The Pale Companion (7 page)

It didn’t take long the next morning to establish the identity of the weird man in the woods. The cold reception we’d received from Oswald Eden the steward on our arrival was thawed out by the warmer manners of some of the lower servants. In conversation with one of them, Davy by name, I happened to let slip that we’d recently played before the Queen and the Royal Court in Whitehall. After that he was like warm wax in my hands, even if the notion of Whitehall was so unfamiliar to him it might as well have been on the moon.

Anyway, what I learned was straightforward and confirmed what the wood-man had told me the previous evening. Robin was indeed his name; he had no other that anyone knew.

How long had he dwelt among the trees? I asked.

Oh, since time immemorabilial, sir, replied Davy. He was like a whatdyecallem? an anchor? or was it a helmet? Living off all by himself and away from the haunts of man.

He meant an anchoret or an hermit: I gently corrected Davy.

So he did, sir, ah what a fine thing was letters and learning in the right hands!

And what did Robin do down in the woods?

Do? – why he talked to squirrels and toads and attercops.

Attercops?

Spiders, sir. Didn’t they know that word in Whitehall town, them with all their letters and learning?

He said he was lord of the wood.

He
was
lord and master in the wood just as Elcombe was lord and master there in Instede House.

And Lord Elcombe, didn’t he mind this, ah, wild man saying such things?

He was harmless enough, sir, Robin was harmless enough. And there were some said he brought good luck on the house.

Very well, I said.

He should be looked after, said Davy. And he was looked after, was Robin.

No doubt, I said.

I still had it in mind to go back and visit Robin later that day. It was curiosity and that player’s itch to observe his species in all their manifestations which prompted me. And a dangerous itch it turned out to be.

Meantime, we of the Chamberlain’s-in-the-country had further rehearsals of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
to fill our mornings, although it was hardly a new play for us. Indeed, I was one of the few who had
not
taken part in a previous performance, and even I had seen it when the Chamberlain’s were still based north of the river in Finsbury. You might think rehearsals were hardly necessary. And if it had been an everyday
Dream
at the Globe it would not have received much attention. But this was a special performance, not quite the equivalent of playing before our Sovereign Lady but not so far beneath it either. Lord Elcombe was a valued patron of the Chamberlain’s and a friend to some of our seniors. Players and their companies can never have too many friends – for the reason that we have several very potent enemies like the watchers in Council, or the puritan, or, worst of all, the plague which canters in on a pale horse to close us all down. So we need friends, the more powerful the better. And there were few more powerful than Elcombe, possessor of a good slice of Wiltshire as well as of a grand Whitefriars mansion in London. When such a man invites you to perform at his son’s wedding and offers to pay you handsomely for the privilege, you don’t hesitate.

However, as I’ve said, we knew the
Dream
pretty well. Even I knew it. So perhaps it wasn’t surprising that my mind wandered in the rehearsal room when I wasn’t being called on to spout my lines and make my moves as Lysander.

Something to do with my part as one of the young lovers caused me to remember, in the long intervals of practice, how only a few days before I’d been at home in London town and talking to Nell – my whore and my good friend – about this strange, fantastical piece of Master Shakespeare’s.

She and I were in my lodgings south of the river. Not the fourpenny-a-week upstairs hole belonging to the witch-like sisters where I’d shivered and suffered during the last winter, but a more commodious establishment nearer to the Globe playhouse. My room was on the second floor of a house in a street called Dead Man’s Place (why it had this unfortunate appellation I don’t know). Perhaps because of the ill-omened street name, rooms there were not hard to rent on favourable terms. In addition, I’d caught the eye of my landlord, one Master Benwell. He looked me up and down at our first meeting, not once but many times. When I told him that I was a player – a revelation not always guaranteed to cause delight – he licked his thin lips. I speedily concluded that he was, in all likelihood, a gentleman who preferred the male gender and the back door. Certainly he liked to talk about such things. He fired questions at me, hinting that the Chamberlain’s was a hot-bed of sodomy. I was about to get on my high horse but realized how his prying interest might be turned to my advantage. From a starting-point of one shilling and three-pence I bargained him down to 1
s
a week. This was more than I’d been paying in Broadwall, but the room in Dead Man’s Place, though not ample, was much better than the one in the Coven. In exchange for a reasonable rent it was understood that I’d provide him with little snippets and snatchets of tittle and tattle to do with the Chamberlain’s Company.

So this shilling chamber in Dead Man’s Place was where I was lying with Nell on an evening in June. Once our more pressing needs had been met, she started to ask me about where we were going on tour, and what we were going to do there, and who for, and how much we’d earn by it, and whether I had a big part this time (“What do you mean, this time?” I said), and a dozen other questions which came tumbling out at once.

“One at a time,” I said. “I can only answer one at a time.”

I was subjected to a rigorous catechism which I pretended to be wearied by but which, in truth, I took pleasure in answering. Doesn’t every man enjoy talking about the mysteries of his craft – and if he does not, he has no business practising it, I think.

“Is that it?” I said after many minutes. “You will leave me with no energy for anything else.”

“Almost there, Nick. Tell me this too. Are you all going to the country? Or are some of you left behind in town?”

“No, ‘we’ are not all going,” I said, slightly annoyed. What was she thinking about? Her trade? “Shakespeare and Burbage and Heminges and most of the seniors remain here.”

“So the children are being let out to play. How will they fare?”

Strangely, the same idea had occurred to me but to hear Nell voice it out loud was somehow aggravating.

“If by that you mean that we are not capable of conducting –”

“It was a joke, Nick.”

“We are to visit Instede House at the personal invitation of Lord Elcombe, I’ll have you know.”

“Hush. Save your passion for later.”

“You’re in danger of dousing it.”

“Then tell me of the play, this Midsummer Nightmare.”

“
Dream
.”

“Dream. See how much you have to tell me still. And talk of your part in it.”

Even if she was only being conciliatory at this instant, Nell did like to hear some account of the plays in which I participated. Inevitably she hung about the playhouses in the way of business but, equally inevitably, she did not much attend to the action on stage. (I’d tried to prohibit her from attending the Globe when I was playing there at first and she eventually told me I had no more right to regulate her trade than she had to regulate mine.)

So I lay flat on my back, eyes fixed on the lumpy plaster of the ceiling, and started to give my
Dream
narration. Nell snuggled up beside me. In fact, my narrow bed didn’t permit of any relation other than snugness.

I told her of Hermia and Lysander, the Athenian lass and lad in ancient times, who are in love with each other. I told her that I played Lysander while young Michael Donegrace took the part of Hermia. All would be well were it not for Egeus, Hermia’s hard-hearted father, who is compelling his daughter to marry another man, one Demetrius. I told her how this same Demetrius is already loved by another woman, Helena. Of the elopement of Hermia and Lysander (Done-grace and Revill) to a neighbouring forest; of the pursuit of them by Demetrius and Helena. Oh, the love-tangle that ensues! For in this charmed wood wander Oberon and Titania, no mortal man and wife but king and queen of the fairies, and they too are engaged in a love-dispute, just as the mortals are.

“It’s not easy to follow,” said Nell.

“It’s not meant to be,” I said, although I considered that my outline had been quite lucid, all things considered. “It is a love-tangle. Unless you have confusion you can never arrive at clarity.”

Nell slipped out of bed, and I assumed she intended to use the jordan in the corner. Instead of the expected tinkling, however, I heard her rummaging about on the small table where my few effects were untidily piled. I gazed at the lumpy ceiling through drowsy eyes. In a few moments she slipped back in beside me. She waved something white before my face.

“Write it down.”

“What?”

I opened my eyes wider. She was clutching a piece of paper and a stub of pencil.

“It will be easier for me to understand, Nick, if you write it down.”

“But you can’t read.”

“I am not altogether unlettered,” she said, with a touch of indignation. “There is someone teaching me.”

This was news to me. I was wide awake by now.

“Someone?”

“One of . . . the sisters.”

She meant one of her co-labourers in the field of flesh that was Holland’s Leaguer. God save us, a pedagogue-whore, I thought, and then banished the description as unworthy.

“
I
could have taught you,” I said. “I have offered.”

“But you prefer me as I am.”

“Of course I do.”

“Ignorant and unlettered?”

“Well not exactly . . . not at all, if you put it like that.”

“Then you would have me different?”

“A little, I suppose.”

“See,” Nell said triumphantly. “Now write down the names of the people from your Nightmare.”

I wasn’t even sure what argument we’d been engaging in here but it was apparent she considered herself the winner, while I was tangled among the toils of her logic. To avoid further discussion, I sat upright in bed and scribbled down the names of the characters, firing off miniature arrows like a demented Cupid or looping them with little hearts to show who went with or after whom. Then, to make it complete, I added some of the others parts as well, the rude mechanicals &c.

When I’d finished, she snatched the paper and pored over it.

“There. Ell . . . why . . . ess – Lysander. That’s your part. And you have drawn a heart which encloses aitch . . . eee . . . arr – Hermia! So that’s who
you
love. And here is Dee . . . mee . . . trius and, er, Helena. And the arrow shows that she is chasing Demetrius. And, Nick!, what is this word? Is it what I think it is?”

She could hardly speak for laughing. I looked at where her finger was jabbing at the page.

“Nell, you would be safer to learn from an absey book than one of your sisters of the flesh. You’ll find no rude words in a child’s primer. No, that’s Puck, not what you think it is.”

“Oh,” she sounded faintly disappointed. “Who’s Puck?”

So I explained about Robin Goodfellow, and that part of the lesson was done. And then we had a joke or two about Bottom before concluding our business together.

Post-Puck, I saw her on her way along Dead Man’s Place. It was still light on this fine June evening. I did not like to walk too many paces with Nell through the public streets, particularly when, as now, she was dressed in what might be termed the colours of her guild (viz, red). This was partly because I had a strange reluctance to be taken for one of her customers and partly because I felt that I might be impeding her trade. If I wasn’t entitled to block a whore’s business in the playhouse, I certainly had no right to obstruct her traffic in the street.

Nevertheless, she seemed in an unusually fond and clinging mood as we parted. Probably because we wouldn’t see each other again until I returned from Wiltshire. It was the first time I had been right out of London since my arrival in the spring of 1599. Nell too was country-born. Like me, she had come to seek her fortune in the great city. It was one of the things which had brought us together.

“I have your paper,” she said, pecking me on the cheek several times.

It took me a moment to realize what she was talking about.

“When I want to be reminded of what you’re doing I shall look and see that you are chasing that boy called Hermia.”

“You’ll not learn to read much from that,” I said.

“Have a good Dream,” she said, departing. “You see, I have remembered your title.”

In the event, Nightmare would have been more apt.

The image of Nell as she walked down Dead Man’s Place, her taffeta dress flickering like a fiery candle on that summer evening, recurred to me as I sat on the side of the practice chamber in Instede House. The sun poured through the high windows and glittered on the polished oak of the floor. In the centre of the room, Thomas Pope was exchanging a few words with Laurence Savage and the others playing the “rude mechanicals”, Nick Bottom the weaver, Snug the joiner
et al.
At this moment Pope was discussing with Laurence and the rest the exact turn or flavour to give to the closing scene, even if they had been through it a dozen times before. Thomas wasn’t at all as grave a senior as Richard Sincklo, indeed he was someone who usually spoke his mind without reserve. He had a deserved reputation as a comic player (and now took the part of Puck, jester to Oberon and all-round mischief-maker). For all that, there was an authority in his words, and he had the knack of providing suggestions and even criticism without giving offence. This made him especially useful in his role of “guider” for our
Dream.

We’d reached the point when the clowns come forward to play out the tragic tale of Pyramus and Thisbe for the diversion of the Athenian Court, of which I as Lysander was an insignificant part. They are such poor journeymen players, these clowns, that they make a mockery of what is serious in love, and at the same time give unintended instruction in how
not
to play. Any fool can play badly, and usually does. But to play badly well . . . ah, there’s an art to that.