ing loudly, but once they were awake and saw that it was me, they chilled. I brought them up to speed about the new plans and requested the three of us play the witches. Will was a little reactive to my telling him how to stage his own play. I get that.

  “As I said to your kinsman, this is your great work, not ours,” he said.

  “But you agreed to help as you could, brother,” said Ned. “She has made a great journey for it.”

  “I’ve promised the witch roles to Dick Robinson and the Rice boys.”

  “You may easily make it up to them,” coaxed Ned. “The play about the mad king who divides his kingdom up among his three sons? Change the sons to daughters and give the boys those parts.”

  Will gave him a wtf look. But then he reconsidered and agreed that we three would personate the witches.

  So I blew off going to the Revels Office and tagged along with the Brothers Shakespeare to the Globe, to rehearse the world premiere of Macbeth. Like you do. You all probably know by now that I totally want to nerd out on a gazillion things about rehearsal, but watch my restraint as I don’t go there. I will stick to what is mission relevant.

  This detail is relevant, though: the Macbeth script that Tilney had signed and stamped was physically present at the theatre. It had to be or else legally, we couldn’t do it. When I received my roll (with my role), of course it contained Gráinne’s spells.

  Pretty sure none of you are theatre nerds, so for ease of reference, here it is . . .

  tl;dr: MACBETH

  The witches have three scenes:

  Act 1, scene 1: WE OPEN THE SHOW

  There’s a rumble of thunder and horrible cacophonous music as the three of us spring up from the open trapdoor (i.e., from Hell) intoning, “When shall we three meet again?” It’s a thirty-second bit, mostly just an excuse to open the show with thunder and lightning. And to let the audience know: the rumors are true, there are indeed Scottish witches in the play about the Scottish king! Here they are. See? They’re ugly and scary but also sorta silly.

  (Note: Gráinne didn’t change anything in this scene, so we were doing it as written.)

  Act 1, scene 3: WE PREDICT MACBETH WILL BE KING

  More thunder! General Macbeth and General Banquo appear, and the witches speak in semi-riddles à la the Delphic oracle. They tell Macbeth that he is going to be king of Scotland really soon . . . but—an important detail—they also tell his buddy Banquo that Banquo’s descendants (including King James, yo) will be kings of Scotland.

  (Note: Gráinne just made one little change to this scene.)

  Act 4, scene 1: WE SUCKER PUNCH MACBETH

  A lot of shit’s gone down. Macbeth and his wife killed King Duncan in his sleep and framed Duncan’s sons for the murder, so now the Macbeths are ruling Scotland, but the Scottish lords are rebelling against their tyranny and Lady M is losing her mind offstage. Macbeth, like a junkie, goes in search of another witch hit and begs them to speak some more riddles that he can obsess on. Here’s where “Double, double, toil and trouble” comes in. The witches brew up a heinous mess of animal parts, which spawns a bunch of freaky apparitions that speak to Macbeth in lame puns, all of which he misinterprets. (Like—spoiler—“no man of woman born can harm Macbeth” actually means “the guy born via C-section is taking you down, dude.”)

  (Note: This is the scene Gráinne went to town on. The “double, double” bit is replaced with a spell Erzsébet says is literally lethal.)

  This is a new play. We have a couple weeks to rehearse it, but we work only a few hours each morning, because then the players have to review lines for their afternoon show. But we get a lot done. Macbeth is Will’s shortest play (he’d heard about King James’s short attention span), and these actors have worked together for ages. Plus of course Shakespeare has been writing specific roles for each of them for years. So it all goes super fast and super smooth. Like I said: I want to nerd out over details, but they are not relevant to my mission, so shut up, Robin.

  Actually there’s one thing that is worth nerding out over: special effects.

  Visual effects at the Globe are pretty useless. You’re performing outside in daylight on a bare stage. The company can string up squibs on a wire and light them, to give the impression of lightning, but the ambient daylight ruins the impact. Plus, the squib smoke smells like rotten eggs. So that kind of stuff doesn’t get done much. Instead, they use a heck of a lot of sound effects.

  But Macbeth opens with witches, and everyone knows witches mean thunder and lightning! So there are these long wooden troughs called thunder-runs suspended above the stage at an angle, and stagehands roll cannonballs down them. The sound is impressive. (Not as cool as what’s going down with the seahorses at the Revels Office, but good enough for the groundlings.) Okay, nerding over. Thanks for listening.

  As soon as rehearsal was over, the company had a quick bite of cheat bread together and then prepped for that day’s performance. Today it was Hamlet. I know that’s not the point of my report, so I won’t go into it, but Richard Burbage, okay, wow. Even if he can’t tell me where Gráinne is.

  After the performance, we hit the Southwark tavern scene. This time it was the Swan with Two Necks, where the ale had a tinge of clove.

  Already the routine was set: first, Andrew North and I crooned a drunken Morley duet while everyone else settled in with their pots and pottles and bowls and tankards. Then the gaming started, while Ned tried to chat me up and Will sat silently watching everyone with a distracted smile on his face, as if he were a scout from another planet spying on the great chaotic experiment called Humanity. When Andrew got too drunk to play to his advantage, he stumbled over to us, cheerfully demanding another duet. Because of the Chandelier Event, I was leery, but Andrew insisted it should be part of our act and tried to pay the landlord’s son to drop the chandelier on cue
. Ned rebuked him and used the moment to grab Will and myself and leave. We hailed a wherry and, once we’d disembarked, hied ourselves to the Mitre Tavern.

  The Mitre was north of the Thames, on Fleet Street. It had a big room in the back where musicians and two-bit theatre companies sometimes performed. It was directly on our path home, so it was the perfect place to hold our shadow rehearsal.

  When we arrived at the Mitre, there were still musicians and dancers bustling in the back room, but the front was nearly empty. This front room contained the largest table I had seen yet, a massive square about ten feet to a side, now cluttered with leftover food and bowls and gaming gear. Ned and I shamelessly scavenged the dregs as Will spoke with the landlord, who’s a friend of his. The landlord gave him a key to a private space on the first floor. Ned and I followed up the steep wooden staircase, the steps worn smooth and concave from decades of use. These ascended to a landing corridor, which opened into a meeting room with a table surrounded by benches and lanterns affixed to the wall. This made the room brighter-lit than downstairs. As the table itself was the largest horizontal plane, we climbed up on it and rehearsed the same witch movements we’d used that morning, but instead of Gráinne’s spells, we recited Will’s actual lines. As I said, the first scene was fine as is, and the second scene only needed a tweak, so we started with the third scene. The big one. The “double, double, toil and trouble” bit.

  Ned, as Witch Number One, stood in the middle of the table. He hunched over and spoke in a demented, whispered falsetto:

  Round about the cauldron go;

  In the poison’d entrails throw.

  Toad, that under cold stone

  Days and nights has thirty-one.

  Swelter’d venom sleeping got,

  Boil thou first i’ the charmed pot.

  To either side, Will and I drew breath to join him: “Double, double, toil and trouble!” we all three whispered together, and then cackled and wiggled our fingers most fiendishly. “Fire burn and cauldron bubble!”

  “Fillet of a fenny snake, / In the cauldron boil and bake,” said Will, beginning the world’s best recipe for bullshit:

  Eye of newt and toe of frog,

  Wool of bat and tongue of dog,

  Adder’s fork and blind-worm’s sting,

  Lizard’s leg and howlet’s wing,

  For a charm of powerful trouble,

  Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.

  I opened my mouth to join in on the next “double, double,” but Ned abruptly held his arm out to stop us. With his other hand he pointed sharply toward the door.

  Somebody on the other side had hold of the latch and was very slowly starting to open it.

  “Stand away, stranger,” Ned barked. “Unless you’ve business with us. In which case, make yourself known.”

  We stared at the thin column of darkness between the jamb and the door. Waiting. Whoever was on the other side neither opened nor closed it. No voice spoke.

  “Sir?” Ned demanded again. Will, who was closest to the door, made a gesture as if to go check in person, but Ned shook his head. “Sir,” he repeated. “We’ll thank you to shut the door if you’ve no business with us.”

  For a beat, nothing. Then the door slammed closed so fast I flinched.

  Will shrugged and gestured us to resume chanting—but Ned, frowning, shook his head no. Voicelessly he mouthed, He has not moved away from the door.

  How do you know? I mouthed back.

  He gestured us to lean in toward him. “There is a creaky plank outside, I noticed when we entered. We didn’t hear it as he approached because we were all chanting. We should hear it when he leaves—else he hasn’t left. We sound like a bevy of witches, and this is the reign of King James. Somebody could haul us off to Ludgate Prison and reap a happy reward for themselves.”

  Will, still looking unconcerned, climbed off the table and took a step toward the door, throwing it wide open to expose the landing. There was nobody there, but we heard the shuffling of leather-shod feet rushing down the stairs. He stepped out onto the landing and peered over the balustrade.

  “Aha,” he said, sounding pleased. “I see him. He’s chatting with the landlord. I’ll just go and tell him we’re not witches.”

  Ned signaled him to stop, but Will descended out of sight.

  Ned and I looked at each other for a moment in silence.

  “For a genius, he’s a right fool,” muttered Ned.

  “There’s naught wrong with explaining ourselves,” I said, but Ned shook his head.

  “The landlord knew we weren’t to be disturbed, and yet then he let someone disturb us. So ’tis either a constable or a witch, and neither will care what Will has to say. My money’s on that witch of yours.”

  “How would she know to look for me h—”

  A collective piercing shriek shredded the air, followed by a boom so intense my ears popped; voices cried out in terror and a thud shook the floor; shouts of alarm cut through the thrum of voices. We rushed for the stairs.

  At least a hundred patrons from the back segment of the tavern had flooded into the front, gesturing madly toward the room they’d just fled and screaming for the landlord. Some men had flipped over the massive central table—that was the boom—and hefted it to the opening between the two halves of the tavern. They had dropped it there—that was the thud—to barricade the back room from the front one. From halfway down the stairs, Ned called for his brother, but his voice made no dint in the cacophony. We both scouted the crowd but couldn’t see him. Ned took my hand and we descended together. Through the outrage and terror, I was able to follow one conversation:

  “But it chased him into the room. It was following him! It must be his own one!”

  “Didn’t look to me like he’d any awareness of it until it grabbed him.”

  “You’re both off,” scolded a third voice. “There wasn’t a man and a bear, there was just a man who turned himself into a bear.”

  “A bear?” Ned echoed.

  “Hear now! Quiet!” shouted the landlord. “Let’s have it from one voice only. You.” He pointed to a fellow, ashen and trembling, carrying the remains of a fiddle. In one hand he held the neck, with the strings splaying out like static-bedeviled hair; in the other hand, the body of the instrument, splintered.

  “We were in the middle—the middle of a dance,” the fellow stuttered. As he spoke, dozens nodded assent; dozens mmm’d and aye’d in agreement. “And all of a sudden, in through the doorway, on his hind legs, rushes a huge bear, like that one at Paris Gardens that always kills the dogs.” More agreement, which the landlord shushed. “And there’s a man right in front of it, just entered the room himself a moment earlier, and-and-and the bear grabs him from behind, picks him up like a child picking up a toy, and hurls him clear across the room and right at me.” Brandishing what was left of his instrument: “My fiddle took the force of it. Everyone screams and gives way, and the bear rushes at the man—and at me!—like he’s ready for supper, and by then everyone was screaming and we all ran out. The bear didn’t mind me then, it was only after the man.”

  I grabbed Ned’s wrist to steady myself. “Where’s Will?” I whispered.

  He shook his head. Then he nodded. Then he shook his head again.

  The landlord stared sardonically at the fiddler until the assenting murmurs had quieted. “You are saying that on the other side of that barricade, a bear is feasting on one of my patrons? He’s at it now?”

  “Yes!” shouted everyone in different pitches.

  “Silence!” he shouted, and the room shut up. “There was no bear. A bear entering this tavern would have ambled right past me, and I’d have noticed it. There is no bear.”

  “Then it weren’t a bear when it entered!” shouted an old man near the door. A hum of agreement from those around him. “’Tis a man who conjured himself into a bear. ’Tis witchcraft surely.”

  The landlord glared at them. “I allow no witchcraft in my tavern. And ’tis a strangely q
uiet bear,” he added.

  “They’re quiet when they eat,” announced another fellow in a blacksmith’s apron. “I seen it at the Gardens when they maul a dog.” A general nodding and sounds of agreement.

  The landlord swallowed, a visible crack in his implacable façade of calm. “I will go and see this nonsense for myself,” he declared, “and find the truth of it.” He reached beneath the counter and casually pulled out, I kid you not, a fucking battle-axe. It had a curved blade to one side of the shaft and, 180 from that, a spike. (I wonder what mischief took place here that he felt he needed to keep such a thing at hand.) He held it with both hands before him, blade forward; the crowd murmured with fearful approval and made way for him to cross toward the upended table.

  Two men pivoted the table to allow a narrow passage between table and jamb. He took a breath and then stepped through. Half the crowd pushed toward him and the other half away.

  “Quiet!” demanded one of the table movers importantly.

  After a moment of hushed anticipation: “What the—what?!” The landlord’s voice was barely audible; men shushed each other trying to hear. After an endless moment, the landlord re-entered, carrying the axe in one hand, the flat of the blade against his shoulder. His free hand dragged by the wrist none other than William Shakespeare. Will blinked as if he had just woken up, seeming indifferent to the hubbub around him. Cries of amazement greeted them.

  “Not a bear in sight!” hollered the landlord irritably. “Return the table to its proper place, sirrah,” he ordered. “A mass delusion is what this is! What accounts for it, be ye all bewitched?”

  If he intended that as a belittling joke, it backfired, for many voices insisted that yes, surely, manifestly, they had been bewitched—and here, in his tavern. Whether that made Will a sorcerer or the victim of sorcery, and whether the landlord was culpable—these matters were instantly debated with the kind of fury that follows a collective adrenaline surge. Fistfights broke out. Ned and I rushed to help Will and turned our backs on the commotion.