Seven Will Out: A Renaissance Revel (34 page)

“But surely, Dolly,” Mary added, “some feelings are timeless. Can you imagine how I felt well into my reign knowing that my people hated me in spite of all my good intentions? Knowing that all my generous and motherly impulses, my desire to guide my people back to the true religious path, were denigrated and thwarted? Do you know what that’s like?”

“Trying to talk a girlfriend down off a loser boyfriend and being flipped off for my pains is probably about as close as I’ve come to it, but I think I can imagine, at least, what your feelings might have been.”

“Then surely you can see, Dolly, why I was so intrigued with the story of
Timon of Athens
, as told in Lucien.”

“Poor old Timon!” I said. “The most generous man in Athens, and everyone was his friend as long as the money held out. Then, when he was down on his luck, everyone deserted him. He left town and lived in the wild, hating and cursing mankind rather fruitily all the while, wishing for nothing more than to destroy the people who’d abandoned him.”

“You know the work!” Mary said, pleased.

“Well, to be honest, it is considered one of the minor works of the Shakespeare canon, but it does have its fans, of which I am one,” I admitted. “Timon’s last banquet before leaving Athens, with the stone and water cuisine served on gold and silver plates, is one fine set piece,” I said.

“If you are familiar with the play, then you know what happened to Timon after that very same banquet while he was out in the wild.”

“Yes! He stumbles upon some hidden treasure and gives it to Alcibiades to fund an invasion of Athens. The Athenians beg Timon to save their city, but he is so disillusioned by then that he wants no part of it. Timon dies, angry and alone, after acknowledging only one true and deserving friend in the whole world.”

“Flavius,” Mary said. “That character was a tribute to my dear friend, Jane Dormer. She was the one true and steady person in my world, which was otherwise so full of people I had reason to fear, hate, or distrust.”

“I can see why the story of the misanthropic Timon would have had so much appeal for you,” I said.

“‘Here lies a wretched corse, of wretched soul bereft: seek not my name,’” Mary quoted. “I certainly worked out a lot of
negative emotion while writing about Timon’s sad but defiant end.”

“He is surely one of the most melancholy characters in the Shakespearian lot, and that is up against some pretty stiff competition,” I said.

“Well,” Mary said, smiling a little, “at least I didn’t end up quite as badly as poor old Timon in the end—naked, hairy, eating raw meat, and throwing rocks at people from a cave.”

All of us, including Mary herself, laughed at that mental picture and at hearing the dour Bloody Mary make light of herself in that way.

“Tell me, Mary, about the immediate fate of your plays; how they went from your little world to Shakespeare’s Globe,” I said, when the hilarity had subsided.

“I think it is fair to say,” she replied, laughing again, “that they got to the Globe in a most roundabout way.”

“Mary, have you just punned on the rotund intentionally?”

“You bet!”

Chapter Eighty-Nine

Tiswas at Amboise

“When I knew my end was near,” Mary began, “I thought, as an author would, of the fate of my works. We’ve spoken already about my position during my reign and of the dearth of people I could trust. There was one, though, who I knew would come up trumps.”

“It was Jane Dormer, of course; trusted lady-in-waiting, and probably your only friend by the time you were on your deathbed.”

“Correct, Dolly. I handed off my works to Jane in my final days, and died knowing she would do the right thing by them. I little suspected how roundabout a path she would set my works on, but life can be funny, can’t it?”

I looked at my reflection—all Renaissance splendor—in a mirror on a distant wall. I had to admit that life could indeed be funny.

“When I arrived here, Jane was able to fill me in on the
first
leg of the journey of my plays.”

“The
first
leg?” I said.

“That’s what I said! You will recall of course, Dolly, Jane’s career after my death.”

“Yes. An ardent Catholic, she married the Spanish ambassador, and returned home with him to Spain. She lived out her life as the Countess de Feria, most religiously, and died in a convent. Did your works wind up in that Spanish convent, Mary?”

“No. My works never saw the sunny skies of Spain.”

“Well then, what skies
did
your plays see?” I inquired. “Just rainy old England’s? Did Jane leave them in your homeland with someone she trusted?”

“No. Jane took my works with her when she left England. She did make a stop on the way over to Spain, though.”

“Of course she did—at Amboise, in France. It’s said that Jane Dormer and Mary, Queen of Scots, became great friends during that layover.”

“We did,” said the Scottish queen. “And that is why Jane left her mistress’s plays in my hands.”

“Whatever did you think, holding the plays of Mary Tudor in your hands, a gift from the other side from your cousin and fellow Catholic and queen?”

“I am a bit embarrassed to admit that I did not give the plays the attention they deserved. The advent of Jane and the plays occurred during that brief, gaudy hour when I was queen of both France and Scotland.”

“It was not much more than a year that you were queen of France,” I recalled.

“And of course, I was so young, not yet out of my teens. The French court was such a glittering place, and I was newly raised to the highest prominence in it. Lording it over my mother-in-law, Catherine de’ Medici, and picking out gowns for the day’s and evening’s wear were the highest priority for me in those halcyon days.”

“‘Your salad days, when you were young and green of experience,’” I offered.

“Green was never my color, Dolly,” Mary said, laughing.

“As I recall, you dressed in white to receive Jane Dormer when she arrived at Amboise in 1560. I suppose that was the fashion equivalent of being young and carefree, back in the day.”

“Jane was a pretty serious young woman, and she spoke to a side of me, hidden pretty deep in those days, that could be intelligent and serious too, when it wanted to. Since that side of me was so little brought out by my frivolous life at the French court, I came to value Jane’s friendship even after a very short acquaintance.”

Mary Tudor smiled benevolently at her cousin’s commendation of her friend.

“I was flattered, during our visit, when Jane entrusted me with Mary Tudor’s plays. I knew how much her mistress meant to her and how seriously she took her duty to those works. She felt that putting them in family hands, and Catholic hands, was important. So she was thrilled when the opportunity presented itself to hand the plays off to me. Once Jane left France, though, I have to admit that I was flummoxed about what to do with them.”

“I guess that would be a bit of a conundrum for a young French queen; what to do with one’s dead elderly cousin’s secret potboilers.”

“That is exactly what I thought they were, Dolly. English was not my first or even second language, so when I read the plays at the time, I understood but did not fully appreciate them. And not long after Jane left, of course, my own troubles, you might say, began.”

“You refer of course to your first widowhood and the untimely death of Francois II,” I said.

“Correct, Dolly. Overnight I went from being the premier woman at the French court to being a dowager while still in my prime. I wasn’t having
that
, young and proud as I was.”

“And so you were Scotland bound, to take up in earnest your career as queen there,” I said.

“That’s right, Dolly. As I prepared to leave France, those plays
did
weigh on my mind. I decided against taking them with me to Scotland. What with the puritanical bent of my homeland’s culture, I knew that the plays I’d read would have little hope for a future there. French theater, on the other hand, was more developed, thanks in part to the popularity of the
Commedia dell
’
arte
. And of course, my husband’s ancestress, Marguerite de Navarre, while most famous as a religious poetess, had also reportedly popped out the odd play. Overall, I thought that Mary Tudor’s plays would be best served by being left in France. I put personal feelings aside and placed them in the hands of the most capable person I knew at the French court; my mother-in-law.”

“So you left Catherine de’ Medici holding the bag—I mean, the manuscripts.”

“I did. And she held them for quite a long time. I left them with her in 1561, and they stayed with her, I later learned, until 1579.”

“What happened in 1579?” I asked.

“Some of the most fun I ever had in my life!” Elizabeth said, actually slapping her thighs—or as close as she could get to them in a farthingale—with merriment. It made me wonder what it might have been like to party like it was 1579.

Chapter Ninety

The Gift That Fixed a Rift

Once her mirth subsided, Elizabeth took me by the hand and led me to a portrait of a man who, at first blush, looked all nose, jaw, and ruff. The lettering on the painting told me that the man who’d set Elizabeth’s farthingale a-twitching that way was none other than the Duke of Anjou, son of Catherine de’ Medici and brother-in-law to Mary, Queen of Scots.

“In 1579, the French Duke of Anjou came to pay court to me,” Elizabeth began. “He was the only one of my royal suitors to actually appear in person. He was so sophisticated and bohemian. What a change his advent made from the usual dour royal courtship rituals, all dusty ambassadors and even dustier portraits.”

“You nicknamed him your ‘frog,’ Elizabeth. History indicates that your frog was something of a dog as far as princely suitors go. He was by all accounts pretty unprepossessing at best—his own brother called him a little monkey.”

“Well, looks aren’t everything, Dolly.”

“The man wore one of those padded, push-up codpieces, as well. At least, that was the rumor at the French court,” Mary, Queen of Scots, added.

“Well, size isn’t everything either. And what a pleasure that he had such tremendous wit,” Elizabeth said. “I also learned, from my dalliance with him, just how well founded the French amatory reputation was.”

“I guess old Anjou was G-spot on when it came to knocking your stockings off,” I said to Elizabeth.

“Of course, the man was also about twenty years younger than I was, and being courted by such a youthful and engaging swain was like a breath of fresh air,” Elizabeth said. “At least, it was at the time of life I had reached by then.”

“A May and December romance; or perhaps I should say a December and May romance, given that you were the elder of the two of you,” I said.

Elizabeth started glowering after my unthinking reference to her age. I diverted her attention quite nicely with a fair rendition of the “September Song.” She wasn’t best pleased about the long, long while from May to December but had warmed up quite a bit by the time the days dwindled down to a precious few in September and November.

“And of course,” Elizabeth said, mollified, “the fact that Anjou came bearing the plays that had been written by my dead sister, Mary, made his arrival at court that much more of an event for me.”

“I see! Catherine de’ Medici punted the plays to her baby boy, the Duke of Anjou, and he hand-delivered them to you, Elizabeth. What a courting gift! What was it like, receiving, as it were, a message from beyond from your departed sister? We’ve already discussed the difficulties of your sisterly relationship in life. How did you feel about hearing from her again, so to speak, after so much time had gone by and with a good few years of being queen now under your own belt?”

“Well, Dolly, I’d been writing plays myself, secretly. To know that my sister had done the same made for a bond between us, even though she was gone. For a long time—for years, in fact—I
held on to those plays and treasured them as though they were private correspondence between the two of us. Those plays healed a lot of sisterly sore spots and helped me to let go of a lot of negative emotions, particularly those about how suspicious Mary was of me during her reign.”

Mary Tudor got teary at this, and so did I, I must admit. The Grey sisters satisfied themselves with joining hands.

“I read and reread those plays,” Elizabeth went on. “I was inspired by them, and in some ways they informed my own work. I realized, as I became more and more familiar with them, just how good they were. It seemed unfair, eventually, to keep them to myself. But of course, the English mores of the day meant that I couldn’t reveal them as having been written by my sister, an anointed queen. I wanted to do justice to them, though, and happily, I found a way to do so and keep it in the family—my own family, if not my sister’s—at the same time.”

Chapter Ninety-One

See ’Em Later, Alligator

“How did you manage to keep those plays in the family?” I inquired.

“Through the auspices of one of my Boleyn cousins—Henry Carey, First Baron Hunsdon.”

“Of course!” I said. “The man was the patron of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, the theatrical company that Shakespeare was associated with.”

“Well, he wasn’t patron yet when I passed the plays off to him, but he was interested in the theater at the time and in making it more accessible and acceptable to all the public, both the plebian and the well-to-do. I wanted to support the effort, and I wanted to find a way to get Mary’s plays out. So I turned the manuscripts over to him for future use, for when he had operationalized his plan for subsidizing and patronizing a theatrical troupe.”

“Did Hunsdon know about your own playwriting efforts?”

“No. He was not privy to that or to the identity of my sister as author of the plays at hand. I had copied Mary’s plays out in a disguised hand as a precaution. I authorized him to attribute the plays as necessary to get them before the public, telling him that I would take the revealing of the true authorship into my own hands, to occur in the fullness of time, after my death. I think he suspected that the plays were mine. I did not disabuse him of that notion because it meant he would be all the more assiduous about assuring the success of the plays.”