Me it was, his sweet Pinky, was his nurse the next morning for the blue-eye he suffered every time, bathed his brows in warmed water and fed him caudel so's he could speak again and stand up from his pallet and dress and begin to think serious again from theatricals, which was our profession.
“Ah, good Sir Pincus,” he'd say, his guts groaning like a siege engine, “what a whoreson rogue am I! Th'art too sweet to salve me so. Better were I to expire of this pox e'en now and go give you your leave to live a gentler life hereafter!”
“Sit up!” I kvetched. Or, “Stand up!” “Button your jerkin closed.” “Wipe your sleeve off where you spewed yourself!” I said, “You don't leave off drink you'll be turned out to perform back in country counties, then what's to eat except for homely curds and stale ale for the both of us, nu?”
“Eat!” he cries out at me like I'm taubstumm deaf. “Nay, speak not of vittles, Pinky! Rather, what's to drink in the house, Pinky? Give me to drink, I beg of you, for the blue-eye pinches poor Will's brain and guts, and my blood's thin as groat's gruel, oh grammercy, give me but a little to drink ere I die!”
Which he did, from his shikking, my Will, me holding him in my arms. Which I'll tell later.
But after these main faults I'm telling honest, such a talent! Which is the main, or most of it, why I'm telling. From dancing. And mostly, besides all the dances of whichever he did, the best he did the old country Morris! This I never can forget, nor nobody else ever saw Will Kempe dance the country Morris. Which is mostly why I'm telling now. I never hear a music except I remember Will Kempe dancing a Morris like I can still see it, like he didn't ever starb, like he's still alive dancing!
Any music, a hautboy the way they sing almost, lutes, Viola de Gamba, a cittern, trumpet tuckets, even some rustic playing his tongs and bones, a pipe or tabor drum, I hear and see my Will dancing a Morris. Mostly of course the tabor and also the pipe. And bells, the bells he wore strapped to his ankles and legs, on his cape and Fool's hat—they way he made them ring with the music from pipe and tabor! It's like I'm seeing him dance again.
Attired of course in his parti-colored motley, his Fool's coxcomb hat on his head, ribbons on his puffed sleeves, bells strapped on—wherever, a stage board in London performing the jig comes after the play, the open room in front of the good fire, dancing a turn to pay Tom Tapster's reckoning for his meat and drink—the shikker!--on the road a hundred thirty-four English miles to Norwich, our nine days wonder. I see my Will dance!
What it looked like to watch I don't know English words to say, only how it made me feel in my herz, from schmertz but also schmaltz it made me feel, everyone who watched feeling the same!
The music could be slow or fast—Jack Dowland's jib he wrote for him is slow like the passy pavan from Court dancing. Slow or else fast, the Morris he did high-step, like the Italian style, which itself was funny. The music starts, pipe and tabor, then his bells. People watching laughed.
Laughed! Like all of life was from one big gleek to laugh at—pantomime it was, Will Kempe dancing what a gleek was everything, from cold winters and wet summers is a laugh, ranks and stations is from a laugh, plague and also pox is also only to laugh at, for laughing is the falling sickness and also the wasting disease and smallpox too, dust on your cloak and mud stuck to your buskins is only for laughing, wenching and tippling is naturally for laughs, Queen Bess herself and all her Court machers are laughs, wars with Spain and France and Holland low countries is to laugh at, that you should die in a ditch to be buried in a potter's field or at a crossroads a suicide is all a big gleek vitz to laugh from! From the whole shtunk is a laugh.
Lacheln. I'm laughing, all of us watching Will Kempe dance are laughing at everything in the world is! To be a mensch alive is a laugh.
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