‘Oh yes. Shakespeare. Henry the Fourth.’
‘Part One.’
‘Yes, you said. So you don’t like it?’
He shrugs. ‘We went to see it. School trip. Was pretty boring.’
‘You don’t like theatre?’
‘Nah. It’s for old posh people, innit?’
‘It didn’t used to be like that. It used to be for everyone. It used to be the maddest place in London. You’d get everyone there. You’d get the posh old people, sure, up on the balconies, dressed to be seen, but then you’d get everyone else. You could get in for a penny, which even then wasn’t so much. A loaf of bread, that’s all. There used to be fights too, sometimes knife fights. People used to throw stuff at the actors if they didn’t like what they saw. Oyster shells. Apples. All kinds of stuff. And Shakespeare used to be on the stage too. William Shakespeare. That dead man from the posters. There. On stage. It’s not that long ago, not really. History is right here, Anton. It’s breathing down our necks.’
He smiles a little. This is the point of being a teacher. A glimmer of hope where you thought it didn’t exist. ‘You almost sound like you were there.’
‘I was,’ I say.
‘What, sir?’
I smile this time. It is tantalising, to be this close to revealing your own truth, like holding a bird you are about to set free.
‘I knew Shakespeare.’
And then he laughs like he knows I am joking.
‘All right, yeah, Mr Hazard.’
‘See you tomorrow.’ Tomorrow. I have always hated that word. And yet, somehow, it doesn’t grate too much. ‘Tomorrow. Yeah.’
London, 1599
I sat in the gallery high above the stage next to an old, snooty, cadaverous man named Christopher, who played the virginal. I say ‘old’. He was probably no more than fifty, but he was the oldest of any man working for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. We were visible to much of the audience, should they have cared to look up in our direction, but we were in shadow, and I felt safely anonymous. Christopher rarely said a word to me, either before or after the performance.
I remember one conversation with him.
‘You are not from London, are you?’ he asked me with disdain.
It was a peculiar disdain, really. Then, as now, much of London was from elsewhere. That was the whole point of London. And, given that there were far more deaths about than births, it was the only way London kept going, and growing.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I am from France. My mother sought refuge here. From the king’s forces.’
‘The Catholics?’
‘Yes.’
‘And where is your mother now?’
‘She passed.’
Not a flicker of sympathy. Or curiosity. Just a long studious look. ‘You play like a Frenchman. You have foreign fingers.’
I stared at my hands. ‘Do I?’
‘Yes. You stroke the strings rather than pluck them. It makes a strange noise.’
‘Well, it is a strange noise that Mr Shakespeare likes.’
‘You play well for your age, I suppose. It is a novelty. But you shan’t stay young for ever. No one does. Except that boy out east.’
And there it was.
The moment I realised, even in a place as large as London, I still had to be on my guard.
‘They killed his mother. She was a witch.’
My heart started beating uncontrollably. It took every ounce of effort to fake a semblance of calm.
‘Well, if she drowned, that proved her innocence.’
He looked with suspicion. ‘I never said drowned.’
‘I assumed it was the ducking stool, if it was for witchcraft.’
His eyes narrowed shrewdly. ‘You seem most excited about this. Look, your French fingers tremble. To be honest, I don’t have the details. It was Hal who told me.’
Hal, the mild-mannered flautist, sitting on the bench in front of ours, didn’t really want to be dragged into the conversation. They had known each other for quite a while, and worked on other productions together.
‘The son didn’t age.’ Hal, pale and mousy and small-mouthed, relayed. ‘She had cast a charm and killed a man to give her boy eternal life.’
I had no idea what to say.
Christopher was still scrutinising me. And then we heard footsteps on the galley.
‘Is this an open conversation?’
It was Shakespeare himself. Standing there, opening an oyster shell, then sucking the mollusc out, careful not to make any mess on the quilted taffeta of his costume. As he savoured the taste his eyes stayed on Christopher.
‘Yes,’ said Christopher, ‘of course.’
‘Well, I trust you are making young Tom feel at home.’
‘Oh yes, young Tom is just fine.’
Shakespeare let the oyster shell drop to the floor. He gave a quick smile. ‘Good.’
He pointed at me. ‘We need to move you forward, to the next bench. To hear the lute.’
I could see Christopher simmering. It was quite a delicious moment. I stood up and walked to my new position, as Hal budged along. I sat down. The inside of an oyster shell shone up at me from the dusty wood, like a watching eye.
‘Thank you, sir,’ I said to my employer.
Shakespeare shook his head, impassive. ‘I assure you it isn’t charity. Now, all of you, play your finest. Sir Walter is in attendance.’
The thing about the front bench was that it meant I had a good view. And the audience was always a show in itself. On a sunny afternoon thousands of people crammed into the place. Far more than you’d fit in the average theatre nowadays, even the Globe. There were often brawls and raucousness among the penny groundlings in the pit and the tuppenny benchers further back. If you had the three pennies needed for a bench and a cushion it seemed, somehow, that you thought yourself above such things, though I noticed that the bad behaviour returned again when you cast your eye up to the upper classes in the balconies.
In other words, you would get all types. Thieves. Troublemakers. Prostitutes. Pale-faced ladies with artificially blackened teeth to simulate the mark of luxury that was sugar-induced decay (a fact I always remember in our modern age of bottle tans and teeth whitening procedures).
There were many songs to enliven the crowd. I particularly enjoyed ‘Under the Greenwood Tree’, sung by a jolly blond actor I have forgotten the name of, who played the faithful Lord Amiens, one of the loyal men willing to go into exile in the French forest with the heroine Rosalind’s father, Duke Senior.
Who loves to lie with me,
And turn his merry note
Unto the sweet bird’s throat,
Come hither, come hither, come hither:
Here shall he see no enemy
But winter and rough weather.
In my mind, the French Forest of Ardennes became la Forêt de Pons that I had known as a child, where Maman and I would sometimes go. We would sit by a large sycamore tree, and she would sing to me there, as I watched falling sycamore seeds. A world far away from the stench and squalor of Bankside, or the smell of beer and shellfish and urine coming from the pit below. Yet the play stirred many other things in me. There were people being exiled, changing their identities, falling in love.
It was a comedy, but I found it quite troubling.
I think it was the character of Jaques that was the problem. He does absolutely nothing. I saw the play eighty-four times and I still can’t remember what he did. He just walked around, amid all the bright young optimists, being cynical and miserable. He was played by Shakespeare himself, and every time he spoke, the words got into my bones, as if warning me of my own future: