Mask of Night by Philip Gooden

of old feuding families and young lovers, one from each side, may sound familiar to you. It’s probably happened often enough in history, and William Shakespeare used it in his tragical story of
Romeo and Juliet
, one of the Chamberlain’s Company’s most successful pieces. Our audiences can’t get enough of attractive youth just as they can’t get enough of doom and destruction. When you put both together you’re guaranteed a crowd-pleaser. But they say that life imitates art, and it was in the attempt to avert a real tragedy, if only in potential, that we were preparing to don our costumes and put on a private performance of the tale of the young lovers.
    I heard all of this – the story of the Constants and Sadlers – from an authoritative source. It was told to me by William Shakespeare himself soon after the Chamberlain’s Company had arrived in Oxford.
    We junior and middling players had installed ourselves in the Golden Cross Inn, where we were to perform and where we were also being accommodated at half-rates for the duration. Our lodgings were nothing special, being a couple of large chambers at the rear of the inn, set aside for groups. But the welcome was warm. The landlord, a man called Owen Meredith, had greeted us in person. Some of the more senior members of the Company had made their own arrangements, having friends in the town and even in the colleges.
    It was early evening. Dusk was thickening. I had wandered out into the town for a brief look around this great centre of scholarship, this famous Athens of England – without, to be honest, seeing any marks of higher intelligence or nobler thought in the faces of people than I was used to seeing in London (that is, not much) – when I ran across Master Shakespeare, looking all trim in a silk doublet. He had not accompanied us from London to Oxford but had travelled down instead from Stratford-on-Avon where he lives, or rather where his family does.
    WS invited me to join him for a drink as night fell. So now we, William Shakespeare and Nicholas Revill, were sitting and drinking together in a tavern, not the Golden Cross Inn but another one on the same side of the wide street known as Cornmarket, in fact bang next door to the Golden Cross. Shakespeare told me he was lodging in this place, which was called simply the Tavern, as if the man who’d baptized it had simply run out of invention. The Tavern, a solid house on two floors with twin gables, wasn’t so different from other similar establishments on Cornmarket and seemed to me to have nothing much to recommend it over the Golden Cross (where we might at least have got cheaper drinks). I wasn’t sure why Shakespeare had chosen to drink here, let alone to sleep in one of their beds. However, when your company is requested by a man who is both your employer and a senior shareholder in your work-place, you usually fall in with his wishes.
    While we sipped at our pint pots – WS being as deliberate, as careful a drinker as yours truly – he told me about the Constant and Sadler families, and about the young lovers, Sarah and William. Since his tone implied personal knowledge, I asked how he had come across them.
    “We have a friend in common, Hugh Fern, who is a physician in this town. He was brought up in Warwick but he moved to Oxford about the same time as I quit Stratford for London. Once he wanted to act but he turned doctor instead. It was in his house that William Sadler and Sarah Constant first met, that is met for the first time since they were children. You could say that Doctor Fern brought them together.”
    “Did he mean to bring them together?” I said, slightly surprised that WS had chosen to impart all this information, not just about the feuding families and the physician called Hugh Fern but also, in a glancing way, about himself. I don’t think I’d ever heard him say anything about his personal circumstances before.
    “Mean to bring them together? Well, I suppose Hugh is a