Seven Will Out: A Renaissance Revel (27 page)

“And there you were, Catherine,” I said, “with your word being the only proof of your marriage; there was no one to attest to it, and you had no paperwork to indisputably confirm that the ceremony had taken place and was legal. Talk about being a day late and a dollar short!”

“Exactly, Dolly. And so Elizabeth sent me to the Tower. I was not angry about it at first. My son was born while I was in prison, and I was allowed to keep my precious animal companions as pets. My husband eventually returned to England and was imprisoned along with me. The conjugal visits allowed us by a kindhearted guard and the eventual birth of a second son helped to pass the time and keep my spirits up.”

I’d read about the conditions in the Tower of London, to which were added, in Catherine’s case, major depredations on
her own premises there by her menagerie of dogs and monkeys. It all seemed pretty unsavory, and I commented that she must have been relieved when Elizabeth eventually had her removed from prison and remanded to court exile and house arrest in various country estates.

“I suppose Elizabeth thought that exile in the country was more comfortable and suitable detention for me. She had separated me from my husband, though, and of course eventually annulled my marriage. I was terribly lonely without my husband, and time hung heavy. I did, however, correspond with my sister Mary, who understood what I was going through because of her own similar experience. She wrote to me of how her literary endeavors improved her mood. Desperate to raise my own spirits, I thought I would give it a try. I wrote my comedy first, in an effort to divert my mind. It worked to a point, but I still was not relieved of the burden of the central tragedies of my life. The most galling of them became, eventually, the themes of my drama.”

“You saw a lot of hardships in your short life; I can see that all of them might have been a little too much to work into one play. Which of your tragic circumstances did you consider the central ones?”

“Imprisonment and exile; loss of rank and privilege; the cruelty that power can lead to. And star-crossed love, of course. Unfortunately, the latter theme was edited out of the play.”

The wine favored by Renaissance folk tended to be very much on the sweet side, and the several glasses I had consumed were telling a bit on the old tum. I think it was my gastric churnings as much as the thematic musings of Catherine Grey that suggested to me the name of her play.

“I am assuming by now that your play was one I’d associate with Shakespeare; I am thinking, therefore, that it is
The Tempest
.”

“Got it in one, Dolly!” Catherine said, taking my arm up over my head and holding it there in true championship style.

“Dolly does seem to be getting into the swing of things,” commented Mary Tudor.

“The exile bit was the giveaway,” I said.

I could see where Catherine could have put a lot of herself, or at least her themes, as she called them, into
The Tempest
. The tale begins, of course, with power gone bad, and the wizardly Prospero and his daughter, Miranda, are exiled as a result of it. Their island home is also residence to spirits with experience of entrapment and, thanks to Prospero’s magic, to some shipwrecked folks from home. Eventually, love and magic conquer all. Prospero resumes his rightful place as Duke of Milan. Miranda resumes her place as Milanese heiress and gets on the fast track to being the princess of Naples as well by marrying one of the castaways, Prince Ferdinand.

“If only my own story had had as happy an ending as Miranda’s,” Catherine said, and I was suitably silent as I considered her eventual death at the age of twenty-seven while still in custody.

“Your story has a happier ending than you think, Catherine,” I pointed out to her a few moments later.

“How so, Dolly?” she asked.

I was pleased to be the one to deliver surprising news for a change. “Well, through the line of your oldest son, Edward, you are a progenitress of the current royal family.”

“Am I? How so?” Catherine asked.

“Yes, we know that
I
have the privilege of being a progenitress through the line of my son James,” Mary, Queen of Scots, said,
looking slyly at her cousin Elizabeth as she did. “But the news we receive here comes about piecemeal, at best. How is it that Catherine is linked to the current regnant?”

“Elizabeth II’s mother, Elizabeth Bowes Lyon, is a descendant of your son, Catherine.”

Catherine was crying with joy at her long-delayed happy ending. Her sisters, Mary and Jane, cried right along with her, as did I.

“Dolly is much more emotional than she was the last time she was here,” Mary Tudor remarked.

“Hard not to be, under the circumstances,” I said in my own defense. “I remember similar tears of joy cried by your mother, Katharine of Aragon, the last time I was here,” I told Mary.

Mary Tudor broke into a huge grin at the mention of the word “joy” in relation to her mother, whose life had not exactly gone down in history as a byword for it.

“
Touché
, Dolly! Mother told me all about that, and I will thank you, belatedly, for making her so happy on that occasion,” Mary Tudor said, kneeling down on the floor next to me and giving me a big hug while she squeezed out a tear or two herself.

Once the minitempest of tears had cleared up, I got back to the literary subject at hand.

“
The Tempest
has come down through history as one of Shakespeare’s final plays,” I informed Catherine, “released decades after your passing. Perhaps that considerable lapse in time and the changing times, tastes, and mores accounted for the heavy editing that Shakespeare applied to your play.”

“Shakespeare was
not
the one to edit my play,” Catherine said. “Well, there may have been minor edits at production time, no doubt, but it was not Shakespeare who was responsible for shaping the final version of
The Tempest
as the world knows it.”

“Who edited your plays, then?”

“The same person who edited mine,” Mary Grey said.

“And my play as well,” said Jane Grey, as the nine-day queen prepared to demonstrate that she was more than just an eight-day wonder.

Chapter Seventy-Four

Holy Folio!

Jane Grey lived an even shorter life than either of her sisters, dying at the age of sixteen. Her end was not the drawn-out demise of the prisoner but the swift, sudden death by execution that was so much a feature of Tudor court life. Her death in fact kicked off the bloodshed of the reign of “Bloody” Mary.

Because Jane and I were old acquaintances from my last visit here, we did not dance around the literary subject at hand very much but rather got right down to business.

“So you managed, Jane, to write a play during your sixteen short years on the planet?”

“My sixteen years on the planet were indeed short, Dolly. The six months I spent in prison awaiting my execution, however, were very long.”

“And the perfect time to engage in some literary endeavors,” I surmised.

“Indeed,” said Jane.

“It couldn’t have been at the behest or suggestion of your sisters, as your death preceded their literary efforts.”

“I wrote at no one’s behest, Dolly. Those last six months of my life were the time of my greatest introspection.”

“Given your reputation for bookishness and studiousness, that is saying something,” I said with respect.

“As my thoughts turned inward, I realized that what I wanted most was to leave my very own mark upon the world before I died. My political life was not of my own making; I was a mere pawn when it came to that. But something good did come out of
it; that nine days’ reign that I was shoved into by others informed the literary endeavor that would be my own, personal, crowning achievement.”

“How so, Jane?” I asked.

“Because of all that happened to me, there were timeless themes that I could speak to in a new and unique way, thanks to my experiences. Themes that concerned
me
just then but that I was certain would concern many others down through the ages.”

“I’d guess your leitmotifs were really more like heavy motifs, given the circumstance,” I said.

“Justice, mercy, and a world in which a woman could advocate for herself and others in law. Those were my chosen themes, Dolly.”

“I understand your needing to make a statement about those things, Jane, but I am rather surprised that you went about doing so by writing a play. History paints you as so serious and scholarly. That doesn’t really comport with your being a playwright; at least it didn’t on the literary scene of your day. I’d have expected some sort of scholarly treatise on the subject from you.”

“Serious and scholarly though I was, Dolly, I was also a girl. Locked away as I was, without having to prove my scholarly prowess to anyone, I was able to let my hair down a bit and indulge in some drama. It was quite enjoyable, really, after a lifetime of heavy academic work, to explore something more fanciful. There was no holding back once I got started. I wrote, in fact, right up to my final hour, leaving the very last scene of my play not quite completed; I had to stop and make arrangements for its dispatch just before I was executed.”

“‘Because I could not stop for death, He kindly stopped for me; The carriage held but just ourselves and immortality.’” The Bard could have been saying those words about you, Jane.”

“He could have been, Dolly, but he was not,” Jane pointed out. “Emily Dickinson said them.”

“Did Emily visit here at some point?”

“So we’re told, but it is all pretty mysterious. Apparently they couldn’t get the poor thing out from under the bedclothes once she’d arrived.”

“Perhaps she’d heard about my cousin Elizabeth and her iron farthingale,” said Mary Grey.

“I think we can let Elizabeth and any of her ferrous tendencies off the hook this time,” I replied. “Emily Dickinson was a byword for reclusiveness.”

“Well, Dolly,” Jane resumed, “your quote attribution may have been off base, but you were spot-on about the immortality bit; my play survived me, even if in a somewhat abridged form.”

I wondered how Jane knew what had happened to her works after her death. I had learned the last time I was here that the residents, other than Henry VIII’s six wives, were all voluntarily exiled and cut off from sources of information other than what they could glean from each other or the various guests they had entertained down through the ages.

“All three of you Grey sisters know that your works were edited; you seem to know who did the editing; and you seem to know what the final product looked like. How so?”

“As you’ve been told, Dolly, we have been allowed, on a limited basis, to bring various of our possessions here to make us comfortable. One of Elizabeth’s courtiers, Emilia Lanier, when
she was due to arrive here, was worried about being caught short with nothing to read.”

“Any bibliophile would sympathize,” I said, thinking of my own stash of lightweight, portable Tudor paperbacks in car, travel bag, and bathroom. Mary Tudor, Mary, Queen of Scots, and Elizabeth nodded in agreement.

“Emilia likes to travel light, so she brought with her a single volume: Shakespeare’s
First Folio
,” Jane said.

“I’d hardly call nine hundred pages worth of Shakespeare ‘traveling light,’” I commented.

“Well, when you consider the entertainment value contained in those nine hundred pages, I think you will agree it is a pretty compact option for the enlightened reader; as Emilia herself described it, ‘Tears and laughter for all time.’”

“That was the poetess Elizabeth Barrett Browning commenting on the Bard, surely,” I said, pleased, for once, to be the one correcting the quote.

“Well, I’m sure Emilia said it as well. They say great minds think alike. Was Mistress Browning a poetess like Emilia was?”

“Yes, indeed; possibly the best known British poetess. And Emilia, of course, while less well known to the general public, was the very first woman in England to professionally claim to be a poetess.”

“Well, Emilia may not be very well known to the general public, but she is well known here, especially in regard to her being a most giving person,” Jane said. Since the lady in question was mistress to at least one elderly theater patron and, as rumor would have it, to Shakespeare himself, I had no reason to question Jane’s assessment of her generosity.

“Emilia’s
Folio
is the only copy of Shakespeare that we have here. You’d think, with its being so valuable and with so many readers in the house, that she’d tend to be protective of it and keep it close. Not Emilia! She’s encouraged us all to share and enjoy it. That, of course, is how my sisters and I were able to follow up on the final condition of our works.”

I think Jane may have had a little more to say, but I did not catch it. I was too busy salivating and trying not to let it show.

“Dolly,” Jane said, my efforts at concealment having failed completely, “would you like to flip through the pages of the
Folio
?”

I dabbed my lips with my sleeve as discreetly as I could and addressed Jane’s offer. “How would I like to hold a priceless first edition of Shakespeare’s
Folio
in my hot little hands? Jane—
let me count the ways!
”

As a Tudor scholar, I had seen, and in some cases handled, more than one important centuries-old publication. The thing about that is that the books were, well, centuries old. They looked old, they smelled old, and they felt old beneath the fingers. They had to be handled gingerly, like newborn babies, if one was permitted to handle them at all.

Because of the cosmic nature of the place I found myself in, the
First Folio
I held had not aged at all since its 1623 publication. Without the patina of age, the elegantly but simply bound work looked and felt like a volume in one of those upscale
Classics of Literature
collections that the well-read once ordered by mail and received at the rate of one volume a month, never to read. Leafing through it one was one of the strangest experiences that I have ever had in my life; and you must remember that as
I handled it, I was on my second visit to an alternate-universe astral Tudor plane.