Readthrough: The Player's Boy: Chapters 5-8

[lilliburlero.livejournal.com]

(Another Henry IV chapter title, incidentally.)

The opening of this chapter has its various echoes of Ready-Made Family (Yetland Cove doesn't seem to have changed much in 400 years) and Run Away Home (saddle-sore runaways). Nicholas's memory of the Armada again serves to illustrate conflicts and interpenetrations of national and religious loyalties: it occurs to me that one of the things these books offer is a primer in the beginnings of a 'British' patriotism in the 16th century.

Marlowe calling Nicholas cousin has some far-reaching consequences, and echoes his later, more durable connection with Shakespeare (it never seems to stop people assuming that Nicholas is a bastard son, but at least the proprieties are nodded to.)

Nicholas shows an enthusiasm for the sea worthy of his descendant, and the pantomime of him being beaten to raise a wind is in a way his first theatrical role. There's some lovely commentary on superstition--always a consistent undertow in Forest--in this chapter too.





Chapter title is As You Like It, and couldn't really be more appropriate.

This portrait of Marlowe subdued, anxious and feeling rather guilty abut Nicholas underlines rather than contradicts our sense of his volatility. Forest writes him as a man marked by death, I think: his refusal to flee underlines his sense of fatalism. She eclipses Marlowe's connections to the Walsinghams in order to bring him into Southampton's orbit. (If you're interested in novels that plays up those connections for all it's worth, including all the Marlowe/Thomas Walsingham slash you can shake a bloody dagger at, I could do worse than recommend Anthony Burgess's A Dead Man in Deptford: eccentric in every way, but one of the best fictionalised Marlowes out there, I think.) Walsingham connections aside, Poley, Skeres and Fryzer cut pretty disreputable figures. Forest's account of Marlowe's death, however, is for now, largely in line with that of that very dubious coroner's report. Though it is far from the last we'll see of Poley, a thoroughly sinister figure, who suborns Nicholas on pain of death into his service, making Marlowe look really rather benign.

We come now, after 80 pages, to the scene of the first paragraph: the splendour of London Bridge almost immediately undercut by the squalor of the plague-struck city, vermin and heads on poles (Poley's words are nicely chilling, I think). And finally, Nicholas is pitched into the orchard of Essex House: a nice echo with the venue for numerous Shakespearean scenes of eavesdropping and spying.





Chapter title from Romeo and Juliet, describing Paris, which resonates a little ironically with Southampton as rather reluctant bridegroom.

We're introduced to Humfrey, who strikes a reassuringly inept figure in these intimidating surroundings. There's been some discussion of Hilary Clare's objections to the informality of interactions between Nicholas, Humfrey and the noblemen: my feeling is that Humfrey's connection to the Danvers family (who will play an important and not terribly edifying role in Southampton's life) and the wonderful picture that Forest creates of a parallel but different unconventionality to Marlowe's are more than enough to account for any inaccuracies. Nicholas's amazement at having blundered into the 'conversation world' he overheard in the Merrick's garden, and found it full of real people, seems apt comment, too.

Like Nicola, Nicholas has a gift for instruction, and he corrects Humfrey's archery stance and aim with his descendant's aptitude for demonstrating slow bowling.

A nerve-racking brush with Gilly Merrick, and then Nicholas is in the presence of Southampton. I'm impressed with the way in which Forest registers Southampton's androgynous appearance, and demonstrates some of its unconscious effects on Nicholas, without intrusive editorial comment.

Southampton's grief at Marlowe's death (though as far as I know there's no evidence he was his patron: I haven't my biographies of Marlowe to hand, and welcome correction or further information on the point) echoes Walsingham's personal affection for Marlowe, implied in the publisher's dedication of Hero and Leander to him. I confess to a weakness for poet/patron relationships, (and can I put in a word for Burgess's other--and perhaps better--novel about this milieu, Nothing Like the Sun, here?) so this has been your regularly scheduled fic prompt. Humfrey's explanation of friendships and enmities in terms of the Trojan War strikes both a Shakespearean note (as we'll see later, in a discussion of Troilus and Cressida), and a homoerotic one. Essex's dislike of Marlowe, and triumph at Nicholas's revelation that Kit was a spy, suggests--without any authorial comment--(to my ear) personal jealousy as well as political suspicion.

I love Nicholas's perception that Humfrey has a 'life-long' face, unlike his own and Adam's more youthfully changeable features--I can think of people like that in my own life.

And Nicholas is also, like Nicola, a good, if untrained singer. And he has, probably fortunately, a similar estimation of his ability to deal with questioning (though subsequent events will prove perhaps a bit more natural talent for crime).

More arse jokes: the ars in praesenti quibble doesn't turn up in Shakespeare, I think, but it's certainly in some of the citizen comedy of the time (Googling finds me an example from A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, and Diane Purkiss, interestingly, speculating on its implications of sodomy as well as chastistement). But it's a moment of remarkable sophistication here, I think, likely to be a bit wasted on the target market: Southampton's pause is primarily one of grief--it's the first time, one imagines, that he is obliged to say Marlowe's name in a context of relative composure, but it's followed immediately by a schoolboy joke which draws deflective attention to his own (possibly sexual) relationship with Marlowe and registers his suspicion about what Nicholas was to Marlowe as well.

Nicholas's revelation that Marlowe was an informer reveals a standing grievance between Essex and Southampton, and the impression that sexual jealousy as well as political risk is involved is rather comically underscored by Nicholas's comparison of them to Geoffrey and Kate having a row. I love Southampton's 'fledgling authority'--so callow! But very moving. And Essex's thunderous look in response--so unguarded that even Nicholas (to hysterical hilarity) realises that he's unquestionably in the presence of a lovers' tiff as well as a Political Incident.

The discussion about how Nicholas might be smuggled out of the house nicely touches upon Southampton's androgyny and on cross-dressing in theatrical contexts.

(Especially astute readers may be able to guess that this chapter caters rather expansively to a number of your correspondent's weaknesses.)




In another satisfying resonance, Nicholas is seen at Titchfield learning some of the skills no doubt described in The Art of Fauconerie.

Shakespeare greets Nicholas with an allusion to that mysterious helpful personage in All's Well that Ends Well, the 'gentle astringer', and Nicholas proves himself a little bit more educated than the average falconer with his allusion to Aesop. It's a lovely meeting between two grammar-school boys.

Nicholas's being spruced up ('it's the guest who minds'), while amusing, reminds us of just how often he's been treated as an object or a chattel.

That tease about the sonnets, Miss Forest, is unforgivable, setting us up for a discussion of the form between Shakespeare and one of the likeliest candidates for his master-mistress, and then revealing them to be 'mock-courtly' jokes written for a student revue. Though it probably makes this the only historical novel for the 9-12 age bracket to contain a reference to the Gesta Grayorum. But there's a good bit of flirting in Southampton's offer to Shakespeare of a sinecure, and with this I suppose we must be content.

In Nicholas's missing his cue there's an echo both of Nicola's drying up at the competition and Esther at the carol service. Dowland's setting here.

I enjoy Shakespeare's unvarnished assessment of Southampton's potential as an actor, and the commentary on the egotism necessary for an actor--foreshades of Lawrie.

More sonnets-related teasing, as Shakespeare tries to persuade Southampton to marry, and I do rather like the tolerant exasperation of: ' "So would many men," agreed his guest politely, not as if he were one of them,' which isn't quite the attitude of the speaker of the sonnets in his more ardent moods, but fits very well with Forest's characterisation. I'll leave the rest of this first impression of Shakespeare to the comments.

So, Nicholas is apprenticed to Shakespeare and becomes the player's boy.



Quite enough from me: over to you!

Comments

A nit-pick

[jackmerlin.livejournal.com]

Does anyone else feel that Nicholas is just too much the wonderboy? Clever, kind, good-looking, photographic memory, athletic, instantly at home on a ship, sings well, immediately liked by all who meet him from pages and lords to sailors and falconers, good with the hawks, never moans, always tries his best, - and as we're about to find out, excellent at tumbling and acting.
In her own time Nicola is a bit of a wonderchild but at least she has some things that she can't do as well as other people. All of Nicholas' attributes can be found in Nicola and Lawrie, but at least then they're shared between two people.
Perhaps this is an adult criticism. I never read these books as a child. Do children rather like the main character in a book to be a complete hero in every way?

Re: A nit-pick

[slemslempike.livejournal.com]

For me it's off-set by his innocence and credulity, that he can be rather dense in some ways. There's probably some necessity for Nicholas to be a little bit wonderboy in order that he could have such entry into the world of the players. And while some flaws might have made him more interesting, in lots of ways it's not really his story, more he is the conduit through which we learn the stories of Southampton, and Shakespeare.

I have ralised I might seem a little defensive - I don't mean to be! I hadn't thought before that he has very few flaws, and you're right that he doesn't. I think that for me he still manages to be an interesting character.

Re: A nit-pick

[jackmerlin.livejournal.com]

I think his situation is interesting in that he is essentially an orphan making his way in the world. And as you say he is our window into the world of Shakespeare and Essex and the others. Clearly he has to be able to sing, act and move well or he couldn't be a player. But it would make him seem a little more human if, for example, he could have been sea-sick on the ship, (as Nicola is) or made a few mistakes when he first joined the players. He is an eleven year old boy after all, and I don't know any eleven year olds that perfect!

Re: A nit-pick

[lilliburlero.livejournal.com]

For all the parallels between Nicholas and Nicola, I think he's essentially a different sort of character: he belongs to the picaresque rather than the psychological aspect of fiction--at least at first, he's a focal point for the creation of a world, rather than of especial interest in himself: and picaresque characters are often implausibly talented and likeable because it gets them into the next situation easily (though I have also met real people who are picaresque like this: I find them fascinating because I am essentially the opposite). And that's especially true when Forest is writing him as an 11-year-old: I suspect he's actually just a year or two too young for her skillset. He's more interesting as a character in his own right later on.

Re: A nit-pick

[(Anonymous)]

I agree: I find Nicholas a bit infuriatingly perfect at times, but he is a vehicle to allow us entry into all sorts of different worlds - very convenient that Marlowe should lead via the sea to Southampton and Essex to Shakespeare, rather than down many nasty dead ends. I find Nicola a far more fascinating character because despite her many talents, she is still often rejected and snubbed. I'm still re-reading, so look forward to see his personality developing. He is certainly somewhat more mature and talented than my 11 year old.

Buntyandjinx

Re: A nit-pick

[antfan.livejournal.com]

I think of Nicholas as essentially Nicola in boy's dress - and I think they are both excellent leads: immensely likeable, resourceful, but also quite vulnerable. I think Nicholas is a good "all-rounder" but not super-gifted - it's made clear that Adam excels him in most athletic/active pursuits and the memory is a bit of a weird quirk more than super-intelligence. It lets him excel at school, but I assume that's because Elizabethan grammar school education is so strongly based on rote learning.

I think Forest must have been tempted to make Nicholas a super-gifted actor, like Lawrie - maybe it's because of Lawrie she doesn't - and as it is Nicholas is a good actor but has to work really hard for it. (Will's remarks to Southampton about what's needed to make a great player - self-love - definitely would apply to Lawrie, but certainly wouldn't apply to Nicholas - and actually don't seem to apply to Burbage later.)

Actually in a weird way Nicholas seems a bit like Harry Potter - eleven years old at the start, finishes up seventeen, an orphan, plunged into a strange world - and kind of an everyman type compared to a lot of the characters around him.

Lilliburlero's point about age - I do think Forest writes younger children well actually - Charles Dodd - but I've wondered why Forest chose to start with him so young as it's not really a book 9 or 10 year olds are going to "get" - and an eleven year old hero might turn off a lot of teenage readers. I wonder if she wanted to write a novel over a much longer time-scale than her contemporary novels (perhaps inspired by Renault?) or whether the Death of Marlowe and the Essex Rebellion provided her frame, and therefore determined Nicholas's age?

Re: A nit-pick

[legionseagle (from livejournal.com)]

The other time point, as well as death of Marlowe to Essex Rebellion as a framing story is Nicholas' voice breaking. You have to have him start young to get enough technique to be able to do both Juliet and Viola.

Re: A nit-pick

[(Anonymous)]

I think as a child I felt uplifted and inspired by tales of children discovering extraordinary talents in extraordinary situations. I don't think I ever worried about a hero being over talented. That academic, sporting, musical and acting potential very often do overlap is perhaps most obvious in children of about 11, before the effects of particular specialisation and training show.

On the other hand, I tended to worry and wonder at the superior courage, kindness, stoicism and honesty of fictional characters.

Although I was a bit shocked by Nicholas's extreme stoicism at school, it does seem that he actually cries more than Nicola. He also gets himself into trouble, whereas Nicola is usually in trouble because of bad luck or her sisters.

Mrs Kent

[slemslempike.livejournal.com]

What is the joke for ars in praesenti? I mean, I get about presenting one's arse, but I don't know latin (and google translate says "art in the present tense", which I'm not sure if it's a mistake or not) so I'm not sure if that's the only humour or if there's another layer I'm missing.

[lilliburlero.livejournal.com]

Also have no Latin to speak of, but afaik it's a pun on rote-learned rules about conjugating verbs, which actually begin 'As in praesenti format...', (i.e. 'the suffix "as" in the present tense becomes [in other tenses...]') and schoolboy humour did the rest.

Welcome correction* on this point.

*but only verbal, please

Yetland Cove

[jackmerlin.livejournal.com]

Is Yetland Cove really Lulworth Cove? It sounds exactly like it, with its shingle half-moon beach, fishermens' cottages and the walk to the look-out point.

[highfantastical.livejournal.com]

I have been dying for fic inspired by these chapters (Marlowe/Southampton, Essex/Southampton, and Shakespeare/Southampton) for many a long year. How I do wish that I could discuss them with Miss Forest, although I am certainly very glad to have the chance to talk to trennels ... but I do yearn to have some kind of access to Secret Private Authorial Notes & Jottings, or maybe some Deleted Scenes.

The characterisation and context-building (especially literary, as you noted) is light-years ahead of any seemingly comparable historical novels set in the Shakespearean milieu, e.g. Cue for Treason and more recent parallels, of which I have read many. AF is very good at achieving the sort of 'thickening' that is necessary to high-quality historical fiction (the unsurpassed achiever of this in my experience is Hilary Mantel; Penelope Fitgerald is also excellent), without cluttering up the narrative with excessively copious bumpf. Walking this line of alienation, yet retaining narrative velocity, yet still holding the reader's empathy (to some degree) for the protag. is ridiculously hard! Most novelists writing children's historical fiction are simply writing a completely different kind of book, and not tackling this at all.

Marlowe/Essex/Southampton/Shakespeare

[antfan.livejournal.com]

How I do wish that I could discuss them with Miss Forest

Do share your own thoughts a bit more with us though! I'm a bit puzzled by these chapters (and I'm sure just don't have the background in 16th century culture to understand them). They seem to be the ones where Hilary Clare seems most justified to me - i.e. it seems very unlikely to me that Essex would have so much attention to spare for some random messenger boy who turns up, or that Shakespeare would speak so familiarly and authoritatively to Southampton and that they would appear to know each other so well.

However, I don't think it's Forest "getting it wrong" - for one thing - there's nothing like this in the rest of the books and also Nicholas realises the oddness "there was no need to be as polite as that to a mere Nicholas Marlow" - and interestingly, seems to dislike Essex for his politeness.

Lilliburlero saying Essex is jealous of Marlow does explain some of it for me (though the rest of the time Southampton hero-worships Essex - but maybe Southampton doesn't even realise Essex's jealousy)? So is that they are all very young men, that Marlowe and Shakespeare are both poets - and so somewhat outside the social order, that there are various intimacies/attractions going on, and so everyone is behaving in a way that they won't as they get older and the conventions get tighter?

Re: Marlowe/Essex/Southampton/Shakespeare

[antfan.livejournal.com]

Also just to add I feel the echoes again with Mask of Apollo where Niko meets Plato and Dion and is very much an observer, aware of undercurrents that he's not really party to.

Essex is pretty much absent - but very important - for the rest of the book so it would be good to explore his character a bit more now and why it is both Nicolas and, it's indicated, Will, don't like him.

Re: Marlowe/Essex/Southampton/Shakespeare

[lilliburlero.livejournal.com]

The sense I get is that Forest's trying to find an intelligible way of conveying intimacy as well as hierarchy without infodumping all over the shop: the physical closeness of 16th-century aristocrats to the servants (themselves gentry) who dressed them, accompanied them almost everywhere, slept in their rooms and often in the same beds. And that might well be magnified in the case of Essex, who has political reasons for creating a very close-knit household, bound by relationships of loyalty above and beyond even the high standard of the time. Poley's means of delivering Nicholas was calculated to attract personal attention and suspicion, and it worked.

My sense of the Essex/Southampton relationship is that Essex is (rightly) suspicious of the poet in political terms but also that Southampton's partiality for middle-class, grammar-school-educated company irritates his aristocratic amour propre. But Southampton isn't doing anything wrong in itself: patronage is an approved aristocratic function. Contemporary documents represent patron/protegé relationships in erotic terms--lots of kissing, embracing, perfervid dreams. That's all socially acceptable, except perhaps if your protegé has a reputation around town for actually having sex with men.

I think they've had this one out before, but been stymied--Essex doesn't know for sure that Marlowe's an agent, and Southampton can always defend himself by saying it's a nobleman's proper function to patronise the arts. What's new is they now know Marlowe was a spy, and that defence is exploded: Essex thinks he's got the upper hand and can tick off his younger friend good and proper for his indiscretions, but Southampton's high-minded artistic defence catches him on the hop and wallops him round the chops with the realisation that it wasn't a conventional relationship of patronage, or even Southampton enjoying a bit of rough: Marlowe was actually giving Southampton something that Essex couldn't: aesthetic bliss. (Of course, he must have known this at some level, but it's another thing to actually be told, as Unity Logan could probably tell you after her efforts on behalf of June White). And to be told in the presence of two small boys, all agog. Ouch.

Re: Marlowe/Essex/Southampton/Shakespeare

[lilliburlero.livejournal.com]

(Well, if you think Southampton's the fair young man of the sonnets, they do know each other pretty well.) But anyway, I think Forest represents Southampton as someone who holds artists in very high regard and prepared (to an extent) to break social rules in their company, hence the freedoms he allows Shakespeare. It puts Shakespeare in the role of Fool, of licensed truth-teller, which is a very ambiguous one.

[fengirl88.livejournal.com]

seconding everything in this comment - I hope that lilliburlero's Antonia Forest Fanworks Fest (http://archiveofourown.org/collections/Antonia_Forest_Fanworks_Fest_2015) will produce some of that fic...

Poley

[mheloyse.livejournal.com]

I love AF's portrayal of Poley - his smiling nastiness sends shivers down my spine, especially his casual remarks about the heads on sticks. He is unambiguously evil in these scenes. Nicholas seems so very vulnerable at this point; more like the 11 year old he is supposed to be.

I wondered if AF had Poley in mind when she created that other double-agent, Foley - the similarity of names struck me.

Re: Poley

[lilliburlero.livejournal.com]

They're interestingly different versions of psychopathy, aren't they? Poley gets off on hurting and frightening people, which Foley doesn't, chilling as he can sometimes be.

Presentiments of Nicholas's acting ability

[nzraya.livejournal.com]

the pantomime of him being beaten to raise a wind is in a way his first theatrical role.

I was actually thinking -- when someone commented on the previous post that they found his stiff upper lip upon receiving the Worst Beating Ever from Master Stockwood objectionable -- that THAT (*not* screaming when actually beaten hard enough to raise a wind and then some) was his first recorded theatrical role. The pantomime beating is a nice inverse of that previous performance (and points not only to one source of Nicholas's acting skill -- the performance of bravery for an audience of his peers -- but also to the vast improvement in his living conditions that even the Mary of Barrashaw (in the company of shady Kit) represents over his school life.

Casual Violence

[(Anonymous)]

Yes, that is a good point that hiding emotions is as important as recreating them. It's interesting that Lawrie can also do this if she tries, but she very rarely does try.

As well as being a bit shocked at Nicholas's resilience at the beating (I once read that younger boys birched at Eton usually lost control of their bladder and bowels) I do wonder how he could then fall asleep riding on a horse that night.

His happiness as a ship's boy also makes me uneasy mainly because of the sentence "and if he did not entirely escape the cuffs and welts common to any ship's boy..."
Welts sound serious and we're only talking about three days. It seems to deny the trauma of violence and is probably the only sentence in AF to actually make me cringe.

Mrs Kent

Am I the only one...

[legionseagle (from livejournal.com)]

...who is both touched, amused and a little, a very little, alarmed by Southampton's parting assurance to Nick that he'll be fine with Shakespeare: "He's an honest man and his son would be about the same age as you"? Sub-text, at least to my mind, "Whatever Kit Marlowe's designs may have been -- and, for all I know and really am not asking, suppose I got told? his actions -- Shakespeare really, really isn't like that"?

Re: Am I the only one...

[mheloyse.livejournal.com]

I hadn't picked up on the sub-text but I really like your reading of it.

Re: Am I the only one...

[(Anonymous)]

A very good point. Marlowe obviously isn't a family man, so it probably is directed at him. The guild rule about apprentices not living with an unrelated single man certainly made me think 'hey up, there's been trouble here. '
Mrs Kent

Re: Am I the only one...

[lilliburlero.livejournal.com]

No, you're not. And given in this 'verse, Southampton sees rather a lot more of Marlowe than he seems to have in actuality, he presumably has a pretty shrewd idea.

(Given the usual sleeping arrangements in inns of the period I'm inclined, I'm afraid, to think that Nicholas owes an awful lot to the anaphrodisiac effects of daily sessions with the Privy Council.)