The Playmaker (24 page)

But what made me even more uneasy was
The Winter's Tale
itself. In the three months since I copied it, the play threatened to rearrange me, setting deep roots that pushed up the settled soil and disturbed old longings. Henry Condell met me at the bottom of the stairs. “Dost know thy part?” he asked. I nodded, puzzled, for he himself had drilled me on it. Then he added, “See that you play only that.”

This was the only instruction he had ever given that concerned somewhat other than posture and voice. The whole Company was feeling their customary apprehension about a new play. Master Will had admitted he was not quite satisfied with it, and when the playmaker doubted his own work, how could the players launch upon it with confidence? All summed, it was a tense company
belting and lacing themselves for the public, none more tightly strung than me.

The third horn blew as the dresser set a wig upon my head. Robin and Dick were trading tales in a corner, cracking and eating nuts as they were often warned not to do before a performance. Young Lawrence Bates, a child borrowed from St. Paul's Chapel to play Mamillius, sat on the edge of the tiring-room loft, swinging his legs and humming a monotonous tune. Kit had already descended and now paced the length of the downstairs rooms with a majestic sweep of train, picking at the chapped skin of his lips. His fingernails were stubs. I backed down the steep stairway as the noise of the audience faded to murmurs, then whispers, then dropped to that quivering, expectant silence I had come to know well. The musicians in the gallery struck up a brief and lively version of “Nutmegs and Ginger,” at the end of which John Heminges and Augustine Phillips strolled out upon stage as courtiers of the two kings, engaged in a conversation that would serve as introduction to our story.

Most actors can recall performances in which the play becomes so real, in speech and deed, that they could be acting their own lives. This is a hazard of the profession, not a benefit, and any player who values his sanity will put some distance between himself and his part, even if that distance is no wider than a hair. Still it happens: the edge dissolves; the player and character drift into one skin and become so joined they cannot tell each other apart.

This happened to me, though not all at once. In the second act
I appeared as a nameless lady of the court, and my only work was to look dismayed at the accusations heaped upon Hermione by her husband. Even a doorpost could have done this, in the heat of Kit's portrayal. His back remained straight as a rod throughout; it was the set of his shoulders that betrayed the inner turmoil—disbelief, outrage, grief. As always, his hands spoke as eloquently as voice or face, whether pointing in accusation, laid upon a fevered brow, or entreating heaven with palms up and fingers spread. He and Master Burbage as Leontes formed an axis between them, a wave of feeling that caught the players up with it and crested at Hermione's trial.

By then I was not acting. As Leontes brought lie after lie upon his wife's character, I ached with the lady. Hermione made her defense with a calm fury and utter conviction, appealing at last to heaven for the verdict: “Apollo be my judge!” Then the two courtiers appeared straight from the Temple at Delphi, bringing the words of the Oracle which would vindicate or condemn her. In a booming, breathless silence a courtier read them out: “Hermione is chaste, Polixenes blameless … and the king shall live without an heir if that which is lost be not found.”

“Ah,” sighed our audience, and I jumped. I had forgotten them.

“Hast thou read truth?” demanded Leontes of the courtier.

“Aye, my lord, even so as it is here set down.”

A pause drew out, longer and longer until the very air seemed heavy enough to crack. Then Leontes said, “There is no truth at all in the Oracle. The sessions shall proceed. This is mere falsehood.”

Cries of “No! No!” broke out from the surrounding galleries. They were still protesting when a servant arrived, bearing news of the death of Mamillius. Hermione swooned at this ill word and Leontes, shocked into reason, repented his destructive folly. He swore to repair the damage, but it was too late. Paulina rushed into his presence half-crazed with grief, heaping damnation more harsh than his own: “Thy tyranny, together working with thy jealousies—O, think what they have done, and then run mad indeed, stark mad!” To this she added a sorrow to top them all. “The queen, the queen, the sweetest, dearest creature's dead, and vengeance for it not dropped down yet!”

A moan ran through the Theater. Paulina's news and the lamentation that followed seemed to release pent-up remembrances of past sorrows. Women wept; men shook their heads. Some small part of me noticed that Robin was overplaying Paulina, that sweat was plastering the corset to my chest, that Richard Burbage had dropped a passage from his repentance speech. But none of it mattered; a family was ripped apart before my eyes, the bond between man and wife broken, and I myself bore the consequences. The family was mine.

In the tiring room I shed my court gown with no sense of relief—the performance was only half done, my part not even begun, and already I was exhausted. On stage Master Will, as the unfortunate Antigonus, observed the weather—“The skies look grimly, and threaten present blusters”—this said in the face of a clear October sun. Then he sadly abandoned his wrapped bundle,
the “poor babe,” to the will of heaven. The threatened storm approached on a roll of thunder pealing ominously from the hut above, and Antigonus made his hasty exit—pursued by the bear, which emerged so suddenly from the curtained space at the back of the stage that ladies in the gallery shrieked aloud. Close upon this horror arrived the simple shepherd who took up the infant, and with her, the story.

Starling found me behind stage in costume for Perdita, a country gown with a soft collar, laced up with a flutter of colored ribbons. No ruff or farthingale, but the dresser had insisted upon filling out the bodice in front. Gregory and Dick were stuffed likewise, all three of us enduring the sly remarks of the stage boys. On stage, the wily Autolycus was cozening the shepherd's son out of his money while pretending to be a traveler in distress; the audience loved this rogue, laughing with delight. As for me, I felt bruised all over with an excess of feeling, and Starling's news did nothing to calm me.

“That medal,” she began breathlessly. “The one that belonged to your father, that you carried the image of in your wallet, and—”

“What?” My mind, moving slowly, suddenly caught up with her meaning. “Yes! What of it?”

“What were the words on it? ‘
Bibite ex—
'”

“‘Bibite ex hoc omnes,'”
I finished impatiently. “What of it?” “Richard—keep still—I just saw it.”

I felt the back of my neck prickle under Perdita's flowing locks. “Where?”

“A gentleman in the second gallery, a little left of center—he called me to him to buy a piece of gingerbread. He carries a wallet beneath his cloak, and when he reached in to get it, I saw the medal on a chain around his neck.”

“Are you sure?” I could scarcely breathe, in the heat and crush of the changing scene.

“Look up, Richard,” Edmund Shakespeare remarked in passing. “Next is our cue.”

“I am sure. He's wearing a tall black hat with a purple ostrich plume—”

“Richard! Our cue!”

“I'll watch him,” she promised, and darted away, leaving me in a worse condition than before. But I stood up somehow and moved to the curtained doorway, where Edmund took my hand and drew me out upon the stage.

… B
E
N
OT
F
OUND

liding over the boards in my short, smooth-gaited walk, I felt a tremor of misgiving that Perdita's lines would fly away, as Nerissa's had done on that first occasion last May. But I had changed since then. The stage itself had tempered me, and all the steps taken on it seemed now to lead to this lost child, soon to be found. I walked into Perdita, and the proof is this: throughout the following scenes, through the extravagant praise of the lady's beauty and grace, no one laughed.

In her first scene she is being wooed by the young prince Florizel. She knows he is a prince, but allows herself to be drawn into his fantasy of their coming marriage, all the while knowing that it cannot happen. When she meets the disguised King Polixenes
at the festival, she admits it to him in veiled terms, while welcoming him with flowers.

The flower speech had terrified me while I was learning it. Perdita goes on far too long (to my mind) about flower seasons and properties; I had fancied the audience would all be asleep by the end of it, or else tossing nutshells upon the stage, as they often did when bored. But miraculously, they listened and caught the point of the speech: that flowers should not be crossbred, princes should not marry with commoners, and shepherd maids should not aspire to be queens.

Henry Condell, as Polixenes, contradicted me, protesting that mixing a purebred stock with a wild one can result in a hardier plant. The groundlings nudged each other, for they saw how Polixenes had set himself up. Sure enough, the king failed to apply the wisdom of nature to the case of his own son. When Florizel announced his intention to marry Perdita, his father threw off his disguise to let the young man know beyond doubt that there would be no crossbreeding with shepherds in
this
royal house. He departed in a rage, leaving Florizel no less wroth, and Perdita sad and sorry: “I told you what would come of this. …”

I turned away from Edmund Shakespeare, as though giving him up forever, and boldly gazed over the lifted heads of the audience. In the second gallery, a purple ostrich plume appeared to bow in my direction. With proud resignation I continued: “This dream of mine—being now awake, I'll queen it no inch farther, but milk my ewes and weep.” A face took shape under the narrow brim of a tall
black hat, a face of noble lines and dark piercing eyes and a dark beard, neatly trimmed. A stranger's face, yet he seemed to know me. His look was so intent, it almost spoke: You do well. Play on.

I did play on, and played better than ever in my brief time on stage—missed no cues, lost no lines, breathed a fullness into that part that was life itself. Perdita grew into what she truly was; layer by layer, the secret of her royal birth revealed itself and she was finally reconciled with her father, to loud cheers from the house. By then much was resolved: Perdita and Florizel pledged to marry, the two kings made friends again.

But there remained the matter of Hermione, never known nor properly grieved by her daughter. When the curtain of the discovery space was swept aside to reveal Hermione's statue, a murmur rippled through the theater. Our audience had followed us into the heart of the story and gazed equally enthralled at this likeness of the lamented queen in royal robes, a crown upon her noble head and a stillness and serenity wonderful to behold.

“Masterly done!” exclaimed Polixenes. “The very life seems warm upon her lip.”

“The stillness of her eye has motion in it,” Leontes mused, “as we are mocked with art.”

A melancholy tune spiraled down from the musicians' gallery. I moved toward the statue as though drawn by it, my hands out. The words leapt so readily to the tongue, I did not have to think about them: “And give me leave—and do not say 'tis superstition, that I kneel and ask her blessing.” I knelt and reached for that
hand, which, in the reaching, became my mother's hand. I forgot everything then—the man with the plume in his hat, the players, the audience, even my part, which I had become. Paulina, the sorceress of this conjuring, hastened to forbid my touching the statue, and likewise held back Leontes from kissing those lips that seemed so warm: “You'll mar it if you kiss it, stain your lips with oily painting. Shall I draw the curtain?”