Death of Kings

by Philip Gooden

  In the gaps and the intervals and nothingnesses that fill up a large part of any rehearsal – and, since these intervals are so much longer than the action, it seems as if the play is an interruption of one’s leisure rather than the other way about – in such pauses, I say, I fell to talking, or arguing, about friendship with my fellow-player Jack Horner, he who had the role of Sebastian.

  Jack was a Londoner born and bred yet had the air of the country about him, being fresh-faced and flaxen-haired and guileless, as it appeared to me. Four years or so older than I, Jack possessed a wife who was his reverse or antipodes (closed, secretive, dark-haired).

  “Why don’t you think that this friendship can be disinterested, Jack?” I said, referring not to ourselves but to the relationship between the two individuals that we played. “Doesn’t Antonio save and befriend Sebastian with no end in view, no end at all?”

  “It is not a friendship between equals,” said Jack. “And so it is no true friendship.”

  “You mean, because your Sebastian is well-born and my Antonio wears a sea-cap and is no gentleman, perhaps. Your definition is too narrow.”

  “I mean that, in this case, the advantage is all to Sebastian. He is the only gainer. Antonio saves his life, Antonio gives Sebastian money and so on, and he receives nothing in return.”

  “Then it is more like love, which seeks for no reward,” I said. “After all, [speaking in my character] ‘Come what may, I do adore thee so.’”

  “Love is not friendship.”

  “Though each may speak the language of the other?”

  “Those are fine words no doubt, Nick, whatever they mean. All I know is that I have a wife . . .”

  (This I knew. Her I knew.)

  “Yes, and so?” I said.

  “I am not friends with my wife, I think. Indeed, I am not sure that a man can be friends with a woman in the way that men may be with each other. Though I suppose I love her – love her not always or constantly, but sometimes.”

  (This I also knew.)

  “Yes,” I said, growing a little uncomfortable where we sat on the benches by the side of the great chamber, watching the bustle of activity and waiting for our cues.

  “Love flares up, like that fire over there, and like a fire it will die down, it must die down,” said Jack. “But if you come to friendship, oh that is a much more even-handed and steady business. Look at us, Nick. We are friends because neither of us has anything to offer or to take from the other. There is no advantage, you see.”

  “Let us ask young Martin Hancock for his opinion,” I said, very glad of the interruption when the lad playing Viola-Cesario came to sit down next to us. This would be Martin Hancock’s last season playing women’s parts. He was growing too tall and his voice was near to cracking in the ring, as Master WS puts it. In appearance he owned very few touches of his ‘brother’ Sebastian, having dark locks and looks. They were easily received as twins, however, by the audience, who will accept whatever they’re told to accept, good-natured credulous creatures that they are. In short, Jack and Martin appeared quite dissimilar, sharing only a certain openness in expression. Even this, however, proceeded from different sources, for Jack’s was a frank innocence and Martin’s was the calculated freshness of one who plays the boy. For though he was but a boy in years – and though in Twelfth Night he played the chaste heroine – he was quick and ribald in his own attire, as it were. At the moment this boy player was wearing male disguise in order that might penetrate (as he would most likely express it) Orsino and his court. He settled himself quite close to me on the bench.

  “Well, Martin,” I said. “You may be able to help us in a question here.”

  “At your pleasure, masters,” said Martin Hancock. “How can I serve you?”

  “Jack Horner and I were talking about friendship. What is the nature of the friendship between Sebastian and Antonio? Can you speak from what you know of your twin brother in the play?”

  I must confess that I was talking to no particular purpose and only to prevent Jack reverting to the subject of his wife. That I addressed Martin more or less as an adult is not to be wondered at. Keeping company with us all the day, sharing in our comedies, our tragedies and our bawdry, these boy apprentices grew up faster than ordinary lads. Also, the fact that they played above their years and out of their sex – and were frequently the dealers-out or the recipients of the most impassioned words and gestures on stage – could not help but spill over into our daily intercourse. Nevertheless, I should say here and now that we of the Chamberlain’s Company largely kept ourselves free from the dangerous taint of sodomy and those other unnatural practices which the enemies of the stage charged us with. It is perhaps as well that this be made clear before you hear the clever quibbles of Master Martin, for they might lead you to think otherwise.

  “It is plain as a pikestaff,” answered the knowing young Martin to my question about the two friends in Twelfth Night. “Antonio wishes to bolster with my ‘brother’ here.”

  “Bolster? What kind of word is that?” said Jack.

  “A perfectly good one,” said Martin. “As good a word as your name, Master Jack Horner.”

  Like the boy that he still was in some ways, Martin delighted in naughty terms and general rudery. When he was not playing honest girls and chaste heroines he spent much time giggling with the other Company boys. The fact that our fellow-player had a name, Horner, expressive of a capacity to make holes in other men’s best coats – in brief, to cuckold them – was to young Master Martin a constant, sniggering pleasure. Believe me when I say that the irony of Jack Horner’s last name was not lost on me at that moment.

  “Now justify yourself,” I said, severe as a schoolmaster, “in this business of Sebastian and Antonio, that is, him and me.”

  “He gives Sebastian a purse full of crowns and ducats but it is not the purse – or the crowns – or the ducats – that he wishes the other to dandle with, I think.”

  “Horrid boy,” said Jack Horner, between splutters of laughter.

  “Mere supposition,” I said with disapproval. I could sense my late father the parson peeping his head out at this point.

  “And when he draws to defend me,” continued the boy, pleased with the reaction that he was getting, “when Antonio draws believing that he is protecting his beloved Sebastian, do you think that it is really his sword he wants to unsheathe? After all, does not Sir Toby Belch later tell me to strip my sword ‘stark naked’, and we all know what he means – even though I am but a poor unfurnished girl in this department.”

  “Hypothesis only, this business of the sword,” I said pointedly, feeling even more like a schoolmaster, one who has discovered a bright boy doing adept but crude drawings at the back of the class.

  “Horrid and clever boy,” said Jack. But in his voice there was a note of admiration that a mere lad should be so forward and fluent in filth.

  “Oh very clever, Martin, but I do not like your construction of this matter,” I said. “I prefer you as the virginal Viola, thinking well of all men – and women too. I’m sure Sebastian here prefers you in that way too.”

  Jack said nothing so I assumed that he agreed. For myself, I found it hard to square the sweet-mouthed and courageous Viola with this naughty lad beside me. But then I should not have done; after all, we are all players.

  “Well, Nick,” said Jack, “out of the mouths of babes and lads . . . This love between my Sebastian and your Antonio is not as disinterested as you pretend. True, I get money from you, to say nothing of being rescued from a stormy sea in the first place, but you . . . all the time you do have an end in view.”

  “Your end, Master Jack,” said nasty Martin, “your . . . bottom.”

  “Not so,” I said, feeling faintly indignant, and wanting Jack to object to this familiar handling. But still he said nothing. Perhaps I felt more indignant than the occasion warranted because I noticed Master WS hoving into view. “It is higher than this. You must raise your eyes, bot
h of you, and stop grubbing on the ground. With Antonio and Sebastian, I see it as being like the friendship between Damon and Pythias in the old story. The one, you know, risked death for the other.”

  “Good old Nick,” said Jack. “Ever ready to think well of us, and to clothe our lower impulses in a cleaner garb.”

  Not so again, I thought rather than said, and I turned slightly away from him in shame as he clasped a fraternal arm about my shoulder. Fortunately, by this time Martin was required once more as Viola-Cesario and so left us. Shortly afterwards Jack and I were due to appear together for our first scene.

  As I have said, Master Shakespeare was the guider during rehearsals for this royal performance. He took no player’s part in the production (indeed, the last role I had seen him in had been as the Ghost in Hamlet) but as the author he was obviously in the best position to oversee the fleshing-out of his words.

  If I were asked about Master WS’s method in guiding us Chamberlain’s men in one of his own plays, I would find it difficult to answer. With someone like Dick Burbage, the business of guiding – or, as one might term it, the direction – was firm and emphatic. If he was the tillerman and the players the vessel, then Burbage kept a strong, steady hand on the boat’s progress. You would always be aware of his presence, sitting up aloft in the stern, one eye on the crew, the other on the waters ahead. But with Master WS it was different. To maintain the analogy: if he was the tillerman, then he was one who did not make an exhibition of himself up there; indeed, he might sometimes seem to be absent altogether from his post (though I do not mean to imply by this that he was negligent). Tiny, infrequent touches on the tiller seemed to suffice. And yet all went sailingly enough. I did not understand the trick of it.

  After I had delivered my first lines as Antonio and had promised to follow Sebastian to the court of Duke Orsino of Illyria, perilous as it might be, because

  come what may, I do adore thee so,

  That danger shall seem sport, and I will go

  Master WS drew me to one side as I exited from the playing area, which was marked out in chalk on the uneven boards of the great chamber.

  “Nicholas, you have a moment?”

  His large, open face tilted confidingly towards me as he placed a cupped hand under my right elbow. He ushered me towards a clear corner. I thought that he was going to say something about the quality of my playing, either in compliment or complaint (though with Master WS the balance was always tilted most indulgently in favour of the former).

  Anyone observing us must have thought that we were discussing something to do with the play. But it was not so, or at least only in the beginning.

  “Nicholas, I heard what you said just now about friendship, about Damon and Pythias.”

  “Oh, you did,” I said, as though half regretful at being overheard – when really I was not. In fact, I own up to wanting him to overhear me.

  “I have often thought that the history of those two would make a good argument for a play. The Two Friends from Syracuse. What do you think? Or simply Damon and Pythias. The one stood surety for the other and was ready to die in his place, when the tyrant Dionysius demanded it. Is that not true friendship?”

  “But it ended happily, did it not?”

  “Yes,” said WS. “Dionysius was so struck by Pythias’s readiness to lay down his life for his friend that he pardoned both of them.”

  “Would that all rulers showed a like mercy,” I said piously – and emptily.

  “We would surely say merci if they did,” said WS.

  “What? Oh yes,” I said, catching the pun before it disappeared round the corner and out of sight. Even by WS’s standards it was a particularly feeble one – and, had I been inclined to contest with him, I would have pointed out that one should not trespass outside one’s own tongue to make a play on words.

  “In that case,” he continued, “a ruler’s mercy was prompted by the honourable friendship of two young men. Even a tyrant may be infected by goodness – though he must catch it by stealth. It will not do to have designs on him.”

  I said nothing, because I could think of nothing to say. When Master WS talked, one generally listened.

  “I have always been moved by these ancient tales of friendship,” he said.

  “Like Antonio and Sebastian in your Twelfth Night?” I said.

  “Friendship as between Palamon and Arcite,” continued WS almost wistfully, and appearing not to notice that I had said anything. “Or Aeneas and Achates from Troy. ‘Fidus’ Achates, as Vergil calls him. Faithful Achates.”

  “Yes . . .”

  “I ask you whether that steady-burning friendship is not a truer emblem of that eternal and stainless love which we are enjoined to believe in, I mean the love which dwells above – a truer emblem than the passion of Aeneas for Dido, and hers for him, which ended in all the fury of the funeral pyre.”

  I wondered to hear WS make a comparison like Jack Horner had made, between man-and-woman’s love and a violent fire.

  “In the olden times, such friendship between men was no doubt possible,” he continued.

  “But no longer?” I said.

  “Olden times become golden times to men’s eyes, but our own age is always leaden. Or iron. Heavy, hard.”

  “But ready to be transmuted?” I said.

  “Why yes, Nick,” said WS, appearing to notice me again. “Everything can somehow be transmuted, the base metal turned to gold. Or if not, we can make it seem so.”

  He motioned with his hand at the room, in which lights flared and business-like yet excited activity and talk flowed around us.

  “Still, Nick, this is not exactly what I wanted to say to you. In the beaten way of friendship. I have a particular request to make . . .”

  Friendship! The word rang in my mind . . .

  And while we’re on the subject of friendship I might as well tell the tale of my dealings with Mistress Isabella Horner. No, not might as well but must. It’s connected with what you’ve just heard, it has to do with what follows. And I’m finding it increasingly difficult to keep quiet about it. Guilt, I suppose, the need to get it off my chest.

  So before I reach my midnight rendezvous in Hart Street with Nemo, here is what we players call . . .

  An Interlude

  It started one afternoon in the late autumn in the tiring-house. Or, to be precise, it started earlier that day. I was going about my lawful business walking riverwards up Long Southwark. Ahead I could glimpse Great Stone Gate framing the entrance to the Bridge. On either side was a parade of houses and shops which were well enough on this side of the Thames – that is, they were without the airs and graces which might have afflicted them on the other bank. I was glancing vacantly at one when I noticed Master WS slipping out of a doorway. By ‘slipping’ I don’t necessarily mean to imply stealth. Quietness and unobtrusiveness characterised Shakespeare’s gait and manner.

  I was about to wave or cry out in greeting when I saw that the playwright wasn’t alone. A woman followed him close at heels out of the door. She was small and dark-haired. In complexion she was almost swarthy. The two stood together for a moment in the entrance before the woman closed the door behind her. Even then I might have called out but something about the way Master WS inclined his head to catch the words coming from her lips made me think that they would rather not be interrupted at this moment. Not that there was anything secretive about the occasion. I didn’t get the impression that either WS or the dark lady was anxious to avoid being seen; neither so much as glanced up or down the thinly peopled street. It was more the easiness that each appeared to have in the other’s company, the mutual familiarity, which suggested that any third party was bound to be an intruder.

  I picked up all this in a long sideways glance and a few forward paces. (Perhaps it is the player’s training which imparts to one the ability to read posture and attitude so quickly.) Afraid of being caught out in curiosity, I did not look back to see which direction they were moving in or whet
her they were even walking together. But as I continued up Long Southwark the image of the two – William Shakespeare and the unknown dark lady – floated through my mind, together with the inevitable questions: Who was she? Whose house where they coming out of (not Master WS’s, for I happened to know he lodged in the Liberty of the Clink a few streets off)? And the inevitable question that slips through your mind whenever you see a man and a woman together, close together, easy together – you know the question that I mean.

  Then I put them out of mind until that afternoon’s performance at the Globe. Or rather after the performance, when we were changing from our costumes into our day-clothes. When players are disrobing in the tiring-house after a presentation, some of us have no greater delight than in picking over performances and comparing them with the previous day’s or week’s. Once we’ve looked at ourselves in the glass, as it were, we turn to the audience. You, mere (but dear) spectators or attenders at the event, may be surprised to learn that your performance too is assessed and weighed by the players. Like us, you can be good, or bad or indifferent. You might have been quick to understand things that afternoon or, perhaps, especially slow-witted. You will be judged on your attentiveness, your readiness to be distracted, your promptness in laughter, your capacity for tears. Individual members of the crowd will be selected for praise and dispraise: the man who laughed loud and long, the woman who was showing a lot of tit.

  As you might expect, it was the younger members of the company who tended to hang around. The older, sensible ones, who had other business or homes to attend to, usually disappeared after a few comradely insults, observations and pleasantries. On the margins of this scene hovered the Tire-man and his assistant, receiving the discarded costumes before lovingly placing them back in store. We’d been playing something not bad in its own way, a madcap piece called A Merry Old World, My Masters.