Sleep of Death (31 page)

‘I could not miss the Prince of Denmark,’ said William, ‘though I must have seen him live and die a half dozen times.’

‘And my Lady Alice?’

‘My mother doesn’t like the play, as you know. Too many words and too many memories stirred up. Probably the very reasons that I like it.’

‘Could you persuade her to attend? It will most likely be my last performance. And I have other reasons . . .’

‘I will try.’

‘Sir Thomas?’

‘My uncle is away on business.’

‘Is he in Dover?’

‘He has business there, yes, I believe.’

So all was arranged.

And now I stood waiting to make my entrance in the dumb-show.

‘How are you, Nicholas?’

I turned round and there was Master Robert Mink, looking as affable as ever.

‘My, I wouldn’t like to have been your opponent,’ he said casting his eyes over my visage.

Despite my best efforts at face-painting it was, I suppose, still obvious from close to that I had disgraced myself in some apprentice-style brawl. In a way this suited the villainous role which I had to play, but I still grinned sheepishly at Master Mink.

‘No questions,’ he said. ‘You young men! Sudden and quick in quarrel, as our friend says.’ He nodded in the general direction of the stage, meaning Master WS.

He was costumed as the Player King, a part that was well fitted both to his bodily size and his good-natured authority. In the dumb-show, and then in the play-within-the-play, he must suggest a weary wisdom. When his Queen announces that she will never marry after his death, he knows that she protests too much. She will do what she says she will not. A royal widow does not sit long with an empty throne for company. Thinking of which, I cast my eyes in the direction of the box occupied by Lady Alice Eliot and William. I could not see them and had to hope that they were visible from the vantage point on the other side where I had secured a seat for Nell.

‘Well,’ said Master Mink, ‘and you are enjoying your time with the Chamberlain’s Men?’

‘I fear that my time is almost over.’

‘Jack Wilson is coming back?’

‘He is sure to be, soon. His mother must either be dead or have decided to live a little longer.’

‘I am glad that he is to return. He is a good player, although I am not sure that you don’t have – ah – darker looks than Jack and so are more apt for darker parts.’

‘Master Shakespeare was kind enough to say something of the same sort when we first met,’ I said.

‘Did he now? Well, he is the best judge of these things, I suppose. Anyway we shall be sorry to lose you.’

‘Thank you,’ I said, reflecting that this was a fine day for compliments.

‘Before you leave you must visit my lodgings. You have not yet heard my Lover’s Triumph.’

‘No, I have not.’

‘My lodgings would be better than the Beast with Two Backs. We would not have to depend on the stumbling service of Gilbert the potboy. I have a fine red wine that I’d like your opinion of.’

‘I would be honoured.’

‘And now I must take a few moments to myself. I always do this before I go on stage.’

He removed himself into a corner. Meantime I fumbled in the sleeve of my costume for a speech I’d penned earlier. This is the very same device which Hamlet uses, a speech of some dozen or sixteen lines planted in the play to expose Claudius. Well, I did not pretend to be Master WS and would not dare to hold up my poor candle to his blazing sun, but I congratulated myself that I’d managed to add a few lines in the style of what Lucianus delivers when he is about to pour poison into the ear of the Player-King (Master Robert Mink). These lines would hint at the real-life mystery and murder of Sir Thomas Eliot.

My plan, as should be evident, was to confront those whom I considered might be responsible for this foul deed.

To wit: Lady Alice Eliot, spied on by Nell in the audience.

To wit: Master WS, spied on by myself from the stage.

(It was a pity that Sir Thomas was absent in ‘Dover’ but I believed that, if he were guilty, he shared that guilt with his wife, and that therefore, if she were exposed, so too would he be.)

All this might seem to strain belief. Why should a man or woman spill their secrets because they see them played out on a stage? But I had authority for what I was doing, the authority of the Prince of Denmark himself, for:

I have heard
That guilty creatures sitting at a play
Have by the very cunning of the scene
Been struck so to the soul, that presently
They have proclaimed their malefactions;
For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak
With most miraculous organ.

Adding lines to plays is common enough. The broader clowns in the other companies did it all the time, even if the professionalism of the Chamberlain’s Men kept Robert Armin, our company clown, within bounds. Nevertheless, what might be tolerated in an older player would not be allowed in a snipper-snapper like myself. Even if nothing untoward occurred as a result of my own little lines-within-a-play-within-a-play, I would be cast out of the Chamberlain’s for impudence, for incompetence. I would never work with such a company again. Most likely, I would never act again.

I would go back to the West Country and, like the prodigal son, turn into a keeper of swine.

I would go back to my own land and follow my father into the church. Without his certainty and his charity, I would become a sexton and dig graves.

But the play had not yet run its course. I had to expose a murderer.

I wasn’t relying on my feeble words alone. I slipped on the cloak and hat that belonged to Adrian, the false steward. They were his badge or emblem, the mark by which he was most surely recognised. Like the cuts and bruises on my face, they sorted with the part I played. That I was wearing a costume not issued by the tireman would also be held against me, I thought, as I rapidly adjusted Adrian’s mantle. There was dried blood around the collar.

And now I must be on. I slept-walked through the dumb-show. I went through the wordless motions of pouring poison into kingly ears, and pouring another kind of poison into the ears of the widowed but receptive queen. All this time I was in a frenzy of impatience to reach the main action so that I might speak the lines I had composed. It would most probably be the last thing I said on a public stage. I was conscious of banks of faces in the boxes and galleries, of shifting bodies in the pit. The day, which had promised so fair early in the morning, had grown dull. Sullen clouds hung over us and I felt the odd drop of rain.

As I came off after the dumb-show I saw Master WS looking at me most strangely. He had no part in the play-within-the-play or in the court scene in which it unfolds, but he was due on very shortly afterwards, a visitor in Gertrude’s bedchamber where the Ghost appears – though only to Hamlet’s eyes – for the last time. Master WS had removed the armour worn in the opening scenes on the castle battlements and was garbed in a night-gown. Now he is to become a wistfully reproachful Ghost, dressed as he might have been in life had he visited his wife’s chamber. He stretches his arms across the divide between the living and the dead but the Queen does not see him.

I noticed that Master William Shakespeare, the Ghost in a nightgown, was looking at Master Nicholas Revill, the player-poisoner dressed in a dead man’s mantle. He was wondering why I wasn’t wearing my proper costume. He was wondering where he had seen my outfit before. He began to make towards me, but at that moment I heard my cue.

The Player Queen has just wished a good sleep to the Player King,

Sleep rock thy brain,
And never come mischance between us twain

and when she exits I enter. As I did my fear dropped away. I became master of the stage. There was a appreciative intake of breath from five hundred people, the little gasp of satisfaction that comes from seeing a villain about to do his worst. While Hamlet flew around talking to Claudius and Ophelia in state of high old excitement, I stood rubbing my hands and pulling naughty expressions.

On the line ‘leave thy damnable faces’ I stepped forward to the recumbent body of Master Robert Mink. He was on the ground with his back to the double audience, that is the court audience of Elsinore and the real audience in the Globe. Before lying down to sleep in his ‘orchard’ he had carefully laid his crown to one side. As I moved forward, I threw covetous glances at this golden ring. I crouched down and reached out a finger towards it, tentatively, as if it were a hot pan. Then I stood upright, fumbled beneath the cloak for the phial of poison and spoke over the sleeping king. I noticed Master Mink regarding me with his open eyes.

With a trembling excitement I got to the end of the bit written by Master WS.

Thou mixture rank, of midnight weeds collected,
With Hecat’s ban thrice blasted, thrice infected,
Thy natural magic and dire property
On wholesome life usurp immediately.

At this point I should have poured the poison into the sleeper’s ears. Instead I went on:

This cloak I wear’s the colour of my heart;
A dead man’s gown, it serves to hide my art.
This poison too is death to all it touches,
He who mixed it now its power avouches.
It well behoves the murderer to beware,
The schemes he lays may bring him naught but care.
I murder now, but inward know full well
That all such deeds but speed my path to hell.

Then I bent forward to deliver my poison. And several things happened at once, some of them expected, some not. What should happen as the poison is poured is disarray. My lord Hamlet speaks quickly to King Claudius and the rest, explaining how this is only a
play
they’re watching. But his words have no effect, and the guilty King shouts for light and dashes for the exit.

What actually happened was this: the players who made up the court spectators, including Dick Burbage as the Prince, at once realised that I’d started to improvise. I sensed rather than saw their slightly puzzled looks and altered postures. What does this provincial lad think he’s doing? How dare he tamper with the lines written by Master WS, author, player and chief shareholder! Where is he taking us? And, if they were listening to the words I was uttering, they would wonder what I was talking about. The references to Adrian the steward, to Old Nick, the dead apothecary, the warnings to the murderer that all his acts serve but to enmesh him more helplessly in the nets of hell, all this had a private meaning that was far from the purpose of the speech as written for Lucianus, nephew to the king. What the Globe audience made of it was anyone’s guess. Probably hardly a one of them noticed anything was amiss. You’d have to know the play very well, as William Eliot did, to be aware of this little straying from the path.

In any case Burbage and the others retrieved the situation brilliantly, as you’d expect. Hamlet spoke his lines, Claudius panicked and headed for the exit. The agitated court dispersed. The overlooked players slunk off, puzzled at the extreme expression of kingly disapproval which their drama had provoked.

I’ve left the most important detail till last.

As I delivered my own inferior lines and leaned forward to discharge the poison into the sleeping king’s ear, I saw Robert Mink’s eyes fixed unblinkingly on me from his position on the stage floor. He took in my tall black hat, he took in my sable-coloured mantle. Like the other players he was aware that I had departed from the text in the lines which I uttered. Unlike them he did not seem baffled. Then it shot through me with the speed of an arrow.

He was the murderer!

Master Mink, who had given me the note for my Lady Alice on my second afternoon in the theatre. Who had hidden up a tree in an orchard in the springtime and secured the death of Sir William, her husband and his rival. Who had enticed poor innocent Francis to his death. Who had put an end to Old Nick and hung him up in the air. Who had urged false Adrian and fat Ralph and dumb Nub to do away with me most viciously. And all this for the love or lust of Lady Alice, so that he might possess her or her property, or both. Just as Claudius slays his brother so that he may lay his hands on wife or crown, or both. Had I not seen, during our meeting in the Ram, how he regarded himself as a true (and spurned) lover? For sure, the fervour and the self-pity with which he had delivered the Lover’s Lament had not been counterfeit. Had I not also witnessed his casual malice, the way he held the unfortunate potboy’s hand over the candle? Master Mink, I saw clearly (even though my brain was wild and whirling), was that most dangerous kind of man who is all sweet and easy on one side to conceal what is crabbed and angry on the other.

This takes many minutes to commit to paper but so fast is our understanding sometimes, that all these things I knew for true in less time than it takes to say ‘one’.

I believe too that my state – exhausted, cut and bruised, newly escaped from the threat of emasculation and death, red-handed with the blows inflicted on the false steward Adrian, conscious that my time with the finest, most noble company of players in the world had now run its course and that I would in future live my life as an humble swineherd, away from the terrors and temptations of this busy city – I believe, I say, that my strange state of mind and my fatigued body gave me an especial understanding. Standing not quite at right angles to the world, I saw more clear what was the case. And the case was not good.

This ‘understanding’ passed between us, Revill and Mink, without words, and Master Mink, he looked both sad and glad. Sad that his secret had been discovered yet also glad to have been found out.

Then he was up and off, escaping like Claudius from the unearthing of his crime. Yet to any onlooker his departure was simply in character. Like the rest of the players he departs quickly but quietly, to avoid the King’s anger and also to leave the stage free for Hamlet and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

As I made my own way off stage I heard the scene taking its predestined course, with the prince mocking his one-time friends and exulting in the certainty of his uncle’s guilt.

I too had found a guilty man, but in a quite unexpected quarter. I thought of my stupidity in assuming that Master WS might be a villain, I thought of the way I had told Nell to fasten her gaze on Lady Alice. I wondered what to do next.