Death of Kings by Philip Gooden Page B

with the inevitable questions: Who was she? Whose house where they coming out of (not Master
WS’s, for I happened to know he lodged in the Liberty of the Clink a few streets off)? And the inevitable question that slips through your mind whenever you see a man and a woman together,
close together, easy together – you know the question that I mean.
    Then I put them out of mind until that afternoon’s performance at the Globe. Or rather after the performance, when we were changing from our costumes into our day-clothes. When players are
disrobing in the tiring-house after a presentation, some of us have no greater delight than in picking over performances and comparing them with the previous day’s or week’s. Once
we’ve looked at ourselves in the glass, as it were, we turn to the audience. You, mere (but dear) spectators or attenders at the event, may be surprised to learn that
your
performance
too is assessed and weighed by the players. Like us, you can be good, or bad or indifferent. You might have been quick to understand things that afternoon or, perhaps, especially slow-witted. You
will be judged on your attentiveness, your readiness to be distracted, your promptness in laughter, your capacity for tears. Individual members of the crowd will be selected for praise and
dispraise: the man who laughed loud and long, the woman who was showing a lot of tit.
    As you might expect, it was the younger members of the company who tended to hang around. The older, sensible ones, who had other business or homes to attend to, usually disappeared after a few
comradely insults, observations and pleasantries. On the margins of this scene hovered the Tire-man and his assistant, receiving the discarded costumes before lovingly placing them back in store.
We’d been playing something not bad in its own way, a madcap piece called
A Merry Old World, My Masters.
    It was the boy-player Martin Hancock who twitted me about a woman he’d noticed among the audience standing next to the stage.
    “I tell you, Nicholas, she was much moved by your plight as Quentin. She was all eyes for you, deserted by your lover in favour of that rich old man.”
    While I was pleased enough to be told that I had touched a member of the audience, I did not quite believe young Master Hancock, particularly because it was he who’d played the faithless
young Zanche in our
Merry Old World.
    “You mean she was not looking at you,” I said.
    “Oh, her eye was for you and it was open,” said Hancock, deadpan in his double meanings.
    “The one in a scarlet dress, you mean?”
    “No, the one
I
mean was in something dark.”
    “Describe her more exactly.”
    “She was about my height,” he said, “and my colouring but deeper.”
    “Not fair then?”
    “No but certainly not foul neither.”
    “Well, Martin, I must thank you for seeking out opportunities for me, though I am well enough furnished already.”
    I was thinking of my Nell.
    “Then here comes another piece of furniture, Nick.”
    “What? Where?”
    “The woman I was talking about, the one who was ogling you.
    I turned round and glimpsed through the backs and shoulders of my fellows a slight figure making her way across the Tiring-house. It was the same woman I’d seen coming out of the Southwark
doorway with WS that morning. This individual was no stranger to some of our company, however. She seemed to be handing out what looked like sweetmeats or confectionary, almost with the air of a
mother rewarding good children. Then she approached Jack Horner and clasped him in a quite companionable way. Jack looked a little uncomfortable, as men sometimes do when they are accosted by a
loved one at their place of work.
    “She is already spoken for, I think,” I said to Martin Hancock.
    Before he could think up some indecent reply we were interrupted by Jack, still in his costume. The dark woman followed him at heels.
    “Nick, Martin, my wife here is eager to meet Quentin and his