As I came off after the dumb-show I saw Master WS looking at me most strangely. He had no part in the play-within-the-play or in the court scene in which it unfolds, but he was due on very shortly afterwards, a visitor in Gertrude’s bedchamber where the Ghost appears — though only to Hamlet’s eyes — for the last time. Master WS had removed the armour worn in the opening scenes on the castle battlements and was garbed in a night-gown. Now he is to become a wistfully reproachful Ghost, dressed as he might have been in life had he visited his wife’s chamber. He stretches his arms across the divide between the living and the dead but the Queen does not see him.
I noticed that Master William Shakespeare, the Ghost in a nightgown, was looking at Master Nicholas Revill, the player-poisoner dressed in a dead man’s mantle. He was wondering why I wasn’t wearing my proper costume. He was wondering where he had seen my outfit before. He began to make towards me, but at that moment I heard my cue.
The Player Queen has just wished a good sleep to the Player King,
Sleep rock thy brain,
And never come mischance between us twain
and when she exits I enter. As I did my fear dropped away. I became master of the stage. There was a appreciative intake of breath from five hundred people, the little gasp of satisfaction that comes from seeing a villain about to do his worst. While Hamlet flew around talking to Claudius and Ophelia in state of high old excitement, I stood rubbing my hands and pulling naughty expressions.
On the line ‘leave thy damnable faces’ I stepped forward to the recumbent body of Master Robert Mink. He was on the ground with his back to the double audience, that is the court audience of Elsinore and the real audience in the Globe. Before lying down to sleep in his ‘orchard’ he had carefully laid his crown to one side. As I moved forward, I threw covetous glances at this golden ring. I crouched down and reached out a finger towards it, tentatively, as if it were a hot pan. Then I stood upright, fumbled beneath the cloak for the phial of poison and spoke over the sleeping king. I noticed Master Mink regarding me with his open eyes.
With a trembling excitement I got to the end of the bit written by Master WS.
At this point I should have poured the poison into the sleeper’s ears. Instead I went on:
Then I bent forward to deliver my poison. And several things happened at once, some of them expected, some not. What should happen as the poison is poured is disarray. My lord Hamlet speaks quickly to King Claudius and the rest, explaining how this is only a play they’re watching. But his words have no effect, and the guilty King shouts for light and dashes for the exit.
What actually happened was this: the players who made up the court spectators, including Dick Burbage as the Prince, at once realised that I’d started to improvise. I sensed rather than saw their slightly puzzled looks and altered postures. What does this provincial lad think he’s doing? How dare he tamper with the lines written by Master WS, author, player and chief shareholder! Where is he taking us? And, if they were listening to the words I was uttering, they would wonder what I was talking about. The references to Adrian the steward, to Old Nick, the dead apothecary, the warnings to the murderer that all his acts serve but to enmesh him more helplessly in the nets of hell, all this had a private meaning that was far from the purpose of the speech as written for Lucianus, nephew to the king. What the Globe audience made of it was anyone’s guess. Probably hardly a one of them noticed anything was amiss. You’d have to know the play very well, as William Eliot did, to be aware of this little straying from the path.
In any case Burbage and the others retrieved the situation brilliantly, as you’d expect. Hamlet spoke his lines, Claudius panicked and headed for the exit. The agitated court dispersed. The overlooked players slunk off, puzzled at the extreme expression of kingly disapproval which their drama had provoked.
I’ve left the most important detail till last.
As I delivered my own inferior lines and leaned forward to discharge the poison into the sleeping king’s ear, I saw Robert Mink’s eyes fixed unblinkingly on me from his position on the stage floor. He took in my tall black hat, he took in my sable-coloured mantle. Like the other players he was aware that I had departed from the text in the lines which I uttered. Unlike them he did not seem baffled. Then it shot through me with the speed of an arrow.
He was the murderer!
Master Mink, who had given me the note for my Lady Alice on my second afternoon in the theatre. Who had hidden up a tree in an orchard in the springtime and secured the death of Sir William, her husband and his rival. Who had enticed poor innocent Francis to his death. Who had put an end to Old Nick and hung him up in the air. Who had urged false Adrian and fat Ralph and dumb Nub to do away with me most viciously. And all this for the love or lust of Lady Alice, so that he might possess her or her property, or both. Just as Claudius slays his brother so that he may lay his hands on wife or crown, or both. Had I not seen, during our meeting in the Ram, how he regarded himself as a true (and spurned) lover? For sure, the fervour and the self-pity with which he had delivered the Lover’s Lament had not been counterfeit. Had I not also witnessed his casual malice, the way he held the unfortunate potboy’s hand over the candle? Master Mink, I saw clearly (even though my brain was wild and whirling), was that most dangerous kind of man who is all sweet and easy on one side to conceal what is crabbed and angry on the other.
This takes many minutes to commit to paper but so fast is our understanding sometimes, that all these things I knew for true in less time than it takes to say ‘one’.
I believe too that my state — exhausted, cut and bruised, newly escaped from the threat of emasculation and death, red-handed with the blows inflicted on the false steward Adrian, conscious that my time with the finest, most noble company of players in the world had now run its course and that I would in future live my life as an humble swineherd, away from the terrors and temptations of this busy city — I believe, I say, that my strange state of mind and my fatigued body gave me an especial understanding. Standing not quite at right angles to the world, I saw more clear what was the case. And the case was not good.
This ‘understanding’ passed between us, Revill and Mink, without words, and Master Mink, he looked both sad and glad. Sad that his secret had been discovered yet also glad to have been found out.
Then he was up and off, escaping like Claudius from the unearthing of his crime. Yet to any onlooker his departure was simply in character. Like the rest of the players he departs quickly but quietly, to avoid the King’s anger and also to leave the stage free for Hamlet and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.