Shakespeare for Squirrels: A Novel (Fool #3)(64)

These would be our audience, the judges and jury and executioners if we did not please, and oh, I did not think our modest play would please. No I did not.

Egeus, still shaking with anger over Hermia’s finding her way past his condemnation, as master of ceremonies, sat directly beside the wedding couple, and behind him, rather cruelly placed, I thought, sat Helena, who had served as a bridesmaid for her friend. We would enter stage right, from our little antechamber, but there were great tapestries, hung from a line behind the stage, that provided us a backstage, too, and most of the players would move there upon Peter Quince’s reading of the prologue.

A troubadour playing a lute was finishing a sad ballad, then we would be introduced. Nick Bottom peeked over me into the room, looking around the crowd for a friendly, or at least allied, face.

“No sign of Gritch or Rumour?” he said.

“Not tooth nor tongue,” said I. “Did you put Rumour’s hat in a satchel to keep Jeff from it?”

“I did, but he’s had a go at Snout’s deerskin hat and was pulling on my ears for a bit before Drool restrained him.”

“That little scamp has singular enthusiasm, doesn’t he? Are you ready?”

“As I can be. But I’ll be using the notes you had Quince make. Short notice.”

I had Peter Quince write down each of the players’ lines on strips of parchment that they carried. Bottom had had less time to study his lines than the others, as he had been with me, invading the gendarmerie. It had been four hours since we locked Blacktooth and Burke in the dungeon, yet no one seemed to miss them, which was suspicious in itself.

“You know, Bottom,” said I, “your cause to return to a nonequine form may not be lost. When the fairies were frolicking, at the harem, I noticed the hair on your arms receded. They may be your hope for a cure when we finish here.”

“Except we’re going to be executed when we finish here.”

“Either way, you won’t have to face Mrs. Bottom looking like that,” said I, ever the optimist.

“Oh joy,” said Bottom. “Pocket, do you see those black robes in the back? Are those Cobweb and the girls?”

There were figures in the back of the hall, where the tables were still laid out from the feast, wearing hooded silk robes like those the fairies had taken from Oberon’s harem. They were far away, and the light dim, but they seemed the right size. Then, one of them moved, and I knew it was not Cobweb nor her two friends, for even from the length of the great hall I could see it scuttling sideways, with none of the light-footed grace of the fairies. Looking around the crowd I noticed black-hooded figures manning the balconies and lurking by the entrances. I counted at least a dozen before I heard the troubadour pluck a final chord and polite applause signaled our cue.

“Places, everyone,” I called to the room. “Quince, you’re on.”

Egeus rose from his seat and walked to the edge of the stage, unrolled a scroll, and, with a voice and manner only slightly less pompous than Rumour himself, read: “And now, for your pleasure or their pain, a group of tradesmen, hard-handed men who have until now never labored in their minds, rude mechanicals, shall present the most lachrymal and laughable tragicomedy of Romeo and Juliet, the original said to have been written by the Ninth Earl of Bumsex, upon his mistress’s bare bottom.”

“A tongue-in-cheek comedy, then?” said Lysander.

“Oh, both lachrymal and laughable,” said the duke, laughing. “Good we’ve had plenty of drink to fuel our tears, be they of laughter or of tragedy.”

“I loathe you with the heat of a thousand suns,” said Hippolyta, staring a hole into the duke’s head, she, evidently, not an aficionado of the theater, and not doing very well at pretending to have received the love potion.

Theseus said: “If it be horrid, we shall take sport in their mistakes and find amusement in their lowly skills—find in their paltry talents the couch of our superiority. Players, play on!”

And around the hall amid applause they echoed the call of “play on!”

As the rest of the company scrambled out of the antechamber, Peter Quince took his place at the corner of the stage and unrolled his own scroll. “Gentles, welcome to our most grisly comedy and tragically romantic Grand Guignol.”

“’At’s fuckin’ French, innit!” shouted Drool from behind the tapestry.

“Not to contradict our esteemed master of ceremony, but we shall not be performing Romeo and Juliet, but instead a most raucous and respectful adventure, called A Fool in the Forest, penned by our own ma?tre de drame Pocket of Dog Snogging.”

At which point I bounded out onto the stage, doffed my coxcomb, and took a deep bow to what should have been thunderous applause.

Egeus stood and waved his scroll. “Now, see here, this shall not stand! ’Twas Pyramus and Thisby you submitted for consideration, and by the grace of the duke, you were given permission to do Romeo and Juliet because you did not have a wall, but this change shall not be permitted.”

In a single motion I drew a dagger from the small of my back and flung it underhand Egeus’s way. The dagger sailed past his ear and buried itself with a thud in the high back of his chair, exactly where I had been aiming.

“Sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up, thou pompous toady,” said I.

Egeus began to protest and I drew my second dagger. “Or don’t,” said I.