Nick Revill of the King’s Men… a company of players whose home is the Globe Theatre… which is an edifice in Southwark… which is a borough on the South Bank of the Thames. The South Bank? The unrespectable side, I hear you say. All those brothels and bear-pits and taverns and prisons. But what I say back to you is this: despite our brothels and bear-pits, we have some famous people for friends. Take the King, for example. Yes, King James — the first of that name to rule over England (but the sixth of that name in his native Scotland) — he is our patron. And William Shakespeare, he’s one of our shareholders as well as our chief writer. He is famous, our Mr Shakespeare. You have heard of him, haven’t you…?
Rambling on like this to myself, I must have slipped back into an alcoholic stupor. I could even hear the sound of my own snoring, an odd effect. When I came to myself once more, the throbbing in my head had eased, and my limbs felt less like pieces of cast-iron. It was still the middle of the night, though. Blackness pressed against my eyelids, while the bed I lay on continued to sway gently as if I was afloat on a sea of ale.
And at that moment a doubt started to burrow into my clotted brain. I pinched at the material beneath my splayed hand. The fustian bedding supplied by my landlady, Mrs Ellis, might not be of the highest quality, but it was less coarse than what I now felt at my fingers’ ends. Mrs Ellis’s mattress would probably not have been good enough for the King of England (and Scotland) but it was a nest of luxury compared with what I was currently lying on.
I sniffed the air. I was used to the smell of my bedchamber, the mouldy odour of the plaster, the faint taint of soot in the air. I could smell damp here, too, but it was a different and more bracing style of damp. There was no sootiness in the air, either. Alert now, I strained my ears but heard nothing familiar. No ringing church bells, no neighbourly cries, no sound of cartwheels rising up from my street, Tooley Street. Instead, there were ominous creaking noises and what sounded like rain gurgling down the street-kennels. A lot of rain.
Only now did I dare to open my eyes, but slowly, as if afraid of what I was about to see. It was so dim that I sensed rather than saw a low wooden ceiling with cracks and empty knot-holes that admitted a little daylight. Only a little light but sufficient to reveal that, wherever I was, it was not my top-floor bedchamber in Tooley Street. And the explanation, which I had been holding at bay for many minutes, now flooded in on me.
The continuous rocking motion was explained. So, too, were those creaks and gurgles. My God, how had I woken up on a boat? How, in the name of Christ, had I come to board a boat in the first place? And not one of those ferries that plies the Thames under the command of a foul-mouthed boatman, but a proper vessel equipped for the open seas! How did I know all this? I struggled to put together the fragments of the previous evening but the effort was too great.
I shut my eyes more quickly than I’d opened them. Maybe if I kept them closed for long enough, then the whole scene would disappear. Maybe when I looked again I would be restored, body and soul, to Tooley Street. But the brain, which had been befuddled, now began to bring back the circumstances that had landed me on a seagoing vessel. A vessel called…? Let me see. Yes, the Argo. That was it. I could hear the man saying it. What was his name? Case, yes, Jonathan Case. I could hear Case saying, ‘My craft is the Argo. You’re an educated man, Mr Revill. You recognize the name, don’t you? The Argo. The vessel that Jason commanded in his quest for the golden fleece of antiquity.’
That was what Case had said, or as near as I can recall. After that, everything went a bit hazy — although in truth it had been hazy enough before.
With eyes still closed, I tried to put events in order, to make some sense of how I’d come to be on board the Argo. Because that was surely where I was, lying awkwardly in a swaying berth, listening to the groans of the ship’s timbers and the gurgling waters as they rushed past inches from where I lay. Was I already at sea? The thought was almost too terrifying to contemplate. Instead, I clung to the notion of land, dry land.
The previous evening I had definitely been on dry land. Very dry land indeed. Legal land, since we of the King’s Men were performing William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night in that den of lawyers, the Middle Temple. It was springtime, and although Twelfth Night may seem unseasonal it is a play for all times and every audience.
We’ve performed in the Middle Temple on previous occasions, and I have to say that the fledgling lawmen make for a coarser and more noisy audience than the groundlings at the Globe. Since they were well-off and educated, that’s what you would expect. Unlike the groundlings, the young lawyers did not stand on their hind legs but rather perched on bum-numbing benches in the well of the dining hall while their seniors — benchers and serjeants-at-law and the like — were enthroned on a dais at the opposite end to our makeshift stage. Many of these were in the company of lady guests, whose incessant chatter did not signify much interest in anything we poor players were up to. Don’t get me wrong. We were pleased enough with the audience. They paid well, and the men among them were (or soon would be) people of influence. More than other trades, players need friends in high places.
We had an especially elevated guest this evening. It was the French legate, the ambassador to England, a gentleman by the name of Antoine le Fevre de la Broderie. He and his entourage had pride of place in the middle of the dais. I don’t know why he was gracing us with his presence. Perhaps he was on friendly terms with the legal greybeards of the Temple. Perhaps he was a devotee of William Shakespeare. Certainly, a visit to this place was a simple enough matter for him, since the little patch of France-in-London which he inhabited was close by, in Salisbury Court off Fleet Street. However, my knowledge of Monsewer de la Broderie did not extend much further.
Where was I…? Ah, yes.
It is a grand place, this Middle Temple, regardless of the quality of its occupants. Above the dais are banks of varnished portraits which glimmer in the light of countless candles. The mighty roof, with its tiers of beams, dissolves into mysterious shadows. On everything is the lustre of power and wealth. And solemnity, if you ignore the braying young lawyers.
They particularly brayed at me, for I was playing that foolish knight, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, who blusters and threatens but whose sword turns to a piece of limp string when it comes to fighting a duel. Even though I never came to proper blows against my opponent, Viola (attired as the masculine Cesario), I received a painful injury which caused plenty of amusement in the pit of the Temple hall. He — or rather she — made an unexpected thrust at me with the foil and, when I twisted clumsily away to avoid it, I fell with a resounding clunk on the boards of our makeshift stage. As I scrambled to my feet with the guffaws of the lawyers ringing in my ears, I felt a stabbing sensation in my side which made me fear I might have cracked a rib.
Once we were offstage, Michael Donegrace, who was playing Viola-Cesario, was all concern until I reassured him that no damage had been done. He shouldn’t have lashed out at me unexpectedly, but, equally, I should have known how to avoid his foil or at least to have fallen without injuring myself. But I’ve noticed that accidents are more likely if you’re playing on strange territory.
By the time that Feste the clown had finished the play of Twelfth Night with his bitter-sweet song and we players had done a little jig — a cautious little jig for me — to round off the action, and once we had bowed to the applause, made our final exits, changed out of costume and quit the Temple, night had fallen. It was cold outside with a draught coming off the river. We wrapped ourselves tighter in our street clothes and looked towards the rest of the evening. Some were going home to wives and families, some to idle away their time in an alehouse, some to do the second thing before the first if they were willing to face their wives afterwards. I, lacking wife and child, could visit the alehouse without a qualm.