Readthrough: The Players and the Rebels: Chapters 1-4

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Title: Hamlet.

Nicholas's precipitate return to the life of a player is marked by quite a lot of commentary on the art: his thoughts about Will's interpretation of Master Ford being authorially-sanctioned but Dickon's being perhaps more subtle and skilful lead into his watching the Jig, and his discussion about improvisation with Kemp. I like Nicholas's tactful 'It was more than that today,' (The Merry Wives has no epilogue). Nicholas's ill-formed thought about all acting being improvisation clearly cuts no ice with the veteran ad-libber, but I think he has a point of a sort. Kemp's partiality for a wind-up extends off-stage too: Nicholas' discomfort is nicely sketched here, and it painfully underscores the differences in approach that have developed between the auteur-theatre of Shakespeare and Kemp's more popular art. I can't help seeing Kemp as just off the northern working men's club circuit in this bit.

OK, I love a pun, especially an implied one, and Edmund pumping Nicholas for information while pumping water over him made me chortle. And it provides an opportunity for a quick infodump for those who haven't read The Player's Boy. Nicholas's guilt over not being able sincerely to wish his father alive again if it would mean him having to stop being a player is a poignant moment, again touching on the novels' ideas about families-of-choice.





Title: Coriolanus.

Humfrey brings news of the aristocracy's various excesses, and Nicholas is obliged to think, as many a reader of history has after him, that if you put this stuff into a play, no-one would believe it. (The plan to dismantle and cart away the Theatre falls roughly into this category too, one reflects, but Forest goes with it anyway.)

Nicholas's failed attempts at saving up to buy Will a ring for Christmas, we learn, have failed (shades of his descendant buying everyone sealing wax) but he has managed to give him a 'fallen star', which is a bit of meteor, I think? Nicholas Marlow Arden did...you roll a drunken sailor for a lump of interplanetary matter? You very naughty boy. The propensity for making early-morning appointments with seafarers is clearly also hereditary. And another touching moment as Nicholas thinks that Marlowe would probably have appreciated it more. Anyone ever played snapdragon? I associate it with Falstaff's rather off-colour speech about what Prince Hal sees in Poins (nice legs, rides well, always swallows), so it made me giggle a bit to think that's what they're all doing here.

Some of Will's history emerges. what do people make of Forest's account of the Lost Years? She gets the poaching legend in, which seems to be a contractual obligation for writers of historical fiction featuring Shakespeare. Young Will echoes both Geoffrey and Nicholas; Forest economically conveys his feelings of liberation on leaving his wife and children, but despite Wyn's protests, it doesn't spare very much sympathy for poor Anne, who might have felt just as trapped, but didn't have the option.

Quick namecheck for Thomas Digges, protegé of John Dee, innovative astronomer and translator of Copernicus into English, which loops back nicely to Kit and Geoffrey's row. Digges' widow married one of the executors of Shakespeare's will, so there's fairly good reason to believe they knew each other. The mention of Shakespeare writing a 'fair hand' (and Nicholas's incredulity) is a joke, I think, about his contemporaries' claim that he 'he never blotted out a line'.

And Edmund suddenly bringing something wild and lonely into the sitting room with the goose-noise is a great detail.

I like the scene of the dimantling of the theatre a lot: Cuthbert's equivocations, Nicolas's suspicious over-innocence (no talent for crime) and his reflections on bravery ('in case being sensible was only another way of being afraid'--echoes of Peter there perhaps rather than Nicola) in his defence of the alley. It's all a reminder of what a dangerous world these characters inhabit; and Nicholas has a fairly close shave with his clumsier assailant. (If he'd had his sword he might have ended up--at best--branded like Jonson, one reflects.)

Humfrey's reappearance highlights some of the other precarious aspects of life: pages, like boy-players, have a sell-by date. Their discussion of the different risks of their lives is nicely done: Humfrey, with perhaps some of the complacency attendant on his higher social status, imagining that the challenges facing the players are felt as less capricious than the whims of royalty is a fine touch. I also like Nicholas's astonishment that Humfrey improvises and composes (a look back to the discussion with Kemp, as well as a resonance with Miranda's compositional efforts in Attic Term?) Humfrey's admission that he feels that there's nothing for him outside Southampton's patronage, and that he's resigned to existing as the Earl's walking ego-boost (I agree with Nicholas that this reflects very poorly on Southampton), is full of pathos, though perhaps it's also implied that Humfrey has absorbed some of his master's disinclination to take charge of his own fate. What do people make of Will's assertion that Humfrey values his friends over his art, and that's the wrong choice?

Oh, Forest would definitely have approved of Simon Russell Beale's creepy Falstaff, I think.

Some nice commentary on theatre and the real world in Nicholas and Burbage watching the troops march off: Southampton's apparent glee at the prospect echoes Humfrey's later reflection on his misapplied physical courage.

Nicholas's pleasure at being seen in the company of a celebrity is compared, interestingly, to the reflected glory of ladies-in-waiting, and the exchange that follows is priceless. Burbage seems sensitive to implications of effeminacy, and intolerant of it in others; I like the way Forest suggests this is a character trait, no more, no less, and no particular authorial attitude attaches to it. The boys' game of keeping score of occasions when they're recognised cracks me up (is it quite as innocent as Nicholas makes it sound to Burbage?) I'd depose that Robin's bruising encounters with apprentices as well as a fear that he wouldn't win might have a bearing on his propensity to tart it up for the fanbase, but it's also a nice comment on Robin barely seeming to exist off-stage. I can't help but be amused at Richard "GET YOUR HAIR CUT" Burbage as well; he's perhaps got a point that people for whom 'everything always goes wrong again' should at least consider the common denominator, but Nicholas's more subtle analysis of the relationship between coiffure and character we know to have the weight of inside knowledge behind it. (Southampton, like Geoffrey and Will, incidentally, married his pregnant mistress.)

Scots Jamie! Who, it will be remembered 'slobbered at the mouth and had favourites; he was thus a Bad King.' I suspect Forest may consciously have been riffing on Sellar and Yeatman in raising him in this context, given that they also have this to say:

He also tried to straighten out the memorable confusion about the Picts, who, as will be remembered, were originally Irish living in Scotland, and the Scots, originally Picts living in Ireland. James tried to make things tidier by putting the Scots in Ulsters and planting them in Ireland, but the plan failed because the Picts had been lost sight of during the Dark Ages and were now nowhere to be found.

Burbage would rather have Essex as King, anyway.

And finally, for this chapter, the naming of the theatre. Will's dodgy Latin is fun ('small Latin and less Greek') and the whole scene reminds me of collaborative efforts among the schoolgirls in the main series. 'The Rent Curtain' (Miss Forest, really!) is a nicely dodgy gag for readers a bit older and/or less pure than the Target Market. It's also moderately blasphemous, which is presumably the reason why the characters are a little less than amused.





Title Henry V (ouch! That one is apposite.)

The discussion between Will and Nicholas about his maintenance is again rather poignant, the more so for both of their excursions into unsentimental pragmatism, and Nicholas's final retreat into childish fantasy. (Is Forest nodding at 'when your voice does finally crack--though it could be three, four years yet'? Surely not, given Nicholas is sixteen--and as it happens, not--or does Will just mean that some young men can access a falsetto speaking range for the stage and carry on playing women's parts after their conversational voices have broken? I can see that being a possibility, by analogy with countertenor singing, but otherwise I can't make sense of it.)

Kemp sells up and leaves the company. Jonson grumbling at Will's misquotation is fun, as well as Will's airy reply (I love these two: this has been your regular &c.). Who's playing who, here by the way? The implication is that Heminges is playing Brutus, traditionally Burbage's part, and Burbage Antony, the soliloquy they're disagreeing over being 'O pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth'? Doesn't seem quite right to me. (Julius Caesar: a play I have not read since undergraduate days. Welcome correction.) Lecky's desire to play Lucius and Nicholas's indifference to the part echoes in odd, deflected ways the plot of Cricket Term. Nicholas's embarrassed response to Lecky's apology is very sweet.

I am indignant on behalf of my adopted country at Humfrey's loathing. On the other hand, I am forced to concede that that is pretty much what Ireland is like, and in the sixteenth century would have been even more so. Some of you may be amused by this. What do people make of Essex's double-dealing with the Queen and Southampton? And of his subsequent conduct?

Humfrey's discussion of the letter with Nicholas is an interesting episode too: Nicholas demonstrates emotional sensitivity in his support for Humfrey remaining silent, and some political savvy in his suggestion that the letter may have been planted. That co-exists very plausibly with his continued hero-worship of Ralegh (what did the apprentice say? this has been your regularly scheduled &c).



Title: The Merchant of Venice.

Armin contrasted with Kemp: a very different sort of clowning, rather an intellectual sort, based on observations of those stigmatised or reified for their mental illness or neurodiversity, and one which unsettles audiences and players alike.

The spectacle of Kemp beginning his dance to Norwich is one of immense pathos--the more so that because is superficially a 'triumph' with a big and appreciative crowd, but when Nicholas reflects he sees that Kemp's time has passed, and that the other players' repudiation of Kemp is in many ways justified. (I love all the little indications of Burbage's celebrity, by the way.)

The scene of Nicholas remembering Ulysses' speech during the Homily and splicing it with the over-reaching verse of Tamburlaine is masterly, I think: though it goes unmentioned, for Nicholas, Antony Merrick might haunt the puns on 'stretch'd footing' and 'scaffoldage.' The content of the 'all too familiar homily' might be penetrating in ways that Nicholas doesn't quite recognise. As in the main series, mischievous or quizzical meetings of eyes before people resume church-going poker faces are significant.

In Will and Nicholas's discussion of Southampton and Essex, the old comparison of them to Achilles and Patroclus returns with dangerous political force. Comparing Southampton to Patroclus now recalls his ineffectual performance in battle (the irony being that Southampton is more Homer's Patroclus than Shakespeare's); bearing in mind the porous boundaries between idealised male friendship and reviled sodomy in this period, the 'monstrous insult' has a sexual dimension too. It's a wonderfully subtle point to make: when Essex and Southampton were paragons, their friendship could be considered wholesome; now that they're both out of favour, it's perceived as sinister, even though their actual relationship hasn't changed at all (and Essex has been quietly stabbing his devotee in the back this long while). It's another instance of the caprice of royal favour, and its immensely wide-ranging consequences, which Humfrey mentioned earlier.

Will, like Burbage earlier on, is inclined to regard Essex's ambitions fairly positively, though, shrewd as he is, he instantly perceives where Nicholas's 'idea' of Essex's baseness has come from. Will's scepticism about Humfrey does--as I think was mentioned earlier--echo in certain ways Rowan's discouraging attitude towards Nicola mending her friendship with Esther. I think the crucial difference is that where Rowan seems to do that out of a peculiarly hard-bitten notion of unsentimentality, Will has a sound political reason to see Humfrey as a danger to the safety of Nicholas, himself and the company as a whole. His final words in this chapter are a typically pragmatic articulation of the coincidence of loyalty and self-interest.



That's enough from me. Next week highfantastical will be posting on Chapters 5-7.