Mistress Shakespeare (32 page)

“I didn’t know you were collaborating,” I said. He’d stayed away from me more lately, lest something happen to him and I be pulled in. “And Lord Strange has not forgiven you for staying with the Burbages and going to other patrons, so I think it’s bad news that he’s kin to Tilney. Tell me everything.”

We sat on the bed again, holding hands. “The play written with others is
Sir Thomas More,
a historical, of course, set in the days of the queen’s father’s reign. It was barely finished but someone must have leaked it to Tilney. He insists several scenes showing how our forefathers had riots over foreigners be cut. The play disapproves of riots, but Tilney told us to rewrite or else. It’s crazy—unconscionable! I even wrote a plea within it to the audience: ‘Imagine that you see the wretched strangers, their babies at their backs, with their poor luggage, plodding to th’ ports and coasts for transportation . . .’ I thought that would put those in their place who want to ship strangers back to their own countries. Cannot a country care for others even if they are different? Has this modern world gone mad?”

“You cannot give Tilney excuses to ruin you. They’ve silenced Kit, and Tom Kyd has not recovered from torture.”

“I know. I hear he’s on his deathbed, and I think they set Kit up,” he whispered, hunching over to put his head in his hands. “Not an accident, but an assassination. But, do you know what?” he asked, jerking erect again. “At least, Lord Strange has written a letter to Robert Cecil, demanding he steer clear of harassing players who are only writing imaginative plays, so hurrah for that.”

But within a year we heard that Lord Strange had died a sudden, bizarre death, by poisoning, it was whispered. Rumors about his weird School of Night still circulated—that its members had been contacting the dead, that witchcraft was involved. If that was not all that made someone—perhaps someone in a lofty official position—want to rid London of him, perhaps he was dispatched for standing up for the players. We both rued his death, but, the sad truth be told in these perilous times, we were more worried about our own safety.

After all that, Will still wrote like a madman, scared but seething. When the playhouses opened again in June of 1594, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men presented
The Taming of the Shrew,
but it worried me that Will now thought of that shrew not as me, but as the queen. He wrote comedies for a while but began to produce history plays that edged on tragedy, such as
Richard II
and the two parts of
Henry IV
. He was aware that he was watched closely, but he seemed increasingly heedless of risk as he wrote and acted his heart and mind.

People flocked to see a William Shakespeare play, but then they had once made Christopher Marlowe their darling. I could only pray that Will’s more bridled genius would keep him safer than Kit’s wild ways had kept him.

 

 

 

I had seldom
been more excited. During the Twelve Days of Christmas of 1595, after things had calmed down a bit, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men were invited to play before the queen at Greenwich Palace. Since the company’s costumer was puking his insides out and I knew the play and players well, at the last minute, I was asked to go in his place, dressed as myself too, though I’d volunteered to go as a lad.

The entire company went silent as the grave as we passed the tavern house near the palace where Kit Marlowe had been killed. Despite the cold winter wind on the palace barge that had been sent for us, James and Richard Burbage removed their hats, then the others snatched theirs off too.

To disembark from a barge at the palace water gate and then to walk right in was a heady experience for a Temple Grafton girl. Inside the vast palace, my head swiveled as if on a stick as we were escorted down a maze of corridors to a huge, decorated hall where a makeshift stage was set up. The play,
Love’s Labour’s Lost
, was a very familiar to me, but since I was so excited, I prayed I would not miss a cue to help someone into a wig or doublet.

“At least this command performance got us the rest of our pawned costumes back,” Kemp groused as he donned his patched harlequin jerkin for his role as the rural dolt Costard. “Our Willy might as well have named my part Custard, all the substance it has to it, eh, Mistress Anne?” he asked, breaking into a little jig and managing to covertly pinch my bum in his flurry of movement.

“Not true,” I said, shaking my finger at him. “The point is that not only learned, wealthy men may fall for women and come to admit that our fair sex is the be all and end all of the world, but a country fool must admit it too.”

“And to think such a pretty wench as you could have a brain—you could have fooled me!” he said and chortled at his own wit.

Kemp wandered off. Will liked the man for his talents well enough, and he was easier to control, he’d said, than Tarlton had ever been. Yet I knew Will longed to write deeper lines for his clown roles. I must remember to tell Will that Kemp wanted that too.

I kept an eye on everyone’s appearance as best I could, darting behind the painted canvas backdrop to cover both sides of the stage, but I also managed to take as many peeks as possible around the corner of the curtain. It had been strung before the dais that served as the stage. And to think that this elevated platform was where the queen sometimes took her meals! Sounds and smells of the court’s Christmas celebration wafted from the next room. Within this large chamber, the air was redolent of the box and bay boughs swagged above doorways and set in windowsills. Kissing bunches of white-berried mistletoe hung from the ceiling, though we’d been so busy we’d all ignored such. Holly leaves with red velvet ribbons edged the stage.

“My friend Jennet says,” I chattered nervously to the lead actor, Richard Burbage, as I helped him into his purple surcoat for his entry as King Ferdinand, “that it was the custom in days of yore to count how many of the holly leaves were pointed—or male—and how many were rounded—the so-called female. Then whichever kind was in the majority supposedly decided whether the husband or wife ruled the roost in the coming year.”

“That’s a good one, Anne. But in this grand house a woman rules whatever the holly—or body—count, and make no mistake about that,” he told me in a whisper.

And where was Will during all this banter? He sat on the back of the dais, hunched over paper he’d balanced across his knees, evidently scribbling something new or amending what he’d already done, then ripping it into small pieces. Maybe he’d been swept away by one of his strange moods during which he heard voices in his head. We had decided we would not hang together backstage, even though most of the players knew we were fast friends, or I would have asked him what he was doing.

The noise increased as the court moved from their dinner tables into the hall for the performance. The smells changed to the ladies’ pomanders and powders.

As we retreated behind the backdrop, I saw Will was passing out small pieces of paper to the cast. A change of lines in this old play at this late date? It was probably something to suit the occasion, something about Christmas or the queen.

I was excited to glimpse her as I peeked around the canvas backdrop. I could see what seat was to be hers in the front row. With a host of other courtiers I did not recognize, Sir Walter Raleigh awaited her arrival. Bending over my shoulder, James Burbage began to kindly name others for me.

He pointed out the queen’s top man, Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury. I shuddered as I gazed at him, not because of his misshapen form, but because I knew he had become the new Walsingham, a more terrifying safeguard and spymaster of the queen. Burbage also pointed out Southampton’s friend Lord Essex, who was a handsome young man—twenty-eight years of age, he told me. However compelling the man looked, he dared to look in a foul mood amidst the Yuletide revelry. There was Lord Southampton, making eyes and little covert gestures at a pretty woman in the queen’s retinue, though he glanced over at Essex now and again. Well, that would make his mother happy if he fell for a suitable woman, I imagined, though I’d heard the queen did not like her ladies to wed while they served her. Until permission was given for courtship and marriage, they were to remain as virginal as their mistress.

“I’ve realized this play is just the opposite of
Taming of the Shrew
,” I whispered to Will as he came to stand next to me for his entrance as Berowne. “There the man’s the conqueror, so I believe I prefer this one.”

“Perhaps Her Majesty will too, but we’ll just see,” he said, seeming out of humor. I wondered if he was always this sour when he played at court. It was almost if he had caught Lord Essex’s foul mood from clear across the large chamber.

The white-bearded Lord Chamberlain himself, one of the queen’s cousins through her Boleyn heritage, made a speech to announce the play. It was, he promised the court, one that would delight the ladies, especially her Most Gracious Majesty, and put the men in their places.

Will just grunted, squared his shoulders and made his entrance onstage. Surely, he would not do something rash to upset the queen. Peeking out, I could see she was intent on the actors, unlike the sulky Lord Essex who stared hotly at her, though she ignored him. Perhaps they’d quarreled. I’d heard that, though she favored him and Southampton, both men had been chastised for intemperate behavior since manners were always expected at court. I could not fathom that of the young earl so perhaps Essex was leading him astray. I cursed myself for continuing to watch the little drama with Essex and forced myself to pay attention to Will’s play.

As the drama went on, I noted that the tutor named Holofernes now sounded much more pompous to show off his learning. He interjected Latin phrases into his English and rambled on and on. The audience laughed at his pretensions. John Florio, I thought. Had Will rewritten that character to mock John Florio? How dare he! It made me think I didn’t know Will well anymore.

Worse, at the very end of the play, I was horrified to hear new lines. In the lighthearted group song at the end, the first verse was the same, mocking married men for not being able to court a new love in pretty springtime. But with Will leading, the words of the second verse now included, “The cuckoo then, on every tree, mocks women too; for thus sings he—Cuckoo, Cuckoo, Cuckoo! No word of cheer comes to the unwed woman’s ear.”

I peeked out onto the stage. Will had changed these words indeed, for two of the actors glanced again at the small pieces of paper in their hands.

Finally, the character of Armado spoke the last lines of the play, directly to the queen, it seemed to me: “The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo. You that way—we this way.”

Everyone bowed and danced the usual jig—Kemp jumping off the dais to cavort before the queen and even getting her up to dance a few measures with him to the great applause of our audience. I watched it all, now not with eagerness but unease. Was Will testing the waters to see how much he could get away with at the end of the play by challenging the queen herself? “No word of cheer for the unwed woman’s ear,” indeed! And the final implication was that, you, as queen, go one way and we the other.

I held my breath as the queen sent her entourage off for dancing, yet tarried with her servants who brought us mugs of spicy hippocras and mincemeat pies shaped like mangers, in addition to the hefty honorarium. Though I was quite certain Her Majesty was making her way toward Will, when she nodded at me and spoke, I felt speechless.

“I am pleased to see a woman among the players, at least behind the stage, for behind every man—or men—there is a strong woman,” she said, words I would ever cherish.

I felt dazzled by the glitter of her bejeweled gown; the sweet scent of her filigreed pomander swept over me. Up this close, she looked very old, ghostly, with her skin colored an unearthly white. Her curled, pearl-studded wig was too red, her lips, brows and cheeks obviously painted.

Yet she was magnificent. I managed a graceful curtsy before she moved on, but if I close my eyes I can still summon up the sight and impact of England’s Gloriana.

“Master Shakespeare,” I heard her say—and noted well that the buzz among the players muted—“I swear I need an explanation of the strange concluding words.”

Rooted to the floor, I stopped breathing altogether.

“‘No word of cheer to the unwed woman’s ear,’ ” she went on in her clarion voice. “‘You that way—we this way’?”

I did not know whether to laugh or cry as I saw Kemp reach into his doublet, pull out the scribbled scrap of paper Will must have given him and thrust it into the closest mince-pie manger.

With all eyes on him, Will bowed smoothly and said, “I admit it is an unusual ending, Your Majesty—that the couples do not wed immediately and that love does not conquer all because of the solemn oath the men have taken. So the women—at least for a year—go one way and the men the other. Of course, the women would wish to wed the men. As a result, ‘no word of cheer comes to the unwed woman’s ear.’

“
Women’s ears
, it should be,” she clipped out, “not to put too great a weight on one little slip you have made. Pray, Master Shakespeare,” she added, enunciating each word as if she were onstage, “do not make a greater error in one of your fine plays in the future.”

She smiled and fluffed her feather fan in his face, but I prayed Will took her words to heart. I knew then that however much I had argued in the past that it was the men around Elizabeth of England who made her policy, but indeed Will had been right. Decisions came from the woman who ruled not only this palace and country, but its prominent people too, especially one increasingly popular poet and playwright.

 

 

 

It was in late August
of the next year that a tragedy occurred to halt Will’s subtle defiance of the queen’s government policies. It was probably the only thing that could have stopped him, at least for a while, because he seethed with resentment and anger over things, from the downfall of his Arden kin to Kit’s death—however much he had disliked Kit. Perhaps, I thought, Will knew he was indebted to him for the gift of brilliant blank verse blasting out from vibrant dramas.