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John paces the floor feverishly, shoving his ruddy blond curls up off of his forehead and then letting them fall back again as he lifts his hands to gesture grandly, or to act out a sword thrust, or a caress. Francis writes down what he says, but only the parts that make sense, the bits that fit together. Sometimes John notices, and sometimes he doesn’t.
“There was a scene between the servants- was there not?” John asks when he has finally talked himself out, when he slides into the chair opposite Francis’s and they begin to look over what he wrote.
“No,” Francis says serenely.
“Yes there was,” John insists. “I remember it now. A scene-- they all gather--”
“As you propose it, there are to be near twelve scenes in the third act already. Would you have another? Is it needed?”
“It may be,” John says, shrinking petulantly down his chair. “But very well, leave it. I will write the third act, and put it in if I see fit.”
He does sometimes see fit. But Francis tends to win in the end.
*
At the Mermaid, Nathan Field introduces them, amazed they have never met.
“You both write for our company!” he cries. He is twenty years old and still a boy: a tall boy, a broad-shouldered boy, but with a smooth face and woman’s voice, milk-white skin and black hair. When he says you write for our company he means just as much you write for me, for he is their star. Cuthbert Burbage longs to have him for the King's Men.
John Fletcher longs for Cuthbert Burbage to long to have him. (Not like that. There is not much question of Cuthbert’s proclivities in that direction, with his pretty wife and three children. There is also not much question of John Fletcher’s proclivities, but there the shape of gossip bends the opposite direction.)
But for now--
“You are both out of Master Giles’ favor,” Field says. This is the manager of the Children of the Chapel; the man on whose favor their livelihood as writers depends, at least for now. “Beaumont, Oxford. Fletcher, Cambridge. And Beaumont has lately been an Inner Temple man.”
“What did you do?” Francis Beaumont asks.
“The Faithful Shepherdess,” John says with a sigh. “I will not disown the play-- I like it well! If the people understood it not, it is no fault of mine. The fault of the players, perhaps.”
Field smiles. “And yet, I have work, and you do not.”
“Mine was The Knight of the Burning Pestle,” says Beaumont. John finds this instinct for conciliation immediately impressive: once started, he can never stop, even when he knows he ought to. But that is why Beaumont’s answer surprises him.
“A satire!” he says. And a sharp one too, mocking audience present and authors past alike. It was not well-received, that John remembers well.
“It was,” Beaumont agrees with a rueful smile. “But not so skillfully done. The spectators took it as but one of the very adventure tales I meant to mock— and a poor one, too. And so I have spent these past months writing odd scenes and speeches for more famous names— Ben Jonson, in the main.”
“Fletcher yearns to write with Will Shakespeare,” Field says, and John finds himself scowling, embarrassed, though he cannot say why.
“No,” John says, though he knows Field thinks he’s just being contrarian. “I wish to write under my own name. For myself.”
*
“I cannot tell how you do it,” Francis laughs, shaking his head. “You have no more hours in a day than I, and yet you put them to far better use. You write three acts in the time it takes me to get through half of one.”
“But they are no better for the speed.” John frowns down at the pages in his hand. He tosses them onto their desk and turns away with a sigh. The moon is bright, though not bright enough to write by (John has tried). “And you exaggerate.”
“But a little. A very little.” Francis rises and stretches his hands over his head. They are both red-haired (Cuthbert Burbage makes like he cannot tell the difference between them, and John still cannot tell if he is in earnest or not), but Francis’s is true copper, it blazes in the candlelight. “But you will burn us out of our living if you write through the night as you do. If you do not set the roof itself ablaze, then it shall be our money burned away.”
“I must put the thought to paper, or it will leave me,” John protests. “I cannot deliberate upon a scene as you do, cannot build it piece by piece in my head. Perhaps,” he grins, “you learned it of Jonson. He trained as a bricklayer, did he not?”
“And became a soldier to flee the trade,” Francis replies. He unlaces his doublet as he speaks. “He has not a bricklayer’s soul. My methods I must own myself.”
“I like them well.” John watches Francis’s ink-stained fingers tug at his fraying laces. John wants to reach over and untie them for him. But does not.
*
Henslowe does not wholly deserve his reputation for being free with money: he has made quite a lot of it. He has built himself up from dyer to tenement landlord to churchwarden, and it is said the dowry his daughter brought to Ned Alleyn was more than generous. But he is readier than the Burbages, perhaps, to give a writer a chance. He has two playhouses to fill, after all. One bad play will not scare an audience away.
(Two might.)
“Have you written with Francis Beaumont?” he asks. John replies that he has not. “He, too, has come to me. I will have a play from the two of you, what say you to that?”
John thanks him, and says it is very generous indeed.
*
The point of contention: a speech.
“It is too long, and ill-placed,” Francis says. “At the very moment when we are most impatient to know what will befall— why, we must hear an age of lamentation instead.”
“We must know how she feels!” John cries. “If we cared for nothing but what would come next, why, let us write an old morality play— let us stand before the groundlings and tell them a tale, and not trouble ourselves with places and personages.”
“There is a time and place for each.” Francis is brandishing his pen threateningly; John seizes the pages from the desk. “It brings the scene a-staggering to a halt.”
“It is the very heart of the scene!” And John clutches it to his own heart, at which Francis cannot help but laugh.
But John, feeling put-upon and peevish, says, “I cannot think why you write with me, when all you wish to do is strip my words way. It is ever too long and too wandering and too wayward with you. If you like it so little—”
“You are unjust,” Francis cuts in. “I love your writing well, and thought our methods suited. Indeed, I have far more need of you than you of me— if you dislike our partnership, let this play be our last. I will be the sorrier, if it is so.”
John does not know what to say. Francis stands.
“You long for your name to stand alone, I know. Why, let it. You have a mighty talent, John. I am made the better by you, not you by me.”
“No!” John cries, feeling suddenly frantic. He throws the page upon the desk and strikes out the speech himself, and it is done before Francis can reach to stop him. “Why, you are right, and I know it well! I am given to excess, to distraction. I must have you to hem me in.”
“I do not wish to— hem you.” He laughs, but frowns as he laughs. “I would not be your shepherd, you my sheep.”
“Shape me,” John amends. “Better me.”
“As any good marriage should, I am sure,” Francis said, and at last John laughs, too.
(It is not so long after this that, finding they are both in need of lodging, they take a room together.)
*
“We must see the scene wherein she decides upon that course!"
“And I tell you, we need not! It demands but a line or two as she enters, and all will be plain—”
“It will not be plain! We must know why she has done it, why she feels that only this—”
“So she shall say it, but she needs no more than ten lines to do it!”
*
The Thames freezes over, and event London has not seen in near ten years. Everyone takes to the river, and though the watermen grumble, the merchants are giddy: food merchants and puppet plays line the riverbank, groups of apprentices play at football. John and Francis stroll the river like any street, like it is any Charter fair.
“Would the ice were clearer,” John says. “Would we could see all the strange fish below.”
“Would the sky were clearer,” Francis replies, his head tilted up while John’s tilts down. “It looks like to snow again.”
They slip and skitter their way to the southern shore, where the iced mud of the streets feels little different from the surface of the river. And there to home, to their room strewn with papers and stained with ink.
John leans out the window, and ducks back in with a pale frosting of snow in his hair. Francis reaches to dash it away and, well-warmed with wine, flicks the melted droplets back in John’s face.
“Now, sir,” John says, with all the dripping dignity he can muster. “I am your elder. You must show more respect.”
Francis’s eyes are very blue, and now they look brighter still, with his cheeks and nose turned red from the cold. Often, very often, often enough he has begun to feel like a silly girl in a play of their own making, John has wished to touch that cheek, a copper curl. Francis’s eyes are very blue, and just now they seem very near.
“You have snow in your beard,” says Francis. John turns away and brushes it out with a huff of irritation. He cannot tell if he is being mocked; he fears he is. He wonders that he has never asked Field what Francis knows of their friendship, of what it has been and what it is still, from time to time.
“I know well you can write a better love scene than this,” says Francis. “I have waited all this while to see you do it.”
John turns back and says, startled, “You have waited?”
“Why, yes.” Francis leans back against their desk, folds his arms over his chest. “For is that not how we shape our stories, you and I? You begin— and you speak too much, and too aimlessly, and use some strange turn of phrase, and I hum and shake my head and say at last, would you not be better served with something simpler— would it not do just as well were you merely to say, Francis Beaumont, we have joined our words and our lives – shall we not to bed, too?”
“Can—” John clears his throat. “Can we not just begin with yours?”
*
Cuthbert Burbage, not often seen at the Mermaid, comes and sits himself across from them.
“So,” he says. He looks oddly like his brother, though their voice and bearing and coloring could not be less alike. “What do you have?”
John clears his throat. “We have…” Nothing, at the moment.
“It is set in Sicily,” Francis says suddenly. “A Sicilian court, ruled by a conquering king. But the true heir yet lives— the usurper fears to kill him, because the people love him so.”
“And the king’s daughter falls in love with the heir,” John jumps in. “And must thwart her father’s plans to marry her to another. But then the heir becomes jealous—” He hesitates slightly, glances at Francis. Are they just reciting the plot of Cymbeline? Well, is that so bad? It was well-received.
“—of a rumor that she is in love with her servant. But it is proved this cannot be, because the servant is a lady in disguise.”
Still distinctly smacking of Cymbeline, but Cuthbert is nodding.
“Very well.” He stands, offers a hand across the table. “Bring the first act to me next week. And be sure there is a part for my brother, eh? He will speak for any play that gives him lines enough.”
John all but lunges for Cuthbert’s hand. “Next week. You shall see it on Monday, sir.”
“Monday?” Francis hisses when Cuthbert has gone. “But we have yet to begin it!”
“Do you think it is because we have written for Henslowe?” John asks, his eyes still fixed on the door, as if Burbage might return at any moment to rescind the offer.
“Perhaps he hopes to lure Field through us,” Francis says. “For we are known to be his friends, and ‘tis said Rossetar means to quite remake the company. It may be the moment at last to bring Field to the King’s Men.”
“The lady in disguise,” John says, the scene already forming in his mind, Nathan Field with his face painted, kneeling in supplication. “That would be the part for him.”
*
Nathan Field remains with the Children of the Chapel.
George Birch plays Euphrasia, who goes about disguised as the page Bellario. Richard Burbage plays Philaster, the jealous, disinherited heir. Despite tricks, lies, and misunderstandings, all goes happily in the end— but it seems like it surely won’t.
Everyone loves it.
*
John Fletcher has seen one of his plays for the King’s Men to print: The Wandering Lovers. Francis spots it in a bookseller’s stall and pauses over it. The play was not a great success, but of course, that is why the company did not mind parting with it.
“Have you seen the title page they set upon your play?” Francis asks carefully when he comes upon John in the Mermaid that evening. John near knocks over his chair as he leaps to his feat.
“I did not know it was finished!” he cries, and seems about to rush out at once, so Francis must hasten to pull the quarto from his pocket and set it upon the table. It sits between them, and they look at it in silence.
THE WANDERING LOVERS it says, and as lately acted at the Globe by His Majesty’s Servants
and then
written by {FRANCIS BEAUMONT,
and
IOHN FLETCHER } Gent.
“We could speak to the printer,” Francis says. And when John says nothing, he says, “They do it because Philaster and The Maid’s Tragedy are so newly well-received. They think our names together— well, it little matters why, it should not be. The play is yours. We will see it amended—”
“I do not care,” John says. He brushes his fingers down the page. “You have a part in it. You have a part in every play I write, and always shall. Why, let them set your name upon it. It is true.”
After a small pause, he adds, “Though I would they might set mine first.”
“In first and second names both, I have the better of you,” Francis replies. “You must blame your godparents, not I.”
John sighs. “Oh, let it be.”
He runs his fingers across their names, the faint indent the press leaves in the paper. “Why, let it be.”