Seven Will Out: A Renaissance Revel (41 page)

“Not quite as long as that, but he did lay low abroad for some little time.”

“And is the less-than-charitable greeting that history has attributed to you upon his return likewise accurate?”

“Me? Less than charitable? Never! What words does history credit me with on that occasion?”

“‘My lord, I had forgot the fart!’”

“What could possibly be more charitable than blessed forgiveness for letting one rip in the royal presence?” Elizabeth asked, her laughter belying any claim to anything like sweet charity.

“Seeing that you are the only queen I know of who is on record as making a fart joke, I must say that I am surprised at your delicacy in defaulting to a belch when you named Sir Toby. Even thusly toned down, though, the man is still a comic masterpiece. Allow me to offer you a salute for Sir Toby!”

“If you follow that up with a fart, I shall smack you!” Elizabeth said, and she looked like she meant it. I gauged the way the wind ought to be breaking, or not, and decided that a change of subject was in order.

“I love that you named the heroines of
Twelfth Night
Olivia and Viola. They are two of my favorite names for baby girls.”

“Fancy!” Catherine said. “I always rather liked Luciana but never had girls.”

“Luciana is a lovely name,” Elizabeth agreed.

“You worked that name into your
Comedy of Errors
,” I recollected, “along with the equally lovely name Adriana. I don’t know what you were thinking with the names Antipholus and Dromio, though, for the twin male characters in the play.”

“My fancy took me where it would,” Elizabeth said. “
Comedy of Errors
was suggested to me back in the early 1590s, when one of my courtiers, a father of twins, mentioned how much he’d enjoyed the twin-driven plot of Plautus’s
Menaechmi
. It seemed excellent fodder for reworking into a comedy for the contemporary stage. I was studying some Aristotle around the same time, and the classical unities were on my mind. Put it all together, and you’ve got
Comedy of Errors
.”

“The classical unities, of course, were unity of action, time, and place, all three factors being visible, as it were, to the audience viewing the proceedings upon the stage. You used that structure to give the theatergoer a very full evening’s worth of theater, not to mention two sets of twins.”

I pondered for a moment on all the fictional lookalikes who’d followed after the twins in
Comedy of Errors. The Man in the Iron Mask
and Louis XIV; Dickens’s
Prince and Pauper
; the Bobbsey twins; Patty Duke and Kathy; witches Samantha and Serena; the
Star Trek
and
Gilligan’s Island
doppelgangers; and Phoebe and Ursula, just to name a few.

“You’ve no idea how robust a legacy your twinning work has been to the entertainment industry at large down through the ages,” I said to Elizabeth.

“Thank you, Dolly,” Elizabeth said modestly, or as close to it as she could get. “And of course, I think I can flatter myself that my remaining play was also a boon to the theatrical world.”

“And what a play it is! You show a gift for understatement when you describe it in generic terms as a boon. It is, in fact, the greatest play in the Shakespeare canon, if not in all the world.”

Margaret Douglas, Mary Tudor, the Grey sisters, and Mary, Queen of Scots, all looked a bit nonplussed at being summarily taken out of the running.

“Sorry, ladies, but I am nothing if not honest to a fault. Talented as you all are, the plume has to go to Elizabeth for the greatest of all the Shakespearian plays:
Hamlet.”

Chapter One Hundred-Seven

Validating Vacillating

My mother was always an advocate of saving the best for last, but I was a little disappointed that we would have to address
Hamlet
, of all the plays, in as constricted a time frame as we were left with. In keeping with the Shakespearian mode, the word “alas” escaped my lips.

“You’re going to quote the Yorick speech, aren’t you?” Jane asked.

I wasn’t, but just to prove that I could, I did. I had no skull to hold in my hand, so I made do with a candlestick.

Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio; a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy; he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! My gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? Your gambols? Your songs? Your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar?

I bowed gratefully to the applause I received. “You are all too kind,” I said. “Who could go wrong with those powerful words on the transience of life?”

“No one,” said Elizabeth proudly. “But those powerful words were not meant to be a statement on the transience of life. They were my coming to terms, in maturity, with the whole Tom Seymour situation of my youth. From a vista of years, I was able to salute him, to forgive him, and to move on from the embarrassing and terrifying
memories of the whole affair. I might have lost everything, you know, just because Tom Seymour was up for a little slap and tickle and I was young enough to be foolish about it. Anyway, I had the last laugh, and knowing that, I was able to write my little summary of the whole saga in that passage and move on from it.”

“Literary history has it that the character of Polonius, with his trite but true platitudes and his plodding wisdom, was modeled on William Cecil, Lord Burghley. Was he?”

“He was, Dolly; Polonius was a tribute to the wisest if least scintillating man I ever knew.
William
Cecil was thus immortalized in
Hamlet
; his son
Rober
t was the catalyst for my writing the play in the first place.”

Robert Cecil, first Earl of Salisbury, secretary of state and lord high treasurer, was obviously as ace a politico as his father. He has gone down in history as small in body but big on brain.

“Robert Cecil led you to write
Hamlet
? How?”

“By haranguing me on the same subject that his father harangued me about during
his
entire career.”

“I’ve got it!” I said. “‘This is the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind,’” I quoted in my best Shakespearian manner.

“I don’t recall having written that into the play,” Elizabeth said.

“You didn’t. Laurence Olivier added it in when he filmed it in the 1940s.”

“He was the husband of that lovely young woman who was here with us for career advice,” Elizabeth recalled. “Mistress Vivian Leigh. She was an English actress, troubled about taking on an important role that would require she speak with an American Southern accent. She was so talented that we encouraged her to pursue the role. We’ve always wondered how it worked out.”

“Well, fiddle-dee-dee,” I said, “it worked out brilliant-lee! There’s been no other real Scarlett O’Hara since Vivian Leigh; she made the role her own and had the Oscar to prove it. Everyone recognizes her as Scarlett O’Hara on sight. It was quite a coup for her.”

“We’re glad that worked out. And what a coincidence it is that her husband did a production of my
Hamlet
.”

“Getting back to the Cecils—it was your famous, or perhaps I should say infamous, inability to make up your mind that Robert Cecil was twitting you on, wasn’t it—just as his father before him had?”

“Yes, Dolly. It was toward the end of my reign, when the Essex disaster was playing itself out. I had a decision to make—whether or not to execute the man. Robert Cecil knew, as I did, that Essex’s execution was necessary. But I could not bring myself to give that final, fatal order. Cecil lost his patience at one point and had at me quite roundly for not being able to decide unequivocally on a course of action. He blamed it on my being a woman. ‘Imagine what would happen to the kingdom,’ he demanded, ‘if a
man
in your position prevaricated the way you do!’”

The little man with the big brain also, apparently, had very big balls. “What did you say to Robert Cecil after that?” I asked.

“Very little,” Elizabeth said.

“You were awestruck at the man’s courage?”

“No, Dolly. I was doing what the man requested: imagining a situation at court in which a man could not nail his colors to the mast and stick with a decision. The theme haunted me for days, like a tune you can’t stop humming. I could not get it out of my head, until I started to write it out of me by beginning another play.”

“So you wrote a play about what many consider, if you will pardon me saying so, the primary flaw in your character?”

“
Flaw
is not a term for monarchs, Dolly!” Elizabeth said, defiantly flinging her plume down to the floor. She tried to be defiant, at least; the plume, not playing ball, floated about in the air for what seemed like a long time before it finally landed at my feet.

“Don’t you see?” Elizabeth continued. “As a woman, I made
an art
of not coming to conclusions and a science of second-guessing. What you call a character flaw was really using a woman’s way to make my reign the greatest epoch in British history!”

It occurred to me that Queen Victoria might take exception to the “greatest epoch” bit, but otherwise I could see that Elizabeth was spot-on.

“A
man
,” she continued, “would have made nothing but a mess by endlessly rethinking and hedging his bets. It is a feminine—not a masculine—art, in my opinion. And so I decided to give the world a tragedy about an indecisive man, based on the dark side of what made my own persona tick.”

“And the Hamlet legends, of course, were well established by your day and age, ready for you to borrow to achieve your purpose.”

“Exactly.”

“I guess the writing of the play helped you to work through the Essex situation too, in the end,” I said.

“It did, Dolly. I was eventually able to let go of some of my doubts and move forward with the Essex execution.”

“Good for you!” I said.

“But not so much for Essex, of course,” as Mary, Queen of Scots, pointed out.

Chapter One Hundred-Eight

Fare-Thee-Wells and Dare-Thee-Tells

“‘What light through yonder window breaks,’” I said, looking at the ever-widening beam shining in through the window. “Ladies, it would seem that we’ve covered all the bases—the entire canon of Shakespeare’s plays, brought to the world not by the Bard but by all of you. Referring to your collective body of works as the Shakespeare canon seems kind of ridiculous now, doesn’t it?”

“Well, the man does still have his sonnets,” Catherine Grey reminded me.

“I like the term
royal plays
,” Elizabeth said. “It captures the essence of the thing perfectly, in my opinion.”

“Well, it will be an honor and a privilege to share the story of the royal plays with the world.”

“It will be after you’ve figured out how to make the world believe it,” Mary Tudor said with concern.

“‘The devil can cite scripture for his purpose,’” I reminded her.

“Well, I’m sure you’ll figure out something!”

“‘There are no tricks in plain and simple faith,’ Mary. I am absolutely certain that this will all come right, eventually.”

“I hope so, dear. Good-bye, and do take care,” Mary said, giving me a kiss on the cheek.

Jane Grey came up and kissed me next. “If anyone can achieve the mission, Dolly can,” she said sweetly.

“Thanks for the vote of confidence, Jane. ‘So shines a good deed in a naughty world’!”

“Good-bye, Dolly,” Margaret Douglas said. “And, Dolly, about the Lennox Jewel—”

“What about it?” I asked.

“That enormous groin flower depicted on it,” she said. “You remember.”

“How could I forget? Talk about flower power!”

“Dolly, should your research for our mission lead you to the story behind that flower—you will keep it a secret, won’t you?”

“‘What springs forth from forth the fatal loins,’ stays in the fatal loins,” I reassured her.

“Good luck, Dolly! You’re going to need it, rewriting history like you will have to do. You won’t know where to begin!” said Catherine, stroking my cheek in farewell.

“Oh, I think I will—‘What’s past is prologue,’ you know.”

“Won’t you be daunted, Dolly, by such a Herculean task?” asked little Mary Grey, getting the big word right for a change on this auspicious occasion.

I replied:

Our doubts are but traitors

And make us lose the good we oft might win

By fearing to attempt.

“I feel confident that I can brave it out, Mary,” I said, bending down to meet her as she got up on her tiptoes to hug me good-bye.

“I hope you aren’t underestimating the inherent difficulties in this task, Dolly. Your fellow academics are not likely to take it lying down when you turn history on its head,” the Scottish
queen pointed out, so moved by the occasion that she actually forgot her execution awareness.

“‘I shall screw my courage to the sticking place,’ and not fail, Mary; no matter what it takes!”

Elizabeth hugged me with tears in her eyes—happy tears. “It’s hard to believe that at last, our literary achievements will be made known to the world. The excitement is almost too much! I’m confident we’ve put our faith in the right place, Dolly, by entrusting you with the mission. I hope you are cognizant of the very high honor that is yours. You’ve made a name for yourself in historical circles with the story of my father’s wives. With
our
story, you will rise to greatness in the literary world as well.”

“I’m not afraid of greatness, Elizabeth. You know what they say! ‘Some are born great; some achieve greatness, and others—’”

“‘Have greatness thrust upon them,’” said two familiar voices in unison from the doorway.

Chapter One Hundred-Nine

A Toast That Is the Most

Katharine of Aragon and Ann Boleyn entered the room arm in arm, believe it or not, and laughing. Their daughters, Mary Tudor and Elizabeth, moved happily to their mothers’ sides. Seeing a look of joy on all four of those faces at the same time was like witnessing a little miracle. Clearly, even after centuries in a ghostly otherworld, the enchantment of mother-daughter reunion had not worn off for any of them. The emotion was particularly evident in the face of Elizabeth, who likely had no memories whatsoever of her mother in life on earth.