Seven Will Out: A Renaissance Revel (23 page)

My mind was reeling with the knowledge that Margaret Douglas, who coulda been a contender for the English throne, had actually written two of Shakespeare’s plays. If Team
West Side Story
had written a tune called
Well, I
’
ll Be Dipped
, I’d have been singing it.

Jane handed me a much-needed glass of wine, and I chugged it down with much less ladylike finesse than I’d had when handling my farthingale.

Elizabeth rose and walked over to where Margaret and I were sitting on the floor. She looked down at my empty wine glass and made a
tsk-tsk
sound.

“Guess I am setting myself up for a heck of a hangover when I get back to the real world,” I said.

“Not to worry, Dolly,” Margaret said. “The effects of libations quaffed in this world do not carry through to your world.”

“That’s a relief,” I said.

“I should think so,” Elizabeth said, turning her attention to my pillow pal, Margaret.

“Margaret,” Elizabeth said to her cousin, “tell Dolly about your other three plays now. The comedy first, if you will. You know it is a personal favorite of mine.”

I had a million questions just from the announcement about the first two plays but swallowed them down and waited for Margaret to continue. Elizabeth’s commanding demeanor was one that did not brook questions on the set agenda.

“I’ve told you, of course, Dolly, about my experiences with my, shall we say, turbulent mother,” Margaret continued. “Well, my comedy is based on those experiences.”

“However did you manage to make a comedy out of the trauma you suffered from your mother’s political and marital vicissitudes?” I asked.

“What I did was apply some corrective fantasy recapitulation to the root of the situation.”

“In other words?”

“In other words, I wrote a story about an unbridled, rampant woman being brought to order and control in spite of herself. In my childhood, I’d wished a million times for that to happen to my mother. Sadly, it did not. So I made it happen in my story, and in a comic way. It was a most satisfying experience!”

“Looks like it must have been,” I said as Margaret started glowing even more. In the excitement of telling her tale, she had run her hand through her coiffure, inadvertently pulling strands of Tudor gold and silver hair around her face in a flattering way.

“My heroine, unlike my mother, was able to modify her behavior based on the ups and downs that she experienced. They were silly ones, of course, unlike what my mother had to go through.
Still, it did me good to correct on paper a situation somewhat akin to the one that I could not correct in real life.”

A therapist, I am sure, would have known the right thing to say about this rather Freudian information dump. I satisfied myself with asking about the name and the particulars of the play.

“All the wine you’ve had this evening has made you lazy, Dolly. Now that you know I wrote
Romeo and Juliet
and
Troilus and Cressida
; surely you can figure out the name of the play of which we are speaking now.”

“
Kiss Me, Kate
!” I exclaimed as the lightbulb went off. Or, perhaps I should say, given the surroundings, as the candle was lit.

“Well, that is a quote from my play, certainly,” Margaret conceded.

“The play, of course, was
The Taming of the Shrew
; it’s true, isn’t it?” I asked.

“Yes, Dolly,” said Margaret, quite bursting with pride.

I sang a few bars of “Wunderbar” from the Broadway musical
Kiss Me, Kate
and got to my feet and did a little dance with Margaret for good measure, just because there is no wrong time for a little Cole Porter. Mary Tudor even cut into our little waltz for a moment or two; she was surprisingly light on her feet.

“And a fine play
Shrew
was too,” said Elizabeth, not one to brook the attention being on others for very long. “A rollicking comedy; I heartily enjoyed it!”

“I’m rather surprised to hear you say that, Elizabeth,” I said, resuming my seat on the pillows. “Most modern feminists take exception to the play. They feel a man roughhousing a woman out of her spiritedness is offensive.”

“Spiritedness and arrogant willfulness are two different things,” Elizabeth commented. “I myself was an example of what you would call
spirited
.”

All six of Elizabeth’s companions examined their shoes as Elizabeth glanced at them for confirmation.

“My aunt Margaret,” Elizabeth went on, “though a loving woman, could be both arrogant and willful at her worst, as our younger Margaret here has pointed out. Such behavior benefits from correction, in my opinion. We know that in modern times, marital behaviors and expectations are different from what they were in our era. Given how life and relationships were when we were alive, no one thought, in our time, that the nature of the taming was out of line with the provoking behavior.”

“And I did set it in Italy,” Margaret pointed out, “where people are, after all, of a more passionate nature.”

I recollected the doings in Padua when the determined Pertruchio wedded the shrewish Katherine, and the depredations of dress, transport, and table that he exposed her to in order to take her down a peg. I recollected also the benefit the taming had on the fate of the shrew’s sweet younger sister, Bianca; I suspected that right there was a good deal of the corrective recapitulation Margaret had mentioned.

“So, Margaret, you were adept at both comedy and romance. Quite versatile when it came to style, weren’t you?”

“When one is a writer, Dolly, one learns that all kinds of different writing have their times.”

“‘A time to every purpose under heaven,’ as Shakespeare had it,” I said, trying to hold my own literary end up.

“That is from the Bible, Dolly—Ecclesiastes chapter three—and as true when written as it was when I was alive, and I am
sure it is still applicable today. It certainly applies to the circumstances under which I wrote my last two plays.”

Chapter Sixty-One

The Party Line on a Maligned Spine

“Yes, do get on with the story of those last two plays, Margaret; wasting time does not count as a purpose under heaven!” Elizabeth said with what she herself would no doubt have called spirit, though I would have called it pure bossiness. Clearly, Margaret was used to it, however, no doubt from all that practice she had with her mother. She took up her tale without turning a hair.

“The last two were of a more sensible nature than my other plays. Catherine Willoughby suggested I write them; she had been impressed with my other works but felt that they lacked a certain groundedness.”

“That sounds like her,” I said, recalling that she was, like me, a woman of academic bent.

“These two serious works of mine were meant to affirm, in the uncertain world of European politics, the absolute rightness of the Tudor family being on England’s throne.”

I could see that the Margaret before me had inherited more than one thing from her grandma, Margaret Beaufort, the family matriarch who had made it her life’s work to toot the Tudor horn.

“My last two plays were straightforward historical dramas, Dolly, telling the tale of my family in recent generations. One was about Richard III, the other about Henry VIII. They were named after their heroes.”

I recollected that both of these relatives of Margaret’s had plays bearing their names in the Shakespeare canon.
Henry VIII
was generally considered a minor work;
Richard III
, however, was another story.

“‘A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!’” I cried lustily. I imagined myself as an onlooker at the Battle of Bosworth Field, where Richard III died ignominiously and Henry VII established the Tudor dynasty.

Mary Tudor piped up as I settled back onto my two little flat feet. “We recall from your last visit here, Dolly, how anxious you were to leave us and get back to the real world. You know horses will not get you out of here, any more than wishes will, before we have finished with you.”

Mary looked over at Margaret, puckishly grinning, and they both laughed. I decided to forebear any further Shakespeare quotations for the moment and to offer Margaret the apology I felt she deserved on behalf of my fellow historians.

“Margaret, the Shakespearian depiction of
Richard III
gave history one of its ultimate bad guys, in all his evil glory. You made him so evil that anyone would thank Henry VII for doing him in. Why, in the play, you even have Richard III murdering those poor York boys, the legendary Princes in the Tower.”

“I’ve been told, Dolly, that you were brought up to speed on the specifics of what
really
happened to those boys the last time that you visited this place,” Margaret said. “That was something I myself had no way of knowing until I arrived here.”

“I
was
brought up to speed on the story of the Princes in the Tower,” I assured Margaret. “And now, it is
my
turn to bring
you
up to speed on something!” I said with what I trusted was spirit rather than the commonplace stealing of a march.

“You portrayed Richard III, Margaret, as having a marked spinal deformity—what we in modern times would call severe scoliosis.
Many of my fellow historians had decried that description over the years. They accused Shakespeare—I guess I should say, you—of trying to make Richard seem more evil than he was through giving him certain physical characteristics. The Shakespearian twisting of his body as an indicator of a twisted mind has been called unfair, inaccurate, and offensive. However, recent findings in the real world have vindicated you; we now know you were simply reporting the truth about the man’s physique.”

“What happened to change things, Dolly?” Margaret asked.

“Richard III’s remains turned up in a parking lot in 2012,” I explained. “His skeleton clarified that your description of his back curvature was spot-on. You were not being unduly unkind or taking literary liberties; you were just reporting the history accurately.”

“What is a ‘parking lot’?” Margaret asked. “Is it an ignominious place for one’s remains to turn up?”

“Well, yes, I suppose you could say it was,” I answered.

“Good!” chorused all three Grey sisters in impressive unison. “The man was a bully, and he deserved what he got,” Jane said with feeling.

“Ladies,” I said, “a little retrospective pity, please, for the man who ended up dead under a parking lot, uncrowned, and with a stab wound to the butt! As the Bard so movingly put it, ‘The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.’”

“I think you will find that Abraham Lincoln said that, Dolly,” said Mary Tudor.

“How do you know about Abraham Lincoln?” I asked.

“His wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, was brought here to discuss first lady theater-going protocols,” Mary, Queen of Scots,
informed me. “She was warned off of it, in a general way. We’ve always doubted she took the advice she was given here; she seemed rather a stubborn character.”

“And high-handed, as well,” said Elizabeth, blissfully unaware, I was sure, of the adage about the pot calling the kettle black.

“I think I can safely say that Mr. Lincoln’s first lady, unfortunately, failed to take your advice,” I said. “But right now, ladies, if I may, I’d like to take the conversation from the subject of advice to the subject of questions.”

Chapter Sixty-Two

The Royal Matron and the Literary Patron

“Am I even allowed to ask pointed questions here?” I inquired. “There was a moratorium on my asking any during my last visit here, but they seem all right now. Am I correct in this?”

“You are, Dolly. Ask away!” said Mary Tudor.

“Well, I’d like some of the background on how five plays written by Margaret Douglas made their way into the Shakespeare canon. My curiosity about this is understandable, surely.”

“I should say so!” said Jane, looking as professorial as is possible for a sixteen-year-old to look. “Any scholar who calls herself a scholar would feel the same.”

“Well,” Margaret said, “it started with my turning for assistance with my literary career to a highly placed individual who was the obvious go-to man for the job.”

“William Cecil?” I asked, feeling confident.

“No, Dolly. Robert Dudley.”

Accompanied by the hissing sound of the air escaping my deflated ego, Elizabeth let a hint of a smile pass over her lips at the mention of her lover, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, and Margaret began her story.

“The year was 1578,” Margaret began. “I had a premonition that my time on earth would soon be over. As a royal personage, my thoughts of course turned to the legacy I would leave behind me. My sons had reproduced and put children tauntingly near the English throne. I had no control, in the last days of my life, over how the fates of those grandchildren would play out.”

“Your grandchildren were the future King James I of England and Arabella Stuart,” I recalled. “Guess you could put it at fifty-fifty.”

“I knew I needed to leave my grandchildren to fate,” Margaret said. “But I also had my literary works to leave to posterity. I wanted my plays to be put out into the world and credited to me
after
I was gone. I dreamed of the glory of literary immortality without the social burden of having to live down being a female member of the royal family who wrote common plays.”

“And so you contacted Dudley,” I said. “You certainly took that down to the wire, Margaret; as I recall, you dined with the man the night before you died. People at the time viewed it with suspicion.”

“And people at the time were incorrect in suspecting Dudley of wrongdoing, Dolly. I dined with him on that last night to pass my five plays into his possession. As the patron of a dramatic troupe and a close friend of the family, he was the best bet I had for the safekeeping of my plays. His troupe had, as part of its warrant, the ability to perform plays with minimal censorship. Given the ribald nature of
Shrew
and the political football that
Richard III
could become, I couldn’t think of a better way to ensure that my plays would see the light of day and meet an audience.”