Seven Will Out: A Renaissance Revel (43 page)

Helena Von Snakenborg picked up the tale. “Queen Elizabeth had possession of her Scottish cousin’s plays, as has already been described to you. Elizabeth started to ponder her own mortality as early as 1590. I was her right-hand woman, her wing woman extraordinaire, her most trusted servant. Elizabeth was already
involved with Emilia and the slow feeding of the Grey plays to Shakespeare, one by one. She wanted her Scottish cousin’s plays, and her own, to be fed to him in the same way. She was fond of Emilia, fond enough to trust her with the plays of the Grey sisters, who were royal relatives but not—discounting Jane Grey’s nine-day disaster—queens. She wanted someone of a little higher standing to come into the picture for the output of actual reigning monarchs.”

“She couldn’t have done better than you, Helena; you can’t get much higher up than a marchioness!”

Emilia Lanier, a product of her age, did not seem one whit disturbed by the whole class issue. She, while a poetess in her own right and the mistress of one of England’s leading men, was not of the noblesse or even the gentry. Her Italian father was a musician at Elizabeth’s court.

Helena continued her tale. “The queen trusted me implicitly with her plays, as she had with so many other things over the years. I had proven myself worthy of such trust again and again; I was, to use her words, ‘tried and true.’”

Take it from me; you have not heard the words “tried and true” until you’ve heard them spoken with a Swedish lilt. Helena continued her tale.

“The queen was very concerned that the royal plays, as she called them, not be attributed to their rightful authors until after her death. So she passed the physical manuscripts of all the plays in her possession, including her own later ones as they rolled off the press, into my care. She thought, for secrecy’s sake, that they were safer in my charge than in anyone else’s, including her own. Spies were everywhere about the court, and Elizabeth’s papers were vulnerable.”

“And the queen chose well when she chose Helena,” Emilia said. “Helena kept mum about the whole thing quite admirably; in the hotbed of a Tudor court, she and I were truly the only two who knew about all those plays.”

“I guess Elizabeth brought the two of you together when it came to working with her plays?” I asked Emilia.

“Yes. She met with the two of us and put all the cards on the table—or at least all the cards that had to do with her plays and those of Mary, Queen of Scots, Mary Tudor, Margaret Douglas, and the Greys. The queen then had me introduce Helena to Will Shakespeare, and Helena used the acquaintance to start funneling the royal plays of Elizabeth and Mary, Queen of Scots, along to Will, separately from my own project with the Grey plays. We funneled slowly, over a course of years.”

“Wow!” was all I had left within me to comment at this juncture.

“For a time, we had Will convinced that the plays Helena was feeding to him were actually her own work and that of some of the queen’s other ladies, who preferred to remain anonymous. His experience with the Grey and Douglas plays made that believable to him, at first. But eventually, he guessed that something more was going on. And then something happened that made him realize the royal plays were, indeed, royal.”

“How did he figure it out?” I asked.

“The queen did her share of attending theatrical productions and saw any number of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men’s productions when they were given for the court. Of course, when she was in attendance, all eyes, including Will’s, sought a glimpse of her. Once, Will was actually able to cadge a look at her while a play was being performed. He said that when she watched a production of
A Midsummer Night
’
s Dream
, her face was a dead giveaway; it was the face of a proud author, if ever he’d seen one. From there he started looking at the handwriting of the royal manuscripts, asking discreet questions, and checking details. He eventually came to me and confronted me with the true authorship of the various royal plays. The man was terrified, quite frankly. He did not know what to do or to think. He loved the fame and acclaim that the plays brought him. On that level, he was more than happy to keep the secret of the authorship of all those plays that seemed to just keep coming to him. On the other hand, he feared, as did everyone, inadvertently doing something to earn the queen’s disapprobation.”

“Gadzooks!” I said, rallying a bit from the information overload.

“Helena and I didn’t dare let Elizabeth know that her secret was out if we hoped to keep our positions at court and our quality of life in general. It didn’t take much to convince Will to keep the secret once we’d talked him down and assured him that
we’d
take any fall that had to be taken, should it come to that. That mollified him somewhat.”

“Old Will was a trusting soul.”

“Old Will was a horny soul and wanting to get under my farthingale. He’d have believed anything I told him,” said Emilia.

“And so the plays kept moving along the Shakespearian pipeline,” Helena continued. “We managed to maintain a very livable status quo until the queen’s final weeks on this earth.”

“What happened then?”

“She shared with me her final wishes. Among them was that the plays that we’d been dealing with, as well as the Margaret Douglas and Mary Tudor plays, be attributed to their rightful authors as soon after her own death as possible.”

“So what did you do?” I asked.

“We went, Emilia and I, to meet with Will to address the situation. We had decided that a pact, or a covenant, was in order. Will agreed, as he had a request to make about the author identity situation as well.”

“What was it?” I asked.

“His wish dovetailed fairly well with the queen’s; he asked that the true authorship of the plays not be made public until after
his
death. He wanted to enjoy the fame and fortune they brought him to the last, or at least to
his
last, here on earth. Emilia and I felt it reasonable to agree. Since she was by the far the youngest among us, it seemed likely that Emilia would be the person in charge of revealing the authorship of the royal plays when the time came. She would need the original manuscripts to do this. Will had them well secured, he said, and would make arrangements for Emilia to receive them immediately upon his death. Given that Will lived away from the court and all its spies and intrigues, we felt that the manuscripts were safest with him and agreed to this plan. We furnished him with the originals of the Mary Tudor plays, which Elizabeth had passed into my hands, for the sake of completeness. And of course, we memorialized all this in a letter, a covenant, jointly signed by Will, Emilia, and myself and witnessed by a fourth, peripherally involved party.”

“I thought that the three of you—you, Emilia, and Will—were the only ones in on this,” I said.

“There was me as well, Dolly,” said a plainly dressed, middle-aged woman, who had just entered the room.

“‘Great Caesar’s ghost’!” I said. “Not another one! Who are you?”

Chapter One Hundred-Thirteen

Spouse in the House

“I’m sorry I said ‘not another one’ when you entered the room,” I said to the woman. “It was nothing personal. Just a little overwhelmed, you know.”

“I understand, Dolly. Take heart. I am the last of the ladies you will meet tonight.”

“And I take it that you are Mrs. Shakespeare, my dear?”

“You presume correctly,” the woman answered.

Mrs. Shakespeare, nee Anne Hathaway, has been given the shortest shrift of just about any historical wife I know of. Shotgun wedding; significantly older than husband; left the second-best bed in deceased husband’s last will and testament. That was about all that I, or posterity, had known about her until now. She was handsome enough for a woman of her age and wore a basic black-and-white ensemble. Her ruff was refreshingly diminutive, and on her head she wore a simple, white linen cap.

“So, Mrs. Shakespeare—Anne—you were the secretary and/or witness to the letter of the covenant between your husband, Emilia, and Helena?”

“I was,” Anne Shakespeare said.

“Had to have been a bit awkward. I mean, you and Emilia working so closely together on something after your husband had written those steamy sonnets for her.”

“Our marriage had deteriorated to pretty much nothing more than a business arrangement by that point, Dolly. I knew Emilia was the Dark Lady, and frankly, I didn’t really care. What I was most interested in was keeping the secret of the authorship
of the plays sacrosanct. I was, of course, more than a little bit older than Will was, and I assumed he would outlive me. Had this turned out to be the case, keeping the Shakespeare plays under Will’s provenance until his death would have meant that I could enjoy,
my
whole life long, the cache of being Mrs. Shakespeare, wife of the famous playwright. It was my claim to fame, so to speak, and I did not want to live to see it end.”

“I guess Will’s dying before you did must have upset that little applecart, didn’t it?”

“It could have, but it didn’t.”

“It was another story for us though,” said Helena Snakenborg. Emilia Lanier nodded in agreement.

“When Will knew he was dying, he turned the covenant letter over to my possession, the information therein to be disclosed to the world, eventually, by Emilia,” Anne said. “He also disclosed to me the place where he had secured the manuscripts of the royal plays, which would be the documentary evidence of the claims made in the letter.”

“That evidence did not make it down through the sands of time though; why not, Anne?”

“The queen had wanted the disclosure of the authorship of the royal plays to wait until after
her
death, and Will wanted it to wait until after
his
. Nobody thought to ask me
my
opinion on the subject. I did not want the information disclosed
at all
! The royalty had their claim to fame and posterity by heritage and right. My husband, Will, would have his claim to fame, even absent of those plays, thanks to his sonnets. Those sonnets meant a lot to him—even more than his plays did.”

“They were the classier form of expression for the Renaissance writer,” I said. Anne Shakespeare was not impressed by the argument.

“A bunch of ditties, and the best of them about a loose woman, no less! They weren’t nearly as impressive, to my mind, as those plays were. Comedy! Drama! History! Romance! Family dysfunction! All seven of the deadly sins! There was something in those plays for everyone to enjoy. I had my eye on the future and on posterity. I felt sure that those plays, in the fullness of time, would supersede Will’s poetry in the public eye.”

“Not to mention the public ear,” Emilia pointed out.

“Either way, I devised a means to protect those plays from being attributed to anyone other than Will and to secure, for as long as possible, my place in literary history as the wife of the man who wrote them.”

“You destroyed the letter and the original manuscripts!” I said, feeling a downright visceral scholar’s pain at the thought of the most significant primary source documents in the world of English literature going up in smoke.

“Actually, I didn’t,” Anne said. “Mind you, I thought about it, though. And I told Emilia and Helena that I had. My conscience, however, wouldn’t allow for the actual destruction of the documents, putting the lie to the authorship of the plays for all eternity. I was too true a subject to my late queen to do that. My conscience was elastic enough, though, to put the lie to the authorship for at least my own lifetime and for an indeterminate while longer.”

“What did you do with, or about, the documents?” I asked.

“I left the royal manuscripts where Will had put them. It was a safe place, a place no one would look for them, I was sure, while I was alive. Once I was dead—well, it seemed to me that if the
Almighty wanted the authorship of the plays to be revealed, then the plays would find their way out of their hiding place and into world. I trusted them, after my lifetime, to fate and to a higher power that would make arrangements for them according to his desire. Those plays have stayed in their place until now—until you, Dolly, came along.”

“So where were—or maybe I should even say where
are
—the manuscripts of the royal plays hiding?” I asked.

“Take your best guest, Dolly,” said Emilia meaningfully.

“Were they somewhere in the Globe Theater; a safe haven in Stratford-on-Avon?” I asked. It was the best I could do on short notice.

“Dolly,” said Helena, speaking as meaningfully as Emilia had, “take your second-best guess.”

Chapter One Hundred-Fourteen

Secreted and Defeated

“Of course! Those manuscripts are hidden somewhere in the second-best bed! The one that Will so cryptically endowed to his wife, leaving a baffled posterity to conjecture why.”

“Will was a fair woodworker, in his spare time,” Anne Shakespeare said. “He hollowed out the posts of that bed, which were enormous, and hid some of the manuscript pages inside of them. The rest of the manuscript pages were deposited into the headboard and footboard, and in the woodwork of the canopy.”

“Where did the bed find its way to after your death, Anne?” I asked.

“My death came upon me suddenly, Dolly, but I did not die intestate. My daughter Susannah was the immediate beneficiary of my household furnishings. Neither I nor Will had given her any reason to suspect the contents of the woodwork of that bed.”

“And what about the covenant letter? Is that in the second-best bed too?”

“No, Dolly. The covenant letter is not in the second-best bed.”

“Well then, where is it?”

“In life, that letter never left Will’s possession. He kept it on his person at all times, even when sleeping. It seemed to me quite fitting that that practice should not change with Will’s death.”

“So that letter; it—it—”

“It reposes in a grave at Holy Trinity Church,” Helena said, kindly finishing my thought for me as I found my way out of my stutter.

“Of course—the covenant letter was buried with Shakespeare!”

“‘Good friend, for Jesus’s sake forbear,’” I said, quoting one of the most famous epitaphs in the English language: