‘The tiring-house,’ I said, gesturing vaguely. We were sitting in a room adjoining the tiring-house.
For where would the players be without their place to change in, and to shelter between appearances? The tiring-house is where reality and illusion meet in perpetual conflict, or so I would go on to claim if Master Burbage was good enough to ask my reasons. The tiring-house is a magical cave of unending transformations, where a player becomes a king in the flick of a costume, and a king may become a beggar when he turns his cloak inside out and smirches his face. I waited for Burbage’s approval, to begin my rhetorical flight.
‘If you don’t mind my saying so, Master Revill,’ said Burbage, ‘that is a very stupid answer.’
‘The stage, I should have said.’
‘The part that matters,’ said Burbage, ‘is wherever the money is taken. That is the centre of the playhouse. That is why I would never join those who sneer at Master Henslowe for the way he makes his money, or how much money he makes or for his attitude to the making of money. In the playhouse, before you can make anything else, you must make money.’
Burbage’s reputation was unspotted. It was hard to think of him trading in whores and chained bears. He was happily married, wasn’t he, with a large number of children?
‘People cross the river in droves every day,’ said Burbage. ‘They come to see us, of course they come to see us. But they come also to see the bears and the bulls in the pits. They come to visit the stews and taste a different meat from what they get at home. In short, they want to see animals being tormented, men and women both, and the men, they want to exercise their pricks across the water. And sometimes they visit plays before or afterwards. The same people. So that is why I have never taken exception to the way in which Henslowe and Alleyn choose to make their money.’
‘I wasn’t,’ I began, ‘I didn’t mean. .’
‘Players are so contemptible,’ said Burbage, in a narrow fluting voice that had an echo of the pulpit in it, ‘that we might as well be whores. We show off what we have and people pay to watch us. What do they call us, “caterpillars of the commonwealth”, “painted sepulchres”?’
‘Puritans say that,’ I said.
‘Not only them. It is a commonly held view. Even so, we are crawling very slowly towards respectability, very slowly indeed. Why are you on stage then, in this despised popular business?’
‘I like showing off,’ I said without thinking. ‘I like being watched, I suppose,’ I said, more slowly.
‘Good, Master Revill,’ said Burbage. ‘I like that. Remind me of what you appeared in with the Admiral’s.’
‘I was in Robert, Earl of Huntingdon and a thing called Look About You. Small parts. .’
‘We must all start somewhere,’ said Burbage.
I said nothing; I had already said too much. A man slipped across the background of the room, and glanced curiously in my direction for a moment. He looked like Master Burbage, the same tapering beard, a similar brown gaze. I wondered if it was Cuthbert, brother to Richard Burbage and the one who managed the business. Burbage craned round in his chair and nodded, and then the man was gone. I must have looked a query.
‘Our author,’ he said. ‘He is the Ghost.’
Indeed there was something ghost-like about the other man’s manner of slipping into and then out of the room, something almost insinuating. Not Cuthbert Burbage therefore.
‘He is the Ghost in the play in question, the one we were talking about.’
‘I remember the ghost appearing, on the battlements,’ I said. “Angels and ministers of grace defend us!” I said.
‘Yes, it is a good beginning,’ said Burbage. ‘I cannot think when our, ah, congregation has fallen so quiet so soon at the start of things.’
‘And the ghost appears in the bedchamber too,’ I said, eager to show off my knowledge.
‘Indeed he does,’ said Burbage.
‘But only to Prince Hamlet, the Queen can’t see him. I wondered why that was.’
‘You’ll have to ask our author, even though I fear you’ll soon find yourself — like the rest of us — too busy for that sort of speculation,’ said Burbage. ‘To business. We may need you for two weeks. That is the time Jack Wilson is likely to be away. His mother is dying in Norwich and not quickly, he has been informed. He left early this morning.’
‘I will take on all his parts?’
‘Let me see. You’ll do the townsman in A City Pleasure and Cinna in Julius Caesar-’
‘Cinna the conspirator?’ I interrupted. Here was a part with a little weight.
‘Not Cinna the conspirator but Cinna the poet,’ said Burbage. ‘You appear and are promptly killed by mistake, to show the indiscriminate bloodlust of the mob. You will do the cobbler at the beginning of the same play and Clitus or Strato at the end, I forget which. The Roman play is two weeks away, when you will also have the part of Maximus in Love’s Sacrifice. Despite the name the part is rather small, I’m afraid. Now this week, you are to be a clownish countryman in A Somerset Tragedy — you can do the voice?’
‘Why, zur, ’tis where I was born. Zummerzet is the place of my naivety, you might say.’
‘Good,’ said Burbage. ‘Then at some point you must be a French count and an Italian Machiavel — but not in the same play.’
He raised a hand slightly as if to prevent my showing my mastery of a French or Italian accent.
‘And of course you will appear in the play about the Prince of Denmark this afternoon.’
‘As. .?’
‘Don’t worry, Master Revill, your parts are very small, you may grasp them in twenty minutes. You will appear in the dumb-show as the poisoner, and then again as the nephew to the King-’
I felt a tightness in my chest. My eyes swam.
‘But that is your. . I mean. . you are. .’
The nephew to the King! Everyone knows that is the principal part in the play! Master Burbage’s part. He wasn’t seriously expecting me to take his role, and anyway how could I? The scroll containing the lines would run across the floor of the room we were sitting in and then all the way up the wall to the ceiling! Hardly to be learned in twenty minutes even if I prided myself on the speed with which I could seize on a part. I was about to say something of all this when Burbage caught my panicked expression.
‘Ah I see,’ said Burbage. ‘No no, I don’t mean that nephew to the King, I mean the nephew to the King in the play inside the play. As such you are only required to come out, look dark, and rub your hands in glee. Essentially, you are repeating the process you enacted in the dumb-show a few moments earlier.’
‘I have lines?’
‘You unburden yourself of a handful of couplets and of the poison which you are carrying. You can play this badly because the murderer is intended to be gloating and obvious. In fact, the worse you play this part of nephew to the player King, the better. It takes skill to play badly. Deliberately badly.’
‘Oh,’ I said, obscurely disappointed, but also relieved.
‘Then you are interrupted by the King, the real King. He is naturally disturbed by what he sees on stage, on the stage which we are to imagine on the real stage, that is.’