‘But,’ says Lauren, coiling her hair around a finger, ‘how do you know what his breath smelled like, sir?’

And I think for a moment how nice it would be if they could know. But of course I just smile and say something about a lack of toothpaste and get on with the lesson.

London, 1599

I had been playing the lute in Southwark all summer and into autumn. I often worked late, till after they closed the city gates, and had to walk the long way home, which could take over an hour.

Now, the weather had turned and the crowds were thinning out. I went around all the inns, asking for work, but they didn’t have any room for me. Being an inn musician was seen as a far better thing to be than a random street performer. I was part of a dying and undesirable breed, I realised. The trouble was, though, that there was a band of musicians – Pembroke’s Men – who had the market pretty much sewn up.

And having heard I was after a job, one of them – a giant bearded fiddler known locally as ‘Wolstan the Tree’ on account of his size and, possibly, the fact that his wild hair looked a bit like foliage in a storm – came up to me outside the Cardinal’s Hat just as it was getting dark.

He grabbed me by the neck and slammed me hard against a wall.

‘Leave him be,’ said Elsa, a friendly flame-haired prostitute I always spoke to on the way home.

‘Shut up, wench.’ Then he turned to me. His teeth were rotten, just a random row of brown pebbles. It was hard to tell if the smell of shit was coming from him or the tanners next door. ‘You ain’t playin’ music in any inn this side of Bishopsgate, lad. Especially not round Bankside. Not alive, you ain’t. This is ours. Ain’t no place for lamb-faced boys like you.’

I spat in his face.

He grabbed the neck of the lute.

‘Get off that!’

‘I’m going to break this first, and then your fingers.’

‘Give it me back, you thieving—’

Elsa was over at him now. ‘Ho, Wolstan! Give it him back!’

He swung the lute high behind him, ready to swing it and smash it against the wall.

Then came a voice, a grand, deep theatrical kind of voice.

‘Stop there, Wolstan.’

Wolstan turned to see the three men who had just appeared on the path behind him.

‘Oh my,’ said Elsa, suddenly excited – or, very possibly, feigning it – as she smoothed the creases in her dress with strokes as slow as cat licks. The whole area was theatre. On or off the stage. ‘It’s Richard the Third himself.’

Of course, it wasn’t Richard the Third. It was Richard Burbage, who even I knew was the most famous actor in London. He was quite formidable-looking at that time. He was not an Errol Flynn or a Tyrone Power or a Paul Newman or a Ryan Gosling. If he was on Tinder he’d be lucky to get a single swipe right. His hair was thin and mousy and his face as lumpy and misshapen as Rembrandt’s, but he had something else, something Elizabethans recognised in a way people in the twenty-first century no longer do: an aura. Something strong and metaphysical, a soul sense, a presence, a power.

‘A splendid evening to you, Mr Burbage, sir,’ said the Tree, lowering the lute.

‘But not, it would appear, to everyone,’ said Burbage.

I noticed the other two men. One was as round as a barrel, and with an impressive beard, neater than Wolstan’s. He was sneering so dramatically I guessed he was another actor. He seemed quite drunk.

‘You frothing stream of bull’s piss, give the boy his lute back.’

The other man was slim and quite handsome, albeit with a small mouth and long hair combed back ill-advisedly. His eyes were soft and cow-like. Like the other two, he was dressed in a padded, laced and buttoned doublet; in his case gold-coloured, I think, though it was hard to tell in the fading light. A well-paid bohemian, complete with gold hooped earring. These were clearly actors, and well-paid ones. I knew they must have been members of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, along with Burbage.

‘Fie . . . Look here. Look at this. Hell is empty and all the devils are here on Bankside,’ said the handsome one, in a resigned but bitter kind of way.

Elsa noticed this man. ‘Shakespeare himself.’

Shakespeare – for it was he – smiled the smallest of smiles.

Elsa turned to the man next to Shakespeare, who was as large as a barrel. ‘And I know who you are too. You’re the other Will. Will Kemp.’

Kemp nodded, and patted his stomach with pride. ‘I am he.’

‘Give me my lute,’ I told Wolstan one more time, and this time he knew the night was against him. He placed the lute in my hands and sloped off.

Elsa gave a mocking wave, waggling her little finger. ‘A pox on you, maggot-cock!’

The three actors laughed. ‘Come on, let’s head to the Queen’s for a quart,’ said Kemp.

Shakespeare frowned at his friend as if he were a headache. ‘You ale-soused old apple.’

Elsa was whispering into Richard Burbage’s ear as he was helping himself to a feel of her.

Shakespeare came over to me. ‘Wolstan is a beast.’

‘Yes, Mr Shakespeare.’

He smelled of ale and tobacco and cloves. ‘It is a shame to see the Tree being himself . . . So, lad, do you play well?’