‘Oh Nick.’
‘Nell.’
‘But you haven’t come yet, come on, I mean.’
‘Oh that. I forgot that for an instant. You are a lovely oblivion. Let me get my breath back. That’s better. But I do appear at the last moment, see, and almost the final words in the play belong to me. As the ambassador from England I stride on stage, diplomatically but confidently, to tell Claudius that his commandment has been fulfilled to the letter. The young men bearing the warrant are dead. Hamlet, you see, switched their names for his while they were on the boat. All this doesn’t make such an impression because at my feet are a dead King, a dead Queen, a dead Laertes and of course a dead Hamlet. “The sight is dismal”.’
‘That’s nice, Nick.’
‘It’s a grim story.’
‘Your arm round me like this.’
‘Funny thing is the spectators are cheerful enough when it’s all finished and we are in the Company, too. I’ve noticed before, people’s spirits are often lifted by a tragedy — while our comedies can leave them thoughtful, even disgruntled.’
Nell grunted something herself but she was already halfway to sleep. Hard day for her too. I wondered how many clients she’d entertained, and, as usual, struggled to stifle the thought. With her snuggled into me, and the evening light slanting on the panelled wood above my bed, I was glad to have some time to myself. I went over the afternoon in the playhouse again, like someone savouring a meal in retrospect. Naturally, I could not claim the lion’s share of anything in the way of lines, attention, applause. Rather than being the lion, I was the whelp. Still, the whelp remembers, and dreams of the day when he will take his rightful place at the feast.
While I was waiting in the tiring-house, much earlier than necessary, I’d seen our author dressed as the Ghost, that is, wearing armour — for Hamlet’s father’s spirit is in arms to signify that there is something rotten in the state of Denmark. I had it in mind to thank him again for saving me from the boatman that morning but he looked at me vaguely as if he were already making his transition to an incorporeal state. I went back to studying my lines for A City Pleasure: here I had a part of substance (at least eighty lines) as a man about town, and I was grateful that there’d be a rehearsal the next morning for we had to play the very next afternoon. Jobbing actors have frequently to step into sick or absent men’s shoes, and their first acquaintance with the play might be when they find themselves in front of three hundred groundlings impatient for the Company clown or tragedian.
So, to taste again my beginnings, my first course, with the Chamberlain’s Men.
My very first appearance in the tragedy of the Prince of Denmark is in the dumb-show that precedes the play inside the play, as Master Burbage termed it. I am the fellow that mimes the removal of the crown of the sleeping ‘King’ and pours poison in his ear; voicelessly, I condole with the widowed ‘Queen’; without a word, I make ardent love to her. I put expression into my action: the grasping hand that fondles the crown is the hand that tilts the imagined phial over the sleeper and the same hand that reaches towards the breast area of the flaxen-haired apprentice boy who is playing the player ‘Queen’. My hand is, I feel, a speaking hand. As this takes place I observe that Claudius and Gertrude are chatting together, while on the other side of the stage Hamlet is all eyes. I realise that Claudius must not understand too soon what is happening. And I see how tidily our author has, as it were, comprised all audiences in this royal audience: one half is always more interested in its own affairs even as the other forgets itself in the action. I do not notice this at the time but only as I think about it afterwards, lying in my bed next to my whore Nell. Then the riches of this play are laid open for me, right after Nell has laid herself open for me, and my unsleeping brain at once wants to throw a bridge across these two kinds of understanding or knowing. . but I can make nothing of this at the moment.
After the dumb-show I reappear as Lucianus, nephew to the ‘King’. And this is something else that baffles me, that I should play the nephew. But none of this matters because I am upstaged by the King Claudius rushing off, crying out for light. And we ‘players’ are about to slink away because it is evident that we have displeased the King (the real King, that is), and then my lord Hamlet wrings our hands and claps our shoulders because we have pleased him greatly. And this is the fortune of the player in little! Up and down like a bucket in a well. Today a Claudius, tomorrow a Cassius, that’s the way of it. In the tiring-house once more, after I’ve conned A City Pleasure I make a pretence of studying my part in A Somerset Tragedy. Here I am a rustic boor. But I am really observing my fellows in the Chamberlain’s Company, and learning to put names to faces: Master Phillips, for example, or Cowley or Gough or Pope.
And before I know it I am out again as the ambassador from England, come with the news that Hamlet’s old schoolfriends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead. But, as I’d said to Nell, this doesn’t go for much when rather more significant characters have bitten the dust. This time I am upstaged by Hamlet’s one genuine friend, Horatio, who informs the newcomer Fortinbras that he alone has the truth to tell. And now Fortinbras, who writes finis to the play, takes charge of everything, including the throne of Denmark. His first and last royal act is to order a military funeral for Hamlet. Then, like in most plays, we end with a little dance so that everyone goes off happy to their next diversion. The sun is shining behind the tower and tiring-house which throw their shadows across the groundlings and the lower seats. Hats bob, tobacco smoke weaves its way upwards, limbs are flexed in time with us as we jig on stage. The spectators make their dispositions.
Nell stirred and rolled away from me slightly. I took advantage of this to get up for a piss in the jerry in the corner of the room. Sometimes after I’d been with Nell I washed my equipment in wine — there was no insult to her in it, she’d told me herself of this method of prophylaxis. Once I’d tried vinegar, but once only. Hard pissing being also recommended as a defence against the perils of venery — and in the absence of a jug of white wine — I pushed the stream out with all the force I could muster. Then, bare-assed as Adam, I went to stand by the window.
My room was on the third floor of Mistress Ransom’s. She was a pale, crabbed woman and kept a filthy establishment whose only merit was its cheapness. By contrast the brothel where Nell toiled was quite spick and span. Mistress Ransom claimed to be scandalised by the proximity of the whore-houses, playhouses and taverns, and went round with a how-I’ve-come-down-in-the-world air. She kept her nose canted up. This enabled her to overlook the filth underfoot and also indicated that she was somehow gazing at a higher social shelf from which she’d been dislodged by a brutish world. When she discovered I was a parson’s son, she could hardly wait to offer me a room. She was a little disappointed when I added that I was a player. In atonement, I made the mistake of hinting that my father’d left me a little fortune (said in such a way as to suggest that little was large) and that I was only toying with the stage. I wanted to ingratiate myself; I needed a cheap room. The fortune my father had left me was little indeed and now almost exhausted.
Mistress Ransom overcame her objections to players, however, within a day or two of my arrival. She loosed her daughter on me. Where old Ransom was pale, young Ransom was on fire. Young Ransom had perhaps twenty nine years to her debit. Her flaming red hair was matched by her flaring face. The bumps and lumps on it flickered like embers. The husband of Mistress Ransom was dead, I was given to understand, though I suspected he had merely decamped. Dead or fled, he must have had a fiery trade, as cook, baker or smith, and stamped its impress on his daughter. Little Ransom, who was twice her mother’s size, came to my room on various pretences: