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of Court. Or so I would have thought before I had much experience of them. I’ve no
time for them as would-be
lawyers
but speak of them now only as an
audience
.
    Like the apprentices, these young men have a riotous reputation but because they’re usually well born they get away with it (unlike the apprentices). They are also players in an amateur
way. Training to be politicians and pleaders in court, they no doubt regard the drama as a good preparation in rhetoric and deceit. They are inclined to the theatrical, and enjoy debate, word-play,
innuendo, love-making, and dressing up. In addition these students of the law are more than happy to see men beating each other over the head. There’s nothing that the sedentary like more than
a good fight, seeing other people fighting, that is. And when a lawyer is involved there is always a good chance of an action for battery, and therefore profit.
    As it happened, the play we were going to stage, William Shakespeare’s
Troilus and Cressida
, contained all this and more. To wit – wit (of a sour sort), love, lust, argument,
filth, battles, treachery, and sulking in tents. As a backdrop, there’s a war, the one between the Greeks and the Trojans. It may even be the original war, for all I know, the very first to
darken the face of the earth. It certainly goes on for a long time, all of ten years. And then there’s the cause of that war the seizing of Helen, wife of Menelaus the Greek, by Paris, the son
of King Priam of Troy. But the story of Troilus is not really to do with
them
– and I should know since this was my part.
    Yes, Nicholas Revill was playing Troilus, the love-sick young Trojan prince who, like Paris, was a son of King Priam. It was the first time, incidentally, that I had appeared in the title to a
play.
    I am a warrior and in love with the beautiful Cressida, daughter of Calchas the priest. Calchas is a Trojan blessed or cursed with second sight. Forseeing his city’s ruin, he has abandoned
Troy for the Greek camp outside the walls but somehow forgotten to take his daughter with him. Comes a time, during which Troilus after a long and laborious wooing is enjoying his Cressida, when
Calchas arranges for his daughter to be brought to him in an exchange of prisoners. The young lovers must part, although not before they have sworn eternal fidelity. Do they keep that faith? You
shall see (even though you already know the answer).
    Meantime – in the foggy by-ways of London rather than on the sun-kissed plains of Troy – Peter Agate and I groped towards our destination beyond Temple Stairs. I knew the area just
to the west of here for it was the site of Essex House, the London palace of Robert Devereux, the now disgraced Earl, and a place which I had twice visited at some peril to my life. In the shadow
of Temple Bar we entered the jumbled precincts of the Inner and Middle Temples. It was only about two in the afternoon but it seemed as though evening was already approaching. I identified
ourselves to a gatekeeper as members of the Chamberlain’s – adding “the players” in case he pretended ignorance – and Peter and I were directed round several corners
and through several courts. Dark-gowned figures were flitting about in these spaces, like crows, and adding to the general cheerfulness of the scene. I supposed they were Benchers or juniors. A
grand red-bricked tower and entrance, crested with the lamb and flag symbol of the Temple, loomed up in the murk. We climbed a few steps. Pushing through a weighty oak door, we left the damp fog
and entered a great hall with an elaborately beamed ceiling and candles massed in sconces along the walls. The tables and benches which had been shifted to one side indicated that when this room
wasn’t being used for playing its real purpose was for dining, probably of a grand sort.
    Inside this hall were my fellows and that air of bustle and excitement which I’ve long associated with a play in its real