By
Donald Freed and Geoffrey Forward
© 2012 Donald Freed and Geoffrey Forward
(Selections from Act I)
So this is the new Globe, the Phoenix of the Bankside, the mistress…mother… of us all. "Age cannot wither, nor custome stale her infinite variety."
My mother called her the whore of Babylon. “And on her forehead was written: Mystery, Babylon the Great, the Mother of harlots and the Abominations of the Earth.” (Revelation 17:5) My mother thought I should be a schoolmaster or preacher. Popish or Puritan, do you think. No matter, in England, thanks be to God and Crown, we’re free to worship as we please in the one true Church of England, at peril of our everlasting soul or discomfiture of our body. They know your heart, God and spymaster Walsingham. My one angel says we are saved by Grace, my other angel says tis by our acts. No matter, decrees our Queen, so We see your name on the parish rolls come a’Sunday. Come a’Sunday there’s not a man in England but he equivocates his soul to God and Crown for life, land and liberty. Only speak softly lest we raise that devil, Thomas Norton, back from the demon’s dungeon. The people called him Rack-Master General. He complained to Walsingham and Burleigh he misliked the nickname his neighbors gave him, when he was only doing his duty to God and the Crown, rooting out sedition. Yet he bragged that under his careful ministrations his guests left the comfort of their rack fully one foot taller than they entered. In saying so I mean no sedition nor speak no treason. Only a fool or a madman would indict authority in God and Crown. Speak the truth, my father said, and offend no man. Speak truth AND do no offense. There’s a paradox on the horns of a dilemma destined for a great reckoning in a little room. Kit Marlowe…We remember lessons learned. Well, as the gentleman said, if you can’t say some’at good say naught at all.
(He looks at the new Globe, walks about the stage, touching and smelling.)
New wood. Fifteen years of passion and toil on those old boards and at the last--poof--all of it--boards and beams. Nothing more than a gun-powder spectacle for the Bankside mob. A cleansing by fire…the resurrection and the life.
A full house in that roaring inferno and not a soul lost, thanks be to God. Only, I'm told, the backside of Henry Condell's best britches burnt out and himself like to be broiled -- but for the providence of a quick-witted fellow with a full pot of ale. A close call, eh, Henry. Well, a lesson from the Lord. But did Henry give thanks for divine intervention? Nay, if I know him, he complained that, "It was a wonderful waste of good ale, putting it to that end."
The old Theater, over in Shoreditch, you know, was the first playhouse to be built in England. Old Burbage, Dick and Cuthbert's father, built it. We used its timbers to build the first Globe. The one that burnt down here.
(He laughs at a memory.)
We had some sport carrying it over from Shoreditch over the Thames to Bankside. Built it from the selfsame timbers. I can still see Mother Burbage, God rest her soul, swinging her broom, beating back wicked Giles Alleyn's henchmen.
Do you ken the tale? The lease for the ground where the Theater stood was up. And by a trick, Giles Alleyn, the Puritan rascal who owned the property, let go by the time for signing a new lease. He had a mind to use the Theater, that we had built and paid for, for his own sport and profit. But he reckoned without the actors.
On a freezing, cold winter night, just after Christmas, 1598 it was, oh, it was bitter cold, we gathered at Burbage's tavern. God rest his soul. He was dead a twelve month then. But Mother Burbage, God rest her soul now, she kept it up, with Cuthbert and Dick.
Round a roaring fire we warmed our stomachs with pints of ale and old Richard Street, a young man then, master carpenter, the builder indeed of all our playhouses, told us our best course was to pull down the Theater and carry its timbers across the Thames to Bankside. No sooner spoke than started. We downed our cups, pulled our hats down over our eyes, muffled our faces, and in the dead, still of that freezing night, the virgin snow squeeking under our boots, marched over to the Theater and carefully, tenderly, like the first disrobing a new mistress, began to dismantle her. Richard Street marking and noting every part, so we could put her back together again. But we had to dispatch our task swiftly lest we be troubled with the constable.
The noise waked the neighbors, Alleyn's righteous ruffians. They rushed in upon us, but we beat them back. Mother Burbage wielding her broom like Hercules' club. We held 'em at bay and bore the great Globe away on our backs over to Bankside. The Globe was born in battle and like the phoenix she rises from her own ashes.
"William, the players are here." That'd be my father's voice. And me running under the hot sun, running through the long grass, running down dusty Henley street, to leap into my father's robed lap in the "King's Chair.” To laugh until my sides ached at the antics of the clowns and my father had to hug me hard, lest I fall. And to be terrified by the villains and devils in red and black, with their long tails and forked sticks pushing sinners into the fires of Hell. The stuff of nightmares for a small child.
(A hammerclose by:Knock, knock, knock.)
Ugly hell, gape not...!
(Knocks again.)
Who's there, in the other devil's name?
(Knocks again.)
Open in the Queen's name.
(Will stamps to center stage.)
Crash open the door. Great muddy boots all over my mother's clean kitchen floor.
"John Shakespeare, come with us."
The Queen’s men, Walsingham, Tidwell, that monster, my father's name on a parish roll of religious non-conformists. You think the devil comes from burning hell? He goes to Chapel in the Queen's livery.
(Will is standing in shadow, the sun etching his face.)
I clung to my mother's skirts and watched in terror as they dragged him into the little room at the end of the hall and with a wonderful invention dislocated each of his fingers, one by one. "Names!" they wanted. "Names!" Who are the papists? Where hides the priest? Discover his hole. In the name of the God of Mercy they showed no pity. They flourished on the murmur of voices and screams of terror.
All my child's mind could see was the nightmare of hanging and boweling. Sitting high and safe on my father's strong shoulders and watching with the other children in the crowd, as the hangman pulled on the victim's legs, reaching up with his great knife, ripping him open, thrusting his hand inside, tearing out the bloody still struggling heart, holding it up in dripping, crimson triumph for all to see. Wiping the blood where it ran down his arm. I was certain that was next for my father. I sobbed in my mother's skirts, "Why doesn't he just pretend he conforms so they'll go away and leave him alone?" I cried, with a child's logic: "Just pretend..."
There I was, twenty-one years old and no future. Until Dick and his father’s company of players came to Stratford. They needed an extra actor—I had a play. And off I went to London town. "The devil’s playground," warned my mother.
Those were the days, eh, Dick, in Shoreditch. We showed the flag at the top of the Theater and blasted the trumpet every noon and all the world knew there would be a brave show that afternoon. That's our tradition, boys. You must take care the great church bells not drown out our trumpet call.
Hah! The Lord Mayor of London, that Winchester goose, would hear no music but the tolling of the bells. And didn't the chief magistrate, an hollow faced loon, and the preachers come after us with blood in their eye, claiming we were "enticing" and "harboring" the city's 'prentices in the theatre, thus affronting God...and mammon.
(He moves to position himself, as in a pulpit.)
You should have heard the preacher's righteous ravings. That battling Puritan, John Stockwood, thundering in the voice of God, from Paul's cross all over London:
Will not a filthy play with the blast of a trumpet sooner call to the playhouse a thousand, than an hour's tolling of a bell bring to the sermon a hundred. Oh, Sodom and Gomorrah! Oh, ye generation of vipers!
Ha, ha! The language was grander than anything in the playhouses. In fact, it was unfair competition. But we drowned them out. Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon, the Right Honorable, the Lord Chamberlain, God rest his soul, led us through those red sea years into the promised land. Ha! Shoreditch!
(Will does a little dance with the rhythm of his words.)
And there, among the whores and cut purses, the street singers, bear baiters, bull baiters, cock fighters, conny catchers, the rhymsters and tapsters, the vagabonds the rogues and sturdy beggars, to say nothing, my masters, of us, the finest actors in the world.
(He reaches a fever pitch.)
Thou seest it now -- A Noah's Ark crammed with every species to be found in London town. A tower of Babel, a...
I see Dick and Ben Jonson making mouths at me down there. I know, Dick. "Brevity is the soul of wit."
(He calms down.)
There were giants in the earth in those times and spectacles...
The plague. That was the one thing that had power to close these doors. It was everywhere. I can still smell it. The reek of rotting bodies. Oh, the pity of it, the Lord Archbishop would not appear in public save he had a quarter of a cut orange in his handkerchief pressed to his nose to take away the smell. All over London the plague hung like poison in the sick air. The rotten humidity seeping up from the dank earth. The jangling of the bells at sunset as they carried the daily dead to their shallow graves. "Cast out your dead. Have ye any dead bodies to bury." I ran out in the fields one day to escape the stench and there I stumbled on some dogs digging at a face in the ground. M'thought it would make me mad. I chased the curs away and covered the thing back up with a long stick. The lodgings all around me had red crosses on their doors signifying the presence of infection and the inscription: "Lord have mercy on our souls." Amen.
I was eating garlic, with butter and salt for breakfast. Wise men swore that would save me from the "wrath of God."
(He pauses, his memories like yesterday.)
I say the actor, Robert Brown, walking with a wand of red to warn us off. He lost his whole family. They were on my diet.
The city was another Bedlam. "Where sighs and groans and shrieks that rent the air were made, not marked. Where violent sorrow seemed a modern ecstasy."
(Selections from Act II)
But "good Queen Bess," as the children call her, lasted longer, it seemed, than old Father Time, and her wits were as sharp as her tongue to the end. She was as great in rage as age, and m'thought that when her Essex betrayed her that, like Cleopatra, her mighty heart would burst -- into an hundred thousand flaws. She made us forget, almost, that...
(He picks up the crown and examines it.)
...within the hollow Crowne
That rounds the mortal Temples of a King,
Keepes Death his Court, and there the Antique sits...
[And] Comes at the last, and with a little Pinne
Bores through his castle walls, and farwell King.
(He carefully puts aside the skull and the crown and those memories.)
Those were dark days. The Essex rebellion, 1601. A year of slings and arrows and unbearable tribulations. Essex beheaded. Southampton sent to the Tower for his part in it.
We actors called before the Star Chamber to answer for our treason. I still tremble when I think of it. Powerless, like a little boy watching his father and hearing his cries.
The Lord Chamberlaine kept us out of prison, or worse. It pays to have powerful friends in high places.
My father died in September of that year.
“I have of late—but wherefore I know not—lost all my mirth….”
That was Hamlet…and me, too. No more comedies.
Melancholy filled my whole body and all my heart. My son was dead. My father dead. My mother, God rest her soul… To her I'd lost my soul and I was dead to her.
Look, I made Dick cry. Well, turnabout is fair play, Dick. How many times have you made me cry. Reduced us all to tears. The greatest actor in England.
I don't have another play for you, Dick. Perhaps, someday, for this brave lady, before I leave this great stage of fools.
(He begins preparations to leave.)
But, till then I'll be in Stratford, dandling my grandchildren on my knee and waiting to see the new players, and some of the old, and taking the children to see 'em, too. "Ripeness is all."
(He is picking up props.)
So wee'l live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded Butterflies: and heere (poore Rogues)
Talk of Court newes, and wee'll talke with them too,
Who looses, and who wins; who's in, who's out;
And take upon's the mystery of things,
As if we were Gods spies:
(He walks down front to talk to Ben.)
Ben-Ben-Caliben. Dick, you've held me prisoner long enough. Come to Stratford and my daughter, Susanna, will make such delights: roast mutton, with spring potatoes and green peas, fresh from my own garden, I pick 'em myself.
And not only food, but time, to sit and listen to the birds sing, to fish and smell the flowers, to see the sun rise and watch the children grow.
I know a banke where the wilde time blowes
Where Oxlips and the nodding Violet growes,
Quite over-cannoped with luscious woodbine,
With sweet muske roses, and with Eglantine;
But that's all one. You have a new globe, a new world…
(He blows out the candle. The smoke spirals upward.)
Our mystery. Our mystery. The player's craft lasts but an instant; and yet, are we the "abstract and brief chronicles of the time." We have imitated nature; we have lived twice; we have made the stage a world; we are actors.
(The stage is almost dark, but Will's face is brightly lit.)