If at Faust You Don`t Succeed

CHAPTER 5

At the theater, the crowd was coming in slowly. Although the theater held somewhat less than three hundred persons, thousands were seeking entry, drawn from all parts of the kingdom. These theatergoers were dressed in all their finery. Men and women alike wore long cloaks, since there was a chill in the air even on this fine May afternoon. The audience was a motley bunch. There were many nobles from the court, among them Lord Salisbury, Lord Dunkirk, Lord Cornwallis, the Lord High Executioner, and Lord Faversham. Some had come with their wives, others with their mistresses, pert in their paste diamonds, and still others, the very young ones, like Lord Dover, who was only eight, with their parents, or tutors, or, as in the case of Viscount Delville, seven years old and sickly, with their bodyguard-doctors. These were the notables; but most of the audience was made up of common people: heavyset cloth merchants from Meaching Row, tall, thin apothecaries from Pall Mall and Cheapside, angular feed merchants from Piccadilly, and the even commoner son, sturdy vagabonds who had cadged a ticket and called no man master, soldiers on leave from the Netherlandish wars with their fantastical plumed caps and deep-cut sleeves. There were more than a few clerics in the crowd, who had come not to amuse themselves but out of a serious purpose, because Faustus was supposed to be a sacrilegious play, and they expected to get good material out of it for their Sunday sermons. They all trooped in, jostling and hawking and spitting and buying oranges and little bags of candy from the wenches who provided such things, and they gawked around at the theater, which was small and oval-shaped with a row of boxes to either side, and a raised stage that extended out over the foremost ranks of the audience.

Flambeaux flickered in the din of loud English voices calling to one another. "I say, Harry!"

"Look, here come Melisande and Cuddles!" And the like.

The admission at the door for those without passes was threepence ha'penny, for the Earl of Netting'

ham's men didn't do this for free. But they paid anyway and no demurs were raised in that free-spending, easy-thinking crowd, for this was a day of celebration, and the future was uncertain, for if the Spanish Armada landed, as some predicted, and prevailed over the naval forces of the red-haired queen, your money wouldn't be worth boo anyway. Down near the candled floodlights, the groundlings had assembled in their best piebald hose and multicolored jerkins to talk and carouse and make japes at the actors.

To a flourish of trumpets, Edward Alleyn came out upon the stage. Young Will Shakespeare, already balding, noted for his future use how the chattering young fops and their loud-laughing ladies quieted for a moment. The houselights of magnesia and naphtha were set alight in pewter bowls set on top of three-legged standards. They had recently replaced the adamantage, the old rush stage lighting in a copper pot that had served well enough in pretheater days. Sparks were applied to them and they flared up, calling the audience to attention. The hautboys in the small ensemble took up the Faustus theme.

The setting on the stage represented the town of Wittenberg in the previous century. It was quite realistic except for the fact that the Draken watchtower where Faustus would later meet the Spirit of Earth was leaning somewhat precariously to the left, for stage design was still in its infancy and proper bracing for the sets would only be achieved in the early eighteenth century. As the curtain went up there was a prolonged clearing of throats, this being the height of the phlegm season, and a rustling of feet covered in many different substances, but most of them consisting of an irregular and scratchy surface, the only sort you'd expect in this day of preindustrial handicrafts. Their roughness accounted for the annoying sounds they made when dragged back and forth through the eggshells and orange peels and the peanut hulls covering the floor in that year of plague when the populace was mad for amusements and willing to pay any price for them.

Just as the performance was beginning Mack hurried in late, and slid along a row of seats with murmured sorrys and oh-excuse-mes and took his seat somewhat breathlessly, the magic mirror, safe in the chamois case, clutched to his side. Marguerite followed, and took her seat beside him with a giggle of girlish anticipation.

"I've never seen a play before," she confided. "Is it like sitting around telling stories?"

"Very similar," Mack said. "Except that people act out the story instead of someone telling it."

"Or sometimes both," a man sitting beside him remarked.

Mack turned. A man of middle years was sitting beside him, robust of form and ruddy of face, with piercing dark eyes and a look of hawklike intelligence.

"Faust!" he said.

"Yes," the personage said. "And you are a stinking impostor."

"Shush," said a surly voice in a row in front of them. "Can't you see the performance has begun?"

On stage, Edward Alleyn stepped forward, swept off his cap with a flourish, and struck a pose.

"I'll discuss this with you later," Mack said.

"Shush!" the man in front of them said.

On the stage, the chorus had finished its opening speech. Edward Alleyn, resplendent in a crimson surplice, with a gilded cross upon his chest, was saying, "Now that the gloomy shadow of the Earth, longing to view Orion's drizzling look…"

"There's nothing to discuss," Faust said. "Simply begone at once. I'll take over from here." "Not a chance," Mack said.

Their exchange was interrupted at this point by the audience, who was not interested in hearing the rude argument of a pair of jackanapes. "Shut up!"

"Stick a boot in it!"

"Stuff it!"

And similar exclamations.

Faust and Mack were forced to desist, for neither of them wanted the truth of the matter to be known. So they glared at each other out of the corners of their eyes while Marguerite and Helen, on either side of them, patted their hands and whispered to them to remain calm. On stage, the actors had gotten beyond Faustus' dialogue with the Seven Deadly Sins, who remained onstage with colored costumes and lugubrious faces, and proceeded to the entrance of several devils.

Mack's mind was working with lightning speed, both defining the game he was involved in and planning out his next move. It was obvious to him that he had more to gain here, and therefore more to lose, than he had thought at first, back in Cracow when he had broken into Faust's studio and accepted Mephistopheles' offer. It was true that the real Faust was here trying to claim his own; but what did that matter to Mack? Mack's reality was more important to him than Faust's, and his reality seemed to have led him to become Faust. Therefore this other Faust, whom he had taken over from, had no real claim to the Faust persona.

Still, it was going to be quite a problem. He needed a way to handle this, get Faust off his back, give him a chance to do his thing. If he let Faust oust him now, what would he be?

An advantage! He needed an advantage! Surely that was the point of all military strategy—to realize when you are in a spot and to seek—the Equalizer.

He realized that by peeking into Dee's magic mirror he might get a glimpse of the future, and thus he could know what to do in this encounter between him and Faust.

He slipped the mirror out of its case, disguising the noise by grinding his feet in the peanut shells on the floor, and remarking to Marguerite, "It's disgusting, how they keep these places." Now the mirror was in his lap.

Just as he was about to look into it there was an explosion on stage, and a bright flash as of hellish lightning. Mack had seen that light before. It was Mephistopheles, conjuring himself.

The tall and handsome demon stepped out of the smoke, adjusted his evening clothes, advanced to stage center, and, peering around at the audience, spotted Mack. "The mirror!" he shouted.

"Yes, I've got it!" Mack shouted back. "Don't worry, it's here!"

"You must destroy it!" Mephistopheles shouted.

"Beg pardon?"

"Get rid of it at once! They've just passed a ruling! By looking into it you'll invalidate the whole contest, since contestants must not be granted foreknowledge of events. It would skew the result, you see."

The audience was mumbling to themselves uncertainly at this point, and sniffing often at the perfume-sprayed nosegays that they held in their dirty, lace-gloved hands. Feet clad in various materials shuffled noisily in the peanut shells, and there was something ominous about the sound, some strange over-or undertone, or both, some unbelievable bass note of madness about to erupt that had an effect on the ear as a tremendous and perhaps bloody happening waiting in the figurative wings that is Everyman's heart from which it would soon be born.

Time to get out of this crowd. Mack got to his feet and edged his way out into the aisle, the better to get the hell out of the place if something happened—because the feeling that theaters are places where sinister things may happen is a notion that sprang into existence contemporaneous with the first theater itself, and it may be that this selfsame first performance of this play of Doctor Faustus gave rise to the legend that it is easy in the theater for something weird and frightening to happen. Marguerite followed along behind him, hanging on to his coattails so as not to get lost in the crowd that had begun to roil and tumble around them.

There was a reason for their panic. One member of the audience, not as simpleminded as he looked, had counted the number of actors onstage and seen that this was not the number given in the playbill. When he relayed this information to others—"There are supposed to be seven devils onstage, but I count eight"—a wave of uncertainty came over those watching. Wooden-framed spectacles were hastily clapped on the long noses that were prevalent in that day as all the spectators consulted their playbills. If there were too many devils on the stage, at least one of them had to be real. It didn't take any Thomas Aquinas to figure that out. Any rightminded person who viewed the matter without prejudice could see beyond a doubt that the tall, thin guy who had suddenly appeared bore more resemblance to the devil of their dreams than the other guy, the actor in the shabby red cotton suit and ill-fitting slippers. And seeing that, a sudden let's-get-the-hell-out-of-here mood swept over the audience, and they began to rise and scrape their feet in the peanut shells, prefactory to stampeding into the exits.

"Hang on to that mirror!" Azzie shouted to Mack. "You can never tell when an item like that will prove useful. Anyhow, you need it for the contest!"

"No, he doesn't!" Mephistopheles cried. "It's only one of his possible choices."

"Then who are you to tell him he can't make that choice?"

"I'm not saying anything of the kind," Mephistopheles said. "I'm merely advising him not to look into it himself, since foreknowledge would compromise the contest, to the mutual embarrassment of Dark and Light."

The audience, driven into a superstitious mania by the trip-hammer succession of downright weird events with sinister overtones, began to panic. Grown men flung ladies' hampers filled with the most delicate hams, roast beefs, sides of pork, and the like out of their way to get to the nearest exit. In vain the band struck up a galhard. The rest was triple time.