‘Langley has money, but if he owned every brothel in Southwark it wouldn’t be sufficient. The little earl is paying.’
‘Little?’ I asked.
‘He has beauty, but lacks stature,’ the reverend explained, ‘while you, my dear, have both.’
I had a sudden memory of Simon Willoughby being pinned against the palace courtyard wall as the rain fell. ‘The earl,’ I said, then hesitated.
‘Richard?’
‘Is he fair-haired?’
‘Fair-haired?’ The Reverend William Venables smiled seraphically. ‘I should rather say that his locks were spun from the palest gold on the distaff of an angel.’ So it was the Earl of Lechlade who had accosted Simon that night? I could not be sure, of course, but it seemed most likely. ‘Why do you ask?’ the reverend demanded.
‘I wondered if I’d seen him, that’s all.’
‘You’d remember him if you had.’
‘Are you writing for him?’ I asked.
Venables looked hurt. ‘Your brother won’t stage any more plays of mine. Hester brings in the crowds, but will he perform Susannah and the Elders? No! Or David and Bathsheba? No!’
‘And Langley will?’ I asked.
‘Francis and the earl recognise quality,’ he said stiffly, ‘but they need other plays.’ He turned to look me straight in the eyes. ‘If you were to take Langley your brother’s new play I think you would find that you never need steal again!’
I just stared at him, too shocked to speak.
‘You should talk to Langley,’ the reverend said.
I did not know what to say. His proposal was so dishonest, so shocking, that I could not find the words. A playhouse’s scripts are among its most precious possessions because if another company could find a copy of a play then that company could present that play. Sometimes, when plague closed the playhouses, a company would publish one of its scripts to make some money, and then that play became the property of anyone who wanted it. That was how we had secured The Seven Deadly Sins. We needed to pay no money to its author, we just performed it when we liked, though too many performances would soon see an empty playhouse. If the Earl of Lechlade’s company came by a copy of the wedding play, or of the new play set in Verona that my brother was still writing, they could perform the plays and so steal our audience. A play script is precious, worth eight, nine, or ten pounds each, and so they are locked safely away. To steal one would be to betray the company, and so I hesitated, stammered, and finally evaded an answer by saying I had promised to stay with my brother’s company through the winter.
‘Promises in playhouses,’ the Reverend William Venables said airily, ‘are like kisses on May Day. They don’t count. Go and talk to Langley.’
Because the earl had money.
And I had none.
I did not go to find Francis Langley. London might be a mighty city, but the players in the playhouses all know each other. I feared that if James Burbage or my brother discovered I had been talking with Langley, then their promise of a man’s part in the new play might vanish like a summer mist. I was tempted, but for once I did not yield to temptation.
Then the Percies came on Monday.
We call them the Percies, but they are really Her Majesty’s Pursuivants, black-dressed retainers whose job is to hunt down and root out those Roman Catholics who would slaughter the Queen and take England back to the Roman church. Their prize quarry are the Jesuits, but any Roman priest or anyone who shelters such a priest can expect the Percies to come calling and on the Monday they came to the Theatre.
We were rehearsing the Comedy, or, to give the play its full title, The Comedy of Errors. We knew the play well, but on Sunday George Bryan had tripped over the lintel of Saint Leonard’s church and broken his nose. ‘We are cursed,’ my brother had said, delivering the news, ‘first Augustine, now George.’
The rehearsal was not going well. A hired man called Robert Pallant had to take George’s part. Pallant was a middle-aged man with a paunch, a spade beard, and a hangdog face. He was nervous because he was playing Egeon, a merchant, who opened the play with an immensely long speech that Pallant had memorised, but kept mangling. Everyone else was just bad-tempered. ‘Let’s start again,’ my brother had suggested, after Pallant stammered to a halt for the fourth or fifth time.
The six players all went to the back of the stage as if they had just come through the doors from the tiring room. ‘The trumpet sounds,’ Alan Rust said, ‘it ends, and you enter.’
Pallant walked towards the front of the stage. ‘Proceed,’ he began and got no further.
‘Jesu! You walk as if you’ve got a bone up your arse!’ Alan Rust bellowed. Pallant stopped and looked astonished.
‘What?’ he began.
‘What’s your first line?’ Rust growled.
‘Um …’
‘Christ on his silver-painted cross! If I ever hear the word “um” on this stage I will kill! I will kill! What’s your goddamned line?’
‘“Proceed, Solinus, to procure my fall and by the doom of death end woes and all.”’
‘End our woes. Christ grant us that blessing! And to whom are you speaking? Pray tell me?’
‘The duke.’
‘The duke! So why are you wandering like a constipated goose to the front of the goddamned stage? The duke is there!’ He pointed to my brother, who was standing on the right-hand side of the stage.
‘The speech …’ Pallant began weakly.
‘I’ve read the goddamned speech,’ Rust snarled. ‘It took a week of my life, but I read it! God in His feather-stuffed bed, man! There isn’t time to watch you waddle as well as listen to the endless stuff. Say the words to the duke! This is a goddamned play, not a bleeding sermon in Saint Paul’s. It needs life, man, life! Start again.’
Alan Rust was new to the company. He had been playing with Lord Pembroke’s men, and James Burbage and my brother had persuaded the other Sharers to let Rust join us. ‘He’s very good,’ my brother had explained to the company, ‘and the audiences like him. He’s also very good at staging. Have you noticed?’
‘No,’ Will Kemp said. He alone among the Sharers had opposed Rust, suspecting that the newcomer had a character as forceful as his own. Kemp had been out-voted, and so Rust was here to tell us what to do on the stage; where to move, how to say the words, how to do all the things that previously the Sharers had squabbled about. They still squabbled, of course, but Rust had imposed some order on the chaos.
‘Jesus on his jakes,’ Rust now shouted at Robert Pallant, ‘what in Christ’s name are you doing?’
‘Going towards the duke,’ Pallant said hopefully.
‘You move like a constipated nun! If you’re moving,’ Rust spoke from the yard where the groundlings stood to watch the plays, ‘then for Christ’s sake move! And talk at the same time! You can do that, can’t you? Go back to the duke’s last line. What is it?’ he demanded of my brother, who played Duke Solinus.
‘“Well, Syracusian, say in brief …”’ my brother began.
‘In brief? Jesus in a rainstorm! Brief? The speech is longer than the book of Genesis! And you,’ he pointed at me, ‘what are you smiling at?’
‘Simon Willoughby just farted,’ I said.
‘At least that’s more interesting than Egeon’s speech,’ Rust said.
‘I