‘Does he die? By touching the pigment?’
‘Of course not. When did you ever hear of a murder plot going right in a tragedy?’
‘Death in an orchard,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘I was thinking of Hamlet, and the death of his father, and how it does not look like a murder.’
‘Quite different,’ said Master Mink, his triple chins wobbling in disagreement. ‘Anyway that didn’t go right in the long run, did it? The murderer never thrives. Master Shakespeare may stretch belief sometimes but there is a truth beyond mere fact, and he is in ample possession of it. But I fear that Master Highcliff with his Somerset farce masquerading as tragedy is another kettle of fish, a stinking kettle.’
‘Why do the Burbages put on this stuff then?’
‘Because it draws in the crowds, dear boy. The spectators want to see sin in all its varieties, they want to see fighting and fucking and fury, and then they want to see all of this punished — otherwise they will not go home comfortable. But I tell you one thing.’
‘What’s that?’
‘We are right to look down on the authors of this stuff. We are right to pay them so little. Master Shakespeare, of course, excepted. Him and one or two others. But for the most part they are journeymen. Where would the writers be without the players? We are the men of value.’
‘I do not have such a low opinion of authors,’ I said, daring to oppose this large and experienced man of the theatre.
‘Do you not?’ he said. ‘There is no time to discuss this now, we are due to begin our rehearsal, but I would be glad to continue this interview this evening if you find yourself in the vicinity of The Beast with Two Backs. It’s in Moor Street.’
‘Is that a pick-hatch?’
‘Merely a tavern. Its real name is The Tupping Rams or some such. At the south end of Moor Street, if you should find yourself in that neighbourhood tonight.’
After my participation in that morning’s rehearsal, I had to agree with Master Mink. I did not think that we would be performing A Somerset Tragedy more than once, as I told Nell late that afternoon. We were in her room. This was barely more than a closet in Holland’s Leaguer, not far from the bearpit. The women had their own rooms and were generally undisturbed as long as they paid an exorbitant rent to the madam and her one-eyed paramour (familiarly known as Cyclops). But the walls were thin, and cries and groans as well as intermittent thwacks penetrated our ears. The sounds were more reminiscent of Bedlam or one of the quarters of hell than a house of pleasure. I did not particularly enjoy meeting my Nell at her place of work, but for the moment my lodgings were on the far side of the river, and I had nowhere to roost on the south bank when I wished to see her. She had shut up her stall to the public for the day. Only now she had got her wares out again for a private browser.
‘Why are you so sure you’ll only play this play — whats-itcalled? — once?’
‘A Somerset Tragedy. It’s a poor piece,’ I said, with all the assurance of a few days in the Chamberlain’s Company.
‘You haven’t played it yet for the public. Maybe they’ll love it. You might have a great run, three or four performances.’
‘You get a feel for these things.’
‘As you have a feeling for this,’ she said, taking my hand and drawing it down.
‘Ah yes,’ I said.
A while later, she said: ‘Nick, the title of your piece is strange, is it not? The tragedy of Somerset.’
‘Why?’
‘I was remembering your father and your mother.’
‘But you never knew them, little Nell.’
‘But you have told me of them, Master Nicholas.’
Such remarks reminded me how young Nell was. And indeed I have noticed that these women — our doxies, our trulls and rude girls — who spend their days catering to the depraved tastes of fallen man have, as if by compensation, a most child-like tendency in them sometimes. Nell had asked me before about my parents, the parson and the parson’s wife, and encouraged me to talk about them. I attributed this to the fact that Nell had no idea who her parents were — or whether they were alive or dead. The woman she once called ‘mother’ was a mere neighbour, if a good-hearted one. Accordingly, with none of her own, she took an interest in my mother and father. Mine at least you could be certain of, for they were united in death.
I was away from the village when they died. In Bristol. On business about my playing, trying to inveigle my way into one of the touring companies, Dorset’s, Northumberland’s, I have forgotten which. My plans didn’t work out, and I’d spent a fruitless couple of weeks hanging around inn-yards trying to ingratiate myself with the players. My father did not approve. Players were parasites and crocodiles, double dealers and painted sepulchres. They were unnatural, because men are not intended by God to be other than they are, particularly not to play at being girls and women. The shows staged in inn-yards and other public places where players flaunted their filth were not only an incitement to disorder and lasciviousness in otherwise upright citizens, they were also a breeding ground for thieves, whores and knaves.
Needless to say, my father had never attended a play. But he knew what he hated. He also knew, like all good men, that God hated what he hated and was busy with punishment, punishment everyday and everywhere. This punishment most often came in the guise of diurnal accident and disaster. Whenever a calamity overtook the village — a house-fire, a sickness among the sheep, the failure of a crop — he looked for the cause in the sinfulness of the householder, the shepherd, the farmer. For larger catastrophes like the Spanish threat, which had gone before I was grown, or the plague, which never goes, he looked to sinfulness on a grand scale. As a nation, we English were all deeply and doubly dyed with the devil’s pitch. We teetered on the lip of the everlasting pit. The strangest thing with my father was that this sense of universal damnation went hand in hand with a loving-kindness towards his fellow humans, so that the householder or the shepherd or the farmer who had suffered calamity was certain to receive gentle words and a helping hand from him. He would thunder away in the pulpit, but when he descended from it he was the meekest, mildest fellow.
You may wonder that I can speak so lightly of what evidently weighed heavily on my father, this sense of sin — mine, yours, his, ours. But I have observed that an extreme course in a parent is likely to produce an opposite, though milder, response in the offspring. So a Puritan sires the whoremaster, while the rake begets a nun. If Nell were ever to discover her parents they’d no doubt turn out to be fine, upstanding citizens. Another explanation was that I’d heard my father’s message too often. Listening to him roar and thunder Sunday after Sunday, and through the week too, inoculated me. What he saw as sin I see mostly as frailty, while what he considered to be a punitive providence I think of as unlucky chance. Most of all, my father the parson reserved his greatest wrath for what he knew least, players and the playhouse. ‘The cause of plagues is sin, if you look to it well; and the cause of sin are plays; therefore the cause of plagues are plays.’ So he reasoned. All fell on deaf ears, however, for I don’t reckon that above one in fifty of us had ever seen what he was so energetically condemning.
And when the plague came to our region who should it strike but those who would have no truck with players and playhouses? I mean the good, honest, simple folk of my village. My mother and father were included in that number.
I came over the brow of the hill. It was a fine spring morning. The last traces of frost lingered under hedges and in the ruts on the track, but the air was soft with the promise of better times. I had failed in my attempt to join the touring players and had been walking from Bristol since three that morning. I should have been returning tired and with my tail between my legs but, perversely, I felt fresh and cheerful. In the distance was the glint of the Bristol Channel and, beyond, the hills of wild Wales stood out in the bright air. Down below was my village of Miching. I wondered what my father would say to the prodigal’s return. He would be glad I had not fallen among the sinful players but, humanly, he would wring my hand in sympathy at my disappointment. My mother, she would say nothing. I took one last look around from the heights and then plunged downhill. In the distance at the bottom of the valley was the cluster of cottages and huts separated by thread-like paths, the church and the manor house a little distant from the common people, the scattered farmsteads, everything that, together, went by the name of Miching.