Fools and Mortals by Bernard Cornwell

 “Lord what fools these mortals be!”

Puck, Midsummer Night’s Dream

Bernard Cornwell is best known for his Napoleonic War books about Richard Sharpe and the rifle brigades and for his Last Kingdom series about Uhtred the Saxon. Both have been made into popular television shows.

Fools and Mortals is a standalone novel about the first staging of Midsummer Night’s Dream.

There is a theory among some academics that Midsummer Night’s Dream was written for the marriage of Elizabeth Carey to Thomas Berkeley on February 19th, 1596. Elizabeth Carey was the granddaughter of Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon, the patron of The Lord Chamberlain’s men, the company in which Shakespeare had a share. As such Hunsdon was a powerful and important figure in Shakespeare’s life. Cornwell runs with this theory for his story and Fools and Mortals is replete with descriptions of London in the snow and the problems of staging a play in a hall by candlelight.

 ‘It was cold. Freezing. The night was still, baked with frost. The snow sparkled where lantern light touched it…I needed shelter, but by this time of night the taverns in Whitehall were tight shut, not even a lamp glimmering.’

‘The music began and I snatched up a pair of shears. Tom and Percy had lit the candles, but they had to stay in the gallery, so two of us mechanicals took the right-hand side of the stage and two the left, where we trimmed the wicks, cutting off the excess to make a clearer, brighter flame.’

The story of Fools and Mortals is told in the first person by Richard Shakespeare, a brother of William’s and ten years younger. Cornwell imagines Richard as getting into trouble in Stratford on Avon and running away to London to beg William to help him become an actor. He finds his older brother rather dour and distant, but undeniably brilliant, both as a playwright and as a theatre troupe manager. After an apprenticeship in one of the boys’ companies Richard graduates to playing women and girls with The Lord Chamberlain’s Men.

 ‘George Bryan, all nervousness gone, had been clawing at me, much to the audience’s joy. They were urging him to drag up my skirts and show them my legs, but I managed to get a knee between his thigh’s and jerk it up hard. He went very still, and the audience probably thought he was having a moment of even greater joy…’

When the story begins Richard is getting too old to play girls and wants proper parts. He has ‘a beard coming’ he says. His brother seizes upon that declaration and shamelessly gives to Flute the Bellows Mender in the mechanicals’ performance in Midsummer Night’s Dream. Richard is mortified.

There is tension between Will and Richard. There is tension between the players and the Pursuivants, employees of the Crown who seek out seditious, Catholic, literature. There is deadly rivalry between theatre companies. And someone steals Will’s latest plays. Is the disaffected Richard to blame?

That is the personal story, but what I enjoyed most about Fools and Mortals was the bigger background and the way Cornwell brings the actors of the day to back-stage life. They are rough, hard-working and are handy with their oaths:

‘ ‘’What’s your first line?” Rust growled.

“Um…”

“Christ on his silver-painted cross! If I ever hear the word ‘um’ on this stage I will kill! I will kill! What’s your goddamned line?”

And I love the asides such as:

‘We are players, and we love an audience. Sometimes, if a play is going badly, it is easy to think of the audience as an enemy, but truly they are a part of the play, because an audience changes the way we perform.’

As true now as it ever was.

If you love theatre, love Shakespeare’s plays and you love a rollicking, fast moving tale grounded in historical accuracy, then Fools and Mortals is for you.