London - Edward Rutherfurd [344]
“I need to find a new master,” he said. “But so many of the best master carpenters are Puritan nowadays, they may not take me on if my name is blackened. Even if I never set foot in a theatre again, things will still go hard with me.”
Edmund had comforted him as best he could, but was not sure what he could do.
He was cheerful, however, for a much more important reason. The play was done – complete down to the last alarum and cannon shot. It was a masterpiece, a mountain of melodrama, bombast and noise. He had sent word to the Burbages two days before, and now they had summoned him to see them. The script of the play was under his arm.
He was surprised to see Shakespeare and three of the others there as well. He had not expected that. Their faces were grave as they looked at him quietly across the oak table. Burbage broke the news.
“I’m afraid the Chamberlain’s men have come to the end of their run,” he said. “We do not want to continue at the Curtain.”
He stared at them. “But my play . . .” He proffered it as though it changed something. “It was written for the Curtain.”
“I’m sorry.” Burbage made a polite nod towards the now useless sheaf of papers. “We called you here because you are a creditor.”
“Fifty-five pounds,” the other Burbage said with the respect that such a sum was due.
“We cannot say when, or even if”, the first went on, “it will be repaid.”
Edmund was flabbergasted. “Are there no other possibilities?”
“We tried for a new lease at the Theatre,” Shakespeare explained. “Allen turned us down.” He shrugged. And for several minutes, the various principals explained to him the difficulties with which their entire business was beset.
It was not often that Edmund forgot to cut a figure in the world; but without even realizing what he was doing, he buried his face in his hands and almost wept. After a time, nodding to them vaguely, he got up and left.
Slowly he wandered back towards his lodgings, digesting the news. The players had no respectable place to act. There was nothing to be done. He was so upset, he even briefly forgot his own play.
It was just as he reached the Staple Inn that the idea came into his head, an idea which sent him running back towards the Burbages’ house. He burst in through the door and, finding them all still at the table, cried out: “Let me see the lease!” He was, after all, a lawyer.
A few minutes later, he made a suggestion. The idea he had had was so daring, so utterly outrageous, so cunning, that for a little while nobody spoke.
“We would have to be careful that no one knew what we were going to do,” he added at last. And then Shakespeare grinned.
Of all the changes that took place during the long century when the Tudors sat upon the throne of England, one of the most striking was scarcely noted at all.
It began during the reign of Great King Harry, but did not happen suddenly. Halfway through Elizabeth’s reign, however, it was becoming noticeable: England was getting colder.
The mini Ice Age of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was never alarming. No ice wall began to advance down the island; the seas did not recede. But over ten decades or so the average temperature of England fell by several degrees. During much of the year, this was not greatly noticed. The balmy days of summer did not cease, and although spring and autumn may have seemed a little cooler, it was only in winter that men really saw a difference. The snows arrived sooner and were more deep. Icicles hung, thick and strong, from the eves. And above all, scarcely known before even at icy midwinter, the rivers froze.
It was a gentle echo of the distant, frozen past; and a hint for Englishmen, if any were needed that, even though the Renaissance from the warm Mediterranean had come to court, university and theatre, their island still belonged, as it always had, to the