All day until darkfall they're watching the revels at Kenilworth. Bears dance. Bands play. Clowns tumble. Men said to be from Egypt swallow swords and snakes. But when will the Queen be corning?
Now then, when darkness falls, at least comes Jove. If great Jove comes, can the Queen be far behind? Here's the great father of the gods, a-shooting of his thunderbolts. See how each one is handed up to him for firing by his lame son Vulcan. So, Vulcan is the firemaster. But does Vulcan have to run?
People could see those fireworks some twenty miles away. The night sky was filled up with flowers of fire. At half that distance, his mother Mary stood in her garden and watched them, wondering, blessing herself and her stars, at home in Stratford. And mildly damned the pealing cannon which woke up Joan.
But those cannon and then these trumpets were for the Queen.
She came riding on a horse as white as snow. She came riding out of the woods and the night, and down to her lake. And more trumpets sounded as the crowds parted and cheered, and Queen Elizabeth rode to her revels here at Kenilworth.
Suddenly there were fairies all round the lakeside, green and golden. Suddenly, also, witches, magicians in black. A mermaid riding on a dolphin appeared in the torchlit lake. Then another, and another, another, another, until a quire of mermaids riding on dolphins was greeting the Queen's arrival, all singing of Cynthia.
And the Queen came on through the crowds, riding down towards where he stood. Lord Leicester rode there at her side, as the fanfares sounded. But she came towards Will as she came to her revels at Kenilworth.
And now the poet Arion appeared upon a dolphin. Not all the crowd would understand this part. To Will, though, it was his own image out there in the lake. He knew about Arion, son of Cycleus, of Methymna in Lesbos. This poet, connected with the birth of tragedy through the invention of a choral kind of dithyramb, spent most of his life at the Court of Periander, but was once thrown overboard by sailors and rescued from the sea by being carried to land on the back of a dolphin who was enchanted by his music.
The thought of a poet on the back of a dolphin had pleased Will from the moment he first heard of it, he did not know why. So here, at a high point in the revels at Kenilworth, was Arion on a dolphin, harp in hand, and ready to make court to the Queen herself.
But as the Queen approached him, it all went wrong. The man on the dolphin, who had been busy among the wine-pots most of the afternoon, got his lines wrong. He stuttered his speech of welcome. He stammered. He forgot. At last, flinging his harp in the lake, he leapt to dry land. He ran to Queen Elizabeth, and tore off his mask, and he cried:
'I am none of your Arion, madam, no, no, not I, but your plain and honest servant Harry Goldingham!'
Sweet bully Bottom was conceived that minute.
It was a midsummer's night. But it was not a dream.
The Queen, on her high horse, coming nearer and nearer.
Will standing then, eyes agog, fists clenched, holding his breath, now almost a living part of the revels at Kenilworth, watching the pageant as the Wild One, the woodwose, hair matted like Pope John the whichever's, fang-toothed, unaccommodated man and no mistake, face caked with filth, Tom o' Bedlam, all overgrown with moss and ivy, like a walking tree, meaning to abase himself before Her Majesty, comes striding from the woods, Caliban, in one hand another tree, a young oak sapling, plucked up by the roots, which he waves overhead as he comes.
'Beauty and the Beast,' mutters John Shakespeare. But he's sprawled out where he watches, and Willy's pretending to himself that he is not with him, not Shakespeare and father; I know thee not, old man.
The Wild Man breaks his tree as the Queen rides by. He breaks his tree in two and he casts it towards her. It is meant as a gesture of abasement, but again it comes out wrong. A half of the tree, looping through the torchlit midsummer dusk, just misses hitting the Queen's white mare across the head. Footmen rush to the horse and its rider.
'No hurt, no hurt!' quoth the Fairy Queen, an affable, laughing guest on this first night of her visit to her favourite, this night of her own revels here at Kenilworth, and then - so near to Will she could almost have touched him - she leans across the neck of her horse and she touches Lord Leicester. Like one of the gypsy girls who'll go with you behind the stalls in Rother Market for a penny, the Queen of all England leans across to tickle the Earl of Leicester's chin and his cheek, and then to fondle the great pommel of his saddle, a leer on her lips.
A high point of the revels here at Kenilworth, for which he ran half the morning, and waited in the sun all afternoon. Hard to surpass a thing like that.
Even the Kenilworth doorkeeper, got up as Hercules, mercifully with no speech to say so nothing to go wrong with that, leading a bear in chains, and the bear behaving civilly, offering the keys of the castle to this Elizabeth. Even Merlin the wizard leaving his island in the lake and breaking his wand in two and on bended knee renouncing his magic art in favour of Her Highness. Even Proteus, the mutable god, already our Will's guardian, casting himself into many forms and fashions to crawl on the ground to please his sovereign lady.
Impossible to surpass that unprecedented moment in the revels here at Kenilworth when the Queen pulled off her gauntlet, embroidered with seed pearls, and with her naked fingers kittled her favourite's neck.
Impossible to surpass the way she stroked him. She played him like a fiddler playing a fiddle.
'Pretty Robin!' she said. 'Ah, my pretty Robin!'
And she laughed to herself, and moved her fingers on his pommel, up and down.
Queen Elizabeth's face was hard, as though cut out from white wood or tallow wax. If such a thing had been imaginable, Will would have sworn that the great cloud of soft red hair about her head had never grown there. He remembered the tales he had been told of how in certain prisons the jailers cut their captives' locks and sell them to be fashioned into curls to suit court ladies, and how some even said that fresh graves have been robbed when girls with long golden hair are buried. Could it be that the Queen of all England was wearing a wig?
Of course he said nothing about the matter to his father when they were riding home, John Shakespeare slumped in the saddle, relying on the nag to know the way, and Will half-asleep himself, worn out with enchantments and disenchantments, with a surfeit of delight, too warmly pleased. And he said nothing about it either to his mother when they got home, and his father fell down in a puddle, and he burst into tears. He told her, instead, the next morning, at their breakfast, of a boy he had seen riding on a dolphin, whose poem seemed to please Her Majesty.
They had been to the great revels at Kenilworth. They had seen the royal revels at Kenilworth. Their revels now, our revels now, are ended. That is the way it was. Never before had England witnessed such splendour.
But what Will remembered was the Queen doing that rude thing to Robert Dudley.
Chapter Thirty-Eight More about Jenkins
Pompey Bum was just at the door, demanding his rent. Being dunned makes me feel quite the author. I told him I would pay him some, and, as most debtors do, promise him infinitely. But I fear the man is no playgoer, and this reference to the Epilogue to the second part of King Henry IV was misspent on him.
It is true that I am a shiftless little person, roving and maggoty-headed, and sometimes not much better than crazed. But it is not true what Mr Anthony Wood told Mr Aubrey - that I was ever exceedingly credulous, stuffed with fooleries and misinformations. That insufferable recluse of Postmaster's Hall does not comprehend my method. He is no amateur of country history. He does not understand me.