Anne played the hapless Hero and Condella was reduced to overacting as Margaret, Hero’s waiting gentlewoman attendant. (Condella always created precisely the character here in Much Ado that she used for the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet, even though I’m certain that the Bard hadn’t meant for the two to have any similarities.) And I got to woo her onstage even though I’m twenty SEY younger than she is.

* * * *

The audience, mostly arbeiters in their brown rawool and a few score doles in their cotton gray, laughed hard and applauded and cheered frequently.

Alleyn and Aglaé were wonderful in their act 1 banter and we’d just gotten into act 2 with Benedick asking me to sing a “divine air”—I don’t believe I mentioned that they had me play Balthasar primarily because I was the best singer in the troupe now that Davin had died and left us—and I’d just begun the song when everything changed forever.

Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more,

Men were deceivers ever,

One foot in sea, and one on shore,

To one thing constant never.

Then sigh not so, but let them go,

And be you blithe and bonny,

Converting all your sounds of woe

Into Hey, nonny nonny.

In the middle of my song, into the tent floated a forty-foot-long heavy iron-gray gravity sledge carrying at least eight carapace-hooded, chitinous, four-armed, ten-foot-tall Archons, each sitting deep in its own iron-gray metal throne. Hanging from the sledge by their synaptic fiberneural filaments, which ran down to their hairless, distended skulls like slim, translucent copper hair, were four naked dragomen. Their oversized, lidless eyes focused on the stage and their cartilage-free ears rotating the better to pick up—and relay to their Archon masters—my singing.