by Susan Cooper
I wished I could ask him who Richard Mulcaster was. “I know the lines,” I said.
“Ah. He says thou hast the memory of a homing pigeon. Who knows, I may keep thee.” He smiled his quick smile, to show he was joking. “We had no love for the Paul’s Boys when we were playing on your side of the river, but Dick is a friend of mine from long ago. A wise, gentle man. And a gentleman too.”
“Yes,” I said. Down in the pit, the two men had finished their raking and were starting to untie and scatter new bundles—of what I now saw was not grass but a thicker green stem. Reeds, I guess. They gave off the odd smell that I’d noticed all through the theater; they made a kind of disposable carpet.
“’Ware heads, below,” said Master Burbage from above, and he swung himself over the edge of the gallery and shinnied down the climbing rope fast and expertly, with his blue cloak billowing out behind him.
Shakespeare shook his head. “The man is all actor,” he said.
“And a good thing for you,” said Burbage, “considering he plays four parts this week, all large.” He looked down at me, suddenly serious, and glanced out at the reed scatterers, as if to make sure they couldn’t hear him. He said quietly, almost in a whisper, “Nat Field—one thing I will tell thee that Master Shakespeare has not, since th’art living in my house and will hear more than tha should. Our Dream is revived so suddenly not by choice, but by command. The Queen wishes it. She has a fancy to see our sweet new theater, but will have us play nothing in it for her but that.”
“But this must not be breathed to a soul,” Shakespeare said. “She will come in secret. Bankside is not Blackfriars, and these are dangerous times.”
Burbage took hold of one of my ears, not gently. “Mention it to anyone and I will cut off thine ear,” he said. “Very slowly, inch by inch.”
I thought of the heads stuck on poles, and decided he might mean it. “I promise,” I said.
Will Shakespeare moved back to the stool and picked up his book. It was not a printed book, I saw, but a bound manuscript. He glanced up at the sky over the pit; sunshine was starting to slant down over the edge of the hollow roof. “Time passes,” he said. “This wooden O of ours is a sundial. Classes, Richard.”
I looked at the lines on his face, and at his ordinary brown doublet and hose, and I thought: Don’t go, please don’t go. It wasn’t because he was William Shakespeare. I just knew that I liked being with him, more than with anyone I knew.
He moved away, then looked back at me. “We shall rehearse together soon, Puck,” he said. “I am to play thine Oberon.”
More than anything from that first day, I remember the noise. You’d think that we have more noise today in the everyday world, what with traffic and airplanes and so many different kinds of machines that didn’t exist then, not to mention radio and TV and cassette players. But the London of that time was full of church clocks striking the quarter-hours, and church bells ringing for services; of watchmen ringing handbells in the street and shouting out the time, and town criers calling out the news. Everyone who sold anything shouted out his or her wares. People have always been noisy, I guess, in towns at any rate. At the Globe Theatre, nobody ever seemed to speak softly if he could shout.
“Nathan Field! Where’s Nathan Field!”
It was a very large voice from a very small man; small but fat, dressed all in light grey. He looked like a button mushroom, and he was marching onto the stage from the tiring-house, the dressing space behind it, with a group of five boys straggling behind him. One of them was Harry.
“Here he is,” said Master Burbage. “And the space is thine for half an hour, Henry—no more.” He clapped the mushroom on the back and headed for one of the upstage exits. Over his shoulder he said, “Master Condell is here to tie thee in knots, Nat.”
One or two of the boys sniggered. Master Burbage disappeared through the door. Small stout Henry Condell looked me over critically. “Well, Nathan Field,” he said, “we shall see what a Paul’s Boy has to offer us. This precious half hour is tumbling practice. I will not turn thee into a show. Just try to follow what the others do.”
“If you can,” said one of the boys cockily. He was about my age but smaller; dark haired, very wiry and agile looking. I guessed he was probably the star gymnast. Henry Condell glanced at him with something close to dislike.
“Go first then, Roper,” he said. “Somersaults.”
Roper did a quick sequence of somersaults across the stage, light as a feather. The others followed him, one by one; two of them, Nick and Alex, were quite good, Harry was so-so; the last, a chubby, fair-haired boy called Thomas, was a real klutz. He rolled sideways out of his second somersault, and giggled. Master Condell sighed.
“Follow, Nathan,” he said.
Head over heels over head over heels I went across the stage, faster than Roper, ending with a jump. I was better than any of them; but then, somersaults are easy.
The boys watched me in silence, warily.
“Cartwheels,” said Master Condell.
One by one we cartwheeled back toward him; Harry turned two, the others three, Roper and I four. Thomas tried to turn one cartwheel and ended in a hopeless heap. This bothered him not at all, and the others seemed to take it for granted, but Roper snorted in disdain. He opened his mouth to say something, caught Master Condell’s eye, and shut it again.
“Walk on your hands,” said Henry Condell.
Roper and I made it across the stage; Nick and Alex fell down halfway. Thomas couldn’t get up onto his hands at all.
“Forgive me, Master Condell,” he said cheerfully. “If I practice for a year, I shall still have no balance.”
“You never practice at all,” Roper said.
“Each man has his own talents,” Henry Condell said mildly. “Now—I want to see the display you have each devised for me in these last three days. I expect to be gratified, surprised, and dazzled. Or at the least, pleased.”
Thomas said, “May I be first?”
Master Condell blinked. “You surprise me already. Very well—let us give Thomas the stage.”
He hopped over the edge into the groundlings’ yard, with startling agility for someone so round, and we followed him. Thomas stood up on the stage looking pudgy and lumpish, and very woeful. For the next few minutes the sad expression on his face never changed, but he went through a mimed routine that was so funny it had every one of us, even Roper, helpless with laughter. He was playing himself, the hopelessly incompetent gymnast; he went through a huge effort to complete each movement, failing more and more disastrously each time. His longing to succeed was so achingly apparent, and his failure so ludicrous, that it broke your heart while you laughed and laughed. He was a natural clown, of a kind I’ve never seen before or since, and he was brilliant.
Henry Condell said, wiping his eyes, “Thomas, I thank thee. Thine apprenticeship will never be damaged by thy tumbling.”
That was the start of my gradually realizing that each of the boy actors in the company called the Lord Chamberlain’s Men was an apprentice, learning his craft. Unlike the boys who were being trained in schools—the real Nathan Field, for instance—they were out in the real world very young, learning to act by doing it. The adult actors were their teachers, and each boy was apprenticed to a particular one of the adults. Harry was Master Burbage’s apprentice, which was why he was living in the Burbage house.
Thomas ducked his head mournfully to Master Condell, still with his sad clown’s expression, then caught my eye and flashed me a quick grin.
Each of the boys in turn got up on the stage after that and went through his own little tumbling routine: a mixture of required movements and personal tricks put together to be as showy as possible. If they’d had parallel bars or a vaulting horse, it would have been like watching mini-versions of Olympic routines. They were all pretty good, even Harry, who seemed to have fairly inflexible joints, but Roper was by far the best. He turned cartwheels and back flips and leapt about the stag
e as if he were made of rubber, and ended with a double flip that brought out a gruff “Bravo!” from Henry Condell.
Roper jumped lightly down from the stage and landed at my side. I said impulsively, “That was great!”
He looked at me with a twisted little smile that had no pleasure in it, just malice. Nobody had ever taught this boy how to like other people. “Now do better, Paul’s Boy,” he said nastily, and he sat down cross-legged on the ground.
What he didn’t know was that I could in fact do better. I’d been good at gymnastics ever since I was very young; the phys ed teacher at my little grade school in Greenville had been a passionate gymnast and tai chi expert, and I’d been his prótegé, even after I’d gone on to junior high. We’d worked out a real show-off routine that had been the high point of my audition in front of Arby, when I was trying out for the Company of Boys. Four hundred years from now.
Henry Condell shook his head, frowning. “This is not a contest,” he said. “Nathan has not worked on a display.”
“But there’s something I can do,” I said. “May I?”
Roper laughed.
Master Condell’s eyes flickered from one to the other of us. He didn’t really like this situation; he was a kind man. “Very well,” he said.
So I got up on the stage, ungracefully, and I took a deep breath and I did my routine. It started with a double flip from standing, and it went on through some really phenomenal stuff, some of it made out of tai chi movements, to end with a triple back flip that I only just managed, because of having been sick. I wobbled a bit but I landed standing, hearing them gasp, and there was a tiny silence and then all the boys clapped. So did Master Condell.
But not Roper. He just sat there.
Henry Condell said to me, “Who taught thee?”
I searched for a name Will Shakespeare had used. “Master Mulcaster,” I said.
Condell’s eyebrows went up, and he looked at me with extreme skepticism. I looked back innocently, and he frowned uncertainly, and shook his head. “Richard Mulcaster’s tastes must have changed since last I had words with him,” he said.
I suddenly remembered the other name. “And Will Kempe,” I said.
Condell’s face cleared, and he laughed. “I had forgot thy connection,” he said. “Angry Will, who has stalked out, I hear, leaving me to find the money to buy his share in the company. Thy cousin, was he?”
“Will Kempe was Nat’s mother’s cousin,” Harry said importantly. I had found him suddenly at my side after I did my show-off turn, though he hadn’t paid me too much attention before that.
I said, “I have not seen him often this past year.” That was certainly true.
“He taught thee well,” Condell said. He was looking at me thoughtfully; I hoped he wasn’t going to ask about the tai chi.
Inside the back of the theater, someone was ringing a handbell. Roper scrambled to his feet. “Our time is over, Master Condell.” For our different reasons, he and I were both glad of the interruption.
The boy actors often had classes in the morning, I discovered—taught by whichever member of the company was free and willing. After the tumbling class, Master Burbage came back and gave us a lesson in what the others seemed to call declamation, though I’d have described it just as verse speaking. Everyone had a prepared speech that they got up and delivered from the stage. Burbage went up to the very top gallery of the audience, and bellowed down criticisms from there. The worst crime was to be inaudible, though it seemed to me that most of the boys were trying too hard to be heard, and overacting horribly as a result. Master Burbage seemed to think so too. “Not so much!” he would yell down at them. “Not so much!”
I didn’t recognize most of the speeches they did. They were pretty ranty and ravy, and I don’t think any of them was from Shakespeare. When it was my turn, I wanted to do the “To be or not to be” soliloquy from Hamlet, which I’d learned for my audition for Arby, but it occurred to me just in time that I didn’t know whether Shakespeare had written Hamlet yet, in 1599.
I didn’t want to do a speech of Puck’s in case they thought that was the only thing in the world I knew by heart, so I did Oberon’s speech, when he’s telling Puck what they’re going to do with the juice of the magic flower that makes people fall in love with whatever they see. It starts:
“I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows. . . .”
I was so nervous that I did all the things Arby hates: I went much too fast, and I sounded like a real southern boy from the Carolinas, not at all like an Englishman. While I was rattling along I saw a movement up in the gallery, as someone joined Master Burbage; I couldn’t see who it was and I didn’t care. I was just relieved when I got to the end of the speech without forgetting the words. But when I’d finished, a voice came soft but clear from up there, echoing through the theater, and it wasn’t Richard Burbage.
“Well done.”
It was Will Shakespeare.
He didn’t stay. He went away again almost at once, and before long it was another class, given this time by a quiet, serious man called John Heminges. Fencing, he taught us. That is to say, he divided us into pairs and he watched us fight. We wore masks for protection, thank goodness, and we used rapiers, longer and heavier than any I’d ever seen, with a kind of button on the tip to keep you from hurting or being hurt.
I fought Harry first. It was kind of a joke, because I’ve done hardly any fencing; I just know the basic moves. And this kind of fencing was different; you didn’t parry a sword thrust, you jumped out of its way, or ducked, or knocked it aside with your left hand, on which you wore a very heavy leather glove. Harry realized how little I knew as soon as we started, and was very patient; he never pushed me, but if we’d been fighting for real, I’d have been dead in the first half-minute.
Then we changed partners and I got Roper.
He was as good at fencing as he was at gymnastics, and twice as aggressive. He wasn’t about to be patient with my clumsiness; he was going to make me look as bad as he possibly could, to get his own back. He yelled in triumph every time his rapier touched me, which was every few seconds, and he chased me all the way around the stage, stabbing and lunging as I backed helplessly off.
“Let be, Roper!” Master Heminges called at last. “This is the Paul’s Boy, is it not? He has not thy training.”
“No—nor any skill neither,” Roper said nastily. And his rapier came full at my throat, and would have hurt, button or no button, if John Heminges had not grabbed his sword arm with a large strong hand and twisted it roughly.
Roper yelped with pain and his rapier clattered to the floor, and I knew I had a real enemy now.
SEVEN
By the time fencing class ended, my stomach was growling loudly to tell me that it was lunchtime, though I didn’t ask about that—which was just as well since I guess the word lunch. wasn’t used much in the sixteenth century. They ate midday dinner, anywhere between 10 A.M. and 2 P.M., and it was the main meal of the day. For us this time it was a kind of picnic, to be eaten fast before starting work at the theater. The plays were put on at 2 P.M. every afternoon, close to the times they would be done four hundred years hence in the theater designed to be a copy of this one, and if you weren’t acting, you’d be working backstage.
Mr. Heminges gave a few pennies to a bigger boy who’d just joined us, Sam Gilbourne, who was the senior apprentice, and he herded us outside and bought street food from a girl with a tray around her neck. It smelled wonderful. We each got a kind of turnover, a big pocket of tough pastry with meat and potatoes inside, and a wooden mug of ale from another street seller, a one-legged man with a barrel on a cart. Sam had six mugs with him in a bag; they were pretty clunky, and smelled of stale beer, but I was thirsty enough not to care. If you didn’t bring your own mug, you had to drink right there leather thong to the handle of the ale seller’s cart.
The noise outdoors was stupendous, even an hour before
the play was due to begin. The air was filled with voices shouting and calling, the rumble of wheels, the whinnying of horses, and over it all the shrill cries of the hawkers selling food and drink. The streets around the theater were crammed with people, and here and there tumblers and musicians working their hearts out for an odd coin. It was more like a fairground than a city street.
We ate our pies, as Sam called them, perched on a fence over the river, watching long low boats called wherries unloading passengers at a jetty near the theater. Two or four brawny men rowed each boat, with long heavy wooden oars. Bigger boats, with sails, tacked up and down the river; it was much busier than in my day, and much more open, because there were hardly any bridges. London Bridge was the only one in sight.
Sam was a friendly, almost fatherly boy. You could tell from the huskiness of his voice and his gangly arms and legs that he was going to be too old to play women’s parts pretty soon. But he was to play one this afternoon, in a play called The Devil’s Revenge, in which his character had her throat cut halfway through.
“Pig’s blood,” he said cheerfully, chewing a piece of gristly meat. “To be squeezed from a bladder in my sleeve. And a beating if even a spot of it lands on my skirt.”
Roper snorted. “And show me a real throat-cutting where the blood does not splash everywhere like a broken waterpipe.”
“No matter,” said Sam peaceably. “The groundlings are happy so long as they see it gush. Come, we must go back.” He tossed his piece of gristle into the air, and three screaming seagulls made a dive for it. And I ran back to the theater, trying to keep up with the group, wondering uneasily where and how Roper had seen a man’s—or a woman’s—throat cut.
The Devil’s Revenge was full of blood and murders, and a spectacular swordfight, and from behind the stage you could hear the groundlings who stood in the yard yelling with delight. It made great use of a trapdoor in the center of the stage, through which the Devil carried people off to Hell, and I was given the job of helping chubby Thomas open and shut the trap, down in the dark space under the stage. Roper was our signalman, standing a few yards off in a place where he could peer through a gap at what was happening onstage. He would make a chopping motion with his hand when it was time for us to knock aside the heavy wooden latch that kept the trapdoor closed.