All Night Awake Read Free

divinity.
    Will’s mouth remained dry. He shook his head.
    Who could this be, whose clothing looked newly made, whose auburn hair showed the darker roots that indicated art aiding nature, whose every trait and feature betrayed a nobleman? Why would such a one talk to a theater owner, the impious rabble of society? And why would such a one bother to mock Will?
    The dandy’s grey eyes looked a question, and his eyebrows arched. “Not a university man?”
    Will cleared his throat. “I’ve never gone to university.” He bowed slightly. “I went to grammar school and then I taught for a time in the country. Then I helped my father in his shop.”
    The finely drawn eyebrows of the auburn-haired gentleman arched upon his white brow, a movement more intent and meaning than Henslowe’s similar look. “Not gone to university? And your father had a shop? Why, that’s fatal.”
    The dandy pulled from within his sleeve a kerchief edged with lace worth more than all of Will’s clothing. He waved this foppery in front of his nose, as though to dispel a bad stench. “A poet should never be a useful kind of person, capable of handling the grosser stuff of life. Tell me, your father is, mayhap, not a butcher, or some such gross occupation?”
    Will shook his head, bewildered, “I pray, no. He’s a glover, but—”
    “Ah, he busies himself with the egg and flour of tanning, does he? And was it at his foot that you learned the fine chervil leather of a couplet, the whiting of poetry?” The gentleman smiled.
    “I . . .” Will swallowed nervously. “I’ve always made poems, pray, to the local girls and . . . . And I admire Marlowe’s plays much.”
    The dandy laughed, a delighted cackle that jangled in the air, mingling with the calls of tradespeople, the enticements of bawds. “A good thing to love Marlowe’s plays. I sometimes enjoy them myself. Do you not, yourself, enjoy them, Phillip?”
    Henslowe rolled his eyes in silence.
    The dandy laughed and turned to Will with sudden, giddy enthusiasm, “So, say a poem for us. A poem.” He stuffed his handkerchief back into his sleeve and stepped back, as if to make room for Will’s expansive wit.
    “Declaim,” the dandy said, and waved a hand encased in pearly grey chervil gloves with a heavy golden fringe at the end that dangled over a dainty wrist.
    Will glanced at Henslowe, who stared not at Will but at the other man, with something like wonder or alarm.
    Would Henslowe listen? Could Will earn his place as a playwright this way?
    Standing with his feet close, Will cleared his throat.
    When he’d dreamed of a moment like this, he’d imagined a tiring room, the air thick with the smell of grease paint, the actors all bespelled by Will’s very presence.
    A theater owner, or perhaps even a nobleman, would ask Will to recite a poem and all the actors would fall silent, all movement stop, till, in the end, nothing stirred amid props and costumes, nothing moved except Will’s voice rising and falling and dazzling all.
    But Will’s reality always fell short of his dreams, and therefore, he cleared his throat and made to start.
    “I have Dutch coins, and German, and French too. Change your coins here, before you set abroad,” a money changer yelled near Will’s ear.
    Will jumped, but his would-be listeners didn’t move. The dandy looked attentive, the theater owner bored.
    His voice shaking, Will started, in measured cadences, to speak his best sonnet.
    It was the one he’d written for Nan when they were courting, the one that ended in hate from hate away she threw / And saved my life, saying not you.
    When Will had finished, the noise of Paul’s had not died down. From somewhere came the high-pitched laughter of a bawd, and somewhere behind Will two gentlemen argued loudly.
    “The sad ballad and sorrowful fate of Romeo,” a ballad seller called out, just to the right of Henslowe, waving a sheaf of smudged printed sheets just within the theater owner’s field