Shakespeare's Spy by Gary Blackwood

the p-plague does. I hope it will not c-come to that. Our p-position is precarious enough as it is. If we had to c-close down the theatre for several m-months, it could be—” He broke off, then, as though he had said too much, and went back to his stitching. “Well, as I s-said, I hope not.”
    Though I did not wish to pry into matters that did not concern me, I had the uneasy feeling that this
did
concern me. “Are we—is the company in difficulty, then?”
    Mr. Heminges considered for several moments before replying. “A bit. But we’ll w-weather it. We always have.” He gave me a rather worn smile. “In any c-case, there’s n-no need for you or the other pr-prentices to worry. L-let us sharers do the w-worrying, all right?”
    I would willingly have obeyed him; I had more than enough on my mind already. But worry is like the plague—or, it seemed, like love. It’s no good at all ignoring or denying it; once the seed has found its way inside you, you are doomed.
    Even had I succeeded in casting aside my concern, it would not have been for long. As we players stood in the cramped space behind the stage, listening to the audience arrive and trying to judge from the sound of them what mood they were in, Mr. Shakespeare, still dressed in his street clothes, burst through the door that led to the outside stairway, bringing withhim a gust of frigid air. “Widge!” he called above the din of the playgoers.
    “Aye!” I made my way toward him through the shifting mass of actors applying their face paint, adjusting their costumes, mumbling their lines to themselves, making all sorts of curious sounds meant to limber up their voices.
    When I was within his reach, Mr. Shakespeare drew me to him. “The master of revels sends word that some men from the queen’s Privy Council are out there tonight, checking up on us.”
    “Is there something amiss wi’ our privy?”
    He laughed. “The Privy Council is a body of Her Majesty’s closest advisers. No doubt they hope to catch us feeding the masses some morsel of Papist propaganda, as a priest gives out morsels of the host at Communion. I imagine Henslowe has put them up to it.”
    Our sharers had long suspected the manager of the Admiral’s Men of mounting various strategies to injure our reputation or our box—that is, the amount of money we took in—including attaching Mr. Shakespeare’s well-known name to plays written by Henslowe’s own committee of hacks, inciting Puritan preachers to stand outside the Globe railing at the playgoers, even planting his men in our audience, where they shouted insults at the actors.
    “You have a line about confession, do you not?”
    “Aye. Eglamour says, ‘Where shall we meet?’ and I say, ‘At Friar Patrick’s cell, where I intend holy confession.’”
    “Yes, yes. I want you to replace that line.”
    “Wi’ what?”
    “You’ll think of something. Are there any other Popish sorts of speeches that you can recall?”
    “Nay. But—”
    The sound of Mr. Phillips’s hautboy signaled that the play was about to commence. Mr. Shakespeare glanced down at his everyday doublet and breeches. “By the matt!” he whispered. “I nearly forgot; I’m playing the duke!” He left as precipitously as he had come, leaving me to invent some new bit of dialogue for myself. Well, if I had any hope at all of living up to my boast of writing a play, surely I could conjure up a line and a half of passable iambic pentameter. If nothing else, the effort would give me something to do besides fret, which is what I was ordinarily doing at this point in the performance.
    Mr. Pope had assured me that a certain amount of fear before going on was a good thing. “Without frets,” he was fond of saying, “there is no music.” But none of the other actors, not even the prentices, looked as though they were going to face the hangman, as I had been told I did. Sal Pavy was examining himself in a looking glass, touching the locks of his blond