Ruled Britannia

turned toward Shakespeare and clapped his big, scarred hands.

When the afternoon came, the play went well. Thinking about it afterwards, Shakespeare shook his head.

The performance had gone well, but there was more to it than that. A couple of the gentlemen sitting at the side of the stage smoked their pipes so furiously, the thick tobacco fumes spoiled the view for the groundlings behind them. The rowdies, having paid their pennies, were convinced they were men as good as any others, and pelted the offenders with nuts and pebbles-one of them, flying high, incidentally hitting the boy playing Juliet just as he was about to wonder where Romeo was. They didn't quite have a riot, but Shakespeare had trouble figuring out why not.

'Ofttimes strange, but never dull,' he said in the tiring room. 'Pass me that basin, Dick, if you'd be so kind.'

'I'll do't,' Burbage said. Shakespeare splashed water on his face and scrubbed hard with a towel to get rid of powder and rouge and paint. He looked in a mirror, then scrubbed some more. After the second try, he nodded. 'There. Better. I have my own seeming once again.'

'I shouldn't be so proud of it, were I you,' Kemp said slyly.

'Were you I, you'd have a better seeming than you do,' Shakespeare retorted. People laughed louder than the joke deserved. The biter bit was always funny; Shakespeare had used the device to good effect in more than one play. Will Kemp bared his teeth in what might have been a smile. He found the joke hard to see.

'Magnificent, Master Will!' There stood Lieutenant Lope de Vega, a broad smile on his face. 'Truly magnificent!. Is something wrong?'

He'd seen Shakespeare start, then. 'No, nothing really,' Shakespeare answered, glad his actor's training gave his voice a property of easiness: for his was, without a doubt, a guilty start. 'You did surprise me, coming up so sudden.'

'I am sorry for it,' the Spaniard said. 'But this play-this play, sir, is splendid. This play is also closer to what someone-a man of genius, of course-might write in Spain than was If You Like It. though that too was most excellent, I haste to add.'

'You praise me past my deserts,' Shakespeare said modestly, though the compliments warmed him.

He'd never known a writer who disliked having others tell him how good he was. Some had trouble going on without hearing kind words at frequent intervals. Marlowe, for instance, bloomed like honeysuckles ripened by the sun at praise, but the icy fang of winter seemed to pierce his heart when his work met a sour reception-or, worse still, when it was ignored. He fed on plaudits, even more than most players. Shakespeare knew he had the same disease himself, but a milder case.

And Lope shook his head. 'Not at all, sir. You deserve more praises for this work than I have English to give you.' He gave Shakespeare several sentences of impassioned Spanish. Hearing that language in the tiring room made several people turn and mutter-the last thing Shakespeare wanted.

'I say again, sir, you are too generous,' he murmured. Lieutenant de Vega shook his head once more. He did, at least, return to English, though he kept talking about plays he'd seen in Madrid before the Armada sailed. This work of mine likes him well, for its nearness to that which he knew before-time, Shakespeare realized. That took some of the pleasure from the praise: what woman would want a man to say she was beautiful because she reminded him of his mother?

After some considerable time, de Vega said, 'But I do go on, is't not so?'

'By no means,' Shakespeare lied. He couldn't quite leave that alone, though. 'Did you write with celerity to match your speech, Master Lope, you'd astound the world with the plays that poured from your pen: you'd make yourself a very prodigy of words.'

'Were my duties less, my time to write were more,' the Spaniard answered, and Shakespeare thought he'd got away with it. But then de Vega reminded him that he was in fact Senior Lieutenant de Vega: 'In aid of my duties, sir, a question-what acquaintance had you with Edward Kelley, that he should call to you when on his way to the fire?'

I never saw him before in my life. That was what Shakespeare wanted to say. But a lie that at once declared itself a lie was worse than useless. Marlowe was right, damn him. De Vega is a Spaniard first, a groundling and player and poet only second. Picking his words with great care, the Englishman said, 'I shared tavern talk with him a handful of times over a handful of years, no more.' Though the tiring room was chilly, sweat trickled down his sides from under his arms.

But Lope de Vega only nodded. 'So I would have guessed. Whom would Kelley have known better, think you?'

Marlowe, Shakespeare thought, and damned his fellow poet again. Aloud, though, he said only, 'Not having known him well myself, I fear I cannot tell you.' He spread his hands in carefully simulated regret.

'Yes, I see.' Lope remained as polite as ever. Even so, he asked another question: 'Well, in whose company were you with this rogue, then?'

'I pray your pardon, but I can't recall.' Shakespeare used his player's training to hold his voice steady. 'I had not seen him for more than a year, perhaps for two, before we chanced to spy each the other in Tower Street.'

The Spaniard let it drop there. He went off to pay his respects to a pretty girl Shakespeare hadn't seen before, one who'd likely got past the tireman's assistants because she was so pretty. Whoever she was, de Vega's attentions made her giggle and simper and blush. Shakespeare could tell which actor she'd come to see-one of the hired men who played small parts, not a sharer-by the fellow's ever more unhappy expression. But the hired man had no weapon on his belt, while Lieutenant de Vega not only wore a rapier but, by the set of his body, knew what to do with it.

Not my concern, Shakespeare thought. He felt a moment's shame-surely the Levite who'd passed by on the other side of the road must have had some similar notion go through his mind-but strangled it in its cradle. Catching Burbage's eye, he asked, 'Shall we away?'

'Let's,' the other big man answered. With a theatrical swirl, Burbage wrapped his cloak around him: it had looked like rain all through the play, and, with day drawing to a close, the heavens were bound to start weeping soon.

A drunken groundling snored against the inner wall of the Theatre. 'They'll need to drag him without ere closing for the night,' Shakespeare said as the two players walked past him.

Richard Burbage shrugged. 'He's past reeling ripe-belike he's pickled enough to sleep there till the morrow, and save himself his penny for the new day's play.' But the idea of the man's getting off without paying that penny was enough to make him tell one of the gatekeepers outside the Theatre about the drunk. The man nodded and went off to deal with him.

Shakespeare skirted a puddle. Burbage, in stout boots, splashed through. It did begin to rain then, a hard, cold, nasty rain that made Shakespeare shiver. 'This is the sort of weather that turns to sleet,' he said.

'Early in the year,' Burbage said, but then he shrugged again. 'I shouldn't wonder if you have reason.'

They walked on. As the rain came down harder, more puddles formed in the mud of Shoreditch High Street. A woman lost her footing and, flailing her arms, fell on her backside. She screeched curses as she struggled to her feet, dripping and filthy. 'Would that Kemp had seen her there,' Shakespeare said. 'He'd filch her fall for his own turns.'

'Clowns.' Burbage packed a world of scorn into the word. 'The lackwits who watch 'em do laugh, wherefore they reckon themselves grander than the play they're in.'

Shakespeare nodded. Kemp in particular had a habit of extemporizing on stage. Sometimes his brand of wit drew more mirth than Shakespeare's. That was galling enough. But whether he got his laughs or not, his stepping away from the written part never failed to pull the play out of shape. Shakespeare said,

'Whether he know it or no, he's not the Earth, with other players sun and moon and planets spinning round his weighty self.'

'Or the Earth and all round the sun, as Copernicus doth assert,' Burbage said.

'He, being dead, may assert what pleases him.' Shakespeare looked around nervously to make sure no one had overheard. 'His Holiness the Pope holding opinion contrary, we enjoy not the like privilege.'

Burbage frowned. 'If a thing be true, it is true with the Pope's assent or in his despite.'

'Here is a true thing, Dick,' Shakespeare said: 'An you speak such words where the wrong ears hear, you'll