Seven Will Out: A Renaissance Revel (40 page)

No Greater Collaborator

Pericles
tells the story of yet another orphaned and abandoned little girl. This child, Marina, is born during a maritime storm. Her mother, presumed dead from childbirth, is buried at sea. Unbeknown to her husband, Pericles, she washes up on a foreign shore alive and becomes an acolyte of the Goddess Diana. Pericles, meanwhile, leaves his little Marina in the safekeeping of a nurse, Lychorida, and a friendly neighboring king. Unfortunately that setup does not go well, and Marina is eventually sold as a slave. However, her noble blood tells, and all comes out well at the end, with Marina, Pericles, and mother happily reunited.

“
Pericles
is the one Shakespearian play omitted from the
First Folio
, Elizabeth. What a shame you didn’t get to see the final product of it once Emilia and her copy of that work arrived here. You must have been disappointed about that.”

“I wasn’t the only one!” Elizabeth said.

Having discussed the themes of the absent mother, abandonment, and corrective recapitulation already, I was not inclined to rehash them in relation to
Pericles
. There was, however, an academic question for which I wanted an answer.

“Shakespearian scholars are pretty united on the fact that
Pericles
was the work of more than one author,” I said to Elizabeth. “Did you work with a cowriter while you were writing it?”

“Well,” said Elizabeth, “yes and no.”

“Your hem and haw sticks in my craw,” I informed Elizabeth. “Come clean, girlfriend. Did you have a collaborator with you when you were writing the story or didn’t you?”

“The person who wrote the first half of
Pericles
died without finishing it. I simply brought the story to its conclusion for her. And while doing so, I took the opportunity to memorialize her in one of the minor characters of the story—Lychorida.”

“Lychorida is little Marina’s faithful nurse and protectress,” I recalled.

“It should be obvious to you then, Dolly, who she was based on.”

“Kat Ashley, of course; your own nurse, teacher, surrogate mother, and guard dog all rolled into one.”

“She certainly has the proportions for such a creature,” Mary Tudor said, looking gratified at the group giggle she evoked.

“It wasn’t much of a tribute, if you don’t mind my saying so, Elizabeth. Poor old Lychorida dies before the family is reunited and doesn’t get to be part of the happy ending.”

“Dolly, all my life I viewed Kat as a mother figure. It was a perfectly satisfactory way for me to look at things as a very young child. When I grew into adolescence, though, and started developing faculties of analysis, things changed.”

“Faculties of analysis don’t go easy on a girl,” Jane said.

“No, they do not,” Elizabeth agreed. “Once I could start analyzing the story of my mother’s life for myself, I could not buy into the stock story of the court, the story of an adulteress and all-around evil witch.”

“Surely Kat Ashley didn’t speak that way about your mother to you!” I said.

“Kat herself always spoke respectfully of my mother, on the rare occasions that we spoke of her at all. Kat was so attached to me—as though I were her own daughter. She did everything she could to keep that illusion of our being mother and daughter alive, for herself probably as much as for me. Those efforts included minimizing discussion of my real mother.”

“How sad for you,” I said. “I guess blended families weren’t as well done as they might have been back in Tudor times.”

“You aren’t dissing Kat, are you?” said Elizabeth, going into instant tigress mode. I’d have sworn that the pile of the velour on the back of her dress rose up a half inch or so along her spine.

“No, I’m not,” I was able to say with honesty. “I’m basing it on a lot of what I’ve heard during my visits here.”

“Dolly
has
spent considerable time with Bess of Hardwick,” Mary, Queen of Scots, reminded Elizabeth.

“Whatever Kat may have done out of an excess of motherly feeling, I do not hold against her,” Elizabeth said. “She was in a difficult position, and so was I. Once I started to feel that my real mother, Ann Boleyn, had been a victim rather than a villainess, I started to feel guilty about my daughterly feelings toward Kat. I felt as though indulging those feelings was somehow making me disloyal to Ann Boleyn. And of course, when I started feeling daughterly toward my dead mother, I’d feel guilty about not giving Kat her due. She was, after all, the woman on the spot.”

“As was Lychorida,” I said, “if I might bring us back to
Pericles
.”

“What we need to bring it back to, Dolly, is John Gower. Kat was a big fan of Gower’s; I knew that much about it all while Kat was alive. What I didn’t learn until after she was dead, though, was just how touched she was by the story of Pericles, the child
orphan of the storm, and her faithful nurse as told in Gower’s
Apollonius
. “

“How did you find that out?” I asked.

“I was going through some correspondence of hers after she had passed on. I found that Kat had started but never finished a play based on Gower’s work.”

“Like surrogate mother, like daughter; both of you surreptitiously writing plays.”

“Kat knew about my writings in the wee hours. I suppose she wanted to emulate me and eventually surprise me with a completed play about an orphaned child and faithful nurse. It would have been yet another bond between us, and one my natural mother could not have shared. Kat died with the play only half-finished.”

“And you completed it,” I said. “Shakespearian scholars have always supposed that
Pericles
was penned by two authors, based on the difference in the first and second halves of the play. Over the years, one George Wilkins has won out as likely coauthor. Who’d have ever guessed it was our girl Kat?”

“Finishing her play helped me to grieve Kat’s death and come to terms with the relationship between Kat, my natural mother, and myself. I was able to let go of a lot of the guilt and mixed emotions by the time I was finished with it.”

As if on cue, Kat Ashley herself actually entered the room. She stood right in a narrow beam of light that had made its way in through one of the arrow slit windows. The sun was coming up; our night together was coming to a close.

“I’ve come to hurry you girls along!” Kat said. “You ought to have finished by now.”

“We’re almost done,” Elizabeth assured her.

“How done is almost?” she asked pointedly.

“Four plays to go.”

“Four to go! Really, now, you must move things along. Condense, my dear, condense!”

“If only you could take your own advice,” Elizabeth said saucily, tapping Kat on her ample behind.

“
I
don’t need to take my own advice.
You
need to take my own advice,” Kat replied. After rapping Elizabeth on the knuckles, Kat turned to me.

“Gloriana she may be, in all her splendor, but she still needs me to keep her on track,” Kat said, now holding Elizabeth by the hand and glowing with substitute maternal pride—and likely a healthy dose of codependence.

“I don’t know what Elizabeth would do without you, Kat!” Jane said kindly.

“You are my saving grace, dear, and always will be,” Elizabeth said to Kat as she walked her to the door. “We’ll be done here very shortly. You can start priming the others to take over from us in a few minutes.”

Kat made her way out the door and down the hall, and I prepared for some of the condensing Kat had so enthusiastically suggested; we had four plays left to cover in those few minutes I’d just been promised.

Chapter One Hundred-Six

The Rom-Com Bomb, or a Winning Way with Twinning

“All right, Elizabeth, we are on the fast track now. Let’s tackle the three remaining comedies first. A capsule version of how each came to be, if you please!”

“Easily done, Dolly. We will start with
Two Gentlemen of Verona
, since that was my very first play. I wrote it when I was in my teens, after the Thomas Seymour debacle. Sexual attraction and what it will drive people to; loyalty and its demands; the impact trusted servants have on our lives; deceit; banishment. You can see why all those things would have been on my mind.”

“Of course I can. Tom Seymour’s sexual escapade with you when you were a vulnerable teenager certainly would have involved all those things. It happened while you were living with Katherine Parr, who was his wife and your stepmother. It also happened on Kat’s watch, and some say with her misguided encouragement. And of course, at the end of it, you were banished from the home of a respected stepmother.”

“That about sums it up,” Elizabeth recalled aloud.

“How did you manage to make a comedy out of a smarmy story like that?”

“‘Smarmy’ is not a word to use to the princely, Dolly!” Elizabeth snapped, tickling me under the nose with her feather till I sneezed. “A lot of soul-searching followed that escapade, and it helped me to grow into a wiser girl than I was. A lot of advice from others, and discipline, also followed, and you know how those can feel to an adolescent. I rebelled against it internally all the while that I was kowtowing to it on the outside.”

“Holy kowtow! I mean, holy cow!” I said, wondering what it would have been like to see Elizabeth kowtowing to anything.

“Because my brother Edward found my behavior during that escapade, as you call it, to be questionable, he sent me some reading material to guide me into the channels of more circumspect comportment. Thomas Elyot’s
Book Named the Governor
was popular for such training purposes at the time; his treatment of the story of Titus and Gisippus intrigued me. I shared this thought with a family friend, who suggested that as a scholastic exercise, I attempt to rewrite the story myself. Little could she know that with the fractiousness of adolescence, I would take her advice, but with a grain of salt: I would write out the story as a brash comedy instead of as an academic polemic.”

“Let me guess; it was Catherine Willoughby who started you on the playwriting path?”

“Who else?” Elizabeth asked.

“Well, Elizabeth, many consider
Two Gentlemen
Shakespeare’s weakest work; I guess it was just your youth and inexperience showing through, wasn’t it?”

“I may have been young and inexperienced at points in my life, Dolly, but weak I never was! I was, however, on rare occasions, a little the worse for the wine. It happened once during Twelfth Night revels.”

“It happens,” I said. “For most of us, the end result is a crying jag. Fancy you turning the experience into a classic play. At least, I am assuming that is what you did—turned the experience into
Twelfth Night.”

Twelfth Night
has a lot of the hallmarks of Shakespearian theater rolled into one neat package: mistaken identity, cross-dressing, star-crossed love, and some goofball comic relief, to name a few.

“So you conceived the idea for
Twelfth Night
when you were four parts pissed,” I said.

“Beg pardon?”

“You were drunk. Tanked up. Crocked. Soused. Smashed, as it were.”

“‘Smashed’ is not a word to use with crowned heads, Dolly.”

“‘Smashed’ and ‘crowned heads’ certainly don’t go together if one is being execution aware,” I pointed out.

“I suppose ‘stewed’ would about cover it,” Elizabeth said gamely. “It was a few years shy of the turn of the seventeenth century that year. I was feeling my age, I suppose. Revels do take more of a toll on one as the years go by.”

“You must have felt like a stewed prune,” I said.

Elizabeth reached over and pulled the plume out of my hat in retribution, and then continued her tale.

“As I lay in bed, half-asleep, half-awake, and feeling a hangover coming on, I’m afraid I perseverated a bit on the poor quality of the entertainments that were provided for the revels that year. I considered that I could do better in the way of comedy than that, and set about to start a play to prove it. I actually started the work that very night. Some of the practical joking that was going on during the revels that year gave me a lot of very suitable material for my Malvolio subplot.”

“And the cross-dressing Viola; yet another heroine inspired by your escapade with your cousin Mary, Queen of Scots?”

“Yes, indeed.”

“And I suppose the overriding themes of marrying outside of one’s station, or not, would have been informed by your experience with Robert Dudley.”

“Not intentionally, but now that you mention it, it’s probably not unlikely that there was some subconscious element to that particular subtext of the play. You’re neglecting to mention my very favorite thing about
Twelfth Night
, though, Dolly.”

“That being?”

“That being Sir Toby Belch.”

Sir Toby, of course, is one of literature’s great buffoons. It occurred to me that Elizabeth, in her comedic writings, had quite a sideline going in uncouth party animals.

“Sir Toby was inspired by Edward de Vere, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford. He was being a bigger ass than usual during the revels that year,” Elizabeth said.

de Vere was a very high-ranking English peer, a poet of note, a theatrical patron, and a contender for the role of Shakespeare ghostwriter, according to some conspiracy theorists. He could also be, as Elizabeth pointed out, an ass, going about knocking up women, brawling, stiffing literally hundreds of tradesmen, and frittering away a large family fortune.

“Why did you call the de Vere character ‘Sir Toby Belch’?”

“Well, I started out calling him ‘Sir Toby Breakwind,’ in memory of that epic fart of de Vere’s, but I worried about that being a little over the top. So I muted it to ‘Sir Toby Belch.’”

“Is it true what they say about de Vere having the misfortune to inadvertently fart when bowing obeisance to you?”

“Perfectly true. And a loud one it was! It reverberated throughout the court. I thought poor old Cecil would have an apoplectic fit, trying to keep a straight face.”

“And is it equally true that the man was so ashamed of his flatulence that he avoided the court for seven years?”