The others rose and identified themselves. I didn’t recognize any of them. Latecomers from the dressing room arrived, and the diverse mix of costumes now included every color, creating a confusion much more plausible than any coordinated costuming could be. This was Bloomsman’s idea, another of her innovations that seemed to give the players more freedom.
When the auburn-haired actress stood, she looked directly at me. Behind the mask of cosmetics (her mouth was a dangerous sickle of dark red) her grey eyes seemed colorless. “Caropia,” she said. I remained expressionless, and she smiled.
Then there was a rustle and a man stepped out of a dim back comer of the room. He was dressed in black, and his short hair was a light, dull blond. He had thin lips, and a wide jaw that made his face look square.
My heart was thumping rapidly. Bloomsman turned to him. “And you are?” she inquired.
“I am Velasquo,” the man said, and at that moment I felt extreme cold, as if suddenly probability had relaxed and all the air had left my side of the room. Something about the man—the turn of his nose—told me I should know him, and in my brain thoughtless energy ran through neural corridors, struggling in vain for recognition.
“That’s very good,” Bloomsman was saying. Everyone else was attending to their appearance, each of them preparing for his or her five thousandth, ten thousandth entrance… I felt isolated. “The whole cast is here. Is everyone familiar with the stage?” The question was ignored. Bloomsman pursed her lips into an expression of contempt. “Let’s begin.”
The curtain rose. Lights dimmed, and the audience was nothing but rows of white faces, which slowly became indistinct, like blobs of dough, then faded away in the deeper gloom. Small rustlings ended, and the little room was perfectly silent, perfectly dark.
A shaft of blue light, so faint that it first appeared to be only a seam in the blackness, gained strength and defined center stage. Into this conjuration of blue walked Velasquo, who stopped as if snared by it. He turned to face the audience, and from my vantage point at stage right I could see his sharp profile, and the light hair, now glazed blue, and a suddenly raised hand, in which a sheet of paper fluttered. He spoke, in a nasal tenor:
“This note commands me: I must have revenge!”
He read the note aloud. It was a garbled, nearly incoherent document, which informed him that his father the old Duke had been murdered, “poison’d by a spider in his bed,” and exhorted him to vengeance. It made only obscure references to the identity of the killer—”What now seems finest is most ill”—and Velasquo threw it down in disgust.
He explained to the audience that his father’s death had been unexpected and mysterious; it had been attributed to overeating by Elazar, a doctor of doubtful reputation. He saw now that the foul play had been obvious. Bitterly he described the corrupt court of Naples, which, under the “dull and amiable” hand of his elder brother Pallio, now the Duke, had become the plaything of riotous sycophants. Pallio was too stupid to want to search for a murderer. (I listened with great interest.) The rest of the court was too evil, and probably somehow implicated in the deed. Only his sister Caropia remained untainted. As he described the rest of us, one by one, my mind reverberated with the memory of the play, which hovered just on the edge of consciousness. Suddenly I knew the end of the play; the tangled plots that led to it were still a blank, but there were tendrils of association that linked each character with his final fate, and I saw the culmination, the vivid murders, my own death, the bloody, corpse-littered stage.
Shaken, I watched Velasquo walk toward me. I had never divined the end of the play so soon before— Velasquo raised his voice, and my attention was drawn back to him. He vowed to look for the note’s author, who clearly knew more than he had written, and then search for the killer:
That was my cue.
I walked on stage and an aura of blue light surrounded me. Velasquo greeted me and I replied a bit too loudly, I thought, for the size of the room. I began concentrating, working to express naturally lines I had never spoken, doing that improvisation of stance and gesture which makes ours so much different from the acting in any previous tradition.
His eyes never leaving me, Velasquo suddenly told me of the contents of the note— “Our poor father has been most foully murdered!”
My mouth fell open. “But nay,” I objected, “he’s dead.” Velasquo ignored me and proceeded to describe the deed, in much more elaborate detail than the mysterious letter had as if the bald mention of the crime had brought the scene up full-bloom in his imagination. At the end of the gruesome tale I said, “That’s not so well done, brother!” and continued to make stupid exclamations of shock as Velasquo listed the rest of the potential assassins at court. Finally be exhorted me to vengeance, and I eagerly agreed to help him. “I’ll be your constant aid. But now, what shall we tell our holy sister?”
“Nothing.”
With an audible snap the stage was flooded in white and yellow light, and nearly the entire cast paraded on. Velasquo moved away from me and drifted off through the colorful throng. The Cardinal led his retinue on, and I performed my function as Duke by calling, in a clear falsetto, for order amongst the revellers. One of the Cardinal’s men proposed a masque, to be held two days hence, and I gave the idea my ducal approval. At the other side of the stage Sanguinetto voiced caustic, railing asides, which were making the audience laugh; in my peripheral vision I could see their mouths opening, faint in the wash of light from the stage. The Cardinal lost several lines by speaking too soon. I had no idea what he had said, and wondered if I had been cued. It was always at this point, in the first crowd scene, that confusions were most likely to occur…
Caropia entered in a white gown, holding a cross at her breast. By the obsequious gestures of the others it was clear she was revered by all. Even Sanguinetto was silent, I went to her and she held out the cross; I kissed it. Velasquo did the same, and the Cardinal bowed deeply. She went to him and they began a quick exchange that the rest of us were supposed to ignore. I remembered my blocking, voiced in Bloomsman’s dry tones—“Mime dialogue with Velasquo, far stage left.”
Velasquo grabbed my arm and pulled me there. I mouthed words and he stared at my forehead. His mustard-brown eyes were nearly crossed in their intensity. Again I had the over powering sensation of presque vu which told me I almost knew him. He mouthed words and as my memory supplied his high, rasplike voice, the sensation of recognition grew to something like panic. Abruptly he turned and began his exit, yet he looked back at me, as if in response to my inner turmoil; his head swiveled almost completely over his right shoulder. At once I knew him.
I stepped back. He squinted slightly, surprised by the move. I turned and crossed the stage, unable to face him, and halted only when I was alone in the narrow corridor between the wings and the prop room.
He was the Hieronrnno, I was certain of it. Was he?
Hieronomo is the hero of Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedie, the first and most influential of English revenge dramas. In it Hieronomo’s son is killed by noblemen of the Spanish court. Hieronomo feigns insanity to facilitate his revenge, but despair pushes the imitation into reality, and by the time he completes his vengeance he is mad.
Someone playing this role had apparently experienced a similar breakdown: the previous December, in a performance at the Kean Theatre, the actor playing Hieronomo’s foe, the old Duke. had actually died, killed by a knife with a loose button-tip. By the time this was discovered, the Hieronomo had disappeared.