A favorite kind of romp

…I soon became a performer in the troupe myself, and if I may be immodest, a not terribly unimportant addition to the company, especially to the lasses and women-folk, for by now I, too, had grown almost as tall as Darrow and had sprung soft down upon my lip and cheek and chin, which Suzie and even Billy did fawn upon.

Even in the most stalwart of troupes, actors “go down”—get ill, or depressed, or vanish two days on end larking with some townsperson, or refuse to leave their caravan from “a case of the sulks.”

Our fifth ordinarily silent troupe member was the first to become ill, with a catarrh that interfered mightily with her ability to speak sans a cough. She did lovely work of hiding it or stitching it into the scenes she played, just as though it belonged there. The first two nights, at least, she did. The third night it proved impossible for her to get out of bed or leave Caravan Three for her feverish state, and thus I was cast in her place.

The play was The Bard’s Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet and the most unlikely part I was to take over for her was a small female role, that of Lady Montague, Romeo’s mother, with but a handful of lines. The largest role that I must slip into in her stead was that of Mercutio, playing to Billy as my best friend. I had learned by heart the two speeches already: one fantastical and the other pathetic. Later on, I was to play gruff Friar Laurence, and what lines I was unsure of would be whispered to me by someone or other in the company, offstage at the time.

In the first role of the young smart, I japed much with Billy who played Romeo, and who in turn flirted back at me, giving a new significance to these young men’s close friendship in the play. This impelled one Oxonian within the audience to laugh out loud and call, “Why, look! They are as Greek as ever were Italian lads! And I’ll wager as prompt at each other with their cods as with their daggers!”—a comment that earned much merriment.

Later on, as the Friar, my beard did itch badly, as did my monk’s cowl, and I was eager to be rid of those, but the applause was delightful, and when Mercutio was called for, I vanished and reappeared sans beard and blanket but wearing the other’s doublet and feathered hat, and bowed to even greater kudos.

Later that night, as we sat in the local public house gobbling down our late and by no means undercooked dinner, t’was Suzie who said of me, “He’s bit. Why look. As surely as though it were a gadfly upon his neck, he’s bit by the streaming limed-lamps he’s fired up himself and by the yokels’ hand claps—stage-bit, the great dolt!”

I colored deeply for it was not entirely untrue. Darrow Elder—who seldom spoke once his tankard was in hand—deigned to utter to me, “A capital Queen Mab, lad.” Then pondering, he added, “A somewhat less creditable death speech.” Which drove us to hilarity, for he could not give aught, not even words, but he must take something back, all the time.

After that night I remained onstage with The Invincible Theatre troupe, earning my own sobriquet, Monsieur Addison Aries, a name conjured by the Darrows, husband and wife, out of my own given name and an old Astrological Almanack one of the company had snitched somewhere in Northern Wales and which they followed closely, for they were a superstitious lot, all of them, our mysterious fifth actor included. None of the women stepped onstage without first spitting behind herself and twirling her index finger in a curlicue while uttering below her breath, “Pig’s foot!”