Authors: Philip Gooden
“I ask you whether that steady-burning friendship is not a truer emblem of that eternal and stainless love which we are enjoined to believe in, I mean the love which dwells above – a
truer emblem than the passion of Aeneas for Dido, and hers for him, which ended in all the fury of the funeral pyre.”
I wondered to hear WS make a comparison like Jack Horner had made, between man-and-woman’s love and a violent fire.
“In the olden times, such friendship between men was no doubt possible,” he continued.
“But no longer?” I said.
“Olden times become golden times to men’s eyes, but our own age is always leaden. Or iron. Heavy, hard.”
“But ready to be transmuted?” I said.
“Why yes, Nick,” said WS, appearing to notice me again. “Everything can somehow be transmuted, the base metal turned to gold. Or if not, we can make it seem so.”
He motioned with his hand at the room, in which lights flared and business-like yet excited activity and talk flowed around us.
“Still, Nick, this is not exactly what I wanted to say to you. In the beaten way of friendship. I have a particular request to make . . .”
Friendship! The word rang in my mind . . .
And while we’re on the subject of friendship I might as well tell the tale of my dealings with Mistress Isabella Horner. No, not might as well but must. It’s
connected with what you’ve just heard, it has to do with what follows. And I’m finding it increasingly difficult to keep quiet about it. Guilt, I suppose, the need to get it off my
chest.
So before I reach my midnight rendezvous in Hart Street with Nemo, here is what we players call . . .
An Interlude
It started one afternoon in the late autumn in the tiring-house. Or, to be precise, it started earlier that day. I was going about my lawful business walking riverwards up
Long Southwark. Ahead I could glimpse Great Stone Gate framing the entrance to the Bridge. On either side was a parade of houses and shops which were well enough on this side of the Thames –
that is, they were without the airs and graces which might have afflicted them on the other bank. I was glancing vacantly at one when I noticed Master WS slipping out of a doorway. By
‘slipping’ I don’t necessarily mean to imply stealth. Quietness and unobtrusiveness characterised Shakespeare’s gait and manner.
I was about to wave or cry out in greeting when I saw that the playwright wasn’t alone. A woman followed him close at heels out of the door. She was small and dark-haired. In complexion
she was almost swarthy. The two stood together for a moment in the entrance before the woman closed the door behind her. Even then I might have called out but something about the way Master WS
inclined his head to catch the words coming from her lips made me think that they would rather not be interrupted at this moment. Not that there was anything secretive about the occasion. I
didn’t get the impression that either WS or the dark lady was anxious to avoid being seen; neither so much as glanced up or down the thinly peopled street. It was more the easiness that each
appeared to have in the other’s company, the mutual familiarity, which suggested that any third party was bound to be an intruder.
I picked up all this in a long sideways glance and a few forward paces. (Perhaps it is the player’s training which imparts to one the ability to read posture and attitude so quickly.)
Afraid of being caught out in curiosity, I did not look back to see which direction they were moving in or whether they were even walking together. But as I continued up Long Southwark the image of
the two – William Shakespeare and the unknown dark lady – floated through my mind, together with the inevitable questions: Who was she? Whose house where they coming out of (not Master
WS’s, for I happened to know he lodged in the Liberty of the Clink a few streets off)? And the inevitable question that slips through your mind whenever you see a man and a woman together,
close together, easy together – you know the question that I mean.
Then I put them out of mind until that afternoon’s performance at the Globe. Or rather after the performance, when we were changing from our costumes into our day-clothes. When players are
disrobing in the tiring-house after a presentation, some of us have no greater delight than in picking over performances and comparing them with the previous day’s or week’s. Once
we’ve looked at ourselves in the glass, as it were, we turn to the audience. You, mere (but dear) spectators or attenders at the event, may be surprised to learn that
your
performance
too is assessed and weighed by the players. Like us, you can be good, or bad or indifferent. You might have been quick to understand things that afternoon or, perhaps, especially slow-witted. You
will be judged on your attentiveness, your readiness to be distracted, your promptness in laughter, your capacity for tears. Individual members of the crowd will be selected for praise and
dispraise: the man who laughed loud and long, the woman who was showing a lot of tit.
As you might expect, it was the younger members of the company who tended to hang around. The older, sensible ones, who had other business or homes to attend to, usually disappeared after a few
comradely insults, observations and pleasantries. On the margins of this scene hovered the Tire-man and his assistant, receiving the discarded costumes before lovingly placing them back in store.
We’d been playing something not bad in its own way, a madcap piece called
A Merry Old World, My Masters.
It was the boy-player Martin Hancock who twitted me about a woman he’d noticed among the audience standing next to the stage.
“I tell you, Nicholas, she was much moved by your plight as Quentin. She was all eyes for you, deserted by your lover in favour of that rich old man.”
While I was pleased enough to be told that I had touched a member of the audience, I did not quite believe young Master Hancock, particularly because it was he who’d played the faithless
young Zanche in our
Merry Old World.
“You mean she was not looking at you,” I said.
“Oh, her eye was for you and it was open,” said Hancock, deadpan in his double meanings.
“The one in a scarlet dress, you mean?”
“No, the one
I
mean was in something dark.”
“Describe her more exactly.”
“She was about my height,” he said, “and my colouring but deeper.”
“Not fair then?”
“No but certainly not foul neither.”
“Well, Martin, I must thank you for seeking out opportunities for me, though I am well enough furnished already.”
I was thinking of my Nell.
“Then here comes another piece of furniture, Nick.”
“What? Where?”
“The woman I was talking about, the one who was ogling you.
I turned round and glimpsed through the backs and shoulders of my fellows a slight figure making her way across the Tiring-house. It was the same woman I’d seen coming out of the Southwark
doorway with WS that morning. This individual was no stranger to some of our company, however. She seemed to be handing out what looked like sweetmeats or confectionary, almost with the air of a
mother rewarding good children. Then she approached Jack Horner and clasped him in a quite companionable way. Jack looked a little uncomfortable, as men sometimes do when they are accosted by a
loved one at their place of work.
“She is already spoken for, I think,” I said to Martin Hancock.
Before he could think up some indecent reply we were interrupted by Jack, still in his costume. The dark woman followed him at heels.
“Nick, Martin, my wife here is eager to meet Quentin and his Zanche.”
Master Hancock affected a coy look while I bowed my head slightly, concealing my surprise that this dark-complexioned woman was his spouse. This added another, uh, layer to my glimpse of her and
Master WS together.
“Oh Zanche I know well enough, but I haven’t seen you before, have I?” she said to me.
“I am newly with the Chamberlain’s . . . Mistress . . . Horner,” I said, wondering why Martin had pretended to me not to know who she was. “A matter of weeks
only.”
“I thought so. I would have remembered.”
Her voice was not quite English. Thick and sweet, it seemed to come from down in her dark throat.
“I hope you approved of our performance,” I said, meaning (naturally)
my
performance and wondering if it was true that this woman had been looking at me on stage in the manner
which Martin had described.
“Yes, although I am no great lover of comedy,” she said.
“Isabella prefers the blood and guts and rhyming couplets of the old school,” said Jack, beginning to unfasten the points of his doublet.
“Women often do,” I said airily, at the same time as the name of Isabella jingled in my head like a bell on a horse’s bridle. Is-a-bell-a. “It is the men who like true
love and happy endings.”
“And the players, what do you prefer?”
“You should ask your husband. He’s been at this game longer than I have.”
“It is quite straightforward. There is only one thing that players prefer, and that is whatever brings them profit,” said Jack Horner, now half out of his doublet. He moved away to
complete his undressing and to hand his costume to the Tire-man. I had already surrendered my playing clothes. The tiring-house was thinning out. I gazed at Mistress Isabella Horner and she gazed
at me. She had a closed, somehow elfish face, with a narrow chin and short, tangled locks of hair. There was something feline about her. Her eyes were as unreadable as a cat’s. Master Hancock
had been right: she was about his height and colour. I was conscious of young Martin now, standing a little to one side of us and regarding us both. He had said nothing since Jack introduced his
wife, but I had the uneasy feeling that he was storing up every word he heard, every glance he glimpsed between us, probably so as to disgorge them later with appropriate commentary among his
ribald young peers.
“But I ask you now . . . Nick . . . ?”
“Revill. Ask me what?”
“Master Revill, what is it
you
prefer? Blood and guts? Or happy endings?”
“Happy endings are harder to play,” I said. “And I have noticed that the audience is sometimes more cheerful at the end of a tragedy than they are at a comedy.”
“That is because the misery of others is often good to behold,” she said.
“While their pleasure can be hard to watch,” I responded (since we were talking aphoristically).
But now her fresh-faced, uncostumed husband returned.
“Well, Nick, are you going to join us? Martin, you will for sure?
“That depends on where you’re drinking.”
We younger players often repaired to one of the many alehouses of Southwark after a performance.
“No tavern, but the pit instead. My wife wishes to be taken there. In fact, I think she came to see the play today only so that we might go to the pit afterwards.”
“Just as she is no great lover of comedy,” I said, conscious of sounding slightly priggish, “I do not much like the pit.”
“Then you are no true Londoner, Master Revill,” said Mistress Horner.
This might have been true but it still stung slightly.
“It is Sackerson today,” said Jack. “Or is it Harry Hunks? I forget which.”
“No matter,” said Mistress Horner, all eager to see some blood and guts. “Let’s hurry or they will begin without us.”
So I and Martin Hancock together with the Horners made up the foursome that now left the Globe tiring-house. It was a fine late afternoon with a couple of hours of daylight left. The
playhouse-goers had dispersed in their various directions; many eastwards to the Bridge or straight up to Bank End to catch a boat to the other side. Some were headed westward like us, and probably
with the same destination in mind. The day’s pleasures were not yet exhausted; the night’s delights twinkled in the distance.
The area around the theatre was criss-crossed with ditches, the contents of which – whether liquid or solid or something in between – rose and fell in languid agreement with the
river. Because the bridges across them were narrow, hardly more than a few pieces of planking, we were compelled to travel single file.
Jack Horner led the way across one such bridge with Martin in his wake. As Mistress Horner went ahead of me she slipped, or appeared to do so, and reached back to grasp hold of me.
Instinctively, my own hand shot out to save her from the turdy trench. She fell back involuntarily, or seemed to do so, into my chest. At the same time her hands clasped tight hold of both of mine
and brought them sharp up against her chest and – to speak a little more pointedly – into the direct region of a nice if diminutive pair of tits. Or so it seemed to me. At the same
time, I couldn’t help – simply could not help, you understand – wondering whether Shakespeare had ever felt what I had just felt. Not Master Horner, for he obviously must have
done, but Master WS.
“Pardon, Master Revill,” she said, her voice deep and resonant in her throat. I said nothing. She took some time to regain her balance, and continued to cling close as we made our
way across the tiny little bridge. Up ahead of us Master Horner was deep in conversation with young Hancock and hadn’t noticed how close to grief his wife had nearly come.
“Thank you, Master Revill,” she said when we reached the safety of the far bank of the ditch (all of eight feet away from the other side). Her way of speaking was quite formal, at
odds with the apparent familiarity of her movements. Perhaps I’d been mistaken in thinking that she had stumbled deliberately. But she was slow to disengage herself from my grasp and,
naturally, I was slow too to relinquish her. She might, after all, have been about to lose her footing once again and I did not want to put myself to the trouble of saving her twice.
Our proximity emboldened me to say, “I have seen you before.”
“I dare say you have,” she said, “although you’ve only been with the Chamberlain’s a few weeks.”
“It was this very morning.”
“Was it indeed?”
“In Long Southwark.”
“I know it.”
I waited for some further comment, but none came (and indeed she owed me nothing).