King of Shadows

by Susan Cooper

  Around noon, Richard Burbage had me pull off my shirt, and stood me in front of him in the corner of the tiring-house where he kept his paints. Then he began putting on my body makeup for Puck. Although he was an actor—which was no surprise, since his father had been England’s first real theater manager—he was also a really good painter, and whenever one of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men needed a special makeup, he would beg Burbage to do it. I didn’t have to beg; he was determined to turn me into an unearthly, magical, and faintly scary spirit. After about fifteen minutes my face, neck, arms, and upper body were all a spooky green, and he was about to start on the elaborate details.

  “Stand still, boy!” He was starting a long straight line from neck to wrist, all the way down my arm. It was the stem from which many intertwining leaves would grow and curl.

  “I’m sorry. It tickles.”

  “I’ll tickle thee with my boot if tha moves again. Joseph, where are his hose?”

  “Safe and out of harm’s way until th’art done,” said the tireman cautiously. He was always very nervous of Master Burbage’s wet paint when valuable costumes were nearby.

  “Well, fetch them out, fool! I have to match the color. Nobody will mar them—thou may’st hold them in thy hand all the while.” Burbage paused, and gave the tireman the eye-crinkling smile that always made people forgive him for yelling at them. It reminded me of Arby. “And th’art a good fellow for guarding company property so well.”

  The tireman snorted, but mildly, and went to get my tights. Will Shakespeare came from behind me, pulled up a stool and sat down to watch Burbage paint. Gladness at seeing him sent a sudden warmth into my throat and my chest; a wonderful feeling, but oddly like pain.

  The brush flickered, and leaves sprouted swiftly around my wrist, and up my forearm. “Thy turn next, Will,” Burbage said. “How does our house?”

  “There is a line down the street fifty yards long.”

  “Even without them knowing. It is a good draw, thy Dream.”

  “And will be very beautiful, this time,” Shakespeare said.

  Burbage looked pleased, and drew a tendril around my right ear, with his tongue curled carefully over his upper lip. I knew he had taken great care with new designs for this production, and spent lavishly on some new costumes, which most of us had not yet seen.

  From outside, the noise of the crowd began to drift in: muffled shouts and laughter, as tumblers, jugglers and fire-eaters struggled for the attention of the waiting audience in the street. You couldn’t buy tickets in advance at theaters then; you had to wait in line, pay your penny admission at the door to the “gatherer,” and run to get a good place in the yard. Or, alternatively, you went to the staircase, paid another penny to another gatherer, and scurried up narrow stairs and along rows of narrow benches to get a good place in one of the galleries. There you would have a good view of the play from a hard wooden bench, which would be made slightly more comfortable by a pillow if you’d brought one with you, or paid yet another penny to rent one.

  It all sounds cheap, I guess, a penny here, a penny there, but it wasn’t cheap then—I’d listened to Mistress Fawcett complaining about prices and wages. For a penny you could buy a pound of cheese, or half a pound of butter; six pints of beer, or a big two-pound loaf of bread. But a workman like a carpenter or a mason only earned about thirty pence a week—so I guess groundlings didn’t go to the theater too often. Mind you, that didn’t stop them from buying munchies from the sellers who wandered about the theater with baskets and trays. Just the way you might buy popcorn or soda at the movies, they’d buy apples, or bags of nuts, bottles of beer or ginger ale. Master Shakespeare once said that he knew he’d written a really good scene if it caught the groundlings’ attention long enough to stop them cracking nuts.

  “Turn round, Nat,” said Master Burbage, and he started painting long strands of flowering vines across my back. At least, that’s what they told me later; all I could feel was the small traveling chill of the brush and the wet paint.

  “Much more of this, and the boy’s fingertips will burst into bloom,” Will Shakespeare said.

  “That is my aim,” said Burbage. “I plan for clusters of dog rose. Go away for ten minutes, Will, go study thy lines. Write the stage-keepers some birdsong.”

  Shakespeare laughed, but he did cast an anxious eye about for the stage-keepers. These were the extra men, the dailies, like the two I’d seen carrying canvas; whenever there were no actors to spare, they had to move props, carry furniture, help to create special effects. They would be busy backstage making the forest magical in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: blowing a little pipe into a bowl of water to make the sounds of birdsong; burning rope in a metal pot, to make smoke that could be puffed with a bellows across the stage, for romantic mist or bewildering fog. The groundlings were very fond of special effects. They particularly liked disasters, and explosions. They’d have loved video games.

  The tiring-house was getting more crowded now, as the day wore on toward afternoon. All the boys but me were playing women in this play, and extra tiremen were on duty, carrying in the long elaborate dresses from back rooms, painting faces with the white cheeks and black-rimmed eyes that were standard for a stage female. The few doors and windows stood wide open, to let in air; it was a warm day, and the enclosed space was growing hot and stuffy. Flies buzzed everywhere, slow and sleepy.

  Out in the theater it was hot too; the sun stood high in the sky, beating down through the open center of the roof. For a while it would blaze into the faces of half the audience, and the ladies who had brought fans would have to choose whether to fan themselves, or to hold up the fan as an eyeshade against the bright light. The drink sellers would do a roaring trade.

  Richard Burbage finished his painting and handed me into the care of the tireman, Joseph, to keep me from smudging his beautiful paint before it dried. Then it was Will Shakespeare’s turn to pull off his shirt and stand still to be made magical.

  Joseph, a small brown man with a completely bald head, drew me into a corner free of traffic and poured me into my snakey green tights. He showed me myself in a rather dim, distorted mirror, and even that blurry reflection was phenomenal: I saw a glimmering green woodland sprite, the perfect image for the lines I would speak. The ears were pointed, the eyebrows slanted up, the eyes were big and dark like the eyes of a fawn. I wasn’t me anymore, nor even Nathan Field. I was Puck. Shakespeare’s Puck.

  “Now up aloft with thee, out of the way, until we begin,” Joseph said. He pushed me toward the ladder that led to the “heavens,” the room behind the stage gallery where the musicians would sit, and I climbed up.

  Out in the theater the noise level began to rise, as the audience came in. Peeking through the door that led to the gallery, I could see the benches and yard filling with sturdy shopkeepers and craftsmen and their smiling beribboned wives, apprentices, students and even a few children. The spaces filled up, all three thousand of them, so far as I could tell, and the noise of all their different voices grew and grew.

  I stood gazing, with the noise thrumming through my head, and didn’t hear Will Shakespeare come up the stairs behind me.

  “Listen to it,” he said in my ear, his hands resting lightly on my painted shoulders. “All those voices which become one—the voice of that single great animal, the audience. The Leviathan. A very large and frightening animal—which we shall tame.”

  I glanced up over my shoulder at his face. His eyes were gleaming, out of the dark makeup that was just as fantastic and unearthly as my own, and he was smiling. This was his world, this was what he did and who he was, and I knew exactly how he was feeling, because the same was true for me. I knew too that I didn’t need to say so. I smiled back at him.

  Suddenly there was a sharper eruption of noise, out in the audience, and I peeked through the part-open door again. I saw a flurry of movement down in the yard, and heard voices raised: “Thief! Stop, thief!” A man was diving through the crowd, weaving, dodging,
but too many hands reached out for him, and soon he was struggling in the arms of two particularly large groundlings. I saw one of them wrench a leather purse away from him. He was a small, thin man, not much more than a boy.

  “Cutpurse,” said Shakespeare. He sighed, and turned away.

  People who worked hard for their pence had no sympathy for cutpurses, the Elizabethan equivalent of pickpockets, who carried a sharp little knife to cut through the leather thong that attached a money pouch to a belt. A quick jostle in the crowd, and a purse was gone, and with it half a week’s earnings, or more.

  The cutpurse was being hustled, kicking and wriggling, toward the stage. One of his captors had gotten some rope from somewhere, perhaps from one of the gatherers who were used to this kind of thing, and he and some others hauled the boy up onto the stage and tied him to one of the big front stage pillars. There he stood, wretched and exposed, and people in the audience threw apple cores and nutshells at him. The good shots hit him in the face. They were big on popular justice, in this century. I’d found out that some crimes were punished by putting people to sit or stand all day in the stocks, with legs or head and hands fastened into a wooden frame, so that anyone who chose could pelt them with rotten vegetables, or dirt, or stones. At the worst, the stones could kill them. I was glad there were no stones handy in the Globe Theatre.

  But the boy was in danger all the same. The groundlings at the theater could be a rough lot; they were, after all, the same men and women who loved to watch bulls and bears chained to a pole and attacked by dogs. (And public hangings and beheadings too; Roper was itching to get me to one of those.) By two in the afternoon, the time of the plays, there were always some of them who were drunk. One of these scrambled up onto the stage now: a chunky, short-haired man with a beer belly, and a shirt open halfway down his hairy chest. You could tell he wasn’t sober straightaway; he got one leg over the edge of the stage and then fell off, so that the crowd shouted with mocking laughter. But he tried again, and made it; and then he pulled out a dagger and staggered over to the pillar, and the captive boy.

  I looked around hastily for Will Shakespeare, but he was gone.

  “A pox on all cutpurshes!” shouted the drunk, waving the dagger. Some of the crowd cheered, but others yelled at him to get down. The boy stared at him, terrified, whimpering, straining against the ropes.

  The drunk stood in front of him, grinning. He slapped one hand against the pillar above the boy’s head, to steady himself, and with the other he put the tip of his dagger against his neck. The boy let out a high gasp of fear. A tiny trickle of blood ran down from the sharp point.

  “Wha’ shall we do wi’ him?” bellowed the drunk to the crowd. They shouted back at him, but in the confusion you couldn’t make out any one shout from another. The boy was cringing back against the pillar, wide-eyed, and I suddenly noticed a puddle of water around his shoes; out of sheer stark terror, he had wet himself.

  I wouldn’t like to guess whether or not the drunk would have pushed his dagger in; I thought he might, and my heart was hammering out of fear for the boy. But at the last minute one of the stage entry doors swung open and out ran two brawny stage-keepers, with Richard Burbage striding behind them in an awesome scarlet cloak. The crowd cheered, in surprise and delight; Burbage was one of their favorites. (The cloak was a cardinal’s robe that he had grabbed from a costume rack moments before, I found out later; he wanted to cover his costume as Bottom, which was far from dignified.)

  The stage-keepers grabbed the startled drunk, and Burbage snatched his dagger from him. With one great flourishing sweep, he cut the boy’s ropes.

  “Gentles!” he boomed out. “Pray you, be merciful-this stinking little villain has had his punishment!” He pushed the boy off the stage with his foot, and the groundlings let him scuttle out of the yard, though not without the occasional kick on the way. Master Burbage was still booming, holding their attention. “In one moment only,” he cried, “this little drama shall be eclipsed by one far greater—good people, we bring you our play!”

  He swept them an elaborate bow, and they roared their affectionate approval. With great dignity Burbage strode off, swinging his red cloak around him, and stage-keepers ran on with mops and brooms to clean the stage, and sweep up the nutshells and apple cores.

  As I turned to hurry down to the stage, past the trumpeter who was approaching the gallery to play his opening fanfare, I saw a twitch of curtains in the Gentlemen’s Room that overlooked the right-hand side of the stage, and two or three masked faces in the shadows. Unnoticed, with no fuss or danger, under cover of the little drama of the cutpurse, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth I had arrived to watch our play.

  FOURTEEN

  I shall never have a day like that again. After the trumpeter’s fanfare, sounding out from the top gallery and sending the doves whirling off the roof, I remember very little until my first entrance. I was so nervous, hopping from foot to foot at the back of the tiring-house, that I heard scarcely a word of the first long scene between Duke Theseus and Hippolyta, old man Egeus and the four lovers. I came to my senses only when Master Burbage, as Bottom the Weaver, went bounding onstage with his five fellow mechanicals—and Roper, all white face and red lips as Hermia, came scooting off, holding up his skirts, skidding to a halt at the tiremen’s table.

  There was a muffled roar from the theater as the audience greeted Burbage again, and Joseph the tireman grabbed Roper and began unbuttoning his dress. Underneath, he wore the floating, gauzy costume of the Fairy: not the kind of pretty-pretty stuff you might expect, but a bizarre, sexless garment that made him an odd little creature—as odd as my Puck. I hoped he knew his words. He and I had to play my first scene together, and because he had been needed for the lovers’ rehearsals, we had only gone through it once.

  Joseph turned Roper around and attached a pair of starched gauze wings to his shoulder blades. Roper had complained about these when the costumes were tried on; they would get in the way of his tumbling, he said. But Master Burbage had refused to listen to him.

  “Th’art playing a fairy, boy, not a tumbler,” he said. “Fairies have wings.”

  I was hopping from foot to foot still; I didn’t know I was doing it. A pair of strong hands took me by the shoulders and pressed down, so that I stopped; then they propelled me across the dim-lit room to the entrance stage right.

  It was Will Shakespeare, wonderfully demonic in his makeup as Oberon. He said, whispering, “Wait till they come off, then run on. And speak loud.”

  I stared up at him, frozen, as Burbage and the rest came galumphing past us, while the audience laughed and clapped. He grinned at me, and suddenly everything was all right, and I ran onstage into that marvelous terrifying bright space ringed by faces. I somersaulted toward Roper, running from the other side to meet me.

  “How now, spirit! Whither wander you?”

  “Over hill, over dale

  Thorough hush, thorough briar. . . .”

  I hoped Will Shakespeare wouldn’t think I was overdoing the somersaults, but the audience liked them, and Roper and I bounced through our scene, both of us ferociously projecting, until Oberon and Titania stalked on, mad at each other about who should own the servant boy. Shakespeare looked magnificent and somehow taller in his exotic pants and cloak, and as Titania, Thomas was magical, unrecognizable. Master Burbage had given him an amazing multicolored costume that shimmered like a waterfall, quite disguising his pudginess, and his high strong voice rang out like a clarinet.

  I don’t think they had clarinets, then. Well, Thomas’s voice got there first. When that voice broke he would obviously be a clown, because he had that natural comic talent—like the company’s new actor Robert Armin, who was playing Flute the Bellows-mender. But today, still a boy, Thomas was beautiful and oddly chilling as the fairy queen. I told him so afterward, and he crowed like a cock and punched me in the stomach.

  As for Will Shakespeare, he was King of Fairyland and of the whole world, as far as I was
concerned. He wasn’t a great actor; he didn’t have that indescribable special gift that Richard Burbage had, that could in an instant fill a theater with roars of laughter, or with prickling cold silence. But as Oberon he had an eerie authority that made me, as Puck, totally his devoted servant. When he sent me offstage to look for the magic herb that he would squeeze on Titania’s eyes, it was my own delight—me, Nat Field—that put spring into my cartwheeling exit.

  “I’ll put a girdle round about the earth

  In forty minutes—”

  And I’d arranged to have the door held open for my hurtling arms and legs, not by Roper, in spite of his repentance, but by Joseph the tireman, who was totally reliable because of his concern for my spectacular green tights.

  On we went, through Shakespeare’s cheerful chain of misunderstanding and accident, to the scene in which Lysander and Hermia, on their happy way to elope together, lie down to sleep in the wood outside Athens. But it’s the same wood in which Puck, sent by Oberon, is hunting for Hermia’s admirer Demetrius and his scorned girlfriend Helena.

  Instructed by Oberon to make Demetrius fall in love with Helena, I came prowling across the front of the stage, carrying the magic flower.

  “Through the forest have I gone

  But Athenians found I none

  On whose eye I might approve

  This flown force in stirring love.”

  Then I spotted Lysander.

  “Night and silence—who is here?

  Weeds of Athens he doth wear;

  This is he, my master said,

  Despised the Athenian maid—”

  And I was tiptoeing toward Lysander, flower in hand, when suddenly a piercing voice rang out from the groundlings’ yard below me, a girl’s voice, full of concern.

  “No, no, that’s not he—that be the wrong one!”