The cries went up.
An iron army brought to a sudden and terrifying halt and introduced to agony, chaos and defeat.
Too famous to live long is what they said of him. But conquerors often lack humour – and maybe that’s why they sometimes die young. Even death didn’t make him grin. In his last procession on earth he proceeded unsmilingly as ever, to lie cold and alone in his tomb, and I gave his corpse a part to play at the start of Harry the Sixth. Dead Henry back on stage, his silent form lies in its black coffin, unspeaking but eloquent symbol of the huge task the political dwarfs have been left to fulfil. Some few of them will be touched by a brand of fire. Dogged York that reaches at the moon, the Earl of Warwick – proud setter-up and puller-down of Kings – Queen Margaret who stood upon the hatches in the storm. And Salisbury, that winter lion who in rage forgets aged contusions and all brush of time. But they’re butchers in a shambles that was England. Brief are the days of glory.
Glory is what I went for, letting the play mirror the bellicose bustle of Henry’s time and ours, as Essex got ready his force to crush Tyrone’s rebellion in Ireland – and the city gave him his grand send-off. Ninety-nine, when all the youth of England are on fire and silken dalliance in the wardrobe lies. For now sits Expectation in the air…
I played the Prologue myself, like an old Greek, whipping up the atmosphere of valour, the heroic bustle. Naturally I didn’t include among that symphony of sounds the screams of the hamstrung whores, carried kicking and yelling on board, tied like pigs to poles, as each ship received its quota – fucking equipment for use by English soldiers and sailors, and their needs at sea. Such sounds would have been out of tune and harsh. No, keep it clean, Will, hold hard to the poetic imperative.
Behold the threaden sails, borne with the invisible and creeping wind, draw the huge bottoms through the furrowed sea, breasting the lofty surge. O! do but think you stand upon the rivage and behold a city on the inconstant billows dancing – for so appears this fleet majestical!
This fleet majestical. Harfleur and Henry, Ireland and Essex. We put the play on in the summer, not long after Essex had left with the Irish expedition, and the audiences loved it. As they lapped up the glory of an illegal war Essex was about to show that in spite of his pride he was no Harry the Fifth, and that as the century had just a few short months left to run, so Essex himself was doomed to die at thirty-four, the same age as Henry. He copied him closer than he could have imagined, but never brought home the victory.
So Harry the Fifth was staged while Essex was still the fragile hero of the hour. I gave it to them all over again – the heroism, the patriotism, kingship, chivalry, the glory and cloudiness of war. I gave them aggression, expediency, betrayal, conscience, heavy care, the two faces of power and the loss of human life. That’s where I humanised young Harry, showing how the conflict between guilt and glory in his soul went well beyond the conflict between the English and the French. You knew full well that the historical Henry never felt a single twinge of guilt. Kings don’t think like that. They know that God is on their side and at Agincourt it was God for Harry, England and St George.
A play then for the ruling class – the band of noble brothers, the aristocratic élite. That’s why they loved it. But so did the groundlings. You’d learned, hadn’t you, Will? – to make drama a mirror in which each man saw what he always wants to see – a reflection of himself.
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And he saw it in a circle, he saw it in the round, in a magic looking glass into which the people stepped, coming to see and to be seen: a new theatre. Harry the Fifth was its first play, along with Caesar, and Harry the Eighth was its last. And between two Henries it lived out its brief glorious life, with a high tide at Southwark for its birth, quickening the playgoers as they came from north of the river, and Venus and Jupiter appearing after sunset like new worlds in the sky.
‘It was your world, my boy – it was your world, lad, wasn’t it?’
Ah Francis, awake again, are we? My world. God was a carpenter and made the world out of nothing, but we were men and needed materials.
‘They were there, Will, all the time, awaiting re-invention.’
Old materials, fresh ideas, new men for a new world. Old Burbage was dead, killed by worry. The lease on the Theatre had run out and the landlord was a grasping rat. He didn’t want another lease, he wanted the land back, and not only the land but the theatre that went with it. Crooked contracts were his speciality. Giles Alleyn, yes, the Burbage sons were left to contend with him and Richard said he’d like to ram a pound of ratsbane down his greedy gullet.
It didn’t come to that, though brother Cuthbert actually bought the ratsbane. They were Burbages and when their blood was up they didn’t fool around. Old man Burbage had even appeared to them on stage, they said – the angry ghost demanding revenge, and he didn’t have to come again to whet a blunted purpose, especially when Alleyn announced he was going to dismantle the Theatre and take its timbers for his own use.
We gathered in the Theatre for a council of war, and we looked at one another helplessly, a circle of fools on a dark and empty stage. There were plenty of words but no way forward. The ratsbane, it was decided, would improve the world by removing Alleyn from it but would not save our playhouse, and the Burbages would be done for murder.
‘That’s when you made history, lad, yes?’
Yes, by heaven, that’s when I made my mental leap, the one that changed the future – or so they liked to tell me afterwards.
‘Listen, friends.’
They were all ears.
‘There is one way to prevent this bastard tearing down our theatre and it’s the only way.’
A ring of eyes, staring at me intently.
‘And that is – to tear it down ourselves.’
They all looked at me as if I were mad.
‘And do what with it – light a bonfire?’
‘No – do exactly what the execrable Alleyn has been proposing to do, convert it to some better use.’
‘And what better use might that be, Will? Do tell us.’
‘Why, build another theatre, of course – but in a different place.’
‘What place, pray?’
The question had been put, but I noticed that all the eyes in the circle had widened – and brightened.
‘Well, there is a site available, I believe – across the river in St Saviour’s parish, not far from the Rose.’
They all stared at me. And then we all stared at each other. With a wild hope.
There was a plot of ground near Maid Lane. We moved fast, signed a lease – we, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men – which meant that we could move in on Christmas Day. It was a mere matter of money, and that was no matter at all. Half came from the Burbages and the other half was made up by Heminges, Phillips, Pope, and Kempe.
‘And you, Will.’
And me, Francis. Which meant that one tenth of the new theatre was mine, together with my share in the Company.
‘You were inspired, my boy.’
There is a tide in the affairs of men.
And that was how, on the night of 28th December 1598, a dubious demolition mob with their hats plucked about their ears and half their faces buried in their cloaks, assembled in Shoreditch armed not with swords and daggers but with saws and hammers and all the weapons of the carpenter’s trade.
O, conspiracy! Shamest thou to show thy dangerous brow by night? Not Erebus itself were dim enough to hide thee from prevention.
But there was one old ally that did conspire to screen us from discovery. The winter of ’98 had brought hard frosts, so savage that the Thames froze at London Bridge just before Christmas. It thawed the following day but on St John’s Day was again iced over lightly. The miracle happened on the 25th. Jack Frost returned in force and the river was almost frozen again by the afternoon. The frost was followed by a ferocious blizzard that cleared the city streets of people – except for that small army of actors, going to war.
&nb
sp; Darkness fell.
What a night, lad! What a night!’ Twas a rough night, but unforgettable. We had a new financial man with us, Will Smith, and a hired team of twelve workmen directed by master carpenter Peter Street. Heminges was there, and Phillips and Pope and myself and the rest of the Company. Kempe didn’t turn up. ‘Where’s Bully Bottom?’ somebody asked. But it didn’t matter. The Burbage boys strode like generals, leading from the front, and took us up Curtain Road in a darkness that was weirdly whitened by the swirling snow. The flakes were stinging our eyes and lodging in our beards like bees out of hell. The ripping wind went through our cloaks, making them shake like the shrouds on a ship. We stood for a few seconds looking at our old Theatre, the Burbage sons especially staring at what their father had put up twenty-two years ago. Now it was coming down. A solemn moment. Wordlessly we went inside.
‘Where are these lads? Where are these hearts?’
The shout came from the darkened stage. It made us all start violently. Had we been discovered? Had Alleyn sent the Watch? We clenched our hammers and axes.
‘I have had a dream! I have had a most rare vision!’
Yes, it was Kempe, waiting for us in the dark, having his last hour on stage, all to himself.
‘O sweet Bully Bottom!’ we all roared, picking up his cue. ‘O most courageous day! O most happy hour!’
Kempe bowed and spoke in a whisper, commanding silence.
‘I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was.’
‘Tell us about it later, you ass!’
‘Ass-hole, if you don’t mind – I will hear nothing spoken against asses.’
This was turning into a performance.
‘I will get Peter Street to write a ballad of this dream.’
But Peter Street was too busy for ballads that night. We took down our Theatre board by board, beam by beam, sweating and sliding in the snow, and under cover of darkness we carried it on carts down Curtain Road and Hog Lane and Bishopsgate, all the way down Gracious Street, past the Cross Keys and west of the bridge, to the Dowgate. Even in these fierce conditions we didn’t want to take the risk of trundling our timbers openly over the bridge.
We didn’t have to. It was the hour before dawn and the river was frozen solid.
‘The Lord hath tamed the water!’ yelled big Burbage, beating his boots on the thick ice and grinning delightedly, his breath clothing him like a fiery cloud. He stamped around like a child imitating a horse.
‘And we are delivered out of the hands of Pharaoh!’
As it happened Master Giles Pharaoh Alleyn was out of London during the operation. And when the old Egyptian returned to the city he would find himself gaping in disbelief at an empty site in Shoreditch, shat on by dogs and deserted by the rats. He had no contract and no theatre.
It had taken all night.
As the snow suddenly cleared and the skies began to lighten over Deptford somebody said, ‘We’ve just made it. Is that the dawn I see breaking over there?’
He was pointing at a pinkish patch downriver, streaking the grey skies of the third last day of the year.
‘No,’ Heminges said, ‘you’re mistaken, friend. Sunrise will be in that line there, closer to the Tower. Look how its stones are glinting already.’
‘It’s further downstream, I tell you, and yon grey lines that fret the clouds are messengers of day.’
‘Gentlemen!’
Pope stepped forward.
‘You shall confess that you are both deceived. Here, as I point my sword, the sun arises and the high east stands like the Capitol of Rome, directly here.’
He was pointing west, away from the light, at the huge pile of newly dismantled timbers. We all knew what he meant.
‘Let’s call it the Capitol, then,’ said Kempe.
‘Or the Dawn?’ suggested Phillips. ‘Or what about the Sun theatre?’
The Burbages looked at one another, then at me.
‘What do you think, Will?’
I thought for a minute as the sun came up and warmed our faces, a huge blood-red ball over the river.
‘Well, we’re making a new world for ourselves, aren’t we? A charmed circle? I’ll tell you what – let’s call it the Globe.’
‘Will – you have been touched by God!’
And we all drew our swords along with Pope and pointed them at the pile of timbers that were lit up by the morning sun.
‘The Globe!’
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Totus mundus agit histrionem – all the world’s a stage.
‘Jenkins would have lashed you, lad, for that Latin gloss.’
An apt and antique motto. And above the Latin tag on the signboard Hercules bore the globe on his shoulders. A Herculean labour – and it had sprung up like Adam’s habitat, a tabula rasa among the other worlds of London’s theatre-land.
‘You felt like God at the start of time?’
God took just under a week to make the world. Peter Street had said he’d rebuild ours in twenty-eight.
What a workman he was! Though the world had lain sick almost five thousand years, it was wonderfully altered. What a workman that could cast the globe of it into an entirely new mould! Peter Street had laid the stage so that it faced north, avoiding available daylight and allowing a little shade to help with the night scenes. You looked up at an upper stage that would be the walls of Harfleur, surrendering to Henry, but from which the owner of great Dunsinane, strongly fortified, would later look out undismayed on a moving wood and proclaim no surrender. I’ll fight till from my bones my flesh be hacked! Your eye was drawn to the curtained inner stage where lovers would play at chess, not love, being of the same sex, and where Desdemona would be strangled, Othello end it all, and such heavy sights screened off when the tragic loading of the bed became a thing that poisoned sight itself. But in dreadful vein you could litter the main stage with corpses sufficient to impress even the battle-hardened Fortinbras. O, proud death! What feast is toward in thine eternal cell, that thou so many princes at a shot so bloodily hast struck? Take up the bodies, then. Such a sight as this becomes the field, but here shows much amiss. Not that bodies were ever unwelcome on the London stages, whether they got up again, bowed to the crowd, and walked off with pig’s blood on their faces or spouted the real thing, sprinkling the heads of the Tyburn spectators.
Enter Hamlet, with a hell beneath and a heaven above, between which he would walk and meditate, in doubt about both, and unsure of action. The trapdoor on which he stood led to ghosts and graves, mysterious sounds, and was an image of the mighty world – London itself was a stage and you were all standing on a trap that might spring open any hour, any day, and catapult you to hell – the dungeon, the gallows, the block, the plague, the best known routes to oblivion. There goes Ophelia now, into that hole out of which Lazarus rose, but as for her, her death was doubtful.
With your feet placed here you looked up and saw the brave o’erhanging firmament, fretted with golden fire, and you informed an entranced audience of three thousand souls, packed into a wooden world of only a hundred feet across, that what you saw was nothing more than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. And breathing the same intimate air as you, they heard you murmur such a thought and heard you whisper suicide to a deaf grey sea of troubles. Groundlings in the yard, nobs in the boxes, they all heard you, as you stepped into this splendid world from the nutshell confines of a tiny tiring house, where you dressed for life’s short comedy or tragedy, depending on the bill, the afternoon, or on how you chose to see life.
Such was the continent of the world, to which a world of beauties and of brave spirits resorted half the year when the elements were kind. They came over the bridge, under the swaying heads, along the High Street, through the alleyways south of the cathedral and the Bishop of Winchester’s palace – and three hundred paces from the river they arrived at Maiden Lane, on the south side of which, west of Dead Man’s Place, there stood the great Globe itself, conveniently plotted in a world of bear
s, bulls, and brothels and surrounded by drinking dens.
The world was their oyster – and ours. Harry was now Caesar, and French blood turned to Roman. It was the summer solstice. There was a new moon that night, auspicious for the opening of a new play, and a new house too, barely baptized. And a high tide too that ensured easy travel for the nobs who didn’t fancy muddying their boots and staining their gowns simply to see an old Roman get it in the neck – as damnèd Casca, like a cur, struck Caesar from behind. An almost homely detail, like deafness and nightgowns and mislaid books, reminding you that terror is no dream – it strikes right to the heart of the real world. The one you live in.
Not everybody approved. Flanked by ditches and sewers and forced out of a stinking marsh – that was Ben’s response. He’d gone off in a thundercloud, back to the Admiral’s Men, objecting that we’d cut Every Man Out Of His Humour. It was much too long and should have gone to the barber’s with Ben’s beard, as I told him myself. Ben could take anything that came – except censure.
Nor did our rivals rejoice. Francis Langley, had built his Swan in the Paris Garden, but it was too far from the bridge and it was easier for swans to come to that theatre than people. We’d stuck close to the bridge in the parish of St Saviour’s, and the dying Swan watched us come, and hung her head. To the west of us the bear pit – starring Sackerson, George Stone and Harry Hunks – later known as the building of excellent Hope. That made me laugh as well as weep, for the slaughter that went on there, the more so as it was owned by Henslowe. Abandon all hope, all ye who enter here – that was our motto for the Hope. If you were a bear or a bull or a poor old ape, or if you were a down-and-out, or an out-and-out hack, or an actor out of work, then No-Hope Henslowe was your only man, Henslowe whose helpfulness had decreased and his ruthlessness grown as the years rolled on. His Rose was just a few hundred feet away, also built on marshy land and fast withering after its dozen years on that ground.
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