Readthrough: The Players and the Rebels: Chapters 1-4

[lilliburlero.livejournal.com]

Title: Hamlet.

Nicholas's precipitate return to the life of a player is marked by quite a lot of commentary on the art: his thoughts about Will's interpretation of Master Ford being authorially-sanctioned but Dickon's being perhaps more subtle and skilful lead into his watching the Jig, and his discussion about improvisation with Kemp. I like Nicholas's tactful 'It was more than that today,' (The Merry Wives has no epilogue). Nicholas's ill-formed thought about all acting being improvisation clearly cuts no ice with the veteran ad-libber, but I think he has a point of a sort. Kemp's partiality for a wind-up extends off-stage too: Nicholas' discomfort is nicely sketched here, and it painfully underscores the differences in approach that have developed between the auteur-theatre of Shakespeare and Kemp's more popular art. I can't help seeing Kemp as just off the northern working men's club circuit in this bit.

OK, I love a pun, especially an implied one, and Edmund pumping Nicholas for information while pumping water over him made me chortle. And it provides an opportunity for a quick infodump for those who haven't read The Player's Boy. Nicholas's guilt over not being able sincerely to wish his father alive again if it would mean him having to stop being a player is a poignant moment, again touching on the novels' ideas about families-of-choice.





Title: Coriolanus.

Humfrey brings news of the aristocracy's various excesses, and Nicholas is obliged to think, as many a reader of history has after him, that if you put this stuff into a play, no-one would believe it. (The plan to dismantle and cart away the Theatre falls roughly into this category too, one reflects, but Forest goes with it anyway.)

Nicholas's failed attempts at saving up to buy Will a ring for Christmas, we learn, have failed (shades of his descendant buying everyone sealing wax) but he has managed to give him a 'fallen star', which is a bit of meteor, I think? Nicholas Marlow Arden did...you roll a drunken sailor for a lump of interplanetary matter? You very naughty boy. The propensity for making early-morning appointments with seafarers is clearly also hereditary. And another touching moment as Nicholas thinks that Marlowe would probably have appreciated it more. Anyone ever played snapdragon? I associate it with Falstaff's rather off-colour speech about what Prince Hal sees in Poins (nice legs, rides well, always swallows), so it made me giggle a bit to think that's what they're all doing here.

Some of Will's history emerges. what do people make of Forest's account of the Lost Years? She gets the poaching legend in, which seems to be a contractual obligation for writers of historical fiction featuring Shakespeare. Young Will echoes both Geoffrey and Nicholas; Forest economically conveys his feelings of liberation on leaving his wife and children, but despite Wyn's protests, it doesn't spare very much sympathy for poor Anne, who might have felt just as trapped, but didn't have the option.

Quick namecheck for Thomas Digges, protegé of John Dee, innovative astronomer and translator of Copernicus into English, which loops back nicely to Kit and Geoffrey's row. Digges' widow married one of the executors of Shakespeare's will, so there's fairly good reason to believe they knew each other. The mention of Shakespeare writing a 'fair hand' (and Nicholas's incredulity) is a joke, I think, about his contemporaries' claim that he 'he never blotted out a line'.

And Edmund suddenly bringing something wild and lonely into the sitting room with the goose-noise is a great detail.

I like the scene of the dimantling of the theatre a lot: Cuthbert's equivocations, Nicolas's suspicious over-innocence (no talent for crime) and his reflections on bravery ('in case being sensible was only another way of being afraid'--echoes of Peter there perhaps rather than Nicola) in his defence of the alley. It's all a reminder of what a dangerous world these characters inhabit; and Nicholas has a fairly close shave with his clumsier assailant. (If he'd had his sword he might have ended up--at best--branded like Jonson, one reflects.)

Humfrey's reappearance highlights some of the other precarious aspects of life: pages, like boy-players, have a sell-by date. Their discussion of the different risks of their lives is nicely done: Humfrey, with perhaps some of the complacency attendant on his higher social status, imagining that the challenges facing the players are felt as less capricious than the whims of royalty is a fine touch. I also like Nicholas's astonishment that Humfrey improvises and composes (a look back to the discussion with Kemp, as well as a resonance with Miranda's compositional efforts in Attic Term?) Humfrey's admission that he feels that there's nothing for him outside Southampton's patronage, and that he's resigned to existing as the Earl's walking ego-boost (I agree with Nicholas that this reflects very poorly on Southampton), is full of pathos, though perhaps it's also implied that Humfrey has absorbed some of his master's disinclination to take charge of his own fate. What do people make of Will's assertion that Humfrey values his friends over his art, and that's the wrong choice?

Oh, Forest would definitely have approved of Simon Russell Beale's creepy Falstaff, I think.

Some nice commentary on theatre and the real world in Nicholas and Burbage watching the troops march off: Southampton's apparent glee at the prospect echoes Humfrey's later reflection on his misapplied physical courage.

Nicholas's pleasure at being seen in the company of a celebrity is compared, interestingly, to the reflected glory of ladies-in-waiting, and the exchange that follows is priceless. Burbage seems sensitive to implications of effeminacy, and intolerant of it in others; I like the way Forest suggests this is a character trait, no more, no less, and no particular authorial attitude attaches to it. The boys' game of keeping score of occasions when they're recognised cracks me up (is it quite as innocent as Nicholas makes it sound to Burbage?) I'd depose that Robin's bruising encounters with apprentices as well as a fear that he wouldn't win might have a bearing on his propensity to tart it up for the fanbase, but it's also a nice comment on Robin barely seeming to exist off-stage. I can't help but be amused at Richard "GET YOUR HAIR CUT" Burbage as well; he's perhaps got a point that people for whom 'everything always goes wrong again' should at least consider the common denominator, but Nicholas's more subtle analysis of the relationship between coiffure and character we know to have the weight of inside knowledge behind it. (Southampton, like Geoffrey and Will, incidentally, married his pregnant mistress.)

Scots Jamie! Who, it will be remembered 'slobbered at the mouth and had favourites; he was thus a Bad King.' I suspect Forest may consciously have been riffing on Sellar and Yeatman in raising him in this context, given that they also have this to say:

He also tried to straighten out the memorable confusion about the Picts, who, as will be remembered, were originally Irish living in Scotland, and the Scots, originally Picts living in Ireland. James tried to make things tidier by putting the Scots in Ulsters and planting them in Ireland, but the plan failed because the Picts had been lost sight of during the Dark Ages and were now nowhere to be found.

Burbage would rather have Essex as King, anyway.

And finally, for this chapter, the naming of the theatre. Will's dodgy Latin is fun ('small Latin and less Greek') and the whole scene reminds me of collaborative efforts among the schoolgirls in the main series. 'The Rent Curtain' (Miss Forest, really!) is a nicely dodgy gag for readers a bit older and/or less pure than the Target Market. It's also moderately blasphemous, which is presumably the reason why the characters are a little less than amused.





Title Henry V (ouch! That one is apposite.)

The discussion between Will and Nicholas about his maintenance is again rather poignant, the more so for both of their excursions into unsentimental pragmatism, and Nicholas's final retreat into childish fantasy. (Is Forest nodding at 'when your voice does finally crack--though it could be three, four years yet'? Surely not, given Nicholas is sixteen--and as it happens, not--or does Will just mean that some young men can access a falsetto speaking range for the stage and carry on playing women's parts after their conversational voices have broken? I can see that being a possibility, by analogy with countertenor singing, but otherwise I can't make sense of it.)

Kemp sells up and leaves the company. Jonson grumbling at Will's misquotation is fun, as well as Will's airy reply (I love these two: this has been your regular &c.). Who's playing who, here by the way? The implication is that Heminges is playing Brutus, traditionally Burbage's part, and Burbage Antony, the soliloquy they're disagreeing over being 'O pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth'? Doesn't seem quite right to me. (Julius Caesar: a play I have not read since undergraduate days. Welcome correction.) Lecky's desire to play Lucius and Nicholas's indifference to the part echoes in odd, deflected ways the plot of Cricket Term. Nicholas's embarrassed response to Lecky's apology is very sweet.

I am indignant on behalf of my adopted country at Humfrey's loathing. On the other hand, I am forced to concede that that is pretty much what Ireland is like, and in the sixteenth century would have been even more so. Some of you may be amused by this. What do people make of Essex's double-dealing with the Queen and Southampton? And of his subsequent conduct?

Humfrey's discussion of the letter with Nicholas is an interesting episode too: Nicholas demonstrates emotional sensitivity in his support for Humfrey remaining silent, and some political savvy in his suggestion that the letter may have been planted. That co-exists very plausibly with his continued hero-worship of Ralegh (what did the apprentice say? this has been your regularly scheduled &c).



Title: The Merchant of Venice.

Armin contrasted with Kemp: a very different sort of clowning, rather an intellectual sort, based on observations of those stigmatised or reified for their mental illness or neurodiversity, and one which unsettles audiences and players alike.

The spectacle of Kemp beginning his dance to Norwich is one of immense pathos--the more so that because is superficially a 'triumph' with a big and appreciative crowd, but when Nicholas reflects he sees that Kemp's time has passed, and that the other players' repudiation of Kemp is in many ways justified. (I love all the little indications of Burbage's celebrity, by the way.)

The scene of Nicholas remembering Ulysses' speech during the Homily and splicing it with the over-reaching verse of Tamburlaine is masterly, I think: though it goes unmentioned, for Nicholas, Antony Merrick might haunt the puns on 'stretch'd footing' and 'scaffoldage.' The content of the 'all too familiar homily' might be penetrating in ways that Nicholas doesn't quite recognise. As in the main series, mischievous or quizzical meetings of eyes before people resume church-going poker faces are significant.

In Will and Nicholas's discussion of Southampton and Essex, the old comparison of them to Achilles and Patroclus returns with dangerous political force. Comparing Southampton to Patroclus now recalls his ineffectual performance in battle (the irony being that Southampton is more Homer's Patroclus than Shakespeare's); bearing in mind the porous boundaries between idealised male friendship and reviled sodomy in this period, the 'monstrous insult' has a sexual dimension too. It's a wonderfully subtle point to make: when Essex and Southampton were paragons, their friendship could be considered wholesome; now that they're both out of favour, it's perceived as sinister, even though their actual relationship hasn't changed at all (and Essex has been quietly stabbing his devotee in the back this long while). It's another instance of the caprice of royal favour, and its immensely wide-ranging consequences, which Humfrey mentioned earlier.

Will, like Burbage earlier on, is inclined to regard Essex's ambitions fairly positively, though, shrewd as he is, he instantly perceives where Nicholas's 'idea' of Essex's baseness has come from. Will's scepticism about Humfrey does--as I think was mentioned earlier--echo in certain ways Rowan's discouraging attitude towards Nicola mending her friendship with Esther. I think the crucial difference is that where Rowan seems to do that out of a peculiarly hard-bitten notion of unsentimentality, Will has a sound political reason to see Humfrey as a danger to the safety of Nicholas, himself and the company as a whole. His final words in this chapter are a typically pragmatic articulation of the coincidence of loyalty and self-interest.



That's enough from me. Next week highfantastical will be posting on Chapters 5-7.

Comments

[mrs-redboots.livejournal.com]

Snapdragon was, I gather, played on Christmas night - we played it once when I was a small girl, because it had to be played on Christmas night.... you poured brandy over sultanas or raisins and set it alight, and the idea was to snatch the fruit from the flames without burning yourself - oddly possible, but I don't remember how or why. Wouldn't play it now....

[legionseagle (from livejournal.com)]

Ah! It appears I have been using "soft" wrong all these years, and that what I experienced on sailing into Wicklow was in fact "Wetting" and it had upgraded itself two levels by the time we dropped off one of the crew in Rosslare, he having recalled an urgent appointment in London. On which note, I think it was remarkable, given that Dublin knew the eyes of the world were on it yesterday, that it managed to produce such a remarkably sunny day. There must be something in the Pathetic Fallacy after all, which I think does tie in with Humphrey's mood.

Mist-shrouded hills and an army fighting an enemy it cannot often see, rotting inwardly from faction and resentment and outward from the wet...it's there in Tacitus Annals One, with Germanicus almost going the way of Varus, it's there in The Eagle of the Ninth, it's there in Henry V (I saw a brilliant production at the Royal Exchange in which water, mud, duckboards and 20th century dress eloquently made the point that We Are Always Fighting in France and it is Always Wet), it's there in various Vietnam works, and it's here.

I particularly like the letter, with no attempt to soften the difficult phraseology, relying on the reader to pick up on the magnitude of Essex's double-dealing from Humphrey's reaction.

I do wish they could have been published as a single volume; Essex in the garden in the Player's Boy and Essex here need to be compared-and-contrasted side by side.

[lilliburlero.livejournal.com]

I think first two, maybe three, levels might be reasonably described as 'a soft day'; I would say also that there is a material distinction between (in ascending order of dryness, though never achieving the condition of being 'dry'): 'a soft day [inarticulate gasping noise indicating resignation to mortality], 'a soft day', 'a grand soft day', and 'a grand soft day (thank God)'. Dublin was quite heavenly yesterday though, with lots of happy people on the streets: quite brought a mist to my eyes.

no attempt to soften the difficult phraseology

Yes, blessed are the editors who got the point and didn't insist on modernisation!

I do wish they could have been published as a single volume

It wouldn't have been that unwieldy, would it? I mean, there are some thumpingly large YA books on the market now and it doesn't seem to affect sales.

[legionseagle (from livejournal.com)]

It reminded me -- both the situation and the phraseology -- of Sir Philip Sidney's letter to his father's secretary, Edmund Molineaux (which was also to do with the Irish Question, Sidney's father being Lord Deputy at the time):

Mr Molyneux

Few words are best. My letters to my father have come to the eyes of some. Neither can I condemn any but you for it. If it be so, you have played the very knave with me; and so I will make you know if I have good proof of it. But that for so much as is past. For that is to come, I assure you before God, that if ever I know you do so much as read any letter I write to my father, without his commandment or my consent, I will thrust my dagger into you. And trust to it, for I speak in earnest. In the mean time, farewell.

Given that's the flower of English chivalry speaking, and to a trusted servant of the family, God alone knows what Essex would have done to Humphrey had he found out.In terms of the risk Humphrey takes in reading the letter and speaking of it it really is a life-or-death matter.

[legionseagle (from livejournal.com)]

Returning to the point about valuing friends over art, isn't the problem with the world of Court (as the letter incident illustrates) that one can't afford to have friends? Everyone is competing for the Queen's favour, and being friends with the wrong person can lose you your livelihood if nothing worse. So Humphrey's valuing something that barely exists in his world over something that Will knows he's got.

And that again ties back to Will's reluctance to accept aristocratic patronage, because that puts art in the same basket as friendship.

[fengirl88.livejournal.com]

I only knew "soft" from the Stanford song A Soft Day, which includes a refrain about the rain dripping from the leaves - whether those are the right conditions to produce that beautiful double rainbow yesterday I don't know, but it was lovely to see.

I agree it's a shame Faber balked at doing a single volume - it seems an odd failure of nerve on their part.

[edit to add] and, thinking about things that need to be read together, I loved your comments on Forest's revisiting of the Achilles/Patroclus comparison and the changing meaning of Essex's relationship with Southampton now both are out of favour.

Will on Friendship, Kemp

[antfan.livejournal.com]

Wonderful chapters, wonderful summaries - thank you.

What do people make of Will's assertion that Humfrey values his friends over his art, and that's the wrong choice?

I think Will has been burned by previous emotional attachments and is now extremely cautious - Anne, the "strange places" his heart has led him since, his hero worship of Essex, even the death of Hamnet etc - he's been let down. He's therefore learned to put more trust in his craft. However, that only goes so far, I think, in that Will is not truly cynical and like Nicholas, I don't really buy the idea that he would ever really sacrifice his friends. (True, he did abandon wife and children, but then Edmund has told us his wife doesn't really care about him anyway.) His caution reminds me of Jan Scott's comment about lifelong friendships being as rare as unicorns - and yet Jan is a very kind mentor to Nicola. I think there is, running through most of Forest's books an awareness that friendships do change, inevitably, with the passing of time, and this is painful but part of life. I suppose Will is maybe trying to warn Nicholas of this, and of the need to find other kinds of fulfilment.

Kemp - the strand with Kemp seems to tie in with this somehow. In his case, friendship is not enough to hold him to the Players, but is it also that art can involve its betrayals too? Kemp and Will seem to respect and like each other - but Will's rise inevitably means Kemp's fall. Again, it seems very Forest to me not to dodge the fact that something as worth having as Shakespeare's plays might inevitably entail the loss of something else which also had value - traditional clowning. (I do think Nicholas is missing the point, actually. If you're a jazz musician, used to improvising, it's not at all the same as sticking to somebody else's score - even if you can still interpret their notes. )

She's using her time frame very effectively, isn't she - the way that Will has gone from impoverished player to respectable and prosperous playrwright, Burbage is now a celebrity, Kemp dangerously close to a has-been...quite different from the modern books.

Re: Will on Friendship, Kemp

[antfan.livejournal.com]

Actually I'm now reconsidering what I wrote above - Will's abandonment of wife and children is surely a betrayal of the deepest kind of friendship there is (or does a wife not count as friends?) Dickon tries to make light of it just because Will is his friend, but Cuthbert's interjection "Never!" seem to me to be pointing to the extent of the betrayal, which Dickon is surely fudging.

Here she's surely pointing up the selfishness of the artist? It may be safest for Will himself to stick to his art, but it's not a kind or responsible thing for a father of three to do. (I love Will though so like Dickon I'm happy to exonerate him.)

Re: Will on Friendship, Kemp

[legionseagle (from livejournal.com)]

Everyone - Edmund, Burbage et al - are desperately giving their own excuses for Shakespeare's conduct towards Ann, aren't they? Reminds me of Karen's censoriousness towards Young Soult and, by extension, Branwell in Peter's Room. I think the ultimate moral (especially considering Jonson and his hand and Kit Marlowe is "Yes, a poet can get away with murder; first,if he's that good a poet and, secondly, provided he chooses the right frineds."

So it's not an antagonism but a synthesis.

Re: Will on Friendship, Kemp

[jackmerlin.livejournal.com]

I wonder if AF had met a few too many people who did the 'of course I'd really love to write books if only I had the time..' thing.
But as far as Shakespeare goes, he would say that people should put craft before relationships, wouldn't he? And because he's now successful and has been able to buy Anne a house, his choice seems respectable and acceptable in his friends' eyes. If he had been unsuccessful Anne would be just another abandoned wife waiting for her husband to grow up and face reality. (I'm reminded of the wife in the film Juno, who's husband is leaving because he isn't ready for fatherhood and wants to be a musician, who tells him 'I can't wait for you to be Kurt Cobain')
I also wonder if Anne's indifference to Will is genuine or simply a practised response in the interests of self-preservation and maintaining some dignity.

[jackmerlin.livejournal.com]

Before Harry Potter there weren't that many - if any - really long childrens' books. It was around the fourth book of the series when everyone was safely hooked on them that they got massively long. Since then childrens' and YA books do seem to have got longer. Nowadays you could put PB and PATR together and no-one would would think anything of it.
Nicholas' age seems to wobble a bit at the beginning. Apart from supposing that he still has three or four years till his voice breaks, there's the talk about how Nicholas should stay in bed with the children while the theatre is being taken down. This at an age when sixteen year olds were certainly taking part in land and sea battles. Ok, they don't want their boy players to get bruised faces, but they don't give that as the reason. If you didn't know that he was already sixteen you might suppose he was only twelve or thirteen at this point.

Re: Will on Friendship,/Shakespeare's Marriage

[antfan.livejournal.com]

I wonder if AF had met a few too many people who did the 'of course I'd really love to write books if only I had the time..' thing

I bet she had!

Re Anne"
I'd guess on a Doylian level, Forest wanted to present Will positively to her audience - hence the Will trying to persuade Anne to join him in London. And hence Edmund's version. Also, I'd imagine she was following the critical consensus of the time that Shakespeare wasn't happily married (though I'm not sure if that's based on much more than Shakespeare being eight years younger, and the second-best-bed.) Does anybody know more about the actual Shakespeare marriage?

At the same time, there is a level of selfishness/egotism surely in being prepared to take that kind of step and just walk out (and maybe in being able to make it as any kind of artist?) and the book doesn't dodge that (as Forest doesn't with Lawrie) and I think that is coming out in Will's remarks on Humfrey. Will actually refers to Humfrey's future wife as yet another future excuse (Nicholas doesn't put the claims of wives very high either but that is probably typical of any sixteen year old boy).

If he had been unsuccessful Anne would be just another abandoned wife waiting for her husband to grow up and face reality.
And he almost has to, in the plague years, doesn't he? It's really his pride that keeps him going...and then his luck changes.

Re: Will on Friendship,/Shakespeare's Marriage

[jackmerlin.livejournal.com]

I guess we are imposing 20th century views of family relationships on Will's marriage as well. Whereas he actually lived in a world where the ruling monarch's father had chopped her mother's head off. By the standards of the time leaving your wife living with your parents probably wasn't so bad!