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

Re: Marlowe/Essex/Southampton/Shakespeare

[legionseagle (from livejournal.com)]

And the Fool ends up getting killed, at least in Lear, as a consequence of the truth-telling role.

It's going to come up more in subsequent posts, but the theme of censorship (and self-censorship) is already out and well to the fore ("Better he learn sooner rather than late to hold his tongue anent such matters"), especially with Essex pointing out, practically for once, that Southampton can hardly ask his guests to hold their tongues around his singing boy.