open sea

Chapter 1448 Freshmen
After the rain, the sky cleared, and the setting sun sprinkled the afterglow on the sparkling Thames River.

The street still hasn't recovered its former prosperity, the ravens on the towering half-dead trees make strange calls, and the miserable sunlight slantly shines on Shakespeare, who is leading his horse walking by the river.

At the end of the street in the distance, the sound of the wheels of the heavy-duty carriage rolling on the stone road and the shouts of the grooms from the Celestial Dynasty faded away.

The young groom thought: Chinese warships must have come to the sea again. The sailors at the dock are happy these days. They don’t have to go to sea to fight. Let them not have to worry about the whereabouts of dinner.

He looked back at the proud racehorse of the playwright Robert Green, feeling deep doubts about fate.

Does he look so out of place with this fine horse?
Probably because the lice running around his head betrayed the fact that he was a poor man.

He had just left the Chinese Literature Hall and walked less than [-] steps when he met three teams of inspectors in black who came to interrogate him and asked the same questions. They all suspected that the horse had been stolen.

Fortunately, he has the admission certificate from the Chinese Literature School, otherwise he might be dragged to interrogate him until late at night.

rich?Rich people get lice too, they just can afford wigs.

He can't afford it, the theater hasn't opened yet, and he only earns a few pennies a day. It's even more difficult to save sixty pounds to buy a particularly large mansion in his hometown. He can't even think about such a luxury as a wig. will think about it.

The evening before yesterday, before he left Westminster Abbey with the twelve pieces of leather paper he earned from washing brushes in the Chinese Literature School, his teacher Li Qian stopped him and told him that the magistrate knew that he was writing a story and asked him to bring the story to class the next day. Let the magistrate take a look.

It's pretty scary to be honest.

The reason it's scary is the art form of mainstream drama in this day and age.

The old dramas were Catholic dramas, which mainly promoted miracles; after the Reformation, everyone had a trend of thinking about leaving the gods behind and releasing human nature, and the new dramas naturally catered to this market.

Although Queen Elizabeth supported drama and used it, the nobles of the Tudor royal family generally regarded theater as a place to spread plague, illegal assembly, and mock religion.

In this way, the highest class that drama can reach is actually only the so-called "gentlemen" such as smugglers, tavern owners, and suburban nobles outside London, and the main customer groups are ordinary people.

The performance must attract attention. As a beginner in the drama industry, the easiest way to attract attention is to describe the three popular themes that the common people like to hear and see.

Violence is not necessarily violent, it must be particularly pornographic.

Anyway, there is no need to sign his name on the scripts created. Once the theater owner thinks it is suitable, he will buy them for more than a dozen shillings, sign them with a pseudonym known or unknown to the audience, and let the actors perform wantonly.

William didn't think he could write any great plays these days, though he did, and he daydreamed all the time that he could take the gold coins out of his head and put them in his wallet.

He can't even change his life by writing scripts with a lot of sloppy stuff.

Let yourself move from the leaky stables of the theatre, with its warm straw and cute little gray shaggy-tailed neighbors, to the streets, to the tenements among the hundreds of whorehouses and taverns.

Ever since he found out that the magistrate wanted to read his script the day before yesterday, Shakespeare stayed up all night, trying his best to revise the script in the theater.

When Professor Li Qian, the teacher of the Chinese Language School, taught him elegance and etiquette, morality and decent behavior, the news brought him an unprecedented sense of shame in his heart.

No one knows the consequences of presenting a story about a cunning and vicious protagonist to the aristocrats who pay attention to etiquette, but today, the prefect yamen suddenly sent guards to the Chinese Literature Hall to give him a card, asking him to With this, he entered the magistrate's Yamen.

It doesn't sound...it doesn't sound like the magistrate intends to hang a poor theater boy outside the yamen.

At least there were no gallows or stakes prepared in the open space outside the magistrate's yamen. I heard that Daming had a kind of torture from the villain Chen Mu, who would put people on pillars and hang them on the reef.

On the way here, Shakespeare was always worried, worried that he would see the gallows or see a sea in the open space outside the magistrate's office.

No, there is only a newly built green brick arc wall outside the prefect’s yamen. It is said that this thing is called a screen wall, which is used to ward off ghosts. People in Ming Dynasty believe that ghosts can only walk in a straight line without turning. Building a wall outside the door can block it.

Under the green brick walls on both sides of the gate, there are neat horse-holding posts. There are two guards with swords and guns standing at the gate. No one is allowed to step on the newly paved stone-brick road in the middle of the road. shrub.

On the plaque of the yamen, four tall lanterns were hung on it, and there were couplets written on the two black wooden pillars on both sides, but Shakespeare couldn't understand it.

The main entrance is where the government works, and the mighty yamen guards seemed to have known that he was coming, and after glancing at the cards, they sent him through the side door leading directly to the inner house of the yamen.

Then the experience made him feel like a wild boar about to be served on the dinner table.

Three shepherd women, who could be called strong enough, grabbed him like a chicken and dragged him into a room emitting an unknown fragrance.

Before he could refuse, he was stripped naked, shook the wallet containing a limited number of coins and two Tong Baos, and threw the clothes into the burning brazier mercilessly.

The naked man was looking at the burning clothes in horror, and the healthy women looked at him again, pulling him gently and throwing him into the big smoking barrel.

These women have a unique method of grasping, pressing his shoulders to make it difficult for him to move, he screamed, and then his head was also pressed into the water basin.

When he was about to suffocate, as soon as he raised his head, a short-haired wooden stick was stuffed into his mouth, brushing back and forth on his teeth and tongue with thick coating, and the strange sweetness spread quickly on the taste buds .

Things with fine wooden teeth are brushed down on the head over and over again, and the lice that grow in the hair, armpits, crotch, and nit eggs on the hair are combed down again and again, and there is nowhere to hide.

People scraped him back and forth with bigger brushes and several kinds of grease. Sometimes they were taken out of the wooden barrel, and sometimes they were pressed into the wooden barrel. No one talked to him, just like a food going through multiple processes.

Sometimes he smelled of sulfur; sometimes he smelled of jasmine; other times he smelled of strange spices.

Finally, when the aroma faded, the oily black water in the barrel had been changed three times, and the flower petals were finally sprinkled to see the bottom, and this terrible suffering was finally over.

His hair was tied into a common bun for Ming men, his beard was trimmed into a neat shape with scissors and razors, and the hair that grew all over his face was slowly cleaned with two thin ropes. Even the eyebrows have been trimmed.

When all this was over, not only Shakespeare heaved a sigh of relief, but also the three healthy women who were sweating profusely from exhaustion, and brought him a fine cotton jacket, black cotton trousers, brown trousers and mille-feuilles. Sole black cloth shoes.

After these were put on, a healthy woman looked at his hairline anxiously running under the black net scarf, and finally took a big black hat and put it on his head, and finally pushed him out of the room.

At this time, the bright moon hung high in the sky, and the lanterns outside the door flickered with warm light.

(End of this chapter)