The Playmakers (39 page)

“Our prayers were answered shortly after,”
interjected Walsingham, “when the usual packet of material arrived
from Christopher. It contained Henry IV.”

“I remember that,” said William. “You gave it
to me and said there was nothing else in the courier’s pouch this
time.”

“I lied. It also contained this follow-up,
The Merry Wives of Windsor.”

“What?” said Budsby.

“Christopher had written them both, in a
surge of productivity,” said Walsingham. “We gave you the first
one, and put the other aside.”

“All we needed now,” interjected Burghley,
“was for someone, some way, some how, to demand its portrayal,
under testing circumstances.”

“And there is no better person at demanding
things than Her Majesty,” said Walsingham. Then he added, “But I
never said that, right?”

“What we needed,” added Burghley, “was for
her to like the first one, Henry IV. And, mercifully, she did.”

“With just a little assistance from your good
self,” added Walsingham.

“I played my role,” said Burghley, giving a
little theatrical bow.

And he had, too,
thought Budsby, casting his mind back to that first presentation.
He remembered watching from the wings at The Globe how Burghley had
sat next to Elizabeth, that unmistakable figure with the rich red
hair and the brilliant white Virgin Queen make-up. He recollected
how Burghley had quite often leaned over to her chair and whispered
comments in her ear, especially when the amusing Falstaff character
was on stage.

“You praised it to high heaven,” said
Walsingham. “She came out of the performance bubbling with
excitement, especially about Falstaff.”

“So much so, a few days ago,” continued
Burghley, “I had little trouble when I said to her, ‘Ma’am, the
Ambassador for France is arriving in a little over a fortnight,
could I suggest a Shakespeare play as the centrepiece of the
welcoming festivities? Perhaps something in a vein similar to
things that you have enjoyed especially of late?’”

“Yes,” said Walsingham, “Gentlemen, I was
there when Lord Burghley said it. And she was onto it straight
away. ‘Shakespeare?’ she replied, ‘a wonderful idea! Remind me,
Lord Chancellor, what was the name of that play we saw with that
fat fellow running all over the stage? Tell Master Shakespeare we
want some more of him and his little foibles, in time for the
arrival of our French guest!’”

The two entrepreneurs looked at each other,
slowly taking on board the fact that they were part of a plot, a
set-up, a conspiracy, whose machinations were almost beyond
belief.

“So,” said Budsby, eventually, “how come, if
you were spending all this time guiding the Queen toward setting up
this challenge, why didn’t you give us the play earlier, to do some
preliminary work on it?”

“Couldn’t risk it,” said Walsingham, “the
word would have got out!”

“Well, I, reject any suggestion that we would
have …” began Budsby, bristling.

“No, no, Mr Budsby,” said Burghley,
soothingly, “we are not suggesting that you would have let the cat
out of the bag. Why, the pair of you have been peerless in
maintaining your silence over what happened at Deptford. It’s just
that …”

“ …once you had given the play to some of the
actors to rehearse,” continued Walsingham, “the rumour would have
spread around.”

That is true,
Budsby
thought.
Actors, especially those in work, can’t
wait to tell those not in work about their latest project - and
either boast about, or whinge about, the relative size of their
role.

“So,” said Walsingham, breaking the silence,
“all you need to do now is persuade the Chamberlain’s Men to do
their duty, and get it up and ready by Saturday week.”

“I’m not sure if that can happen,” said
William forlornly. “That’s a fraction of the usual time they need
to even get it to first rehearsal stage.”

Burghley came forward and leaned over
Shakespeare. William noticed that the cheery figure, up until now
studding proceedings with cute little theatrical bows, had been
replaced by the customary, serious, dangerous Burghley.

“It will be done, Master Shakespeare,” said
Burghley. “Make no mistake about that. We did not dump the
Admiral’s Men after the presumed death of Christopher, and replace
them with the Chamberlain’s Men as our prime acting troupe for
nothing. They will do what they are required to do.”

“I understand,” Shakespeare said. “I
understand.”

“I hope you do,” added Walsingham, in a
similar tone, “it’s important that your role as the number one
playwright remains unsullied, and that Christopher remains in
France and Italy sending us back information, and occasionally
sowing the seeds of foment amongst the city-states.”

“It is a situation that is to the advantage
of none other than Her Majesty’s Government,” said Burghley.

“Phew,” said Shakespeare, shaking his head
slowly. “This thing is bigger than I ever would have possibly
thought.”

“What? A plot so intriguing it is beyond even
the imaginative skills of England’s great playwright?” said
Burghley, drawing back and laughing. “Never!”

And with a little bow, Burghley suddenly
vanished.

“I’ve had enough, too,” said Walsingham,
“this meeting of the playmakers is adjourned. You know what to do.
Someone will see you out.”

He opened the door, and Shakespeare watched
in astonishment as a young female hand - a hand that he judged to
be barely nineteen years old and presumably that of Walsingham’s
third wife - suddenly protruded through the doorway.

Walsingham took the hand, tenderly kissed it,
said, “Coming, my dear,” and in an instant was gone.

“My God,” said Budsby quietly. “And we
thought we were in this merely up to our necks …”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

By 1598, the Chamberlain’s Men were being
acknowledged throughout London as England’s premiere acting
group.

Headed up by the towering presence of Richard
Burbage, they had, in the preceding five years, attracted capacity
audiences with the sheer drama of
Richard
II
, mesmerised them with the comedy of
A
Midsummer Night’s Dream
, and astonished them with the
realistic assassination of the lead character in
Julius Caesar
.

Their reputation had grown to epic
proportions since they had been formed immediately after the
distressing death of Christopher Marlowe.

That had been the saddest of days for
everyone in the London theatre scene.

The sudden extinguishing of a great talent in
a tavern punch-up had sent shock waves through the small, tightly
knit army of actors, directors, back-stage staff, promoters, and
theatre-owners. Not so much the death of a friend, but being
typical egocentric theatre types, more a matter of, “My God, now
where will my next play, and my next pay, come from ..?”

So frenzied and absorbed were they about
their cloudy future, they did not notice that only one person
around them stayed calm and cool in the aftermath.

Sir Thomas Walsingham.

It was strange. His boy wonder, his literary
star, his investment - nasty critics had even incorrectly
suggested, his lover - was now dead. Yet he showed not one glimmer
of emotion. He was so workmanlike, so focused, so
matter-of-fact.

“It’s his way of dealing with grief,” was the
generally accepted explanation. “To get on with things.”

So consumed with their own little lives were
they - “Do you think Master Shakespeare can go on and fill
Christopher Marlowe’s shoes?”- that they took little notice when
Walsingham abandoned all links with the Admiral’s Men.

The Admiral’s Men, that doughty group of
individuals lead by a giant of an actor, Edward Alleyn, had up
until that point, been the major performing company in the city.
Few eyebrows were raised when Walsingham formed a new group, the
Lord Chamberlain’s Men, and named it after Edward de Vere, the
actual Lord Chamberlain himself. After all, de Vere, the first Earl
of England and Queen’s favourite, was a bit of a theatre man - a
sometime poet and would-be actor himself. No one made much of an
issue of the fact that he was also the son-in-law of one of
Walsingham’s closest friends, Lord Burghley …

So intense was the navel-gazing that the
theatre community at large did not even realise that Sir Thomas was
also behind the later re-build of the Globe Theatre on the south
side of the River. They had dutifully volunteered to carry the
lumber from the remains of the dismantled playhouse, simply called
The Theatre, across the city to be re-assembled in the shape of a
roundhouse at Bankside.

Nor did they care much that Burbage’s
brother, Cuthbert, played a leading role in its management, or that
William Shakespeare, now the hope of them all, had been quietly
given ten per cent interest in the new theatre.

In the end, few people noticed, knew, or
cared that, despite the loss of his front-line writer, Sir Thomas
Walsingham - busy enough as a politician, businessman, and, some
said, spy-master - had for some reason jockeyed himself into the
control of the theatre scene in London.

It was a scene that was tawdry in many ways -
the lowest of the social strata paying a mere ha’penny to view a
play from the heaving, sweating, smelling audience pit at the foot
of the stage. Yet it had a certain nobility - the aristocrats,
well-to-do merchantmen and courtiers paying anything up to sixpence
to view from the relative sanctuary of the dress circle, sometimes
in the company of the Queen herself.

No one had been bothered to make much of the
fact that one of their own, the actor Derek Berkhardt, had suddenly
dropped out of the business and disappeared, too. Gone back to
Germany, to find his roots. So the rumour mill said.

Everyone was more distracted by the potential
impact of their loss.

“Christopher was a truly great writer,” had
been the general lament raised during a hastily organised wake at
Percy Fletcher’s tavern, the only real celebration conducted after
the body had been inexplicably and rapidly buried without ceremony
at Deptford.

In these conversations it had always been
left unsaid that William Shakespeare, too, was proving to be a
genius with the pen, and a writer of plays that, ironically,
captured the essence of the effervescent, poetic style of the
now-dead Marlowe.

But, it was also generally concluded that the
phlegmatic William was, well, different.

As Burbage put it, “Whereas Christopher
exuberantly loved his plays like a pet dog or a favourite toy,
William seems to treat them more like a commodity. Whereas
Christopher caressed every syllable across the page with a loving,
creative stroke of the quill, William appears to turn them out as a
carpenter would construct a pigsty. Whereas a Marlowe play went
through a period of exciting, overt gestation - the writer involved
in weeks of musing, earnest discussion with associates over an ale,
try-outs of dialogue on astonished strangers - a Shakespeare play
seems to suddenly, almost secretly, turn up, practically
overnight.”

And still, five years on, as the actors
assembled for a read-through of a brand new script brought across
to them at the re-built Globe by Budsby, the doubts lingered.

“Another one?” boomed the great Burbage, as
he accepted the hand-written pages from Budsby. “It is as if he
does it by magic.”

He let the statement hang in the air, and
some of the ensemble began to look at each other, and nudge each
other with their elbows. But any thoughts of exploring the matter
further were immediately circumvented by the persuasive voice of
William’s guide and mentor.

“The writer is an unusual animal,” the big
fellow suddenly said, handing out copies to the remaining ensemble.
“In my experience - and as a man who has devoted the best part of
his life to entertaining the populace, I believe I am qualified to
comment on this matter - there are three types of writer, all
beginning with the letter that starts my surname, the letter
B.”

“The letter B?” said Burbage, his rich
theatre voice coming from a flabby set of jowls and a giant rotund
chest that had been compared many times with that of Elizabeth’s
father, Henry the Eighth.

“Yes, first up, there is the Bleeder.”

“Wot? He covers the page in blood?” said a
voice, belonging to a pale, thin stripling, still in the formative
days of his acting career.

“No, no, no, young man,” said Budsby. “I am
speaking metaphorically, of course.”

“Meta-what?” said the puzzled young actor,
his brown eyes widening. “You better be careful with them big
words, Mr Budsby, you’ll end up on the rack.”

The group let out an uneasy laugh.

“I don’t mean it in the literal sense of the
word,” boomed the big voice. “I’m not suggesting the writer
actually drips drops of blood on the page, I mean that he agonises
over every word. The Bleeder writes something down, he scratches it
out, he puts it down again in a slightly different form, he stares
at the ceiling, he writes some more, he holds his head in his
hands, he gets up for a walk around the desk…”