Sleep of Death

by Philip Gooden

  Mink held the boy’s hand above the dying candle for a instant before bringing it down hard onto the mess of wick and flame and smut and grease. When he released his grip, Gilbert sprang back from the table, shaking his hand in the air and making noises which were further from sense than ever. Then, still waving the offended limb, he shambled off towards the outer darkness, whining softly. From the table on the other side of the room came a bark of laughter. Somebody at least had appreciated the scene. More pitiful than the treatment of the boy was the way he seemed to accept it as his due, as if life could be no better and no different. I was reminded of a beaten cur slinking, without remonstrance, tail between legs, into a corner.

  ‘Good,’ said Mink. ‘Sit yourself down once more, Nicholas. When I have recovered my breath’ – though, by the by, he seemed not the least winded by his actions, while I (as I realised after a moment) had been holding my breath throughout – ‘I will try again for refreshment. This time maybe, we will be favoured with the mistress’s attention rather than her idiot’s.’

  ‘Perhaps she will be less than happy with you for treating her son like that,’ I said.

  ‘That is as nothing to what she does to him herself. I have seen her beat him senseless when he was younger.’

  ‘But he cannot help himself,’ I said.

  ‘That is why she used to beat him,’ said Master Mink. ‘That, and because he reminded her every day, in his misshapen way, of the heat of her reins. The quondam heat. She is no longer what she was, is our Mistress Goodride.’

  The terrible thought crossed my mind, not only that Robert Mink might have known Mistress Goodride carnally (this was more than likely, judging by his off-hand and faintly contemptuous manner of referring to her appetite), but that this poor drawer Gilbert might have sprung from his own seed.

  ‘I must leave,’ I said. ‘I have business to attend to.’

  Then Master Mink became all sweetness to me. Putting a confiding hand on my arm, he spoke low, ‘Please stay a little longer, Nicholas. Be comfortable. I will not keep you long from your business. We have not yet come to the reason why I wished to meet this evening. I would value your opinion on a matter.’

  I had all this while been standing, but now I sat once more. His words were flattering. I was a still unfledged member of the Chamberlain’s Men and – although I tried my best to forget the fact – only a temporary one. Naturally, I harboured the hope that, by my skill and willingness, I might so impress those he had called Master Cabbage and Master Shakeshift and the others that they would create for me a permanent space on their boards. Master Robert Mink was one of the most senior players of the Company; it was in my interest to pay him the tribute of listening, and of providing him with an opinion if he so desired.

  Such arguments with oneself are always the easiest to win.

  Mink fumbled in his fine-quality, ale-soaked doublet and retrieved a sheaf of papers. ‘One reason I grew angry with that foolish boy was that I feared for these.’

  He extracted a sheet, seemingly at random, and brought it up close to his eyes in the attempt to read. Now that the candle had been so summarily snuffed out by his own action, there was only a dim, swaying lamp suspended from the low ceiling. It was as ineffectual as a glow-worm.

  ‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘I know them by heart.’

  ‘What do you know?’

  ‘The Lover’s Lament, I will begin with.’

  He cleared his throat. His slumped shape seemed to straighten on the bench.

  “O lady coy, be not proud, be not proud,

  To see thy conquest at thy feet implore

  Thy favour. For, like to Actaeon’s cloudy

  sight when, with heart all sick and sore,

  He glimpsed the charms of Artemis,

  As she did show to envious woods her—”

  Et cetera.

  I cannot go on. I had to sit through this stuff but that is no reason why you should have to. I will be merciful and draw the veil over Master Mink’s effusions.

  Robert Mink did go on, however. Declaiming, sighing, whispering, urging, as if on stage, he begged his mistress to have pity on him. He threw himself into Tartary. He exalted her unto the skies. He waded through a Dead Sea awash with naiads, and a forest-full of dryads. He called in aid the whole classical pantheon. But, like all true lovers in verse, he ended no better than he had begun, still lost and lorn, alas!

  ‘Well?’ he said when he had not so much finished as, for a time, dried up, like the kennel down a street in hot weather.

  Naturally, I knew full well whose verses they were, while, inwardly, I marvelled that a player with all his experience of others’ words should be so blinded to his own.

  ‘Is it Master Thomas Nashe?’ I said, all innocence and guile wrapped up together. ‘Is it he?’

  ‘Oh no, not Nashe,’ said Mink, not yet ready to reveal his hand.

  ‘Well’ – I pretended to flail about for a suitable name – ‘it is Master Shirley then.’

  ‘Nor him neither.’

  ‘Marlowe? It had just a trace to my ears of “Come live with me and be my love” – as the passionate shepherd says to his inamorata.’

  It had no such thing, of course, but Master Mink was inordinately pleased to have his versifying likened to one of the most famous poems of our time. I could see, even in the tavern darkness that swathed us, his bulk swell up with the pleasure of it all. Deciding, perhaps, that he was unlikely to top Kit Marlowe for comparisons, he decided to own up.

  ‘I am no Kit Marlowe,’ he said, though it was plain from his slight smirk – which I could not so much see in his face, as hear in his words – that he considered himself not so inferior. ‘Though it may be that I am as much of a passionate shepherd.’

  I could not square the man of soft feelings and elevated opinion with the impatient figure who had crushed and burnt poor Gilbert’s hand; nevertheless, I continued to play my part.

  ‘They are your lines?’

  Nicely done, Nicholas, I thought, in its admixture of surprise and no-surprise.

  ‘A poor thing but mine own.’

  ‘Oh not poor, Robert, but rich.’

  But something about my quick and facile rejoinder, coupled perhaps with my ready use of Master Mink’s given name, roused his suspicions. No one is so quick to take offence as he who is easily flattered. He returned the sheaf of papers to his ample doublet.

  ‘You do not mean it.’

  ‘I do, believe me.’

  ‘You do not mean it and I do not believe you. No matter, Master Revill.’

  He spoke mildly, yet I already had witnessed enough of Mink’s mildness and what it might be a prelude to. Fortunately, he now gave me my dismissal for the time being.

  ‘You have business to attend to, you said. Another evening, and you may hear The Lover’s Triumph.’

  ‘I am at your service,’ I said, already rising from the table.

  Outside, the cobbles of Moor Street were slimy with the rain that still fell, as steady and remorseless as Master Mink’s verses.

  Scene: The next day. The house of Sir Thomas and Lady Alice Eliot. During supper the conversation turns to plays and players, in particular the value of the company clown.

  William Eliot: You have Robert Armin with you now, don’t you? In the Chamberlain’s Company?

  Nick Revill: As successor to Will Kempe, yes. Armin is our clown and so the heir to Kempe’s bauble, his thing.

  Lady Alice: It was not such a little thing, Kempe’s, unless I have been misinformed.

  Sir Thomas: Kempe the jig-maker. Your only jig-maker.

  Lady Alice: He jigged his way across more country than lies between here and Norwich, and more than country, I’ll be bound.

  William Eliot: ‘Successor’ and ‘heir’ are grand words for the company clown, though from the way that he spoke them I don’t think Nick approves of the trade.

  Nick: I wouldn’t say this beyond these walls, but I don’t believe clowns and suchlike are an
ornament to the profession.

  Sir Thomas: Profession, ha!

  Nick: With respect, sir, that is exactly the reason why companies need to be careful in selecting their clown.

  Sir Thomas: Explain.

  Nick: We are no longer a bunch of tatterdemallions setting ourselves up on a wooden cart in some draughty inn-yard, there to play peekaboo with the Devil and God and Everyman, in a creaking Morality of vice and virtue. We are the voice of our age. We are the mirror of the times. We inhabit one of the finest buildings in the greatest city the world has ever seen, and in our little Globe is the greater globe contained, in all her passion and splendour and, yes, sometimes in her squalor too.

  William: Well done, Nick! Some more wine?

  Sir Thomas: Clowns surely have their place too in all this splendour and squalor?

  Nick: But it is in the nature of the clowns to break bounds, to flow over their banks, to obscure the face of the play with their meaningless torrent of words and gestures. I believe that is one reason for Armin joining the Chamberlain’s and Kempe leaving us. Armin is less . . . broad.

  Sir Thomas: Oh, if you want broadness then I remember Tarlton back in the eighties. He was the one, a small hunched fellow with a squashed nose. He’d jig and he’d rhyme and do his faces, and then turn about and shake his arse at the crowd as if he was going to fart at them.

  Lady Alice: Oh yes! And you have heard the story told of a lady that once offered to cuff him . . . because he was so impudent to her face.

  Sir Thomas: What’s that, my dear? Tell us.

  William: He struck at her first?

  Lady Alice: He was sharper than that. Words before blows. He agreed to the cuff – but only on condition she reversed the spelling.

  Sir Thomas: Tarlton was the one, there is no doubt about it. There has never been a clown to match him. Tell me, Nick, you’re the insider. It’s not just my age but our clowns have grown more sedate. They roar less than they used, do they not? And, from what you’ve been saying, you must approve of this change.

  Nick: What Master Richard Burbage calls the congregation loves them still, unfortunately, but they are no friends to our authors. The playwrights are of my mind, I think. They would muzzle them. Clowns hold the words of others very cheap indeed, and think nothing of mangling whatever the authors provide.

  William: ‘Let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them’.

  Nick: As the Prince says.

  Lady Alice: Prince who?

  William: The Prince of Denmark, mother.

  Lady Alice: Oh, him.

  William: Hamlet is giving advice to the players before they perform in front of the King and Queen at Elsinore, if you remember. He has a message that he wishes conveyed to his mother and step-father and he doesn’t want the royal court distracted by zanies.

  Nick: Though Hamlet speaks also out of a feeling for the players and their art, surely?

  Sir Thomas: Art, ho!

  Lady Alice: I don’t like that play about Denmark. They all talk so much.

  Sir Thomas: It was a painful experience for us to watch, as you may imagine, Nick.

  Nick: I – yes, I – it must have been.

  Sir Thomas: Here was a man done to death by his brother – and dying in an orchard too – with the brother marrying the grieving widow. My own brother goes to his eternal rest. Lady Alice and I go to the Globe for some recreation, a little diversion, the latest piece by Master Shakespeare, and what do we find? That some of the outward circumstances of our lives have been shadowed forth on the stage.

  William: But what of that, uncle? Our withers are unwrung.

  Lady Alice: Unwrung withers, William?

  Sir Thomas: A line from the play, my dear.

  Lady Alice: Dear William knows that play so well.

  William: It bears study, mother.

  Sir Thomas: If I was of a suspicious cast of mind I would consider that Shakespeare had borrowed our clothes to flaunt himself in front of the public. That he was profiting from Lady Alice’s widow’s weeds.

  William: Pure coincidence. The sad loss of my father and of your husband, madam, and your brother, sir, must have occurred even as the author was writing. The idea is not his, in any case. There is an older play of Hamlet, by somebody or other. No author worth his salt is going to use real life when there are so many books and plays to borrow from.

  Lady Alice: What is he like, Master Revill? Master Shakespeare, who is he? Is he greedy and unscrupulous, ready to exploit a private tragedy? I have heard that he would be a gentleman but that he combines that wish with a hard head for business.

  Nick: Then you know him better than I do, my lady. I find him hard to . . . describe. He plays the Ghost, you know, in this tragedy of the Prince of Denmark, and that seems a part which is especially fitted to him.

  Sir Thomas: How so?

  Nick: A ghost is everywhere and nowhere on this earth. He materialises and then vanishes, without a by-your-leave. You might see him but you cannot seize him. And when he speaks, we pay attention because he carries intelligence from some place the rest of us have never been.

  Lady Alice: You mean to make your Shakespeare mysterious.

  Nick: I hardly know him, as I say. I’m only a humble player. He is the author. But he did me a good turn recently when he rescued me from the attentions of a boatman who had his arm across my windpipe.

  Sir Thomas: Then your company author must be a strong man, I wouldn’t choose to wrestle one of the Thames boatmen. I have some respect for him now.

  Nick: He overcame him with words.

  Lady Alice: Oh, words.

  Nick: There was a certain balance in the case, my lady, because the boatman had taken exception to one of my words, and was trying to throttle me because of it.

  Lady Alice: A rude word?

  Nick: Worse, my lady. A would-be witty word. I was stupider than I knew and our author rescued me from it. Tell me, Lady Alice, he has never visited this house, has he?

  Lady Alice: Who?

  Nick: Master Shakespeare.

  Lady Alice: Would I have asked you about him if he had?

  Nick: I thought perhaps . . . maybe . . . when your first husband . . . it might have slipped your . . .

  Lady Alice: I know there is a fashion now for taking up with theatre people, and in the highest circles of the land too, but Sir William, my first husband, didn’t really hold with them. He was rather set in his ways. I think he still thought of your kind as a – what did you call it? – a bunch of tatterdemallions in an inn-yard. So it’s most unlikely that anybody from your world could ever have crossed our threshold. Not even Master Shakespeare. Why do you ask?

  Nick: Oh, no reason, my lady.

  Sir Thomas: That means that Master Revill here does have a reason – but doesn’t want to reveal it.

  Of course I had a reason. I wanted to know why the initials WS were carved into the tree where, I was pretty certain, a murderer had been crouching. I didn’t want to think that a principal shareholder and occasional player in the Chamberlain’s Men (let alone the leading author of our times) had somehow crept over a garden wall and secreted himself up a pear tree. Even less did I wish to contemplate the idea of this reserved, likeable man dropping down from his leafy perch, creeping across the grass and, in some manner as yet undetermined, putting an end to the sleeping life of Sir William Eliot.

  True, Master WS was a proficient in the art of murder – just as he was in those other dark arts of lying, cheating and forswearing, of slander, theft, mutilation and mayhem. To say nothing of treasons, plots, conspiracies and stratagems, as well as the more homely gamut of envy, lust, sloth and avarice. Master WS was quite familiar with all these things because it was his job to sound humanity to its nethermost depths. He is a playwright and daily presents us with our vices and virtues, leaving us to choose whether or not to acknowledge them. Everything human is known to him; nothing, perhaps, repels him.

  But knowing is one thing and doing is
another. Master WS might show what passed through the mind of cut-throat or cut-purse as he lay waiting for his prey, but that didn’t mean that he was either one of those creatures. All are at liberty to think murder, and some of us may speak it, but few, thank God, do the deed.

  There must be other explanations. And now I cudgelled my brains to come up with them. As: suppose that the ‘WS’ I had seen inscribed in the bark stood for Walter Self or Will Savage or Wynne Sourdough. And then I thought that these initials most probably signified Wrong Scent, for I was becoming less and less convinced by my train of reasoning. Perhaps I had imagined those initials in the bark, I had been so eager to discover the mark of a lodger in the tree.

  In my notebook and using my Greek lettering I had little to transcribe that night. I’d found out almost nothing from my supper with Sir Thomas and Lady Eliot and William, except that her first husband had disapproved of plays and players. Like many who lived to the north of the river Sir William considered them, considered us, a threat to good order. The theatre enticed apprentices away from their masters’ service. The theatre encouraged lewdness and other low thoughts and bad acts. My lady Alice, however, differed from her late husband. She had a taste for the saltier comments of clowns – I recalled Tarlton’s reversed ‘cuff’ remark. I recalled too the low-cut gown that my lady was wearing. And then I shut my little book wearily, and considered going to William on the next day and telling him that my stay in his mother’s house was fruitless, for there was nothing to uncover. In truth, I felt that I should move back to my side of the river, and return to my kind, the players and whores and ruffians, the superannuated soldiers and sailors of Southwark. It was generous of William Eliot to have offered me hospitality, whatever his ulterior motive, but I could not repay him except with titbits of gossip about the Chamberlain’s Men – and even here, there wasn’t that much to tell. It was as my Nell had claimed: they were, with odd exceptions like Robert Mink, the most regular group of men.