Readthrough: The Players and the Rebels: Chapters 11-14

[lilliburlero.livejournal.com]

Title: Hamlet.

The players have now been placed in a dangerous position by the failure of Essex's rebellion, and their reactions are characteristic. August's 'stout' loyalty to the Essex faction in retaining Humfrey is touching, I think, and I really feel for Nicholas, still in shock, finding it difficult to keep quiet about what he has seen and experienced; the resonances with the main series are notable. Will's defence of Southampton and his furious reaction to Burbage’s bad-taste remark about the headsman cutting Southampton’s hair for him (Dickon is sort of obsessed with the hair, isn’t he?) suggests demonstrates that there’s still considerable affection there. I enjoy Edmund and Burbage ganging up on Will’s ‘vengeful’ portrayals of enemies in his plays.

Will’s conversation with Nicholas underlines the paranoia of late-Elizabethan society (is it paranoia when they’re out to get you?); the reflection that Tyburn might be preferable to a life of vagabondage echoes Edmund’s earlier thought that execution might be better than dying painfully and lingeringly of an illness. I think I’m still with Nicholas here though. And Will’s needing to be reminded that he has a wife and children--oh, Will.

August’s appearance before the Privy Council turns out to be an anti-climax, but the scene of waiting, with its eerie silence and Nicholas trying to fill same with chatter, is marvellously creepy. And the boys’ hysterical reaction to the relief of tension is well-observed.

I’m delighted at the suggestion that 1 Henry IV’s Francis is drawn from the life, and I think the tipsy melancholy of the pub scene is beautifully done, and the constraint that has grown between Humfrey and Nicholas positively painful.





Title: The Merchant of Venice, appropriately enough perhaps for a chapter with courtroom drama, albeit .

Forest approaches Nicholas’s thoughts of courting Bess in some fascinating ways: almost as an intrusive compulsion, ‘tenacious as a clawing cat’; in contrast to the high romance of a ‘lady all air and fire’, and despite Bess’s significant age, also in contrast to Romeo and Juliet; with guilt and shame which he eventually works out is a consequence of her evident, but perhaps unreciprocated love for him. (I don’t know that all this bodes awfully well for their eventual marriage, what do others think? This has been your regularly scheduled &c.) That in turn seems to prompt the thought of Humfrey, with whom his relationship is also unequal, and to the unsettling thought that it is being first in both Humfrey’s and Bess’s affections that is important to him, for which he ‘disliked himself very much indeed.’

This daydreaming means that Nick misses his stop, as it were, and ends up seeing the trial of Essex and Southampton at something very much like first hand. The device by which this is accomplished is perhaps rather contrived, but I can forgive Forest almost anything for her flash-forward to Barnabas’s uneventful and frustrated life ‘was not, and never would be, one for who doors are opened.’ (This has been your regular scheduled &c; also, Barnabas is effectively Justice Shallow, isn’t he?) For all his haplessness, Barnabas has a rather better grasp of the function of trials under an authoritarian regime than Nicholas does, and his words are the more chilling for coming after the homely offer to share his mother’s generous provision of packed dinner.

The sketch of Essex, oscillating between magnificent and vulnerable; and the detail that even Nick, who is looking out for Southampton, finds it difficult to focus on him in the presence of Essex’s charisma, is brilliant; even more so, the description of the two men leaving the court: Forest’s confidence in moving straight from that tragic register to the bathos of Barnabas meeting his master again and Nicholas’ encounter with Hunsdon.

The final line of the chapter, I think, bears comparison with that of the penultimate chapter of End of Term, and falls slightly short of it.





Title: Twelfth Night, which is rather piquant, considering.

I love the performance of Hamlet, all the more disconcerting because it is not precisely applicable, and yet some of the lines, in the charged atmosphere, seem impossibly proleptic. The emphasis on the play’s closing moments seems to me Forest’s calculated rebuke to modern productions that turn the play into a chamber drama by cutting Fortinbras; and the moment of the Queen’s cry of grief and anger is masterly. I love the fact that it is now, finally, that Nicholas sees her as old and fragile, and that he gets to speak the play’s resonant closing lines. It may be observed that your correspondent is not a fan of cutting Fortinbras (and scarcely more of dicking about with Fortinbras to make ‘go bid the soldiers shoot’ a firing squad, but that is another discussion.)

The flat, shaky mood of the players after the performance is expertly conveyed; Henry’s fretfulness about the company being blamed for the lines that did seem to have a topical resonance and Will’s rejoinder that he’d be in just as much trouble if they’d altered a script approved by the Master of Revels again indicates the totalitarian mood―in many ways these are the books that Patrick Merrick is seeking when he expresses his frustration with the Whiggish, Protestant version of English history in End of Term.

Will and Burbage’s discussion of the merits and otherwise of Hamlet is a delight, I think: Burbage displaying a very actorly egotism in his satisfaction with the part, not the play, Will observing shrewdly that ‘it sprawls’, Nicholas (with a superstition that will be transmitted down twenty generations) attributing the play’s lack of success to a curse put on the court by the Faerie Queene.





Title: The Merchant of Venice.

In the febrile aftermath of Essex’s execution, the words of the Liturgy, like those of Hamlet, seem full of resonance; the applicability of certain phrases, regardless almost of context, seems to me a Forestian motif―appropriately echoed, perhaps by how memorable and apt her readers find certain of her lines. Nicholas’s recollection of an Ash Wednesday service that he attended with his father as a small child merges interestingly into the thought of Essex becoming a similarly hazy memory for Southampton, suggesting another way of understanding that complex relationship. Coming full circle, Nicholas also thinks of Kit Marlowe, and the awful mystery of mortality.

Things are getting serious when Ned considers reading a book. But at least it isn’t sermons. Forest denies us any resolution of Nicholas’s estrangement from Humfrey; the sight of the Philips household in mourning for Essex is moving but perhaps slightly absurd too.

Nicholas returns to Deptford, where in accordance with the laws of narrative, he runs into his past in the form of Adam. We learn a little of Adam’s life since the grammar (not so much that this cannot be your regularly scheduled &c.); the detail that his delight on escaping the tyranny of Master Stockwood was short lived indeed is particularly effective. And finally, Nicholas achieves his ambition of going to sea. The quotation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the final lines is a particularly nice touch, I think.



Well, that really is it from me: we've read our way through all 12 Marlows books. It's been just over a year, at a fairly conservative estimate about 100,000 words written in readthrough posts, and over 6,000 comments.

I'd like to thank the guest posters: legionseagle, who took on Peter's Room and the sailing bits of Run Away Home, coughingbear who took on Cricket Term; highfantastical, who posted on parts of the Players books and on Falconer's Lure; jackmerlin, who posted on chapters from Ready Made Family; and sprog_63 who posted on Falconer's Lure.

Thanks to the trennels mods, thewhiteowl, ankaret and coughingbear for their exceptional modding.

And finally, thanks to everyone who participated in the discussions, without whom &c.

It's been an epic experience: I feel I've learned a lot about Forest and her books, and I've enjoyed myself trimmensely. I hope you have too. I find myself a little overwhelmed, so I hope you'll excuse me if I don't launch into a prolonged panegyric, but I am enormously gratified and touched by the enthusiastic and informed response that there has been to the readthrough.

I hope after a short break we might continue discussion of the Marlows books with some thematic posts, and if people would like to, also a readthrough of The Thursday Kidnapping. The fic fest is still open for sign-ups for another two weeks, and there are plenty of prompts already there awaiting a claim.

But for now, I'll gently rise, and softly call: good night, and joy be to you all.

Thanks once again to everyone.

Comments

Bess

[jackmerlin.livejournal.com]

I love the last few chapters but the bits about Bess are my least favourite bits. It seems an extraordinary way for a sixteen/seventeen year old boy to be thinking about a girl. It comes rather out of the blue as well, given that the emotional intensity of the previous chapters has been all about Nicholas' relationships with Humfrey and Shakespeare.
In some ways I like the description of the thought of marrying Bess as being tenacious, suggesting that she has crept into his affections without him even realising; but couldn't poor Bess have been given something distinctive to make Nicholas fond of her, other than the simple fact of her liking him.
Even accepting that a childrens' book at that date couldn't allow Nicholas to be sexually curious or interested in a girl, it's odd that there isn't even a fleeting mention in his thoughts of her appearance or physical presence - couldn't she have had lovely eyes or a nice smile or something?
In the modern books there is a physical charge between Ginty and Patrick, even though they never so much as kiss. Patrick's eyes, his hair, his build are all briefly alluded to. Hands brush, smiles are shared etc.
The Bess bits don't add to the plot at this point. Finding out that he had married her in CT has a point in making the Burbages ancestors which is interesting for Nicola, but this book would have been complete without it. Or is it just there to stop people reading too much into the close male friendships?

Re: Bess

[buntyandjinx.livejournal.com]

I agree, the Bess bits are jarring but totally in keeping with AF's view of the world. To me, it read as a very unromantic take on marriage, especially in those times.Nick is well aware society dictates he must marry and that Bess would be the ideal, approved candidate - tying him to Dickon and by extension to Will. He wouldn't even have to do any work to woo her. It casts a fascinating shadow over Nicola learning that they did marry - were they happy, was Bess always "second best" to Humphrey or did Nick grow up a bit and become slightly less idealistic in his view of women?

Re: Bess

[mrs-redboots.livejournal.com]

But marriages back then weren't necessarily love-matches, were they? In fact, for most of history, you married who you were told (or, in the case of women who went out to places like the infant USA, the first one who came along) and basically got on with it. If Nicholas reckons Bess would be the perfect woman to marry, they'll shake down all right, even if they aren't wildly in love. People did. Of course there were some horrific cases of abuse, but I think those were in the minority.

RE: Re: Bess

[white_hart]

I agree - I think the idea of marriage being mainly about love (rather than a largely economic union) is much more recent. (I'm not sure how recent - maybe nineteeth-century? Jane Austen, for instance, is much less romantic and more pragmatic than people generally think of her as.) If Nicholas likes Bess, generally, and she likes him, and Dickon thinks he'd be a good son-in-law, then I think they would do very nicely together.

Re: Bess

[jackmerlin.livejournal.com]

While I agree with both the above comments about marriage not being about romantic love then, Nicholas is only sixteen or seventeen. He has no immediate dynastic or financial need to marry. Of course, connecting himself to the Burbages will help cement his future career, so that influences his thinking, but I still think the feelings of a boy his age wouldn't have been entirely pragmatic.

Re: Bess

[lilliburlero.livejournal.com]

What interests me about the way Forest presents it is that though it is plausible as an Elizabethan middle-class way of thinking about marriage--marrying into the firm, as it were--it doesn't come to Nicholas as a pragmatic calculation, even of a idle sort, more as a sort of intrusive thought, presenting itself when he's drunk and his inhibitions are lowered (in a more introverted way than most people's are, but still lowered) and then returning to him compulsively in the morning when he's hungover (and suffering from the psychological hangover symptoms of guilt and melancholy). Which suggests that he might have feelings about Bess that he's not ready to acknowledge to himself yet.

I like oursin's suggestion that after a year Bess may be more independent, and Nicholas might have some competition for her affections, forcing him to confront those feelings and make a bit of effort.

Re: Bess

[buntyandjinx.livejournal.com]

I agree, marriages weren't about romance then - but very interesting AF should flag it up in what is purportedly a children's book. I do thin, given AF's world views and her dislike of following conventional storylines, that while there's every chance Bess and Nicholas will rub along, there's also a strong chance they won't. We'll never know.

Re: Bess

[jackmerlin.livejournal.com]

I think they probably have a good chance of being happy. Nicholas is kind natured so will treat her fairly. She may give him the calm stability he's never had, having not known his own mother. The best relationship Nicholas has ever had with a woman is with Wyn Burbage who has been kind and welcoming to him. If Bess grows up to be like her mother - enjoying looking after her husband and a brood of children, and Nicholas stays kind and easy going they could have a far happier marriage than the sort that starts romantically.
If Romeo and Juliet had lived their marriage would have been disastrous.

Re: Bess

[antfan.livejournal.com]

I totally agree about Bess being a nonetity. And yes, I do think it's to do with this being a book about male friendships.

It comes rather out of the blue as well, given that the emotional intensity of the previous chapters has been all about Nicholas' relationships with Humfrey and Shakespeare.

Maybe this is kind of the point. Someone once said to me that Sam marries Rosie at the end of Lord of the Rings because otherwise the book is too plainly a love affair between Frodo and Sam. I'm absolutely NOT suggesting Forest is being homophobic, but I do think - I said this in an earlier thread - that the females/heterosexual element of the book is oddly lacking - a bit like a Hollywood bromance where they put in a nonentity female love interest just to give themselves an out so to speak. I think maybe Bess is there so Forest can write in a totally uninhibited way about Nicholas's feelings for Humfrey and Will without herself/editors/readers (I don't know which) feeling uncomfortable or self concious that there is “more to it”. I also think this could be entirely unconscious on her part. If this isn't so, it's a great mystery to my mind as to why she's written so inadequately about female characters and about teenage sexual attraction when we know very well from her other books that's she's extremely adept about writing about both.

I'd also add that she's given pretty much every male character in the book, so far as I can see, with the exception of Kit Marlowe and Humfrey, a heterosexual interest of some kind.

Even accepting that a childrens' book at that date couldn't allow Nicholas to be sexually curious or interested in a girl

But they could – look at the exactly contemporary Mantlemass books, historicals written for an identical age of audience, which have a strong romantic element. Sprig of Broom, the book in the series published the same year as Players and the Rebels, also as a male lead, similar coming-of-age, but he is in love with Catherine Mallory – who is a complete contrast to Bess, full of spirit. I really think Forest didn't do it because she didn't want to. She wanted to write about male friendships.

Having said all that, there is yet another way of looking at it that occurs to me. PATR is the story in a way of Nicholas's friendships with Humfrey and Will – and yet the end of the book indicates that close and loving as those friendships are, in a sense they are coming to an end – or at least, about to change significantly. In the case of Will/Nicholas, this feels like a parental relationship – Nicholas is now venturing into the world, and although he will always love Will (and indeed declares his love for Will) he is launching himself into adult independence, and presumably when he does return to London, the relationship will be different, for this reason. With Humfrey, it's more bitter: by being the reminder of Humfrey's past, he's no longer the straightforward comfort to Humfrey that he once was. Maybe Bess is also pointing up the fact that human relationships change, and that Nicholas himself is likely to have different needs in the future (perhaps, as lilliburlero says, ones that he's not quite ready yet to acknowledge), so that his friendship with Humfrey would have changed for this reason too?

(I think this sense of friendships/relationships changing in their nature, and the poignancy of that, is a strong theme of many Renault books, which I think some of us think must have been a big influence on the Players books. I think it's there with Niko/Thettalos but maybe even more with Last of the Wine, which in a sense is a book all about an evolving friendship/love relationship.)

Apologies for such a long response!

Re: Bess/Nicholas disliking himself

[antfan.livejournal.com]

Nicholas disliking himself always reminds me of Nicola at the end of Cricket Term, realising that she wouldn't mind losing the Prosser to Meg but not to Lawrie - and disliking herself for the fact.

I guess it's a similar response in a way- that it can be harder to be generous to the people you're closest to. It's also why I think Nicholas and Nicola are very similar - almost the same - character, in that they share this self-awareness, and also the integrity/kindness to regret it.

The last two lines.

[jackmerlin.livejournal.com]

I love the last two lines and think it is one of the most perfect endings to a book ever. I think that the way Nicholas finds comfort in Will's words always being with him is the way I feel, and I imagine most members of Trennels feel, about AF's own words; that wherever we go and whatever we do her books, her characters and her stories are always with us - carried in our heads even when we haven't got the physical books at hand.

Re: The last two lines.

[antfan.livejournal.com]

That's beautifully put. I absolutely agree.

Re: The last two lines.

[buntyandjinx.livejournal.com]

Thirded, it's a lovely way to end it.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

Re Bess, and how it is becoming this expected but still somewhat juvenile attachment - my own head-canon for this is that when Nicholas comes back she's grown up as much as he has, and if she's not quite Beatrice (MAAN) in her response to his return, she's no longer soppy adolescent dog-like devotion-girl, and probably surrounded by other suitors.

[jackmerlin.livejournal.com]

There's a prompt for fic!

[legionseagle (from livejournal.com)]

I do wonder how far some of his alarm at the thought of marrying her is tied up with his perception of their age difference and that a gap in which he can see her as an adult will be beneficial.

[white_hart]

Thanks so much for running the readthrough. I mostly haven't been reading through, due to lack of access to the books and/or lack of reading time, but I have been reading the Players books (The Players and the Rebels for the first time) and actually managed to finish a couple of days before this post went up (at which point I found myself feeling stupidly bereft with no more to read - would love to read more fic for these books!).

The bit where Nicholas (in his cups, let us not forget, Nicholas being a dreadful lightweight even compared to the other boys) first thinks about marrying Bess and compares her to "Will's girls" interested me; I wonder if Forest meant us to reflect on Will's own marriage, and whether he also found Anne Hathaway sadly lacking compared to the girls of his imagination?

Another bit that really struck me in the tavern section was the mention of Nicholas as an "attendant lord" in Hamlet, which seemed to me to identify him somehow with J Alfred Prufrock, and maybe to foreshadow his future as much more ordinary than his youth has been. Although first he gets to have his adventure at sea, and maybe hear the mermaids singing himself. Though this may just all be a wild flight of fancy on my part.

The end of an era

[mrs-redboots.livejournal.com]

I have so very much enjoyed this readthrough. Fridays are simply not going to be the same from now on. Thank you to all who have had a hand in making it such an enjoyable experience.

[legionseagle (from livejournal.com)]

I love the tension and the wait, especially since there's Nicholas rhubarbing desperately on and Sam is giving him nothing.

[fengirl88.livejournal.com]

in many ways these are the books that Patrick Merrick is seeking when he expresses his frustration with the Whiggish, Protestant version of English history in End of Term.

I like this point a lot, and it makes me even more frustrated that the books have mostly been out of print or hard to get hold of for so long.

I have loved the readthroughs, and am so glad you did them.

Patrick's view of Players Books

[antfan.livejournal.com]

I can see Patrick liking the start – the noble Antony Merrick, the smuggled priest, the evil atheist...and then becoming increasingly bemused: why are we all suddenly in London, amongst these irreligious theatrical types? Why does nobody seem to care about the Faith either way? Why does Antony just get a little cameo appearance (prompting Edmund to religious reflection for all of 10 seconds)? Why is everyone actually pretty happy with Elizabeth? And then the appearance of Blount – at last, somebody with the right ideas – only, oh dear, he's a fanatic who wants to depose the Queen and put in a clearly incompetent rabble of the "rash, dangerous and disappointed" (in Will's words) in her place!

Will’s rejoinder that he’d be in just as much trouble if they’d altered a script approved by the Master of Revels again indicates the totalitarian mood

Also, I think "totalitarian” is a step too far – the Elizabethan state didn't have sufficient power, and I think Forest presentation shows this. Essex is guilty, it's not a show trial set up to frame him, the Players are in danger because they have got mixed up with genuine traitors, no state can stand by and permit armed insurrection. The Players don't in fact get into any kind of trouble. The espionage in the book is directed against aristocrats rather than the populace at large, and the greatest hostility towards the Players from the Puritans rather than State itself. The least pleasant aspect of the regime is Robin Poley, and the book is fairly unequivocal that Nicholas did the right thing in cooperating with Poley.

Would give Patrick quite a bit to ponder...

[legionseagle (from livejournal.com)]

I always tear up a little about Nick taking the inch or so of sodden rope from the Golden Hind; it bookends his memory of his father saying, "We've Drake afloat and our Eliza ashore", because they've lost Drake soon -- very soon indeed -- they'll not have Eliza, either (and Ark Ralegh has become Ark Royal and in due course Ralegh will be executed "For being left over from the last reign" -- a Sellar & Yeatmanism I always think is even truer than it's funny.) It's very much the end of an era on all fronts.

So I'm not sure Patrick Merrick would be so happy about it, come to think of it: it still is "Good Queen Bess" even if she does run an authoritarian regime (I love the side comment about her proposing to go to confront the rebels herself) and when it's gone, it's gone forever.