Three or four rustic gallants sat on the stage, and talked ostentatiously, with a great deal of very knowing laughter, each one keeping a side glance upon the noble lady in the balcony, to see what impression he was making; for each was convinced that her softly eager looks toward the stage were cast in admiration of himself.
The stage was of rough boards upon an underwork of upright barrels and trestles. At its back there hung from the balcony a curtain behind which a few makeshift steps descended to the door of an inn parlor now used by the actors as a tiring-room. The balcony thereabove was not devoted exclusively to the musicians; like all the other galleries around the yard, and to which chambers of the inn opened, this one held crowds of spectators,—inn guests and town's people. But of this one, that part immediately over the stage had, since the change of play, been cleared of people, and now remained so, with poles placed on either side as barriers. This part was reserved as Juliet's balcony; an inn chamber gave access to it from the rear. The height of the stage was such, that the floor of the balcony would be level with Romeo's eyes; but that mattered nothing to the imagination of an Elizabethan audience.
Even the steps leading to the balconies were crowded; the yard itself, paved with cobble stones, was more densely so, and with rougher and noisier people. Here were the lowest classes represented, but not those alone; here was a rawer wit than among the groundlings of the Globe Theatre; here was a smaller measure of acuteness than there, and here was a loutishness that was there absent.
The inn gates were now closed, but for a narrow opening, where stood two of the players' men to receive the money of what spectators might yet arrive.
The hour when the play ought to have begun had passed. But the crowd was the more tolerant of a burden upon its patience, for the fact that "Romeo and Juliet" had been substituted for the other play. Shakespeare's love-tragedy, which at first production had made the greatest success in the brief history of English drama, was the most popular play of its time; and to a county town of the insignificance of Oakham, it was still a novelty, bright with the lustre of its London triumph.
But at length the pleasure of anticipation lost power to sweeten the delay of realization. The crowd murmured. The musicians, who had fallen to playing "I am the Duke of Norfolk," for there being nothing else left unplayed, became the targets of derisive yells; the unseen players, behind the curtain, were called upon to hasten. My lady had changed her position several times, and my lord was beginning to wonder why the devil—
And then the curtain was pushed a little aside, and Master Sly stepped forth again, now dressed for the part he was on this occasion to enact,—that of Mercutio. The crowd gave a shout of welcome, the musicians came to an abrupt but grateful stop. "The prologue," remarked several of the knowing, and then indignantly bade others hush, who were making the same remark.
But Master Sly's air was not suggestive of an ordinary prologue. It was hesitating, embarrassed, a little dubious of consequences. He began, rather to my lord than to the audience as a whole, a halting, bungling speech, of which the purport was that, by reason of the sudden illness of an actor who played a part necessary to the movement of the tragedy, and as no unoccupied player in the company knew the part, either "Romeo and Juliet" must be for the occasion abandoned, or its performance marred by the reading of the part, "which marring must needs be the greater," said Mr. Sly, "for that it is a part of exceeding activity, and hath some furious fighting with the rapier."
Here was a damper, whose potent effect became at once manifest in blank looks on faces noble and faces common. My lord and his lady were as much disappointed as the rudest artisan or the pertest grammar-school truant. The assemblage was yet in that chilled silence which precedes murmurs of displeasure, and Mr. Sly was drawing breath to submit the alternative of another play or the marred performance, when from a gable window high above all galleries a voice rang out:
"Go to, Will Sly! I'll wager 'tis the part of Tybalt; and that Gil Crowe's illness comes of the same old cause!"