A Gentleman Player; His Adventures on a Secret Mission for Queen Elizabeth. Robert Neilson Stephens

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СКАЧАТЬ in every thrust and parry, but, even so, there was need of a trained fencer's grace and precision in it. Good fencing was in itself a show worth seeing, in a time when every man knew how to wield one weapon or another.⁶

      The audience was wrought up to that pitch of interest which every fifth act ought to witness, when the final scene came on. Each man—especially among the apprentices, the soldiers, and the lords—constituted himself an umpire of the contest, and favored the fighters with comments and suggestions. The sympathy, of course, was with Hamlet, but no one could be blind to the facile play of the Laertes, who indeed had the skill to cover up his antagonist's deficiency with the weapon, and to make him appear really the victor. The courteous manner in which Hal confessed himself hit put the spectators into suitable mind for the better perceiving of his merit. There could be little doubt as to the outcome, had the fight been real, for Burbage was puffing in a way that made the queen's observation, "He's fat and scant of breath," most apt. During the sword-work, the lords and soldiers aired Italian fencing terms then current, in praising the good defence that "the mad girl's brother" made; and when he seemed to wound Hamlet, there burst out a burly voice from the midst of the yard, with:

      "I knew that thrust was coming, Master Marryott! Tis I—Kit Bottle!"

      When Laertes confessed his treachery and begged Hamlet's forgiveness, so well had Hal fenced and so well acted, he won such esteem of the audience as to die in the best odor. And when, at last, the rushes covering the stage boards were in turn covered with dead bodies, when the curtains closed, and the audience could be heard bustling noisily out of the theatre, Hal partook of the general jubilant relief, and hoped the beautiful young lady had indeed seen the last act from somewhere in the house. The actors arose from the dead, looked as if they had jointly and severally thrown off a great burden, and hastened to substitute their plainer clothes for their rich costumes.

      "Come with us to the Falcon for a cup or two, and then to the Mermaid to supper," said Shakespeare to Hal, as the latter was emerging from the theatre a few minutes later, dressed now in somewhat worn brown silk and velvet. With the poet were Masters Heminge, Sly, Condell, and Laurence Fletcher, manager for the company of players. The six walked off together, across the trodden field and along the street or roadway, drawing their short cloaks tight around them for the wind. The Falcon tavern was at the western end of the Bankside, separated from the river by a little garden with an arbor of vines. As the players were about to enter, the door opened, and a group of gentlemen could be seen coming from within, to take boat for the city or Westminster.

      "Stand close," said Fletcher, quickly, to the actors. "We may hear an opinion of the play. My lord Edgebury is the best judge of these matters in England."

      The players moved aside, and pretended to be reading one of their own bills, as the nobles passed.

      "It holdeth attention," my lord was saying to his companions, "but—fustian, fustian! Noise for the rabble in the yard. 'Twill last a week, perchance, for its allegory upon timely matters. But I give it no longer. 'Twill not live."

      "Gramercy!" quoth Sly to the players, with a comical smile. "He is more liberal than Gil Crowe, who gives it but three afternoons. Come into the tavern, lads, and a plague on all such prophets!"

      My lord Edgebury and Gil Crowe, ye are not dead yet. At all first nights do ye abound; in many leather-covered study-chairs do ye sit, busy with wet blankets and cold water. On this occasion, though no one knew it at the time, you were a trifle out of your reckoning—three hundred years, at least, as far as we may be sure now; not much, as planets and historians count, but quite a while as time goes with children.

CHAPTER II.

       Table of Contents

      AT THE TAVERNS.

      "We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow."—Henry IV., Part II.

      That this narrative—which is to be an account of things done, not an antiquarian "picture" of a past age—need not at every step be learnedly arrested by some description of a costume, street, house, aspect of society, feature of the time, or other such matter, let the reader be reminded at the outset that the year 1601 was of Elizabeth's reign the forty-second; that England was still in the first thrill of the greatest rejuvenescence the world ever knew; that new comforts, and new luxuries, and new thoughts, and new possibilities, and new means of pleasure, had given Englishmen a mad and boisterous zest for life; that gentlemen strutted in curiously shaped beards, and brilliant doublets, and silken trunk-hose, and ruffs, and laced velvet cloaks, and feathered hats; that ladies wore stiff bodices and vast sleeves, and robes open in front to show their petticoats, and farthingales to make those petticoats stand out; that many of these ladies painted their faces and used false hair; that the attire of both sexes shone with jewels and gold and silver; that London folk were, in brief, the most richly dressed in the world; that most ordinary London houses were of wood and plaster, and gabled, and built so that the projecting upper stories darkened the narrow streets below; that the many-colored moving spectacle in those streets was diversified by curious and admiring foreigners from everywhere; that although coaches were yet of recent introduction, the stone paving sounded with them as well as with the carts and drays of traffic; that gray churches, and desolated convents, and episcopal palaces, and gentlemen's inns, and turreted mansions of nobility, abounded in city and suburbs; that the Catholics were still occasional sufferers from such persecution as they in their time had dealt to the Protestants; that there were still some very proud and masterful great lords, although they now came to court, and had fine mansions in the Strand or other suburbs, and no longer fostered civil or private war in their great stone castles in the country; that bully 'prentices, in woollen caps and leather or canvas doublets, were as quick to resent real or fancied offence, with their knives, as gentlemen were with silver-gilt-hilted rapiers; that the taverns resounded with the fanciful oaths of heavily bearded soldiers who had fought in Flanders and Spain; that there were eager ears for every amazing lie of seafaring adventurers who had served under Drake or Raleigh against the Spanish; that tobacco was still a novelty, much relished and much affected; that ghosts and witches were believed in by all classes but perhaps a few "atheists" like Kit Marlowe and Sir Walter Raleigh; that untamed England was still "merry" with its jousts, its public spectacles, its rustic festivals, its holiday feasts, and its brawls, although Puritanism had already begun to show its spoil-sport face; and, to come to this particular first Monday in March, that the common London talk, when it was not of the private affairs of the talkers, had gone, for its theme, from the recent trial and death of the brave but restless Earl of Essex, to the proceedings now pending against certain of his lesser satellites in the Drury House conspiracy.

      Before entering the Falcon, Hal Marryott sent a last sweeping look in all directions, half daring to hope that the lady in gray and murrey had not yet left the vicinity of the theatre. But the audience had gone its countless ways; at the Falcon river-stairs the watermen's cries and the noise of much embarking had subsided; and the only women in sight were of the Bankside itself, and of a far different class from that of her whom he sought. He sighed and followed his companions into the tavern.

      They were passing through the common hall, on their way to a room where they could be served privately, when they were greeted by a tall, burly, black-bearded, bold-featured, weather-browned, middle-aged fellow in a greasy leather jerkin, an old worn-out red velvet doublet, and patched brown silk trunk-hose, and with a sorry-feathered remnant of a big-brimmed felt hat, a long sword and a dagger, these weapons hanging at his girdle. His shoes barely deserved the name, and his brown cloth cloak was a rag. His face had been glum and uneasy, but at sight of the players he instantly threw on the air of a dashing, bold rascal with whom all went merrily.

      "'The actors are come hither, my lord,'" he cried, with a flourish, quoting from the play of the afternoon. "A good piece of work, Master Shakespeare. СКАЧАТЬ