Readthrough: The Player's Boy, Chapters 9-12

[highfantastical.livejournal.com]

Thank you very much to lilliburlero for giving me the opportunity to guest-post this week -- the first two TPB recaps were fantastic and it's an honour to follow in her footsteps!

First chapter title this week is from Merry Wives. The chapter starts with a time-swoop, skipping over all Nicholas's earliest interactions with Will apart from those first meetings in Southampton's household. Will comes to Titchfield, in 'A Poor Player' (Chapter 8), in September: the first page of Chapter 9 takes us from September to Christmas, and the second page from Christmas to May. This is miles distant from the tiny, detailed canvases of the modern Marlows, where September-to-Christmas (a term) would constitute one whole book. How are you finding the difference in timescale and scope, now we're further into the book and the march of time has begun? I think it adds a dimension -- it lets Forest explore the themes she loves on a bigger scale -- but is much lost? There is, at least, a lot of space to fill: if anybody has itchy fic-writing fingers, I think the September-to-May adjustment period needs some stories. Nicholas continues to be adaptable and brave: 'Like the rest of them, Nicholas felt perpetually weary, cold, discouraged: since he was one of them, he put up with these things as best he could and, like them, asserted he was sure their luck must change.' I liked lilliburlero's suggestion that Nicholas is in the picaresque tradition; I think that for me, he inhabits a sort of shifting space, where he becomes conveniently less-realist and less-human (and more picaresque) whenever necessary for plot purposes, but then that aspect is blended with AF's hyper-acute -- and much more realist -- observation of humanness in some other scenes. More of this later!

In London. 'He can sleep in your chamber tonight, Master Shakspere, and tomorrow I'll put a bed in one of the attics.' -- more careful notation of who'll be sleeping where, even though Marlowe is out of the picture. Is this what Forest had to put in to get the largely-homosocial, periodically-definitely-queer book published? Guesses welcome. I really like the sense that AF creates of how Nicholas's education has shaped his thought: just as in previous chapters he's reached for classical examples -- a beautiful woman must be Helen; enemies must be Hector and Achilles -- Chapter 9 sees 'To make a book of them? Like Ovid?' And Will, like Kit Marlowe, is straightforward about the fact that literature has a monetary function: 'I wrote them as a get-penny'. It's not that TPB and TP&TR don't value, idealise and romanticise literature and words, because in a lot of ways they do, but AF holds that dimension in constant balance with their financial aspects. She sets up the two sides of the deal right away, at the very beginning, when Nicholas first recites Tamburlaine to save his family's house and it is so enthralling that his brother keeps on reading after the wager's complete. But that balance of ideas never goes away and she begins to bring it out more distinctly in today's chapters, with Will and Richard Burbage bargaining about the arrangements for Will's membership of the Company and the purchase of his plays even as Nicholas reads the verses from Lucrece that will leave him 'bemused, gorged, reeling word-drunk' (which bit do we think it was?).

Any thoughts on Will's 'wretched memory for faces', by the way? Is it a trait AF simply chose to assign to him, do we think? Clinical prosopagnosia, or not? I like to believe that his head is busy with words, and so he doesn't devote much brain space to visual memory, but YMMV. Any first reactions to Richard Burbage? His frankness seems appealing. But the rumour about the moment of Marlowe's death, innocently repeated in front of Nicholas, is a bitter moment when we've seen what really happened. Burbage 'truly' isn't hinting that Nicholas is Will's son. Or so he says. Will can't immediately remember the age of his own son, which might be natural enough when he's been on the road so long?

Will Shakspere: stealth Ricardian. I think this is sort of wildly ridiculous but also fun. Anyone else? I do like it, in a way: for the sense it gives of how frangible different histories (whether oral or written) can be. I like AF's sheer nerve in adumbrating the idea of a totally different Shakespeare-authored portrait of 'Crookback' than the one that has actually come down to us, and I think this openness, the sense of narrative possibilities not quite shut down, is reminiscent of Hilary Mantel (who as I mentioned in a previous post's comments, is the historical novelist par extraordinaire of the past 50 or so years). It's not Forest's 'thing' in the same way, but anticipating this move towards an un-banal, un-determinist style of historical fiction is part of what makes her so creative and effective. And Will's 'moment', reacting to Hola, ye pampered jades of Asia -- is he intimidated by Marlowe's 'mighty line', or thinking he can certainly overgo that if he keeps at it, or is it just echoing in his head? -- once again reminds me that I find virtually every instant Will is on the page fascinating and worthy of scrutiny.

The latter part of this long chapter is largely interested in Nicholas's learning of the craft. I've read a lot of boy player novels, and this (taking TPB and TP&TR as one book) is the only one that really pays sustained attention to the work of the actor. It's usually of much less interest relative to other plot elements -- emotional arcs, intrigue, etc. -- and the boy heroes are generally fairly uncomfortable with playing female parts. AF is unusual in portraying dedication and a long, specialised, emotionally engaging training. Of course she takes her artists fairly seriously in the 'modern Marlows' books too, but they are only able to do their thing now and then, apart from Lawrie's holiday practising with make up, personal imaginings of how she might play things, &c. The societal differences allowing for children to work at much younger ages offer AF a chance to write full-time professional children, and she does it well. The homosocial world of the theatre is compared to that of the grammar initially -- Nicholas is ignored by the other boys like a new schoolboy -- but my impression is that it's, in general, more humane: Nicholas seems to get a fair bit of credit just for doing his best, which would hardly have been the case with Master Stockwood.

Chapter 10: 'The Youngest of that Name' is from Romeo and Juliet, and the chapter begins with a reunion for Nicholas and Humfrey, during which Humfrey's account of the Danvers' brothers' killing of their neighbour provides some welcome material for Will, apparently mid-composition of R&J. Of course it would be impossible for Forest to do all the chapter titles like this, but it's fantastic when she can rise to such heights of deftness. Also, we have some clever narrative work going on all at the same time here: even though Forest is working with a timeframe that is so much bigger overall, the woman knows how to handle a passage. It is simply wonderful to see how, on the second page of this chapter, she interweaves foreshadowing of the major themes that will unfold through the rest of the entire arc of the whole double-book (TPB and TP&TR) via Nicholas's relatively naive claim that Lord Southampton had to help Danvers brothers to escape, set against Will's caution; alongside that, she harks back to the rumour-version of Kit Marlowe's death related by Burbage by giving us two different stories about what happened to the Danvers' victim. Lest we think this is a heroic and exciting account of nice Lord Southampton Helping His Friends, let us not forget, Forest quietly reminds us, that the story of a death isn't necessarily what a death was like: that you can be sitting on a horse hours afterwards, shivering. And this is all on top of the Romeo and Juliet material. I know some people in trennels have mentioned wanting to discuss Forest's writerly craft: I'm all for it. Women writers in particular don't get enough of this sort of detailed attention, and with AF it's nearly always rewarding to zero in on the technique of a passage.

Another quick movement of time. We're making fast progress. Think of Geoffrey writing in the farm log -- Nicholas has been gone a long while. Southampton's disfavour introduces the topic of Essex, so that Will and Nicholas can discuss him. Will's feelings for Essex are fascinating. 'And once I'd have given -- no, perhaps not my right hand -- but certainly ten years of my life to have him -- what was your word? -- familiar with me.' Gosh, what to make of this? AF rather did away with the sonnets as direct evidence of Shakespearean (Shaksperean?) queerness in the origin-story she assigned to them, but this sentence reads as homosocial-world-sliding-into-queer-inflected, to me. Ten years of his life! The book is so slippery, moving from apparently asexual hero-worship to allusions which inherently reflect queer sexuality (Achilles and Patroclus) but are somewhat submerged or flattened by their context in a children's book. And then there's the weird stuff like pederastic!Marlowe. Maybe we'll have been able to figure some more of it out by the end of the readthrough.

Edmund, with his face 'variable as a reflection in water' and his ready charm. Could he be this era's Tim? Or ... more of a Lois? And Nicholas's possible status as Will's illegitimate son comes up again.

And so we come to Chapter 11, 'Well-Grac'd Actor', its tite from Richard II. And oh goodness, here are some gender issues. Whatever was said to Robin is too dirty for the page, otherwise surely it would just be written down (although it's also something applicable to any actor, not just the boys). Even Robin -- the most instinctively stage-inhabiting of the boys who play women, the one who doesn't exist outside his [mostly female] parts -- is insulted by whatever reference has been made to him as a less-than-totally-and-ideally-masculine body or being. Perhaps a catamite? Or perhaps AF picked something that's fallen completely out of use now but still wasn't allowed to put it in. It would be interesting to look through a lot of surviving Puritan pamphlets and try to find what she might have meant: unless one of you enterprising spirits has already done this? Obviously I'm not trying to suggest that in the real world, any particular gender presentation means that a homophobic or transphobic slur would be less likely to be damaging; but I think it is rather surprising that self-confessedly conservative AF is writing such a nuanced portrayal of gender issues, whereby female parts are taken absolutely seriously as craft requiring multi-year commitment, but there is also quite a complex and plausible spectrum of aggressions and microaggressions directed at those in this somewhat nonconformist social role.

Nicholas's growing understanding of and emotional investment in his acting is shown in small ways through the book; before he even gets the part of Juliet, we have him looking at the cast-off gown: 'Nicholas eyed it admiringly, though it looked more Robin Goffe's style than his'. A more usual authorial line in boy player books, if they even manage to get the boy playing female roles at all (sometimes they just opt for Puck to avoid all those Girl Problems) is to focus on discomfort around the wearing of female clothes, eagerness to move onto male roles, &c. Of course it's partly AF's long timescale that allows her to show us Nicholas with plenty of time to have adjusted to clothes that would, once, have felt strange and new -- but she's certainly the only author of a book like this that I know of, to allow her boys to have a sense of what their style in dresses looks like, even though it's eminently plausible that they would!

Nicholas has really jumped up in the playing world: 'it was the first time his playing would make or mar the play'. But this is one of his hardest battles, one of the first times that craft isn't going to be enough. He has to unfasten something inside, is what I take from AF here. She's juggling with real emotion and stage emotion: it's craft, craft, craft -- until it isn't. Until you need more. Nicholas can't act as well as he will act, eventually, without everything that he's had to learn, and is still learning, through honest toil. But the opening and unfurling of self, and the breathing-in of life to the play ... it makes me wonder (and I know we'll never know!) how AF linked it up to novels and the writing of novels, which are in a sense just the words, the 'dry bones'. They can't live like a play does.

And it's when Nicholas loses himself and sees a girl that he finds that courage. Another mistaken-gender moment, connecting Nicholas and Southampton? But Nicholas gives his heart to the Queen in a chapter titled from Richard II -- and not just any moment of that play, but a moment of Richard's degradation. The play with which Elizabeth I is said to have identified the rebellious circumstances of this time close to the end of her rein: of which, doubtless more in a few weeks when we move onto TP&TR.

Chapter 12: the chapter title is from The Winter's Tale, which wasn't written around this time, but the choice is a significant one all the same. The chapter starts with a summer tour. Hamnet joining the Company is suggested and poor Nicholas is put on the spot about what it's like to be a boy player. How do the conversations between the boys compare to those between Kingscote girls, do you think? For me, the Kingscote ones probably squeak into first place -- it isn't the boy player group that I love best about the historicals -- but I still think the dialogue is compelling and witty. I do love the fact that the famous Faustus story makes it in there, and I love the quotation-capping! If anyone would like to share favourite moments or lines, please do.

One of Forest's strengths has to be shock. The horrible moments when things turn from okay and normal to very definitely not. Nicholas finding out about Hamnet's fall, and everything that follows, is up there with other examples in the AF canon, I think. Edmund's selfishness strikes a jangling, bitter note, and the blind feeing of Nicholas says everything that needs to be said about Will's state of mind.

Nicholas gets that high compliment from Burbage, after the impromptu Juliet in Oxford. And once again it's the power of words, the power of dramatic poetry, carrying him and us along -- just as it made Geoffrey keep reading when he'd nearly lost everything. Nicholas learns that no matter how great everything else might be, theatre and costumes and all, you can do it on the words alone. And then another turn, like the turn in a sonnet. It's been foreshadowed all along, if you know your Winter's Tale or your biography of Shakespeare, but it strikes fresh every time. Nicholas's guilt and sorrow is convincingly bizarre, irrational -- 'You must ask my father and Lawrence to look after you--' That's an impulse of charity, even if it comes from guilt, manifesting in the magical thinking of grief. And the last sentence, I think, is perfect, so I won't even quote it: I'm sure it sticks in many of your heads, as it does in mine.

***

A long summary of some PACKED chapters covering masses of time, professional formation, maturation, and much else besides. So that is more than enough from me -- over to you!

Comments

" ... to get the largely-homosocial, periodically-definitely-queer book published ..."

[mheloyse.livejournal.com]

It's worth noting that RMF was published in 1967, and The Player's Boy in 1970 - AF was inspired to write TPB in Shakespeare's quartercentenary year, 1964 - so in all probability, when AF wrote these scenes, homosexuality even between consenting adults was still a criminal offence. In this context, the laboured explanations of who's sleeping where are hardly surprising, even disregarding Nicholas's age.

Re: " ... to get the largely-homosocial, periodically-definitely-queer book published ..."

[highfantastical.livejournal.com]

I'm surprised she is anything like as frank as she is about male-male desire, especially given the date of writing and publication.

Re: " ... to get the largely-homosocial, periodically-definitely-queer book published ..."

[mheloyse.livejournal.com]

Yes - and she doesn't appear to have been a person who sought to present herself personally as outrageous or bohemian, or even particularly liberal - quite the opposite. I envy AF's ability as a writer to detach herself so thoroughly from the perspectives of her time; it's what enables the total immersion quality of her historical fiction.

Re: " ... to get the largely-homosocial, periodically-definitely-queer book published ..."

[(Anonymous)]

Maybe it is a little surprising in a children's book, but I can't imagine saying that Tudor England was quite a homosocial world would be that unusual by the late sixties. I'd think it would be pretty standard in academia.
Lizzzar

Re: " ... to get the largely-homosocial, periodically-definitely-queer book published ..."

[oursin.livejournal.com]

This is possibly reading too much into it, but might there be an implication that Will could occasionally be bringing a woman home for the night and having a young boy in the room might cramp his style? (Thinking of the 'William the Conqueror was before Richard the Third' anecdote.) Or is this too respectable a house for such goings-on?

Re: " ... to get the largely-homosocial, periodically-definitely-queer book published ..."

[lilliburlero.livejournal.com]

My sense is that Will as Forest writes him is a bit too discreet to conduct his extramaritals in plain sight of his landlady, though everyone knows his marriage is fraught and extramaritals are probably going on. And there's that rather touching bit about the sonnets where Nicholas reflects (in the context of his own relationship with Bess) that Will must have had love-affairs, and they'd been unhappy.

Re: " ... to get the largely-homosocial, periodically-definitely-queer book published ..."

[antfan.livejournal.com]

I get really confused about this – sometimes thinking that, as JackMerlin suggests, that Forest is writing close male friendships without intending to suggest any sexual element, and sometimes thinking “no come on, she obviously is” - the stuff about Marlowe, that mention of Shakespeare's about Essex being “familiar” etc etc. In a way, the references come and go so unnervingly I'm never quite sure what to make of it or if I'm imagining it – rather like the Hamlet scene, in fact, in the next book.

One thing I definitely feel is that she's deliberately putting in some “alibis” - little things that say “just in case you were thinking all this is implying something about these characters's sexuality, actually it isn't”. To my mind, these include possibly the references to sleeping arrangements, but definitely the references to Elizabeth I – whom Nicholas clearly doesn't lose his heart to, and really isn't that bothered about in the rest of the book, so why is that passage there? Only because otherwise it's all so male – and also Bess Burbage. She really is a nonentity, and you'd almost be tempted to think – ah, one of those writers who just can't write females – except one thing we do know about Forest is she can write adolescent females! So why has Forest bothered including Bess when she isn't interested in her, why does Nicholas have a crush on Elizabeth I (only he doesn't), why is she constantly reminding the reader that Will and Nicholas's relationship is essentially father-son (actually I do think it is, but it's SO constantly being pointed out), why make sure that Augustine Phillips has a family and that Robin is walking out with a girl...I think she is somehow “covering” herself – whether to satisfy her editors, the children's literature establishment, or herself even at some subconscious level, I'm not sure.

There's also the Renault link. We know from Cricket Term that Mask of Apollo was an important book to Forest, and I think must have been a big influence of her writing the Players books – I definitely see lots of links between the two. So its hard to think with this model before her that she doesn't see the implications of what she's writing or the kind of world that she's created.

Re: " ... to get the largely-homosocial, periodically-definitely-queer book published ..."

[legionseagle (from livejournal.com)]

I don't see Nicholas as being portrayed as having a crush on Elizabeth but I do see him as being drawn into her very real cult of personality; something Will discusses as an issue for writers in the next book. And the one thing every historian of every stripe seems to agree on is that Elizabeth both was fascinated by and knowledgeable about the theatre in general, patronised the Lord Chamberlain's Men in particular and that many of the great Shakespeare plays were performed first at Court, so it would be odder if Elizabeth weren't a major presence.

Also, she has to be foregrounded somehow, given what's going to happen in the next book - it's rather like a book which spans a six year period and begins in 1994 New York having a character looking up and being impressed by the Twin Towers in the early chapters.

As for Robert Goffe and Augustine Philips, both of them are historical figures who left children; according to the Dramatis Personae, Goffe's wife was Philips' sister. So it may be less a case of Forest spatchcocking women into their lives so as to "cover" herself as to her preferring accuracy when she can get it.

" How are you finding the difference in timescale and scope ...?"

[mheloyse.livejournal.com]

My immediate thought is, how much better AF handles the difference in scope in the Players novels than she does in The Thursday Kidnapping (given that they were both intended to be single books) - and I think it's the extended story arc allowed by the lapses in time in the Players novels (which TTK lacks) that enables AF to make the Players novel(s) succeed.

TTK gives me the impression that AF is trying to cram far too much characterisation into a small space (the opposite of making a pint of ignorance fill a hogshead of knowledge, to borrow an analogy from PR) - had TTK been the only AF non-series fiction I'd read, I'd have felt she was struggling to make the transition - but the Players novels suggest to me that it's not word count that AF needs, but sufficient fictional time to play out a story arc.

(Apologies for straying slightly off-topic with TTK references - hoping we will have a read through of this one later!)

[edited for ridiculously-late-night typos - befuddled my inner clock by staying up last night to watch election results].

Juliet: beauty and emotion.

[jackmerlin.livejournal.com]

I love the Juliet chapter - it's my favourite chapter so far. I like the fact that for the first time Nicholas can't do something easily and has to worry about it, and the reactions of the other players and Burbage's wife.
I really like the way it makes me reflect on ideas about beauty and emotional expression. Nicholas finds the key to playing Juliet when he realises that as a girl he is beautiful - he will 'teach the candles to burn bright'. And knowing that, he can let go of whatever he was holding back, and become the ardent, impulsive, emotionally reckless Juliet.
Which makes me ponder; are people who are beautiful - and more importantly - know that they are beautiful, more open, unreserved and free with their emotions because they can be. Do they assume that people are interested in their feelings and emotions because people always have been? Because, (like Nicola who wonders if she would mind Esther's panics more if she didn't find her face so fascinating) people just are more interested in someone who is beautiful / good-looking? And do Juliet, and other beautiful people subconsciously/unconsciously know that? (Esther doesn't, but does Esther know that she is beautiful?)
Do people who are average looking or plain learn to be more reserved or emotionally cautious precisely because they have a more realistic idea of just how little most people really are interested in others emotions?

Re: Juliet: beauty and emotion.

[learnsslowly.livejournal.com]

I don't know how it would feel to be beautiful, but being plainer than average, I had, from the time I was quite a small girl, the background feeling that I had to be more helpful, pleasant, politer, good-tempered to make up for it. (At which I'm sure I failed.) Perhaps this explains why, despite myself, I imagine Ann as the least pretty of the modern day Marlows.
Even as an adult, I think there is an something of expectation that an ugly person has to "make up for it" in some way, or morally offends by failing to please the eye. The expectation is more or less from different people, of course, and the expression of it varies considerably too.

Insulting Robin

[lilliburlero.livejournal.com]

My guess is that to achieve that reaction from Robin the taunts took a turn from what we'd now call homophobia/transphobia into dangerous political/religious territory. It doesn't have to be much of a turn: sodomy as 'crimen laesae majestatis, a sin horrible committed against the king: and this is either against the king celestial or terrestrial' (Edward Coke). Not that the apprentices are poring over hefty juridical tomes, but the idea might well have filtered down through sermons or overheard conversation. So Robin can't just do the 16th century equivalent of flipping them the bird and walking on, he has to be seen physically to defend himself. And he seeks to protect all the players--who've just got back on their feet after a fairly wretched time, and don't need their precarious social position destabilized--by not repeating the dangerous material (he might be overestimating the danger, too; 'being a little hero who doesn't sneak', to bolster his self-esteem at having to be rescued from the scrap by his master). So when Nicholas brings it up later during the summer tour, there's the irony of resonance with his own repetition of dangerous blasphemies at the beginning of the book.

It's interesting, in the vague context of unspoken (possible) treason, that Edmund then seems to use the opportunity as a fairly callow attempt to seduce Nicholas, which in turn, even if he believes Will about Nicholas's paternity (and he does seem to) still has a faint whiff of incest about it? A distinct sense of betrayal, anyway.

Re: Insulting Robin

[legionseagle (from livejournal.com)]

The obvious taunt (which would cause that much trouble) would be to tie their patron into the homophobia; ie suggesting that they were the Lord Chamberlain's boys as opposed to the Lord Chamberlain's men.

It's interesting that a book/duology which is all about the power and majesty of language is also intimately concerned with all the numerous ways in which using the wrong language or not remaining silent can lead to trouble.

"What the apprentices said" also loops nicely back (or forward, given both the chronology and the publication order) into the material "deemed either treasonous or blasphemous" which Nicola would have liked to know

Though part of it is Forest's aristry; like Lawrie and the Regent's tortures, the reader/listener can imagine much worse things than one can say, especially than one can say in a way which is both period-appropriate without being incomprehensible ("It is a criminal libel to call a lawyer a daffy-down-dilly") and can get past a children's book publisher in the mid 1960s.

Re: Insulting Robin

[intrepid--fox.livejournal.com]

"It's interesting, in the vague context of unspoken (possible) treason, that Edmund then seems to use the opportunity as a fairly callow attempt to seduce Nicholas"

Could you expand on this? Reread as I may, I can't see that in the scene at all, nor in any of the rest of the interactions between Nicholas and Edmund. But I've known the books almost inside out since my early teens, and have difficulty seeing them except through the squint of early adolescence. It's one of the reasons I'm finding this read through so particularly fascinating.

[coughingbear]

I love Nicholas's transformation scene too - the moment when he discovers that although the work is always necessary, he can be touched by the magic of the theatre too. It is where he belongs. And having had that experience he can draw on it again, even 'cold, in your breeches'.

[mrs-redboots.livejournal.com]

I'm inclined to think that a lot of the work can be read on several levels - friendship, homosexual relations, whatever. Forest is writing, largely for children, in an age when homosexuality was still a criminal offence, and of an age in which women, except the Queen, were largely invisible. So one can read it either way, there are deliberate vaguenesses.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

Yes, homosexual activity was still a criminal offence up to 1967 (and in quite a lot of circumstances remained so after then because of narrow interpretations of 'in private' and, of course, the very high gay age of consent).

However, by the mid-60s you are getting more and more open debate on whether it should be a crime, based on homophile campaigns going back (in the UK) at least to the 1890s and the works of J A Symonds, Edward Carpenter and Havelock Ellis. All of them leaning quite heavily on pointing out historical instances and societies which were, like the classical Greeks, much admired and not only didn't think male-male relationships were no big deal but the worthiest kind of love.

And by the 60s you also had a flurry of modern literature - Renault is probably the best known but there were plenty of others - with sympathetic gay characters and a critique of the state of the law.

Just because something was criminal under the laws at the time didn't necessarily mean that people thought it should be or that people who did it should be utterly shunned.

Conversely, of course, even though lesbianism was not a crime in the UK, there was a good deal of social stigma.

But people had been saying for decades that the laws on homosexuality were bad laws, and this included clergy of various denominations who were all about distinguishing something that might be a sin (and therefore a matter for personal conscience) from a crime (and something the state should be leaning on).

I could go on here with the long tradition of Manly Bromance in literature either specifically for the young or considered entirely suitable for them, but will stop here. Noting only that there is a reason why my journal is entitled 'It's Always More Complicated'.

[highfantastical.livejournal.com]

I think AF does work with ambiguities a lot -- and very effectively! -- not only in relation to sexual questions. (Not that you were necessarily implying that.) With respect to people's precise feelings for each other, often those can be very nuanced: Nicholas and Edmund, for instance. I don't mean that at all in a sense of 'is there any sexual aspect to either boy's feelings?', but that there is so much more involved! Jealousy, curiosity, security vs. insecurity, Edmund's superior social skill but Nicholas's greater importance to the Company as an up-and-coming skilled and trained boy player... There may also be some sexual element, on one or other side. But I think part of AF's skill lies in the fact that the interactions and relationships are almost invariably so multi-dimensional. On the other hand, there is strong textual evidence for some of the characters having same-sex sexual feelings; I don't think those moments are presented in a particularly ambiguous way. Nevertheless, the relationships still feel complicated and ambiguous overall, I think.

Shakespeare and Richard

[legionseagle (from livejournal.com)]

Amusing as it was, I thought it was a bridge too far actually to have the line from the city council archives brought in to Will's soul-searching over how he wrote Richard III. And I particularly like Burbage's tactless cheer that it'll all be stale in a month, and the fact that it's almost immediately proved false.

Re: Shakespeare and Richard

[lilliburlero.livejournal.com]

I think it probably is laying it on a little thick, but I like the fact that Forest does register the continued resentment of the North towards the Tudors, 60 years after the Pilgrimage of Grace.

Re: Shakespeare and Richard

[antfan.livejournal.com]

I couldn't believe at all that Will would have scruples about Richard III - or would see him as anything other than copy. Mind you, I never believe that people can get so worked up about Richard now and they obviously do (preparing for an online lynching by Trennels Ricardians).

I do love that comment about the play soon being stale, though. It seems to me that Forest is having a little conspiratorial joke with the reader there - we all know better than you, Dick Burbage - and similarly I find it very amusing that a stagestruck Will basically wanted to be an actor first and foremost, and that the world's Greatest Playwright ended up writing almost accidentally. It's reminiscent of Renault and her references to that obscure Macedonian prince, and like Highfantastical says, kind of opens up possibilities in the readers' mind.

Can we talk about Hamnet?

[legionseagle (from livejournal.com)]

That scene with Nicholas coming back from the stables holding the sixpence is the one which stuck with me from first reading to this. It's a brilliant moment of foreshadowing; one knows that there can be no good outcome, even if one's no idea of Shakespeare's family.

Re: Can we talk about Hamnet?

[lilliburlero.livejournal.com]

Yes, it made me wish I'd read the books as a child, before I knew. (Actually, the historicals give me the feeling of having missed out on not reading them as a kid, whereas the modern-set books don't.)

Nicholas being able to supply "'He's dead?", for which everyone else is 'grateful', struck me too--a weird resonance with Nicola's confirmation of Foley's death in Traitor?

Re: Can we talk about Hamnet?

[coughingbear]

It's such a shivery moment, isn't it? And then Forest lulls us a bit (those of us who didn't, the first time, know what was going to happen) with no news, and the boys speculating on whether Hamnet will join them; and then we have Will's return.

Like highfantastical, I love Nicholas's sad and guilty 'You must ask my father and Lawrence to look after you--'. And it seems to express too, the way that Will has become family for him.

Re: Can we talk about Hamnet?

[antfan.livejournal.com]

Forest is superb on reactions to death, isn't she? Nicholas's guilt because of his jealousy towards Hamnet, and Edmund's initial apparent callousness - or putting of his own concerns first - which I think is very typical of someone that age. And yet Edmund isn't straightforwardly callous either, because later he finds his grief keeps overwhelming him. And then, Burbage's line about how "we've all lost a child" - another reminder that we are within a very different time.