"Your Maj-?" Shakespeare squeaked in surprise. Elizabeth's eyes flashed. Awkwardly, Shakespeare dropped to his right knee.
"Your sword, Sir Robert," Elizabeth said.
"Is ever at your service, your Majesty." Robert Cecil drew his rapier and handed it to the Queen.
By the way she held it, she knew how to use it. She brought the flat down on Shakespeare's shoulder, hard enough to make him sway. "Arise, Sir William!" she said.
Dizzily, Shakespeare did, to the cheers of his fellow players and of the crowd in the Theatre. Queen Elizabeth returned the rapier to Robert Cecil, who slid it back into its sheath. "Your-Your Majesty,"
Shakespeare stammered, "I find me altogether at a loss for words."
"This I do now forgive in you, for that you were at no loss whilst setting pen to page on this play, which did so much to aid in mine own enlargement and England's freedom from the tyrant's heel," Elizabeth replied. "The necessity of this action makes my speech the more heartfelt, hoping you will measure my good affection with the right balance of my actions in gratitude for yours, for the which I render you a million of thanks. Sweet is my inclination towards you, whereby I may demonstrate my care: of this we shall speak more anon." She swept off the stage, Sir Robert Cecil once more following close.
Out she went, through the groundlings. They cheered her as lustily as before, and turned back to shout,
"Hurrah for Sir William!" Still dazed, Shakespeare bowed to them one last time before leaving the stage.
And had we given King Philip, and had the rebellion failed, Queen Isabella might have dubbed me knight this day, he thought, at which spectacle these selfsame folk would have cheered no less.
And if they had given King Philip, and if Isabella had knighted him, would he be thinking Elizabeth might have done the same had the company presented Boudicca? He shook his head, not so much in denial as in reluctance to get caught up in the tangling web of what might have been. Going back to the tiring room was nothing but a relief.
He found no peace there. Players kept coming up to pay him their respects. So did the tireman, the bookkeeper, the tireman's helpers, and everybody else who managed to get into the crowded room.
Some of them were really congratulating him. More, he judged, were congratulating his rank.
That thought must have occurred to Will Kemp, too. After bowing low-far too low to a knight (or to a duke, for that matter)-the clown said, "Ay, by my halidom, you're a right rank cove now," and held his nose.
"Go to!" Shakespeare said, laughing. " 'Tis the stench of your wit I'd fain rout from my nostrils."
"Had I more rank, I'd be less. Had God Himself less, He'd be more," Kemp said.
"Your quibbles fly like arrows at St. Sebastian." Shakespeare mimed being struck.
"Arrows by any other name would smell as sweet," Kemp retorted. Shakespeare flinched. However fond of puns he was himself, he'd never looked to see Romeo and Juliet so brutalized. Loftily, Kemp added,
"The same holds not for me."
"Naught holds for you," Richard Burbage said, coming up beside him. "Nor honor nor sense nor decency."
"Ah, but so that you love me, Dick, all's well!" Kemp cried, and planted a wet, noisy kiss on Burbage's cheek.
"Avaunt!" Burbage pushed him away, hard. "Aroint thee, mooncalf!"
The clown sighed. "Alas, that love, so gentle in his view, should be so tyrannous and rough in proof." He puckered up again.
"Good Lord, what madness rules in brainsick men," Burbage said.
"I am not mad; I would to heaven I were," Kemp replied. "For then, 'tis like, I should forget myself." He capered bonelessly-and more than a little lewdly.
Burbage looked ready to thwack him in good earnest. "Give over, the both of you," Shakespeare said.
Will Kemp gave him another extravagant bow. "I'd sooner be a cock and disobey the day than myself and disobey a knight."
"Half cock, belike," Burbage said.
"I yield to your judgment, sweet Dick, for you of all men surely are all cock as well."
"Enough!" Shakespeare shouted, loud enough to cut through the din in the tiring room and make everyone stare at him. He didn't care. "Give over I said, and give over I meant," he went on. "The Queen hath said we are to be rewarded according to our deserts, and you'd quarrel one with another? 'Tis foolishness. 'Tis worse than foolishness: 'swounds, 'tis madness. Did we brabble so whilst in the mist of terrible and unavoided danger we readied Boudicca for the stage?"
Shaming them into stopping their sniping didn't work as he'd hoped. Burbage nodded. "Ay, by my troth, we did," he declared.
Kemp only shrugged. "Me, I know not. Ask of Matt Quinn."
Shakespeare threw his hands in the air. "Go on, then," he said. "Since it likes you so well, go on. You were pleased to play on cocks. Strap spurs on your heels, then, and and tear each other i'the pit." Will Kemp stirred. Shakespeare glared at him. That quibble never got made.
As the players left the Theatre, Burbage caught up with Shakespeare and said, "There be times. " His big hands made a twisting motion, as if he were wringing a cock's neck.
"Easy," Shakespeare said. "Easy. He roils you of purpose."
"And I know it," Burbage replied. "Natheless, he doth roil me."
"Showing him which, you but urge him on to roil you further."
"If he prick me, do I not bleed? If he poison me, do I not die? Have I not dimensions, sense, affections, passions? If he wrong me, shall I not revenge? The villainy he teacheth me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction."
"He is a clown by very nature," Shakespeare said. "It will out, will he or no. And he hath a gift the auditors do cherish-as have you," he added hastily. "The company is better-the Queen's Men are better-for having both you twain."
"The Queen's Men." Burbage's glower softened. "There you have me, Will. A prize worth winning, and we have won it. And I needs must own he holp us in the winning." He was, when he remembered to be, a just man.
When Shakespeare walked into his lodging-house, he found Jane Kendall all fluttering with excitement.
"Is it true, Master Shakespeare?" she trilled. "Is it true?"
"Is what true?" he asked, confused.
"Are you. Sir William?"
He nodded. "I am. But how knew you that?"
Before his landlady answered, she took him in her arms, stood on tiptoe, and kissed him on the cheek.
With her blasting and scandalous breath, he would rather have had a kiss from Will Kemp's lips. He didn't say so. He would have had no chance anyhow, for she was off: "Why, I had it from Lily Perkins three doors down, who had it from her neighbor Joanna Ball, who had it from Peg Mercer, who had it from her husband Peter, who had it in his shop in Bishopsgate Street from a wight returned to London from the Theatre. Naught simpler."
"I see," Shakespeare said, and so, in a way, he did. Rumor ran so fast, before long it would likely start reporting things before they happened. As well it did not with Boudicca, he thought, else the dons had found some way to thwart us.
"Sir William," the Widow Kendall repeated, fluttering her eyelashes at him. "To have a knight dwelling in mine own house-dwelling so that he may pay his scot, I should say."
"Fear not, Mistress Kendall," Shakespeare said. "Whilst I be no rich man, still I am not poor, neither.
Have I ever failed to pay what's owed you?"
"Never once-the proof of which being you dwell here yet," his landlady replied. Shakespeare hid a sigh.
She loved him for his silver alone.
The door to Cicely Sellis' room opened. Out came the cunning woman, with a round-faced matron with a worried expression. Almost everyone who came to see her had a worried expression. Who that was not worried would come to see a cunning woman? Mommet bounded out and started sniffing Shakespeare's shoes, which to his nose must have told the tale of where the poet had been.