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.

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

[jackmerlin.livejournal.com]

Given that AF was a very traditional Catholic who believed that the rules of the Church should be set in stone for ever, and seemed to despise any idea of abandoning the bits one didn't agree with, she must have accepted, at least theoretically, that homosexual physical relationships were 'wrong'. And yet the way she writes about feelings in same sex relationships suggests otherwise.
I once read a comment by a writer in relation to Tennyson's 'In Memoriam' that society in the past accepted and admired expressions of intense, emotional love between people of the same sex, while at the same time being horrified by any idea of sexual relationships between them. So they could romanticise and even idealise love between two men while not accepting that a physical relationship might even exist. I wonder if AF is also coming from that direction in her depictions of Miranda/Jan, Shakespeare/Essex, Southhampton/Marlowe especially as these are all one-sided and unrequited loves?
Or is she such a good writer that she can completely put away her own strongly held beliefs and give some of her best, most sympathetic characters feelings that are totally in opposition to her own opinions?

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

[lilliburlero.livejournal.com]

I welcome correction on these points, because it's not really my area of experience or expertise, but afaik the Catholic Church was a lot less noisy about homosexuality at the time Forest was writing, when there wasn't wide general acceptance of gay relationships to set itself against. My sense (again from limited experience in a particular university setting) is that the more traditionalist wing of the Catholic church has typically been quite attractive to gay men in particular. And Forest seems to have had no personal homophobic views (very much the reverse). So I don't think she sensed any particular dissonance between the Church's doctrine and her own interest in exploring homosocial milieux and homoerotic dynamics.

There were certainly theoretical distinctions made between highly idealised romance and physical relationships right up to Tennyson's time (actually, Tennyson's generation might have been the last in which it obtained generally--Tennyson's son gets pretty twitchy about some of the more fervid bits of In Memoriam. When you start to look into them, though, the distinctions get very blurry indeed. Alan Bray's essay here (http://wikidshakespeare.pbworks.com/f/Homosexuality+and+the+Signs+of+Male+Friendship+in+Elizabethan+England.pdf) is a classic text on how 16th century distinctions between the reviled sodomite and the idealised male friend turn out to be very porous.

FWIW, I think Forest implies as strongly as she possibly can that a physical relationship did exist between Marlowe and Southampton, or at least, Essex assumed one did.

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.

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 ..."

[coughingbear]

Yes, I was going to make the same point about attitudes to homosexuality in the Catholic Church at the time Forest was writing - I think it's a mistake to read too much back from current arguments into what was thought and felt in the 1960s and 1970s. I am reminded of James Alison, a Catholic priest and theologian, and gay man, who converted at 18 in about 1977 from evangelical CofE partly because he found RCism more spacious and welcoming. It can be tricky to draw liberal/traditionalist lines in the Church because people often fall on different sides depending on the issue - a love of the Tridentine Mass or conversely of the Vatican II changes doesn't necessarily tell you everything about a person's other views.

Of course, I also think Forest is a great enough writer as to be able to inhabit all her characters!

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.

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

[legionseagle (from livejournal.com)]

In the second book he beetles off to Bishopsgate on something which I'm fairly certain is an irregular liaison.

[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'.

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

[jackmerlin.livejournal.com]

But it isn't just a question of how welcoming people within the Church were at that time, or what people thought or felt. The Church has never not taught that homosexuality is 'wrong', just as heterosexual sex is wrong unless you're married, and using contraception is wrong. And people who ignore those rules are choosing which bits of the religion they want to follow, which is up to them obviously, but I have always had the impression that AF didn't like that sort of pick and mix approach. Or is that just Patrick?
I suppose I am just curious as to how people stayed within a Church that told them what they were doing was wrong, and how they reconciled their faith with their sexuality - which is veering off topic I suppose!

'It's all so male'

[jackmerlin.livejournal.com]

It's all so male, but is it? Does Nicholas ever do or say anything that a girl wouldn't do or say? (I am still on TPB and haven't started reading TPATR yet.) The world of the playhouse seems very androgynous in a way, and even the adult men aren't blatantly masculine.
I wonder if Af didn't give Bess much character because she knew that there were no real Burbage children. She had to invent a daughter so that Lawrie could be a descendant, but perhaps she felt that giving her too much of a part would be a step too far?

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

[lilliburlero.livejournal.com]

I think one answer is simply that the Players books represent sympathetic characters committing a pretty full range of what the Church would regard as mortal sins, and at very least, Forest doesn't regard the sexual ones as any more egregious than the non-sexual ones, or the homosexual ones more so than the heterosexual ones.

And yeah, I don't think Patrick's necessarily a reliable guide to Forest's own views: he represents her thoughts on Vatican II, but he's also a believably characterised callow 16 year old, who's yet to learn quite how nuanced and complex the world can be.

Re: 'It's all so male'

[lilliburlero.livejournal.com]

I think the players' world is definitely a setting in which there is ample potential for exploration of gender both consciously by characters and thematically by their author. For example, Nicholas's non-recognition of his reflection costumed as Juliet surely echoes his initial identification of Southampton as a woman?

But I confess I'm a bit puzzled by Does Nicholas ever do or say anything that a girl wouldn't do or say? Given that his profession is one that operates a gender bar, he pretty much spends his time doing and saying things that girls in his society don't do and say, doesn't he?

And sure, none of the adult players is represented as noisily macho, if that's what you mean by 'blatantly masculine' (Burbage is a bit jumpy about effeminacy, but that is quite clearly represented as an aspect of his character and attitudes not necessarily shared by others) but the playhouse nonetheless does appear a male world insofar as it's populated by (what we'd now define as) cis men/boys, who (offstage) exhibit a range of different character traits which might have gendered associations but who fairly unambiguously understand themselves as men/boys?

Re: 'It's all so male'

[jackmerlin.livejournal.com]

Well yes, my mistake! Obviously girls couldn't be actors then. My remark was more to do with the sense that Nicholas could be Nicola-in-a-boy's-costume.
I'm reminded of a passage in a Phillip Pullman book where a girl is pretending to be a boy, and she has to study the way the boys move, talk and act round each other. It's not necessarily about being 'macho', just that their conversations and reactions are different.

Re: 'It's all so male'

[legionseagle (from livejournal.com)]

It seems a bit odd that when we were discussing the first four chapters the issue came up of staking Kate -- that her husband felt happy to include her in a bet -- and when we were discussing the fact he at least didn't go so far as to mention he'd done so in the farm log, the perfectly credible suggestion that Kate would, quite possibly, have been illiterate was raised, and that brought up the issue of period mores as regards treatment of the sexes. So in the question of the time, of course Nicholas does something a girl wouldn't do or say; he's gone to the grammar, he considers being a cabin boy, he's taught hawking, he's a player -- in fact, everything Nicholas can be and is, he can be and is simply by the accident of his being born male.

So is your question about whether he's credible as a male character? If so, how do you find his masculinity lacks credibility?

Re: 'It's all so male'

[lilliburlero.livejournal.com]

There are lots of parallels between Nicola and Nicholas, obviously--but I don't get the sense that Forest has neglected to characterise him as his own person: I think it's a different sort of characterisation--she's covering more time in less space, so the kind of intense interiority we get with the modern books isn't quite there--but I don't sense he's just Nicola transferred.

Weell...I'm reminded of Dorothy L. Sayers on writing gender difference in dialogue: "A man once asked me ... how I managed in my books to write such natural conversation between men when they were by themselves. Was I, by any chance, a member of a large, mixed family with a lot of male friends? I replied that, on the contrary, I was an only child and had practically never seen or spoken to any men of my own age till I was about twenty-five. "Well," said the man, "I shouldn't have expected a woman (meaning me) to have been able to make it so convincing." I replied that I had coped with this difficult problem by making my men talk, as far as possible, like ordinary human beings. This aspect of the matter seemed to surprise the other speaker; he said no more, but took it away to chew it over. One of these days it may quite likely occur to him that women, as well as men, when left to themselves, talk very much like human beings also."

Or do you mean that adolescent conversation has more gender markers because teenagers are working out how to be themselves and then they settle down, as it were, into a less binary general humanity? And maybe his experience of a professional world where communication (to an audience and among--admittedly, an all-male--group) is very important has meant that Nicholas settles down into 'human' communication at a relatively young age?

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

[legionseagle (from livejournal.com)]

Together (I suspect) with some sins that the Church hadn't got round to mentioning because even 1500 years give or take still doesn't get you to the end of human stupidity.

To say nothing of the way characters are forced into a pick-and-mix approach anyway because whatever Patrick would like to believe (and the set-in-stone liturgy that he's going to the barricades to defend in The Attic Term is still pretty much a work-in-progress at the date of the Player's Boy) the Catholic Church does change and during the Counter-Reformation even more than usually.


Antony Merrick, for example, as liadnan observed in one of the last rounds is following the Blessed Edmund Campion line on Elizabeth's excommunication which means yes, also he's following the family tradition of setting himself up in opposition to the Pope himself (though less culpably, of course, because the Pope hasn't yet decided he's infallible - that's going to have to wait another 250 years or so).