I felt my heart beat faster and faster and my breath come more and more quickly as each moment passed, and I prayed to be granted the first thing I had ever truly wanted for myself. My eyes caught those of Alexander, who, perhaps sensing my fear and hope and need to be accepted as a member of the troupe, smiled at me encouragingly, seeming with one glance to understand and accept who I was.
Several minutes later, my father returned, placed his hand on my shoulder and announced to me that I would be joining the King’s Men as an apprentice, that I was to honor my master and learn the acting trade to the best of my abilities, while continuing to be a good and dutiful son and an obedient servant of God.
Three days later, along with what few belongings I possessed, I left my home with the King’s Men, joining with them for the remainder of their tour, then onward to London and whatever my future might bring.
Chapter Three
In which I describe my first
impressions of my new master,
the actor John Heminges, and
my time on the road with the
King’s Men
When I left home, I was but thirteen years old and had never before been more than a mile or two away from Reading. I had never before spent a night away from my father and brothers and sisters, and yet here I was walking away from them with a troupe of actors whom I had never before known, going towards a future life I could not yet begin to imagine.
I here admit that on that first night as I lay curled up in the cart in which we slept, missing my father and siblings and home and all that I knew and felt familiar with, my fears and worries and feeling of being alone got the best of me, and much to my shame I began to cry. Alexander, who was still awake and talking with his friends, came over and lay directly next to me and did his best to comfort me by gently stroking my hair and back, while softly singing a song he told me he had heard Master Heminges’s wife sing to her children:
Golden slumbers kiss your eyes,
Smiles awake you when you rise.
Sleep, pretty wantons, do not cry,
And I will sing a lullaby:
Rock them, rock them, lullaby.
Care is heavy, therefore sleep you;
You are care, and care must keep you.
Sleep, pretty wantons, do not cry,
And I will sing a lullaby:
Rock them, rock them, lullaby.
As he half-sang, half-whispered the lyrics into my ear, I felt myself comforted and not nearly so alone, and I quickly fell asleep.
The next morning, the other actors looked at me with an initial curiosity, which soon changed to a seeming and apparent disinterest. I quickly came to realize that I would largely be ignored until I proved myself worthy of being in their company.
I was fortunate though in that my master, John Heminges, took pity on my feelings of loss and isolation, and walked alongside me for a good deal of our travels over the next several weeks, asking me about myself and telling me about his own life as an actor and shareholder in the Globe Theatre.
Thirty-seven years of age when he took me on as his apprentice, Master Heminges had nearly completed his own apprenticeship as a grocer when, in 1588, he married Rebecca Knell, the sixteen-year-old widow of William Knell, who had been a member of the acting troupe known as the Queen’s Men. Working as a grocer did not and could not, he swore to me, compare to life in the theater, and within the course of just six years, he had established himself as a lead actor with Lord Strange’s Men and three years later found himself as one of the Chamberlain’s Men, the troupe of actors and playwrights supported and licensed to perform by Henry Carey, the Lord Chamberlain. That same troupe, just two months before I was apprenticed to it, became known as the King’s Men, serving under the patronage of His Royal Highness, the newly crowned James I.
It was that patronage, I learned, that allowed us (and I am making free use of the word “us,” as I was not as of yet an official member of the troupe) to legally perform plays on stage at the Globe as well as while touring the country. It also gave playwright Master Shakespeare the title of “Groom of the Chamber” and rewarded him and the other shareholders four and a half yards of red cloth each for royal livery, to be worn only on state occasions.
I was immersed immediately into the acting life during those weeks on the road, as we awaited news that the plague had ended in London and the theaters had been reopened. We traveled from town to town, largely on foot, one wagon piled high with the company’s possessions and costumes, pulled by an exhausted-looking horse that Richard III himself would have questioned giving up his kingdom for. I was informed, during the course of our travels, that this tour was successful, at least in comparison to a similar one a decade earlier when the theaters in London had closed due to the plague, and the troupe had toured the countryside with so little success that everything, including costumes and props, had to be sold in order for the actors to eat.
When we arrived in a likely-looking place, be it a larger city such as Bath or Shrewsbury, or one of the smaller towns in between, Master Heminges would change out of his dusty travel clothes and into his most elaborate regal-looking costume. He would then present our papers to the town’s officials and ceremonially request permission to perform that evening. When permission was granted, and it was rare that it was not, the first task given to me as an apprentice was to act as the troupe’s public crier, walking through the town announcing that the King’s Men had arrived direct from London to perform the exact same plays presented to the royal court. I would shout out (or sing out in all truth, given my still high-pitched voice) the name of the production being performed.
On the first day it was generally the play I saw performed in Berkshire, Shakespeare’s As You Like It. If we stayed a second evening, The Tragedy of Hamlet would be performed. If a third night was called for, it would be either The Life of King Henry the Fifth or A Warning for Fair Women, the choice dependent on what Master Heminges and the other senior members of the troupe determined would be a more popular choice, given the demeanor of the previous afternoon’s audience.
At this point I was not yet allowed on the stage. I was under instructions from Master Heminges to observe everything, to learn as much as was possible on how the actors performed, how they moved, how they projected their words, and most of all to absorb everything done on stage by Alexander, both in his role as Rosalind in As You Like It and as the most piteous and heartbreaking Ophelia imaginable in Hamlet.
I had shared a few words with Alexander by this point and found him supportive of me and willing to assist me in any way possible. He said he was most eager to move on from women’s to men’s roles. In my youth and naivety, I trusted in him when he told me this. I was later to learn that this was to some degree an act of bravado on Alexander’s part, since actors are always acting. The transition from playing women’s roles to men’s was often a difficult one, and many a boy actor’s career ended when he was able to grow his first beard.
And that was exactly the age that Alexander was. If one looked carefully, the first thin wisps of facial hair were apparent, and while Alexander was rightly proud of them, he also, at the same time, did whatever was possible to cover them up and keep them hidden from view.
While Alexander might rightly have been concerned about his future, one could not see it in his performance. I’d seen his Rosalind and knew what to expect, but I was again positively bewitched by the ease with which the young man I was coming to know as a potential friend transformed himself into Rosalind, and then Ganymede when she flees for her life into the Forest of Arden.
But I was even more transfixed by his transformation into the young girl Ophelia in Master Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which he enacted at Oxford in one of the college halls. A character most dissimilar to the bold and courageous Rosalind, Ophelia, whose love for the young Hamlet is ultimately dismissed by him with a rage-filled scorn, lacks Rosalind’s
strength and by play’s end dissolves into madness, and then, ultimately and most regrettably, suicide. I shall never as long as I live forget Alexander’s portrait of Ophelia’s fragility, and then the good Queen Gertrude’s mournful response to her tragic end, which to my eyes and ears seemed the perfect response to Alexander’s delicate portrayal:
Her clothes spread wide,
And mermaid-like awhile they bore her up,
Which time she chanted snatches of old lauds,
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and indued
Unto that element. But long it could not be
’Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pull’d the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.
Many years later, when I was awarded the opportunity to perform the role of Gertrude, I recalled the image of my dear lovely Alexander as Ophelia, lying drowned in the weeping brook, as I recited those lines. Real tears came into my eyes as I did so.
We had been touring the countryside for three or more weeks when word reached us in October that the plague had, God be praised, seemingly run its course, and the theaters had been given permission to reopen. With that, we immediately set forth for London, where my real apprenticeship would at last begin.
Chapter Four
In which I describe our
entrance into London, my
initial impressions of the great
city, and my introduction
to the Globe and to Master
Shakespeare
It was difficult for me to fully comprehend. For the first time in my life, I, John Rice of Reading, was approaching the great city of London in the company of the King’s Men to which I was now apprenticed, walking arm in arm with my new friend and protector, Alexander, when less than a month prior, I had been nothing more than a lonely schoolboy.
While I have lived in London for a goodly number of years now, and its wonders have become routine, I still shall never forget my first walk into the city. We had changed into our theatrical costumes — even I, although still in the garb of a young boy — and we waved banners and beat drums to allow the city’s residents to know that we had returned from the road and that our theater, the Globe, would once again be open to welcome audiences.
We entered into the city at St. Magnus’s Corner on the northern end of the great London Bridge. It was a sight unlike any I had ever before seen. The roadway was crowded with more people assembled in one place than I could have possibly imagined. The road was held up over the river by heavy stone piers, and on either side were houses as well as shops selling luxury items of the very highest quality. Indeed, as Alexander pointed out to me, there was right on the bridge a store selling meats and produce of all kinds, housed in an ancient two-story-tall stone building.
I began to feel more and more anxious as the crowds grew even thicker, and I held tight to Alexander for fear of getting separated and lost in a city I had no knowledge of. We had nearly crossed the bridge when I saw them. There, on the Great Stone Gate, nearly at the Southwark side of the bridge, were severed heads, what seemed to be thirty of them in total, stuck on poles for all to see. There were so many that, as I later learned, they necessitated the employment of an official Keeper of the Heads. On some the flesh had completely rotted away, leaving nothing but the gaping stare of the skulls. Other heads still had pieces of skin attached to them and were surrounded by swarms of buzzing flies. On one a lone black crow sat vigil, staring blankly ahead, idly picking at what remained of the dead person’s scalp.
I remember staring at them in horror, unable to move, amazed that the crowds were able to walk past as though they were nothing out of the ordinary. Alexander gently pulled me along off the bridge, and I realized once we were past that my entire body was shivering with fright. I felt my friend put his arm around my shoulders and tell me that I was not to be afraid, that they were the heads of those who had conspired against the king, traitors who deserved their fate, whose remains were placed there for all to see as a warning.
The rest of the walk was a blur, a mixture of sounds and sights and smells that melded together into a swirl of impressions that remain with me yet all these years later. The sounds of the workmen and their tools, the sing-song chanting of the women walking down the road selling their wares — “Hot pies of all sorts, mutton pies, leek pies, kidney pies … sausage … buy my glasses … bay and rosemary for remembrance …” — blended with the sounds of the milkmaids, the merchants calling out for customers, the bellowing of the cattle and grunts of the swine being driven to market … a mix of such distinction that I can close my eyes and the scene is there before me, as vivid as it was when I arrived that first day in London.
Alexander seemed bemused at how rapidly my mood had changed. The fear and repulsion I had felt on the bridge encountering the piked heads of traitors had disappeared, to be replaced with a growing sense of excitement along with something approaching awe. This, I thought, is what life is like, what life should be like. This, I thought, is where life is, not in the quiet of the countryside but here in the city, where, it seemed, anything and everything could be found, where everything was possible. These feelings only deepened my resolve to succeed in the theater. Less than an hour after entering the great world that is London, I knew that no matter what, this would be my home.
But while London would be and still remains my home, my physical home for the time of my apprenticeship was to be with Master Heminges. He, along with his wife, Rebecca, and their five surviving children (four had not survived infancy, another four would arrive during the time of my apprenticeship) lived in a somewhat crowded home in the parish of St. Mary, Aldermanbury. Their home, I was to learn later, was a less-than-ten-minute walk from the residence on Silver Street where Master Shakespeare lodged with his friends the Montjoys.
Also living with my master was my new friend, Alexander, who would remain there until his life abruptly changed and his apprenticeship came to an end. For the time being though, we would be bedmates, sharing a small bed on the upper level of Heminges’s house where we would often, on cold nights, lie pressed together for warmth. During those nights, as we became more familiar with each other, Alexander would tell me about his life, about the theater and acting, while giving me what would prove to be invaluable lessons on the art of personation — how to transform myself from the young boy I was into the young girl or woman that the parts I would play required.
But that was still to come. The next morning, after quickly eating a slab of bread and cheese at a long table shared with the entire family, Master Heminges, Alexander and myself crossed the river over to Southwark and the place that would become the center of my existence, the place where I discovered what I was capable of being, the place where I was made much of and felt myself to be at last myself — the Globe Theatre.
That theater is gone now, burned to the ground during a performance of Master Shakespeare’s The Famous History of the Life of King Henry the Eighth, or as it was more commonly known, All Is True. And while it is also true that the theater was rebuilt, the new one never quite, as I see it, captured the magic of the original.
The Globe, along with the Swan and Rose theaters, was located in Southwark, which although just across the Thames from the city proper, was not then under the jurisdiction of the city authorities. For this reason the area was filled with entertainments of all sorts not necessarily thought moral and proper. Along with theatrical productions, visitors to the area could avail themselves of establishments where dancing was allowed, where prostitutes of all sorts plied their trade, where entertainments of the most brutish kinds were presented to crowds who exulted in sports that were, in truth, celebrations of blood and death.
I shall talk about those kinds of entertainments at greater length later in this memoir, but now I’d prefer to remember instead the first Globe Theatr
e and the story of its construction, or actually its reconstruction in 1599, which it seems likely few now remember.
It was Master Heminges who told me of its history. In the year of our Lord 1576, James Burbage had built the first building in London dedicated solely to theatrical performances, known simply as “The Theatre,” which became the home of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. It was here that the early works of Master Shakespeare were performed, as well as those of Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Kyd, the popularity of whose play The Spanish Tragedy, now I believe seldom performed, helped the playhouse to remain profitable even during the leanest of times.
Even though the Theatre was successful, as the year of our Lord 1598 came to a close, James Burbage and his son Richard Burbage, the lead actor with what was then the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, now the King’s Men, came to learn that the owner of the land on which the Theatre had been built had plans to tear it down. But before that could happen, James’s brother Cuthbert found a new site on which to build, in Southwark, close to St. Saviour’s church, south of Maiden Lane and west of Dead Man’s Lane.
And so on the 28th of December of that year, the Burbage brothers, along with players from the Lord Chamberlain’s Men as well as any other able-bodied souls who could be persuaded to help, dismantled the Theatre piece by piece, then transported the timber to Peter Street’s Wharf at Bridewell Stairs. There it was loaded onto barges in the dark of night, sailed across the Thames at high tide and then brought forth to Dead Man’s Place, where it sat until the beginning of the new year and the work of reconstruction could begin.
By the time my master had related the history of the Globe, we had approached it. To my surprise, the theater itself, despite its name, was not strictly round like a globe. Instead, by my count, it was a twenty-sided edifice. Close by the entrance, a flag depicted Hercules carrying the globe on his back, much as the players had done with the Globe, along with the Latin words totus mundus agit histrionem, meaning “the whole world is a playhouse.” (Although the flag only flew on the days the King’s Men performed, on this day, their first day back in the theater in months, it was felt appropriate to fly it as an announcement that the theaters were open once again.)
I Was Cleopatra Page 2