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| Gabriel Spenser George Barbier |
His mother was a woman named Flum who had a little basement in Piked-Hatch at the end of Rotton-Row. After supper a captain with brass rings on his fingers used to come to see her, along with two gallants in loosened doublets. Flum lodged three girls named Poll, Doll and Moll, and none of them could stand the smell of tobacco. Frequently when they retired to the rooms above, the polite gentlemen would accompany them after first taking a glass of Spanish wine to wash away the taste of their pipes. Little Gabriel used to sit on the hearth watching them roast apples to put in their ale-pots. Actors of all sorts came there too—actors who dared not show themselves in the big taverns where the famous entertainers went. Some of them boasted in the grand manner, others stuttered like idiots. They often played with Gabriel, teaching him tragic verse and rustic jokes, and once they gave him a scrap of giltfringed crimson drapery with a velvet mask and an old wooden dagger. Then he paraded up and down all alone in front of the fireplace until his mother’s triple chins shook in a quiver of admiration for her precocious child.
Later on the actors took him to the Green Curtain in Shoreditch, where he trembled to see the excessive rage of a little comedian hurling his way through the role of Jeronimo. They showed him old King Lear with his wild white beard, kneeling for pardon before his daughter Cordelia. A clown imitated the follies of Tarlton, while another, wrapped in a bedquilt, terrified Prince Hamlet. Sir John Oldcastle made everybody laugh with his fat belly, most of all when he snatched his hostess around the waist while she permitted him to rumple her bonnet and slide his fat fingers into the buckram sack hanging from her belt. The fool sang songs the idiot never could understand. A clown in a cotton hat kept sticking his head out from behind the wings to make faces. They had a juggler, too, with monkeys, and a man dressed up like a woman, whom Gabriel thought looked like his mother, and whom the beadles with their tall maces came stalking to at the end of the piece, dressing him in a rich blue robe, declaring they would carry him off to Bridewell.
When Gabriel was fifteen the Green Curtain players noticed that he was pretty and slim enough to play the parts of women or young girls. He had very white skin and large eyes under fine arched brows. Combing down his unruly black hair, Flum pierced his ears to hold a pair of imitation double pearls. He joined the Duke of Nottingham’s troupe where he was given dresses of taffeta and damask with spangles of gold and silver foil, laced corsets, and hempen wigs with long curls. During rehearsals they taught him to act. He blushed at first when he found himself on the stage, but he was soon responding mincingly to gallantries. Bustling with excitement, Flum brought Poll, Doll and Moll to see him. He must really he a girl, they declared, laughing, and they said they certainly meant to unlace him after the play. They took him back to Piked-Hatch, where his mother made him put on one of his dresses to show the captain, who begged him a thousand mock pardons as he placed a cheap gold-plated ring set with a glass carbuncle on his finger.
Gabriel Spenser’s best friends were William Bird, Edward Juby and the two Jeffs. One summer they toured the countryside with a company of vagabond actors, traveling in a tilt-covered wagon that served them also as a shelter when they halted for the night. On the way to Hammersmith one evening, a man stepped out of the road side ditch and showed them the muzzle of a pistol.
“Your money!” he demanded. “I am Gamaliel Ratsey, highwayman, by the grace of God . . . and I don’t like to wait.”
The two Jeffs responded with a wail:
“Money we have not, your grace . . . only a few brass spangles and tinted rags. We are poor wayside actors, like your patron lady herself.”
“Actors!” said Gamaliel. “Now this is well met. No rogue nor gamester I, but a good friend of these spectacles. Had I not a certain respect for Old Derrick, waiting to drag me up the ladder and stretch my neck for me, I’d never quit the river banks and happy taverns where you, my sirs, are customed to display such spirit. Welcome ye are this fine night, so up with your stage and give me your best. . . . Gamaliel Ratsey listens. That’s not a common thing and you can tell it in the towns.”
“But it will cost us money,” ventured the two Jeffs timidly.
“Money!” exclaimed Gamaliel. “Who speaks to me of money? I am king here as Elizabeth is queen in the city, and I’ll pay you royally. Forty shillings for you.”
Trembling, the actors came down from their wagon.
“Please your majesty,” asked Bird, “what would you have us play?”
With his eyes on Gabriel Spenser, Gamaliel Ratsey reflected.
“Faith,” he said at last, “a pretty piece for this missy, and damn well melancholy. She’ll make me an Ophelia with those flower fingers . . . true fingers of death, she has. ‘Hamlet,’ that’s what ye’ll do, for well I like the humors of that composition. Were I not Gamaliel I might be Hamlet himself.”
They lighted the lanterns. Gamaliel watched the performance attentively. When it was over he said to Gabriel Spencer:
“Sweet Ophelia, I will excuse you from further compliment. You are free, actors of King Gamaliel. His majesty is satisfied.”
Whereupon he disappeared into the darkness. As the wagon started off at dawn they found him again barring the way, pistol in hand.
“Gamaliel Ratsey, highwayman,” he said, “has come for King Gamaliel’s forty shillings.”
The two Jeffs promptly gave it over.
“Now get on with you!” ordered Gamaliel. “My thanks for the play; decidedly the humors of Hamlet please me infinitely. All courtesies to Ophelia.”
And with that he galloped away.
Following this adventure the troupe returned to London, where they told a great tale of a mistaken robber stealing their Ophelia, skirts, wig and all. A girl named Pat King, who often came to the Green Curtain, declared she was not a bit surprised. She had a plump face and a round body. When Flum invited her home to meet Gabriel she found him pretty and kissed him sweetly. After that she came back frequently. Pat was the mistress of a brickmaker who disliked his trade, having an ambition to become an actor at the Green Curtain. His name was Ben Jonson and he was very proud of his education, being a clerk with some knowledge of Latin. He was a big square man, scarred by scrofula; his right eye was higher than his left and he had a loud harsh voice. This colossus had seen service as a soldier in the Low Countries. One day he followed Pat King, seized Gabriel by the scruff of the neck and dragged him out to Hoxton field, where he made him stand up and face him, sword in hand. Flum managed to slip Gabriel a blade ten inches the longer, and this passed through Ben Jonson’s arm. Stabbed through the lung, Gabriel died there on the grass. Flum ran for the constables, who carried Ben Jonson off swearing to Newgate. Flum hoped they would hang him but he recited his Latin poems to show he was a clerk, so they only branded him on the hand with a red-hot iron.
Marcel Schwob
Imaginary Lives
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