Mistress Shakespeare (26 page)

I wanted to say that he could do plenty, but it was a wonderful night—the last for years—as the four of us hurried away with our ladder, buoyed up by laughter and love.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

As far as I was concerned,
another cursed comet might as well have come slashing through the sky to signal dread and destruction. For one thing, poor Jennet miscarried yet another child, which made Kate all the more precious. The new decade of the 1590s, which should have showered Will and me with joy and bounty, brought nothing but ill fortune—except for the fact that Sir Francis Walsingham died that year. But just as Robert Cecil was taking over at court as the queen’s chief minister for his increasingly ill father, Lord Burghley, the young Cecil also took over Walsingham’s covert yet blatant watch on us all.

Will had described these days best in a play he was writing about a pair of passionate but star-crossed young lovers beset by feuding families.
Romeo and Juliet
was taken from earlier stories but was also based on our early days in Stratford, though Will had transplanted the play to the popular site of Italy. (All things Italian, including my dark looks, were in fashion these days, but more on that later.) Will’s line was “These violent delights have violent ends.” And so it seemed for us and all of London.

Will was working both as an actor and playwright with Lord Strange’s Men at the Curtain while the Lord Admiral’s Men played at the Theatre next door, but the Burbages oversaw both places and sometimes mingled casts. By then, Will’s plays were performed in those theatres, in Henslowe’s Rose, in the great carrier inns and, even, more than once at court—the latter a subject we avoided so we wouldn’t argue about the queen.

Our terrible times that year began with a bit of violence that was somehow both domestic and yet public too. One in which we were innocent bystanders and yet suffered for.

As Will and I were leaving the Curtain one chill November eve in 1590, we heard screeching. At first, I thought it was a wounded bear in a nearby cage, but we saw it was a woman with a small band of rough-looking men in a shouting match with Will’s friend and mentor, James Burbage. Burbage faced the small mob just outside the Curtain.

We finally made out something besides curses. “You been cheating me and mine, Burbage, pocketing gate receipts, now hain’t you? You still owe my husband more than a pittance.”

We went a bit closer. The brawny woman was shaking her fist in the silver-haired Burbage’s face.

“You must have mistaken me for the quick-fingered Philip Henslowe, Mistress Brayne,” Burbage shouted back, “so take your rabble and be off with you!”

Will told me over the noise, “That must be the actor John Brayne’s widow. At least Tom Kyd or Ben Jonson aren’t here to pitch into this fray. They’d love nothing more, and Jonson’s drinking and brawling will get him in real trouble some day.”

Will was right. Later, Jonson killed an actor named Gabriel Spencer in a duel in Shoreditch Fields. He was tried for it and narrowly escaped the hangman’s noose by being able to read the so-called neck verse in Latin, Psalm 51, admitting sin and begging for redemption. Still, he’d been branded with the Tyburn T on his thumb so that if he ever assaulted another person, he’d be hanged outright.

As for playwright Brayne and his vociferous widow, as with Marlowe or Jonson, this just went to show that many of the artists of the day—actors and playwrights alike—were not coddled, heads-in-the clouds persons but brazen brawlers. Even the Widow Brayne carried on that legacy, and I recalled how loudly Richard Tarlton’s widow had bellowed at his memorial service, interrupting the speakers. It made me grateful that Will spent his free time either writing or with me—usually both and the same. He had a reputation for diligence among his fellows, unlike those who loved to drink, brawl and whore.

Meanwhile, the Widow Brayne was not to be put off. She was obviously after funds she felt were owed Brayne or her, and was not a bit shy about publicly berating Burbage.

“My friends come here to see you pay up! Not quick-fingered, but sticky-fingered, that’s you and your ilk!” she screamed and launched into a string of oaths that would have made a sailor proud.

Suddenly, James’s son Richard, the great actor Will was hot to write for, appeared with a broom and began to swing it at Mistress Brayne’s men. His deep voice rang out over the crowd, “You’ll not gainsay my father! I’ll send you scum packing! Go bray, bray, bray your lies somewhere else, Widow Bra-bra-brayne, you bawdy, beslubbering, beef-witted harpy!”

Fists flew with insults and curses. I feared more than a broomstick would become a weapon and sensed Will was tempted to wade in with the Burbages. I tried to tug him away, but someone heaved a brick. It grazed Will’s temple, making a small stream of blood that I tried to staunch with my skirt.

“Hell’s gates,” he muttered as he sat against a building around the corner while I tended him, “I’m seeing shooting stars!”

That was the harbinger of our newest onslaught of tough times, for soon the battle was of another sort. Lord Strange’s Men had a falling out with the Lord Admiral’s Men and split into two groups. Will stayed with the Burbages at the Theatre, while the rest of Lord Strange’s company left with famed actor Edward Alleyn for the Rose across the river. That was pretty much the end of Lord Strange’s patronage of their company. Burbage’s actors later picked up the artistic benefactor William Herbert, the Earl of Pembroke, but for a while they were adrift, and Will was panicked to find a patron for his own plays and poetry.

Ironically, he wanted to ask someone I had met years before at the clown Tarlton’s memorial service, the handsome young Earl of Southampton. For one thing, it turned out the earl was distantly related to Will through the Ardens. He was still shy of twenty years now, but he adored poets and playwrights; it was all the rage for them to dedicate sugary sonnets to him. Will said the next time Henry Wriothesley, Lord Southampton, sat upon the stage to see a play all the better, he’d slip him a flattering poem and dare to introduce himself.

The only good thing to come of the rift between the actors was that, though Will had at first alienated Henslowe by not going to the Rose with the others, he was now the Burbages’ chief playwright. And it turned out that Henslowe still could not resist Will’s work—if there was to be a venue for such work at all.

For next in our onslaught of misfortune, a riot of apprentices erupted on Bankside, led by ruffians who spread the fray across the river. The queen’s Privy Council promptly closed all the playhouses for three months, forcing the players to take a tour of the countryside to stay solvent.

“I must tell you,” Will said as we walked back into the city from a rural tryst, a farewell for we knew not how long, “that our travels will include three nights in Stratford on the first three days of October.”

“Ah, so you’ll be home. You’ll see everyone.”

“I will be glad to see my children and my parents, make no mistake about that. As for the other . . .”

“The other Mistress Shakespeare.”

“It brings it all home again—you know what I mean,” he told me as he tightened his arm around my shoulders to grapple us closer as we walked reluctantly back toward the city. “How I long to make things right between us. To rewrite our history, so I don’t have a country wife and a—”

“A city wife.”

“Yes, well, there’s nothing good about the situation, except for the exquisite depths of anger and agony to which the situation has plunged me.”

“You mean it’s all fodder for the passions in your plays.”

“You realize how we almost finish each other’s thoughts?” he asked as the walls of the city came in view. “I pray that on the road without you, I shall be able to complete my long
Venus and Adonis
poem and have time for the plays too, though without my muse . . .”

“And her pen writing down the words that spill from you . . .”

“Anne,” he cried and turned me to him, “I shall miss you so. But we’ll be back in three months, opening again for London crowds, together forever, I pray.”

I bit my lip to keep from crying. Forever was such a very long time when one did not even have tomorrow.

We walked a bit apart as we entered the city. It was a good thing, for someone soon spotted Will and ran up to him, waving a piece of paper.

“A reprieve?” I heard him ask the man, someone I did not recognize. “Did the Council agree to hear our petition to reopen the theatres?”

I could not catch the man’s reply, but he shook his head as Will took the paper and bent over it. What? I wondered. Something about the queen? At least it did not look as if it could be a letter with dire news from home.

“Have the Burbages seen this?” Will asked the man. “No? Then best show it to them—no, let me keep this. There are many ways to stage a fight, and this reeks of a sneaky one.”

When the man left him, Will came to me at once. “I’ve been attacked and by my so-called fellows,” he said, thrusting the printed page at me. “Here!” he said, pointing, and his fine voice broke. A frown furrowed his brow; he looked as if he would cry. I tore my eyes away from his distress to read aloud:

 

“There is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that

with ‘his Tiger’s heart wrapped in a player’s hide,’”

 

“He’s quoted a line from your
Henry VI
,” I said, then went on:

 

“Who wrote this drivel?” I demanded. “And what, pray tell, is a ‘Johannes Factotum’?”

“Who wrote it? Playwright Robert Greene, the drunken lout. And the pompous Latin phrase means I am a jack-of-all-trades, a do-it-all—at least in my own eyes. More like a pompous jackass,” he muttered.

“You are talented in many ways, and Greene is jealous.”

“You said the same about Kit. I can understand competition, but must they roast me publicly on a barbed grill? Even Ben Jonson, a bricklayer by trade, no less, though he was educated at Westminster, has assailed my lack of education, telling people I have ‘Little Latin and less Greek.’ I’ll just show them with
Venus and Adonis
! It’s rife with classical characters and allusions.”

“Curse them all, you are not writing in Latin and Greek. You have a way with depicting real people who, like your audience, don’t speak to each other in Latin and Greek.”

“I pray you, don’t say the other writers are just jealous again.”

“All right then, they are bitter. You’ve proved that playwrights need not stick to their precious classical unities of time and place and can use all classes of people who try to solve their own problems without the silly pagan gods riding in on clouds with wheels to help them out! I don’t care what you say, they are jealous of your God-given talents!”

He almost smiled. “I detest jealousy. It’s a weakness and yet it shows a sort of perverted strength. It eats at me. I can’t help it, and I have no right, but I am ever jealous of others’ attentions to you. Yet you have every right to go off with someone else, since I can’t give you what you deserve.”

I stood amazed he had admitted such and apologized for it too. It continually angered me that, after all we’d been through, he thought I would betray him with another man—however much I had once wanted to do such,
anything
to get back at him for putting me on the rack of tormented love.

“Will, the others have you doubting yourself, so stop it. Just promise me on your days on the rural roads—and at home—that you won’t forget me.”

“Impossible! I will love you—I, Will, love you.”

Though he was still seething, we continued on our way, parting near St. Paul’s with forlorn, mutual waves. Before turning my face toward home, I watched the milling crowds swallow him up. Despite our looming separation, I hoped for better times soon.

But a few days after he’d left town, more than the theatres closed from a cause worse than rioters or slurs. Like a monstrous demon, ravenous for human lives, the Black Death came to devour us.

 

 

 

People who had
the means to do so left London like rats off a sinking ship. In his dray that usually brought wine bottles from the wharf, John and Jennet took little Kate and went to Oxford to stay in the inn they were considering buying. Before they fled, John buried some of his bottles of choicest wine in their tiny herb garden and took others, swathed in sheets, with them.

They offered to take me too, but I said I’d leave with my carriers who were due in two days. Where I’d stay at home, I wasn’t sure, for my little cottage was still leased to others, but I could rent a room from someone in Temple Grafton. If it were not for the Shakespeares right down Henley Street, I would ask my Whateley kin to take me in again and pay them this time too.

Both Davenant housemaids and John’s shop man had not come in, but I was grateful for that and even more relieved that the actors were already out of town, so I knew Will was safe from the plague. Rationing my food and drinking only wine, I’d not gone out for two days and kept the house quite closed. With an onion stuffed with figs, rue and treacle about my neck to ward off deadly air, I dared to venture outside. Maud had brought me this smelly protection; she was making a lot of coin selling such. Though it was a nice enough day, I was careful not to take deep breaths.

As I walked toward the Maiden Head Inn to meet my carriers and tell them we must turn about and head home at once, I was surprised to see how deserted the streets were. I stopped to read the
Bill of the Dead
posted on the apothecary shop, though I stood a ways back from it and squinted to make out the words. I couldn’t read the names from here, but I could make out the numbers. Five hundred and seven Londoners dead already—forty-nine in this ward, but nearly two hundred up in Shoreditch! Damnation, but the theatres there would be blamed again.