foreign currency exchange, street urchins urinated on the stone floor for to make it slick with ice and to watch the burgesses and bawds and dandies slip and fall.
Further down near the river, in the new, hastily built and dingy Liberty of the Clink, in the Theater, a wooden amphitheater open to the elements, the King's men rehearsed.
They wore their somber, black or brown everyday suits and cloaks.
Watching them say their lines and take their marks, Will Shakespeare, playwright and sometime actor, sighed. He felt too old now, too worn out, for the capers and acrobatics of the stage. At thirty-eight, he felt worn beyond his years.
But he missed the stage still, and he envied the actors.
This afternoon, for the performance proper, transformed, like tropical birds in this icy London, they'd wear their bright feathers: the satin and the silk, the shiny tinsel and brightly colored paste jewels of their art and craft.
Upon the stage, they'd be kings or noblemen, and figure in this place a distant city of spires and gold. And for a moment the audience would forget the cold and the bad harvests and the price of food, and laugh and cry and applaud the magic on the stage.
But for now the art was all craft, craft that must be polished and honed and sharpened against mistakes in the weaving of the illusion later.
And, watching, Will marked slips in craft and missteps in technique. But, most of all, he marked the absent one, his brother Edmund.
Where could the boy be?
Will Kemp and Ned Alleyn and all the other actors echoed their lines rigidly and made slow movements that would come fluid and tumbling in the play.
"Here comes the almanac of my true date." Will Kemp said. "What now? How chance thou are returned so soon?"
The line fell like a stone into a well of silence, no line answering it.
Kemp, who'd been reciting with his eyes closed, now opened them, startled, like a man who puts his foot down, in a dark night and finds not beneath it the solid ground he expects. " . . .so soon?" he repeated, and looked about, obviously trying to raise a response. " . . ..So soon!" he said, this time peremptorily, as if the very force of the exclamation would force the reply.
Will Shakespeare sighed.
Edmund Shakespeare, who would play Dromio in the play, was not there. Kemp glared around himself
Further down near the river, in the new, hastily built and dingy Liberty of the Clink, in the Theater, a wooden amphitheater open to the elements, the King's men rehearsed.
They wore their somber, black or brown everyday suits and cloaks.
Watching them say their lines and take their marks, Will Shakespeare, playwright and sometime actor, sighed. He felt too old now, too worn out, for the capers and acrobatics of the stage. At thirty-eight, he felt worn beyond his years.
But he missed the stage still, and he envied the actors.
This afternoon, for the performance proper, transformed, like tropical birds in this icy London, they'd wear their bright feathers: the satin and the silk, the shiny tinsel and brightly colored paste jewels of their art and craft.
Upon the stage, they'd be kings or noblemen, and figure in this place a distant city of spires and gold. And for a moment the audience would forget the cold and the bad harvests and the price of food, and laugh and cry and applaud the magic on the stage.
But for now the art was all craft, craft that must be polished and honed and sharpened against mistakes in the weaving of the illusion later.
And, watching, Will marked slips in craft and missteps in technique. But, most of all, he marked the absent one, his brother Edmund.
Where could the boy be?
Will Kemp and Ned Alleyn and all the other actors echoed their lines rigidly and made slow movements that would come fluid and tumbling in the play.
"Here comes the almanac of my true date." Will Kemp said. "What now? How chance thou are returned so soon?"
The line fell like a stone into a well of silence, no line answering it.
Kemp, who'd been reciting with his eyes closed, now opened them, startled, like a man who puts his foot down, in a dark night and finds not beneath it the solid ground he expects. " . . .so soon?" he repeated, and looked about, obviously trying to raise a response. " . . ..So soon!" he said, this time peremptorily, as if the very force of the exclamation would force the reply.
Will Shakespeare sighed.
Edmund Shakespeare, who would play Dromio in the play, was not there. Kemp glared around himself