Throughout the ceremony, I kept my eyes on my beloved Alexander. Seeing the look of happiness on his face, as well as on Mary’s, it was difficult for me to begrudge either of them this day. To do so would be purely selfish on my part, placing my friendship above God’s wish for us to find happiness and fulfillment in marriage and family.
As we left the church, my feelings of happiness for Alexander along with my own self-centered feelings of pity must have been apparent on my face. Alexander came to me, put his arms around me and held me tight. He assured me that his feelings of friendship and love for me would never change, and bade me vow to never forget that.
We all then retreated to a nearby inn, where Master Shakespeare himself hosted Alexander and Mary’s wedding feast. There were heaping platters of beef and mustard, frumenty, mince pies and of course quantities of ale, some of the best of which I had ever had the chance to indulge in.
The festivities continued for the majority of the day, ending only when Master Shakespeare himself, after pounding his tankard on the table to get the attention of all in attendance, stood up, seemingly a bit wobbly on his feet after several hours of imbibing.
“It is an honor for me to be here, to attend and honor the marriage of one of my beloved King’s Men, Alexander Cook, to Mary Hastings, whom I just had the pleasure of meeting. And while it might be untoward for me to mention this in public,” he said with a slight grin, “it might interest you to know, young Cook, that when I myself got married, some … well, more than twenty years ago I must confess … my bride, Anne, was also with child, and all turned out well.”
At this point, he chuckled knowingly, about what I do not care to speculate, finished the ale remaining in his tankard, and after wiping his lips upon his sleeve, told the room, “Before we all depart going our separate ways, and before the happy couple go their now-united way, I would like to toast Alexander and Mary.” And then, yet again pulling a scrap of paper from his gown, he read:
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
admit impediments. Love is not love
which alters when it alteration finds,
or bends with the remover to remove.
But then he stopped, mumbling, “No, that is not right …” And then speaking hesitantly as if the words were coming to him for the first time, he said:
Honour, riches, marriage-blessing,
Long continuance, and increasing,
Hourly joys be still upon you!
Juno sings her blessings upon you.
And sitting down hard on the bench behind him, he called for a pen, appeared to write down what he had just recited and shouted out that with that, our revels had ended. And so they did.
As we variously, dependent on the amount of beer that had been consumed by each, walked, stumbled and teetered our way out of the tavern, the rest of the King’s Men silently exchanged looks and nods, at which point they turned to walk down a street that had a look wholly unwholesome. Master Shakespeare turned to me and proclaimed, “And here is where we must part ways, young John Rice. Where we go is not fit for a boy such as yourself, and if I be honest with myself and with you, ’tis not fit for us either.”
Heminges and several of the others burst into laughter at the comment. Shakespeare placed a finger to his lips to silence them, and, placing his hand on my head as if in benediction, or perhaps to keep himself from falling over, said, “I leave you now, John, with this.”
Assuming a pose I’d seen Burbage take before launching into a speech on stage, he said:
What early tongue so sweet saluteth me?
Young son, it argues a distemper’d head
So soon to bid good morrow to thy bed.
Care keeps his watch in every old man’s eye,
And where care lodges, sleep will never lie;
But where unbruised youth with unstuff’d brain
Doth couch his limbs, there golden sleep doth reign.
“With that, John, we must part ways. And as you know, parting is such sweet sorrow …” which only served to add to the laughter and general sounds of hilarity from the remaining King’s Men, who turned and went down a narrow alleyway, disappearing one by one into the darkness.
I was then left, for the first time since I had arrived in London, to walk back to my lodgings alone. Without Alexander by my side, the way seemed longer and the streets darker and more threatening. The crowds of people, many at this time of the evening, departing loud and red-faced from finishing a night such as the one I had just had at the tavern, had me pulling into myself, withdrawing from the noise and darkness and all that surrounded me.
When I arrived home, I was for the first time sleeping alone, without Alexander next to me, without feeling his warmth, his arms holding me close and keeping me safe and protected from all that caused me to fear, making me feel special and, dare I say, loved.
The bed, which previously had felt small and warm and cozy, had never felt so cold and large.
Chapter Twelve
In which I assume parts of
greater importance, while
those assigned to Alexander
grow less so, and the plague
drives us out of the city
While my outward appearance as I continued working and training at the Globe remained, as best as I was able to make it so, one of great cheer, inwardly I remained heartbroken. I avoided being in Alexander’s presence as much as possible, for whenever he was near I found myself unable to stop looking at him. Feeling my eyes welling up with tears at what I saw as the loss of my friend, I would turn quickly away without making it seem as if I was doing so.
This strategy, however, soon proved for naught, because as our season at the Globe went on, I was given the roles that Alexander was now too old to play properly, and at the request of Master Heminges, he was given the task of working with me as I prepared.
The work was hard, as difficult as anything I had yet to attempt. The roles I was asked to personate during the spring and summer of 1605 were of varying types and completely different characters — women of different positions in life, all of whom wanted different things — and I doubted my ability to do them justice.
Indeed, thoughts of failure were ever on my mind; I was frightened that if I should fail, my time with the King’s Men would soon be over. Alexander, though, had no doubts, nor did Master Heminges, whose watchful eye was ever present as I rehearsed my movements and learned my lines and cues.
Now is perhaps a good time to note that I was the only actor, both because of my age and lack of experience, who was afforded the luxury of a reasonable, although still not lengthy enough, time to rehearse. For the most part, because time was limited given that we performed almost every day, actors were presented their roles only the morning of the day before the performance. They had at best a few hours in which to memorize their lines and cues or to learn where they would stand on stage along with their entrances and exits, while having to remember all the same for their performance of a completely different play that afternoon.
I was fortunate in that Master Shakespeare, having acted himself upon his arrival in London, seemed to know not only how to write well for actors of all kinds, but how to write for boy actors whose task it was to portray his female characters, in particular. Our roles, although of great complexity and intensity, were, compared to the men’s roles, shorter and so easier to memorize. The speeches were, as Master Shakespeare himself had described to me, composed in such a way that the phrases, the breaks in the lines of prose or poetry where I would have to take a breath were on average shorter than those in the men’s roles, making them not only easier to recite smoothly, but to memorize as well.
So given that, and given Alexander’s help in preparing, the challenge of memorizing my lines and cues, of learning how each character should move, how they would enter and exit, all of the exterior aspects of the charact
er that would easily be seen and applauded or dismissed by the Globe’s audience, while a challenge, could, it seemed, be mastered.
What most worried me though was how I, young and inexperienced when it came to life as I was, could begin to comprehend and make believable the lines written for these young girls and women, lines that as I learned them seemed to beautifully express their personages, their dreams and ways of being and thinking and viewing life. These characters, although human, were completely foreign to me, as women as well as in their own beings. Why did they say the things they said and feel the things that they felt? I fully recognized the art in what Shakespeare had put on paper, but how could I read their words in a convincing manner, and by doing so, bring the characters to life, be it Ophelia, Juliet, Viola or Helena?
But as I rehearsed my speeches, read my lines aloud and moved through the scenes, I found myself somehow transforming. I was no longer John Rice, the young boy trying to please Masters Shakespeare and Heminges, as well as my dear friend Alexander, the rest of the King’s Men, the audiences and, ultimately and always, God. Instead I was Juliet, desperately in love with Romeo; Ophelia, driven mad because her love, Hamlet, has so cruelly rejected her; Viola, in love with a man in love with someone else; and Helena, in love with a man who says he truly hates her.
Somehow, by some mysterious alchemic miracle, I found it within myself to become each of those women, to become the characters and read their words not as lines in a play written by Master Shakespeare, but as though speaking them for the first time.
If, dear reader, you will allow me to indulge myself albeit briefly, it might be of interest in helping you to better understand the life of an actor that I am now leaving behind by offering examples of what I mean.
While personating Juliet, I became a love-awed thirteen-year-old girl, who while impatiently waiting on her wedding night for Romeo to return, declares that when her beloved dies, the very night itself should cut him into little stars, because the very brightness of his being will then make heaven look all the finer:
Come, gentle night, come, loving black-browed night,
Give me my Romeo …
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun.
As I read those lines on stage, I was Juliet in love with her Romeo. I was also, in part, John Rice, whose feelings for Alexander had not changed nor ever would.
In the same manner, I became Ophelia, the daughter of Polonius, the councilor of the Danish court, who loves Hamlet. He, at one time, loved her well, but now has cruelly rejected her, a pain that drives her to madness as she, clothing asunder, wanders through the court, speaking to all assembled there:
There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance — pray you love, remember. And there is pansies, that’s for thoughts.
…
There’s fennel for you, and columbines. There’s rue for you. And here’s some for me. We may call it herb of grace a Sundays. You must wear your rue with a difference. There’s a daisy. I would give you some violets, but they withered all when my father died. They say a made a good end.
As I read these lines and moved across the stage, I could feel Ophelia’s madness slowly encroaching upon me. Her pain at losing Hamlet and her father was my pain at losing Alexander and my mother. I was at once both Ophelia and myself, and felt close to tears as I presented the rosemary to Hamlet’s mother, Queen Gertrude, personated by Alexander, and remembered myself carrying the rosemary at his wedding procession.
And I confess with some amount of embarrassed pride that I espied several teardrops silently rolling down his face at the same time. It was a moment that evidenced that I had done what it was I had meant to do. I had so believably become Ophelia on the stage that even Alexander seemed to believe and accept the illusion and wept for her in her madness as if she was real, and not the same boy he had shared a bed with for better than a year.
If I must write of Helena, and it seems I must, the less I say of her and the play All’s Well That Ends Well the better. It pains me to speak anything less than the most heartfelt praise for any word that came from Master Shakespeare’s pen. But Helena, who loves the oafish dunderhead Bertram with a most unwomanly avidity that strikes one as well nigh unbelievable, who chases after a man who does not love her and who is, indeed, utterly unworthy of her love, was not a role I enjoyed playing, or, truth be told, that audiences enjoyed seeing. I consider myself fortunate that I only personated her three times while with the King’s Men.
I can, however, say nothing but the strongest words of praise and love for the delightful Viola and the comedy in which she appears, Twelfth Night. It was the first opportunity I had to personate the kind of typical comedic role that Master Shakespeare later told me gave him a great deal of pleasure to write — that of a girl who, like Rosalind in As You Like It, is forced by circumstance and fate to spend the majority of the play personating a boy.
“I cannot tell you why it does so,” he told me one evening several years later as we sat drinking at the George Inn, “but it tickles my imagination to no end to compose a part for one of my beloved boy actors that allows him to play a girl who then is forced to pretend to be a boy. The audience seems to take a peculiar pleasure in it as does the actor, and for myself, composing the multiple layerings of boys as girls falling in love on stage with other boys, and men falling in love with girls who are really boys amuses me as few other things do.”
It amused me as well, since as I have observed earlier, these types of roles were very much similar to the way I felt myself in my relations with others.
Viola, disguised as the boy Cesario, is sent by her master, Orsino, to woo Olivia on his behalf. When Olivia, who has started to fall in love with Cesario, unaware that he is actually a she and has been constant in her refusal of Orsino’s love, asks what he would do if he was Orsino to prove his love, I say:
If I did love you in my master’s flame,
With such a suffering, such a deadly life,
In your denial I would find no sense,
I would not understand it.
To which Olivia responds, “Why, what would you?”
To which I answer, in my favorite passage of the play:
Make me a willow cabin at your gate
And call upon my soul within the house;
Write loyal cantons of contemned love
And sing them loud even in the dead of night;
Hallow your name to the reverberate hills
And make the babbling gossip of the air
Cry out “Olivia!” O, you should not rest
Between the elements of air and earth
But you should pity me.
To which the only words Olivia can muster are “You might do much.”
I understood this speech and Viola all too well, since in a manner of speaking I was John, Cesario and Viola all in one. And need I say that Olivia was personated by Alexander? You could then, if you will, imagine all I was thinking and feeling as I said those lines. It was a bewildering and perplexing experience not knowing which of the three I was, yet at the same time, a moment of great familiarity to me — being someone, or in this circumstance, being some ones, while at the same time still remaining, in some small part, John Rice.
It seemed to be the role that life had assigned to me, and one in which I was, oddly enough, most truly myself.
And in that role, as an actor, my confidence grew with every performance that season. The audiences seemed, indeed, to embrace me and my work. Masters Heminges and Shakespeare told me regularly that I was becoming precisely what they had hoped I would and could be, and at last the King’s Men seemed to embrace me as one of their own. I had, after nearly two years of apprenticeship, proved my worth.
&n
bsp; There was though one exception to my growing sense of worthiness, and my desire to be absolutely truthful in this telling of my life demands that I must inform you of it. During this time, my dear friend Alexander seemed to distance himself ever so slightly from me, whether because of his marriage and newborn child, because he saw me excelling in roles that had previously been his alone, or because of matters pertaining to our previous closeness that were now painful for him to remember and think on, I do not know. All I do know is that our previous closeness was now fading.
But, truth be told, I was so involved in the performances, in learning my lines and bettering myself that I scarcely had time to look back at what had been lost. New roles followed new roles, and after six days a week of working from light until dark, I was often scarcely able to get myself home before falling into a fast sleep in my bed.
That is until the 5th of October in the year of our Lord 1605, when the theaters were again closed due to the plague ravaging London, and we were forced to flee and find refuge away from the city.
Chapter Thirteen
In which a most audacious
assassination attempt by
the nefarious Guy Fawkes
is thwarted, thereby saving
the lives of the royal family
and all the members of
Parliament, and finally, Master
Shakespeare expresses his
confidence in me
Throughout the month of October, due to the closing of the theaters, the King’s Men toured the areas outside London. There, performing where and when we could, we put forth the plays we had recently staged at the Globe, alongside other older plays still popular in the provinces. These included the pastoral romance Mucedorus, written by a playwright whose name has since disappeared from the records, and Jonson’s Volpone, a fine play indeed, but one, as might be assumed, I had no role in. Master Jonson was still the only person not persuaded that I should be allowed to act at the Globe at all, much the less in one of his plays.
I Was Cleopatra Page 7