Juliet's Nurse

by Lois Leveen

  Not just took. Killed. The bloodied violence of it, that is what maddens me. How she drove the dagger in. How she’d not cared who she hurt with that single stab.

  Not cared for anything but Romeo. Not cared for me.

  Who could love her more than I did? Who could lose more than in all my life I have?

  The hate comes on quick, like the heat that’s flashed over me the year past. My face goes red, my body sweats with it. But then just as quick it’s gone, leaving me grief and guilt instead.

  I raised six sons and then reared Tybalt. Watch boys turn to men, and you’ll learn how they’re drawn to danger. But I’d not known how fragile a girl can grow in the season she starts to ripen into a woman.

  This is what shatters my heart, over and over again. That I’d not known, not seen, not ever sensed how fragile she was. How she could be so unlike me.

  My father’s beatings. The first great plague. Pietro’s sudden slaying. Bit by terrible bit, every awful thing that ever happened to me taught me to survive. Not like my girl, who never suffered aught. Never suffered because I was ever near to tend and cosset her. Never suffered and so could not bear the slightest sorrow, the hint of unfilled longing, the least glimmering of loss. And so was lost herself.

  Should I have let her suffer? Would it have taught her to survive?

  Or was it better to keep her short life always sweet? Sweet as a taste of honey on the tongue.

  You cannot live long on only honey. You cannot survive without tasting much that’s bitter. Wormwood coats life’s dug, and that’s where we must suckle.

  Slowly the days stretch and warm. Winter melts toward spring, and I wake half-thinking it’s already Pentecost, though we’re still in Lent. As the sun glows outside my waxed-cloth window, I rise from bed and ready myself to visit the hives.

  The bees have roused themselves as well. They’re already soaring out, seeking the first of the year’s blooms. Pietro once said a hive was like a parish church, but to me each hive seems more like its own teeming city. The bees who guard the entryway, the others who fly far off to gather. Those that stay inside, turning collected pollen into precious nectar, and the ones deepest within who tend their brood. By some miracle each knows what it must do to keep the whole thrumming hive alive. This is the beauty Pietro found in tending bees. This is what finally comforts me.

  I feel my husband’s presence most here, near one of his hives. Tybalt’s presence, too. My boys I feel more whenever I carry my tithe of beeswax candles through the streets where they once played, to San Fermo where they prayed. But my last—my Susanna, my lamb, my Juliet. I feel her against me, always. Carried like fragrance on a rose, like mother’s milk on a baby’s breath, like pollen goldened on a soaring bee.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Juliet’s Nurse isn’t a book I expected to write—it feels more like the book chose me. My focus has always been on intersections of American history and literature. But after I finished The Secrets of Mary Bowser, a novel based on the true story of a slave who became a Union spy in the Confederate White House, the title Juliet’s Nurse suddenly came to me. I pulled my copy of Shakespeare’s play (which I’d last read in high school) off the shelf, and reread it in a single sitting.

  I was amazed and intrigued. Although the events in the play take place across just five days, it hints at loyalties, rivalries, jealousies, and losses that extend far back in time. Shakespeare places the young lovers squarely at the heart of his play: Romeo has by far the greatest number of lines, followed by Juliet. But the character who speaks the next largest number of lines is not the head of either the Capulet or Montague households, nor the prince who rules Verona, nor the friar who first marries the lovers and later orchestrates Juliet’s feigned death. The person to whom Shakespeare gives more lines than all of these characters is Juliet’s wet-nurse—a woman whose very presence within the Capulet household seems curious, given that when the play begins Juliet has already been weaned for eleven years. What did Shakespeare see in her? What can we see only through her eyes?

  Bawdy and clearly of a lower class, the nurse as Shakespeare presents her seems out of place among the cultured, wealthy Capulets. Her name, Angelica, is mentioned only once in the entire play. But in the very first scene in which she appears, the nurse reveals that she lost her virginity at age twelve, that she is the widow of “a merry man,” and that her own daughter was born on the exact same day as Juliet but did not live. Writing Juliet’s Nurse gave me a chance to explore this tantalizing, troubling backstory—while also offering a new, historically rich view onto the action at the heart of Shakespeare’s tragedy.

  Romeo and Juliet is the best-known play in English literature and the world’s most cherished love story. Taking on such a popular literary work—a perennial high school reading assignment, a staple of theater companies around the world, and the source for powerful reimaginings from West Side Story to Franco Zeffirelli’s classic film to the electrifying Romeo+Juliet starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes—is no small task. When I traveled to Verona to conduct my research, I was astonished to learn that more than half a million people come to the city each year to visit sites associated with Romeo and Juliet. This deep attachment to Shakespeare’s play convinced me there was an audience hungry for the story revealed in Juliet’s Nurse.

  Focusing on the nurse forces us to ask one of the most terrifying questions any person can face: What would it be like to lose a child? Delving into the history of wet-nurses, I learned that the arrangement described in the play was quite common: wealthy families in this era preferred to employ a wet-nurse whose own infant had recently died, and who thus had “fresh” milk to devote to their child. Imagine the intensity of losing your newborn, and then, that same day, being given the chance to nurture another baby—yet always knowing your relationship with her is tenuous, subject to the whims of her parents.

  Now imagine experiencing those things in a world so different from our own. Violence was a regular feature of city life in fourteenth-century Italy. Divided allegiances to the ruling prince, to the Pope, and to increasing their own power and property drew wealthy families into bitter, bloody rivalries. Though most households in Verona had fewer means than the Cappelletti or the Montecchi, in the steady rhythms of daily urban life, everyone—from the poorest of the poor to the merchants and artisans we would think of as the middle class to the richest nobles—was driven by forces of honor, piety, and myriad local alliances and rivalries as they struggled to survive.

  Understanding this time and place was crucial to exploring Angelica’s story. Although Shakespeare tells us the season in which the play’s tragic events take place—late July, just before the August 1 harvest holiday of Lammastide—the year is never mentioned. But important hints abound. The inclusion in the play of Prince Escalus (Shakespeare’s version of the Scaligeri family name) places the events before 1405, when the Scaligeri lost power and Verona became subject to Venetian rule. And in the pivotal scene in Shakespeare’s play in which Mercutio is killed, he exclaims not once, not twice, but three times to Romeo and Tybalt, “A plague o’ both your houses!”—perhaps the most dreadful curse for anyone alive at the time.

  Plague first came to Italy in 1348, bringing unfathomable horror: in less than two years, between one third and one half of the entire population was dead. In some places, the death toll rose as high as 60 percent. Think of what your town would be like, what the nation would be like, with so much of the population suddenly gone.

  Imagine the terror Mercutio’s dying words would have struck in the Veronese, who knew firsthand what plague meant, for those whose bodies rotted away, and for their bereft survivors. In Shakespeare’s play, Juliet has no sisters or brothers, and Lord Capulet tells Paris, “The earth hath swallow’d all my hopes but she.” Even the most wealthy and powerful families were vulnerable to the loss of their children, a tragic and haunting experience that in Juliet’s Nurse affects both the hired wet-nurse and the affluent family she serves.
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  What was it like to live in the wake of such devastation? How, without our modern understanding of the effects of emotional trauma, did individuals make sense of their experience and move forward with their lives, despite all they’d lost? These are some of the questions Juliet’s Nurse answers.

  Ultimately, Angelica’s experience parallels one of history’s great paradoxes: the horrors of the plague contributed to Europe advancing from the medieval era into the Renaissance. The death of large segments of the population created new opportunities for survivors. Peasants moved from the countryside to cities. Young men enjoyed professional prospects beyond their family’s original standing. The loss of so many spouses and betrotheds caused shifts in how marriages were contracted. New markets for luxury and everyday goods emerged, as international trade flourished—bringing with it advances in transportation and the intermingling of European, African, Asian, and eventually New World cultures. As Friar Laurence reminds us in his first speech in Shakespeare’s play, what’s tomb is womb. The Renaissance was the rebirth following the plague’s enormous death toll.

  But the story also resonates in our own era. Romeo and Juliet ends with the suicides of the teenage lovers, following the violent deaths of other young men. Weaving Angelica’s story around these incidents from the play pushed me to think deeply about violence, despondence, and suicide. What would enable Angelica to withstand the anger and grief that destroy so many of the other characters? What larger lessons can we learn from her?

  This became the overarching theme of the book. Juliet’s Nurse probes the relationship between loss and endurance, because in life, as in the novel, suffering exists not in opposition to, but as an inevitable experience of, survival.

  LEARN MORE

  Visit www.loisleveen.com to learn more about the medieval and Renaissance history of Verona, Italy, and to find reading group questions and resources for teaching Juliet’s Nurse along with Romeo and Juliet.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Novel writing can sometimes be as sweet as honey, and other times as bitter as wormwood, and I offer great thanks to many sweet people who’ve kept me from turning bitter.

  Rosemary Weatherston is such a keen reader and dear friend, she keeps making both my life and my books better. David ­Garrett proved ever collegial in helping me access myriad scholarly sources. Carol Frischmann, Naseem Rakha, Kathlene Postma, and Shelley Washburn read the draftiest of first chapters and convinced me that I really had a book. The Newberry Library supported my research with an Arthur and Lila Weinberg Fellowship, and Judy Wittner opened her home to me during my time in Chicago. Dr. ­Michael Slater and Dr. Shoshana Waskow provided ­medical counsel on a ­variety of fictive injuries and diseases. ­Obscure ­materials on ­medieval beekeeping and church practices were located by Janie Rangel and translated by Armanda Balduzzi and Hanna Hofer. The far-flung participants in the Medieval-Religion, Mediev-L, and MedFem LISTSERVs gave me insight into the period that shaped my characters. I’ve consulted more scholarly books and articles than I can list here, but suffice it to say that without the work of many academics, I couldn’t have created this novel.

  Here in Oregon, the wonderful members of Portland Urban ­Beekeepers not only provided a hands-on understanding of beekeeping, they taught me the power of a welcoming hive. ­Multnomah County Library is truly a treasure, and I am always grateful for its resources and its dedicated staff, and indebted to the voters and government officials here (and everywhere) who understand that library funding is critical to the well-being of the entire community. I continue to be sustained by readers and by the bookstore and ­library staffs around the country and abroad who eagerly embraced my first novel, The Secrets of Mary Bowser, and whose enthusiastic nagging about when I’d have another kept me from procrastinating as I wrote Juliet’s Nurse.

  William Shakespeare endowed Angelica with just enough intriguing backstory, while also providing an inspiring model of ­literary appropriation. Laney Katz Becker proved once again that a sage agent benefits an author at every step of the process, and words can’t say how much I appreciate all she and her colleagues at Lippincott Massie McQuilkin do to help me write the best ­novels I can and to connect readers around the world with them. In our very first conversation, Emily Bestler won my heart when she told me that because her name is on every book, she cares about each one as much as the author does, and she’s proven it true time and again. She and Megan Reid are not only savvy ­readers (and re-­readers), they are also so warm, supportive, and funny that it is always a pleasure to work with them, even when they make me toil much harder than I ever thought I could. Any author might feel lucky to have one such editorial team, but I am ­extraordinarily blessed to benefit as well from the astute input of Anne Collins. Readers often do not realize how much goes into the making of a novel, but I owe a great debt to Jeanne Lee, Hillary Tisman, ­Mellony Torres, ­Alysha Bullock, Adria Iwustiak, Amanda Betts, and many, many other ­people at Emily Bestler Books/Atria Books and Knopf/­Random House Canada for this beautiful book you (or your ereader) now hold.

  As ever, my deepest gratitude goes to Chuck Barnes, who has read countless drafts, engaged in spontaneous plotting sessions, put up with a too-often very moody writer, and courageously ­suffered through a research trip to beautiful Verona, Italy. Here’s to a love story that is always a comedy, and never a tragedy.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Photograph by John Melville Bishop

  Award-winning author Lois Leveen dwells in the spaces where literature and history meet. Her work has appeared in numerous literary and scholarly journals, as well as The New York Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Chicago Tribune, Huffington Post, Bitch magazine, The Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, and on NPR. Lois gives talks about writing and history at universities, museums, and libraries around the country. She lives in Portland, Oregon, with two cats, one Canadian, and 60,000 honeybees. Visit her online at LoisLeveen.com and Facebook.com/LoisLeveen.

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  ALSO BY LOIS LEVEEN

  The Secrets of Mary Bowser

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  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2014 by The Lois Leveen Company, LLC

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  First Emily Bestler Books/Atria Books hardcover edition September 2014

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  Interior design by Jill Putorti

  Cover art and design by Alan Dingman

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Dat
a is available.

  ISBN 978-1-4767-5744-5

  ISBN 978-1-4767-5746-9 (ebook)