An Assassin's Guide to Love and Treason by Virginia Boecker

Author:Virginia Boecker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Published: 2018-10-22T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 19

KIT

THE GLOBE THEATER, BANKSIDE, LONDON

21 DECEMBER 1601

I stand in the tiring-house along the left side of the stage, listening for my cue.

Onstage, and sitting on a bench at a long trestle table, are Thomas Alard and Aaron Barton. Today is the first rehearsal in full costume and so it is a merry one, all of us dressed in gowns and wigs, our faces full of stage paint.

First there is Aaron, who is stocky and short and is wearing crookedly drawn-on lips and a low-cut gown—lower than it should be—that displays half his naked chest. The seamstress who sewed it, Mistress Lucy, is only an apprentice and somehow mixed up Aaron’s measurements (confusing his height with his width? I do not know) and Mistress Lovett nearly wept when she saw him in it, the hem trailing the ground a full three feet too long and the bodice practically down to his navel, a nest of ginger chest hair on full display. Aaron laughed and laughed, and Master Shakespeare declared it ploosnar, which none of us understood, but it must have meant something good because the chest hair stayed.

Thomas Alard is just as entertaining as Olivia: thick Venetian ceruse covering his face, splashy red lips, and pink-flushed cheeks, dark penciled eyebrows under a pitch-dark and tightly curled wig. His dress is no less severe: black, long-sleeved and high-necked, topped with an elaborate white ruff. He is eighteen, too old to play a woman by at least two years, too tall and too broad, the ruff deemed necessary to hide his bobbing Adam’s apple. His voice is an unsteady falsetto, and in this scene he starts out wearing a black veil over his face, all but a shroud. Even so, Thomas is a good player. He plays up his masculinity to great laughs, and he’s got this funny walk he does that makes him look as if he is floating underneath all that velvet. The first time Master Shakespeare saw him do it, he laughed so hard I thought he’d rupture something.

It is also our first rehearsal with an audience. The players not onstage, the stagehands, the costumers, the musicians, and Master Shakespeare gather in the yard to give us a sense of what the performance will be like.

“Remember, the stage will be in the center of the Hall, so the audience will be split. Half sitting on one side of the stage, half on the other,” Will Kemp says knowledgeably, as he’s performed before the queen and her court countless times. “Whichever side the queen is on, she will be sitting at the very front. Her eyesight isn’t what it used to be, nor her hearing, so she needs to be quite close. Her ladies will be with her; they’ll take up the whole of the first row. Behind her on one side, her favorite noblemen and their wives. On the other, her favored courtiers. All the way in the back are her ministers and, behind them, her guard. The worst seats in the house, as usual.

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