Seven Will Out: A Renaissance Revel (39 page)

“Yes. Some indigestible fruit was lying on my stomach, and a few things were lying on my mind. I was just finishing
As You Like It
and was in a rare writing mode. I wanted to line something up to be started the moment I was done with it to take advantage of the muse when she was at her best.”

“That’s understandable.”

“Of course, the lady of the house at Bisham being so very literary a person also served to get my writer’s plume a-twitching.”

“Who was she?”

“Elizabeth Russell, aunt of Francis and Anthony Bacon. She was a poetess, a translator, and a deviser of entertainments; at least she was when I was on progress to her country home. She wrote a pastoral for me herself and had it performed for me during my stay; she called it
The Lady of the Farm
. It was Arcadian revels of the usual sort, but she was quite proud of it; nymphs, Pan, wild men, verdure, mythological figures, the lot. Elizabeth Russell was not unlike Bess of Hardwick when it came to personality. Her bragging about her works made me want to brag about mine, and of course, I couldn’t. Writing masques for at-home use was genteel and acceptable, unlike writing plays like mine, for eventual public consumption. The woman brought out the competitor in me; I wanted to do Arcadia in a way that would set the standard for all future works of that nature.”

“You certainly succeeded,” I said.

“Well, the reading material for that particular progress was also on my mind, or at least in my subconscious.”

I wondered aloud what Elizabeth’s equivalent of a beach read would be.

“Edmund Spenser’s
Faerie Queene
,” Elizabeth said. “It had come out a year or two earlier. Since it was a tribute to me and my reign, I knew I should reread it sooner or later, and this progress seemed the ideal opportunity.”

“How did you enjoy it?”

“Well enough. It was the timing of my reading it that mattered. The country masques and entertainments tended to be a little heavy on fairies, sprites, and mythological creatures to begin with, and with Spenser’s work added on, it all became somewhat overwhelming.”

“So, between exotic fruit overload, hostess envy, and faerie burnout, you—”

“I had the most vivid dream I’d ever had!” Elizabeth said. “
Midsummer
was the easiest of my plays to write because all I had to do was transcribe that dream.”

“You literally dreamed up all those woodland characters—Bottom, for instance?”

“I think I know how Bottom made his way into the dream. At dinner the night before the dream, Lady Russell was complaining about her husband, and how he left all the attention to detail about my visit up to her. She said the man just went around with his head up his arse.”

“That about covers Bottom,” I said.

“I think I know how Peaseblossom, Cobweb, Mote, and Mustardseed got into the dream as well,” Elizabeth said.

“They
do
seem a bit Beatrix Potter for someone of your, shall I say, less than fanciful character. How did they find their way into your dream?”

“I remember discussing with my ladies, as we retired after dinner, that the housekeeping at Bisham left something to be
desired. There were all sorts of detritus under the furniture and in the corners. I was only calling things I found as I actually saw them on the Bisham floors.”

“Oberon, Titania, and the foundling prince Titania refuses to relinquish to her husband; what made you dream them up?”

“Gilbert Talbot, Bess of Hardwick’s son-in-law, was among those present at Bisham. He was in hot pursuit of a handsome young dogsbody his wife had just hired. Gilbert had recently inherited the Shrewsbury title, and had just been created a Knight of the Garter; his wife didn’t want anything beneath his dignity to happen during the progress. Ergo, she kept Gilbert on a very short leash and wouldn’t let him near the young man.”

“I guess Gilbert hadn’t changed much from when he’d been milling around hallways, trying to chase the likes of poor, old Marlowe around,” I conjectured.

“Lady Russell’s two daughters made it into the dream too. Their mother was bound and determined to get them positions with me as maids of honor. To that end, those two girls were in my face, so to speak, wherever I turned at Bisham. Their mother even made them part of the entertainment; they played two sisters, Sybilla and Isabella, ‘two virgins keeping sheepe, and sewing their samplers.’”

“It wasn’t much of a leap from there to your dreaming up Hermia and Helena, was it?” I asked.

Mary, Queen of Scots, quoted:

We, Hermia, like two artificial gods,

Have with our needles created both one flower,

Both on one sampler, sitting on one cushion,

Both warbling of one song, both in one key,

As if our hands, our sides, voices, and minds,

Had been incorporate. So we grew together…

Elizabeth was touched by the tribute to her play. “Fancy you remembering my play so well!”

“It’s the needlework reference; it hits me where I live, or at least lived, all those years I was captive and embroidering away for dear life. It isn’t often that one finds a literary reference to the hobby that saved one’s sanity.”

“You are not the only one to appreciate the play,” I said. “It is probably the most popular of the Shakespearian comedies.”

“More popular than my
Much Ado about Nothing?
” Catherine Grey asked plaintively.

“And my
Love’s Labour
’
s Lost
?” little Mary Grey added, making a most becoming moue of disappointment.

“I’m afraid so,” I said as Elizabeth gave Catherine and Mary each a caress of condolence, brushing their faces with her plume.

Jane Grey was having none of it; her sisterly pride came to the forefront. “All I can say about that,” Jane said, “Is ‘
what fools these mortals be!
’”

Chapter One Hundred-Four

Winter’s Chill Fits the Bill, or Nothing Finer than Paulina

A guttering candle caught my eye, and reminded me of both how far we had come and how far we had yet to go. Mary Tudor noticed my gaze.

“Let’s keep things moving,” she suggested. “I think you should tell Dolly about your absent mother plays next, Elizabeth. They are,” she said, turning to me, “among my favorites in the entire canon.”

“I can see why,” I said, remembering how tragically Mary had been separated from her own mother, Katharine of Aragon.

“They strike a chord with me, too,” said the Scottish queen. She sighed and walked over to a picture of her own mother, Mary of Guise. The woman was beautiful; she looked, in fact, like Deborah Kerr in a French hood.

“Of course, you were separated from your mother when you were only five or six years old,” I recalled. “And you saw her only once again in your lifetime, when she made a visit to France.”

“Probably my fondest memories are of that visit,” the Scottish queen said.

“We just
wished
that our mother could have been absent,” Jane Grey said, speaking for all three Grey sisters.

“That is something I cannot imagine,” Elizabeth said, in a rare moment of unvarnished vulnerability. She was the only woman in the room who, in life, probably had no recollection of her mother at all, with the woman having been executed when Elizabeth was just a tot. As she held her breath, her fair skin took
on almost a bluish hue for a moment or two. Finally, she exhaled slowly, and the color returned to her cheeks.

“‘A sad tale’s best for winter,’” I said, quoting from
Winter
’
s Tale
.

“Well, we have no seasons here, but I will take your cue, Dolly, and start with the story of my
Winter
’
s Tale
,” said Elizabeth. “It was suggested to me as I was reading Robert Greene’s
Pandosto
. The parallels between the first part of the story and that of my own family were too marked for me to ignore.”

“Let me see—a king who erringly and publicly accuses his wife of adultery, leading to her shameful death. Baby daughter of said wife abandoned by her father and brought up by surrogates in a manner she ought not to have faced. Sounds like your family, all right. That is the first part of
Pandosto
covered, and the first part of
Winter
’
s Tale
as well.”

“In the second part of
Pandosto
, the king happens upon his daughter once she has grown up but does not know her identity. He falls in love with her. When he learns that the girl he has fallen in love with is his own daughter, he kills himself.”

“Pretty deep waters there but nothing applicable to your own family story, surely.”

“Exactly, Dolly. That is why I decided to adapt the story into a play and change the second half of it. I wanted to give my family something that it had never had: a happy ending. Even if I could do it only in fiction, it seemed worth doing.”

“And you succeed so well with that in
Winter’s Tale
. Corrective recapitulation done right! The lost daughter grows up to be a real catch and marries happily ever after. She is also reunited with a now-repentant father after the space of sixteen years. And best of all, the wrongly accused wife is vindicated and turns out
not to be dead at all but in hiding. She is reunited with her husband and her daughter, and all live happily ever after.”

Elizabeth nodded in affirmation. I wondered how much longer my ability to recap Shakespearian plays without mixing up the plot of one with another would hold out.

“You accomplish in the space of a short play something that would take modern family therapy years to achieve,” I said.

“I’d wondered at times, as I was writing the play and afterward, if the happy ending was perhaps a little too easy on my father, given the extent of his crimes against my mother. However, after what you’ve told us about the head injury theory, I can let go of that concern.”

“Glad to be able to give you that gift,” I said.

“I tried to give my mother an allegorical gift in
Winter
’
s Tale
by gifting her counterpart in the story, Hermione. Hermione had something that Ann Boleyn never had in life—something that might have made all the difference in my mother’s story, or at least might have comforted her in her trials.”

I had a feeling I could see where Elizabeth was going with this and offered a quote accordingly.

“‘I would rather walk with a friend in the dark than alone in the light,’ as the Bard said.”

“Actually, Dolly, I believe Helen Keller said it. And truer words about friendship were never spoken.”

In
Winter
’
s Tale
, the wronged queen, Hermione, has an ace bestie named Paulina. Paulina goes to bat for the queen even when it is dangerous for her to do so. She keeps the wronged queen safely under wraps for years and years and eventually engineers the woman’s dramatic reentry into the life of her husband and daughter.

“Paulina is one of literature’s all-time great friends,” I said; “faithful, wise, brave, patient, and with a flair for the dramatic. Ann Boleyn had no such support in her short life. She had ladies-in-waiting and cousins, but history has not suggested to us that Ann Boleyn had any really close and trustworthy female friends. I wonder what her story would have been like if she’d had someone close by who would stand up for her when the whole world was rallied against her.”

“Her story may or may not have ended any differently,” Elizabeth said. “But the quality of her life would surely have been improved had she had at least one really good woman friend. And so when I wrote my story, I gave her one, providing Paulina to Hermione.”

“It takes a good friend to be one,” Mary Tudor said.

“Helen Keller again?” I inquired.

“No, Dolly; just me, talking common sense. In life, Ann Boleyn was a lone wolf, or more accurately still, a lone hunter, like a cat. No pack instinct at all. It’s hard for someone like that to make friends or to inspire Paulina-style friendship in others. Elizabeth would have had no way of knowing this, her mother having died when Elizabeth was too young to remember her. I of course was old enough to assess Ann Boleyn’s character from close up, in life.”

“Well, fortunately, my mother has mellowed since your last visit here, Dolly. She and Katharine of Aragon have formed a bond of friendship that, while not perfect, gives satisfaction to them both,” Elizabeth said.

“Frenemies, perhaps, is how I see them,” I said.

“That would pretty much fit the bill,” Mary Tudor said.

“It would fit the bill for more than one relationship here!” Margaret pointed out.

“And of course, since your last visit here, Dolly, and what it accomplished, Henry VIII’s wives have had much wider scope to rub elbows with other queens who came after them,” Jane explained. “Ann Boleyn made great friends with Queen Marie Antoinette of France, for example.”

“Yes, she has,” Elizabeth said. “French fashion, the decapitation motif, and Marie Antoinette’s unpopularity with the common people and generally bad press gave her much common ground with Mother.”

“My own mother made a French friend too,” Mary Tudor added. “Empress Josephine. You should hear the two of them go on about infertility and midlife marital abandonment—a couple of soul sisters, those two!”

“Our father actually got quite chummy with Josephine’s husband, Napoleon. The difficulties that both went through to finally procure a male heir created a bond between them. That and the fact that, after all the effort they put into getting those sons, the immortality of line that they expected from it did not materialize, “Elizabeth said.

“Their first meeting would have been something to see! Imagine little Napoleon trying to do the French cheek-kiss salute with all six feet plus of Henry VIII! He’d have had both an altitude and an attitude problem to contend with there.”

“The logistics would be challenging, but not impossible,” said little Mary Grey, the voice of experience.

“‘’Tis time to fear when tyrants seem to kiss,’” I said, bringing us quite neatly, I thought, to Elizabeth’s next play:
Pericles, Prince of Tyre
.

Chapter One Hundred-Five