Even though Roger Bacon is cited as the possible author, evidence is murky about the true authorship. Scientific analysis of the vellum and ink has dated the book to the late fourteenth or fifteenth century. In the hundred years since its discovery, numerous academic experts have been unable to decipher it, and theories abound: Is it code or an entirely new, made-up language? Is it a forgery or a hoax? The wildly different interpretations say more about the people studying the book than about the book itself, proving nothing about the truth of its origin. Diana didn’t have time to worry about the authorship in her search for the Book of Life’s missing pages, but perhaps it is a mystery she will revisit.
See also: SCIENCE: Matthew de Clermont’s library of scientific works through the ages
Plays and Prose
TO MY DEARE LADIE AND SISTER, THE COUNTESSE OF PEMBROKE,
Here now have you (most deare, and most worthy to be most deare Lady) this idle worke of mine. . . . Read it then at your idle tymes, and the follyes your good judgement wil finde in it, blame not, but laugh at. And so, looking for no better stuffe, then, as in an Haberdashers shoppe, glasses, or feathers, you will continue to love the writer, who doth excedinglie love you; and most most hartelie praies you may long live, to be a principall ornament to the familie of the Sidneis.
Your loving Brother
Philip Sidnei
Title: The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia
Author: Philip Sidney (1554–86)
Background: Philip Sidney wrote much of the early draft of The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia in the 1570s while visiting his sister, Mary Sidney, the Countess of Pembroke, at her home. Many years later, in 1586, Philip was in the midst of making extensive revisions and additions to the book when he died from injuries suffered at the Battle of Zutphen. After his death his sister merged the older version with the newer Arcadia and oversaw William Ponsonby’s publication of the book in 1590.
Arcadia is a narrative romance told in parts, punctuated with poems. Written in the classical Greek dramatic style, it follows the intertwining narratives of noble princes and simple shepherds, enlivened with epic swordfights and jousts, political intrigue, attacks by wild animals, love, cross-dressing, and mistaken identities. The book enjoyed immense popularity in its time and is credited as one of the earliest successful English-language examples of the novel—that is, a book that is read for the sheer pleasure of the story. William Shakespeare borrowed from Arcadia for one of his subplots in King Lear, and England’s king Charles I is said to have quoted lines from it as he mounted the scaffold to his execution for treason in 1649.
Matthew gave Diana a copy of Arcadia for their first Christmas together. Diana had read it—and disliked it—when she was an undergraduate, but she marveled at the newness of her gift, fresh off William Ponsonby’s press in London in 1590. No word yet on whether she enjoyed Arcadia any more her second time through.
See also: CHARACTERS: William Ponsonby, Mary Sidney
From Scene I
Philosophy is odious and obscure;
Both law and physic are for petty wits;
Divinity is basest of the three,
Unpleasant, harsh, contemptible, and vile.
’Tis magic, magic that hath ravished me.
Scene VII
Faustus: Come on, Mephistophilis, what shall we do?
Meph: Nay, I know not. We shall be curs’d with bell, book, and candle.
Faustus: How! Bell, book, and candle,—candle, book, and bell,
Forward and backward to curse Faustus to hell.
Title: The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus
Author: Christopher “Kit” Marlowe (1564–93)
Background: Marlowe wrote this play at the end of the sixteenth century, inspired by contemporary German legends about Johann George Faust, an unsavory alchemist. Marlowe also drew from events in his own life, perhaps incorporating the Widow Beaton’s test of Diana’s magic with a bell, a book, and a candle, for great dramatic effect.
The protagonist of Marlowe’s play is an ambitious and learned man, Doctor Faustus, who forges a pact with the devil. In Marlowe’s telling, Faustus summons a servant of the devil, an angel named Mephistopheles, and makes the angel an offer, pledging his soul to the devil in exchange for twenty-four years of magical powers and knowledge. The devil takes the deal. Faustus uses his new magical powers to amaze and trick others, tricks that include making antlers sprout from a man’s head, turning a horse into a heap of straw, and rendering himself invisible. As the play proceeds, Faustus fritters away his power on what are essentially parlor tricks as his death and damnation loom ever closer. He is increasingly fearful and, in his final moments, is consumed with regret as the devil takes him.
The play was published posthumously in 1604, eleven years after Marlowe’s death, but it was performed much earlier and enjoyed tremendous popular response. Among other tales that grew up around the play, audience members reported seeing real devils onstage, and there were accounts of people driven mad with fear after seeing the performance.
In order to timewalk from the present to 1590, Diana needed three items from the past to guide her. Along with Ysabeau’s earring and Matthew’s chess piece, she carried a holograph copy (a copy handwritten by its author) of Christopher Marlowe’s manuscript of Doctor Faustus. In it Marlowe had inscribed, “To my own sweet Matt. Whoever loved, that loved not at first sight?”
BARABAS
Hast thou no trade? Then listen to my words,
And I will teach [thee] that shall stick by thee:
First, be thou void of these affections,
Compassion, love, vain hope, and heartless fear;
Be mov’d at nothing, see though pity none,
But to thyself smile when the Christians moan.
Title: The Jew of Malta
Author: Christopher “Kit” Marlowe (1564–93)
Background: Marlowe wrote The Jew of Malta in 1589–90, around the same time Diana and Matthew visited London together. The first recorded performance was in 1592, and hundreds of years later it remains one of Marlowe’s most famous and influential plays. Diana owned a paperback copy, and when she first caught sight of Marlowe in 1590, she recognized him immediately from his image on her book’s cover.
The Jew of Malta is both a tragedy and a dark, irreverent comedy, its characters and plot twists exaggerated for satirical effect. The central conflict lies between a Jewish merchant named Barabas, the wealthiest man in Malta until his riches and home are unjustly seized, and a greedy Christian Turk, Governor Ferneze, who seizes Barabas’s property for tribute. Barabas proceeds to exact horrible and sometimes tragic revenge by attacking and betraying anyone who stands between him and his riches, even murdering his own daughter. In the end Barabas manages to turn the tables on Ferneze and briefly becomes governor of Malta himself, until the Maltese army turns on Barabas and kills him. The tragedies of the play include not only what Barabas does in the name of revenge but also what is done to Barnabas by the hypocritical Christian Ferneze. Indeed, both the brilliance of the work and a broad portion of its appeal lie in the way in which it can be read, satirizing either Christians or Jews, depending upon the prejudices and predilections of the audience. In an era when one’s status and even one’s survival depended upon one’s religious beliefs, The Jew of Malta spoke to the private struggles many Elizabethans faced. This included, of course, the iconoclastic members of the School of Night.
From Act IV, scene III:
FERDINAND
By heaven, thy love is black as ebony.
BIRON
Is ebony like her? O wood divine!
A wife of such wood were felicity.
O, who can give an oath? where is a book?
That I may swear beauty doth beauty lack,
If that she learn not of her eye to look:
No face is fair that is not full so black.
FERDINAND
O paradox! Black is the badge of hell,
The hue of dungeons and the school of night;
And beauty’s crest becomes the heavens well.
Title: Love’s Labour’s Lost
Author: William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
Background: This is one of Shakespeare’s earliest plays, written between 1593 and 1594, after he had moved to London (and while he was employing Annie Undercroft as a housemaid). Its first recorded performance was on Christmas of 1597, for Queen Elizabeth I. The play follows doomed efforts of the king of Navarre and three of his men to commit themselves entirely to scholarship and intellectual pursuits for three years. During that time they have pledged to subsist on very little sleep or food and to live entirely without the company of women. Predictably and comically, they fail in their efforts, and in very short order. The king falls in love with a princess, and his men fall in love with her three ladies-in-waiting. In the end they all agree to wait a year and a day before marrying in order to prove the steadfastness of their love. The play contains multiple allusions to prominent Frenchmen, which would have given it particular resonance for Elizabethan audiences. The characters of the king and his three men were clearly meant to represent—and ridicule—Henry of Navarre and three French generals. Likewise, Shakespeare’s reference to the School of Night is a dig at his rival, Kit Marlowe, Marlowe’s dark and gloomy verse, and the dangerous company he kept, including Matthew Roydon. Incidentally, Love’s Labour’s Lost contains the longest scene in all of Shakespeare’s plays (act 5, scene 2) and act 5 also has the single longest word in all his plays: honorificabilitudinitatibus, which is Latin for “the state of being able to achieve honors.”
Poetry and Verse
Of Adam’s first wife, Lilith, it is told
(The witch he loved before the gift of Eve,)
That, ere the snake’s, her sweet tongue could deceive,
And her enchanted hair was the first gold.
And still she sits, young while the earth is old,
And, subtly of herself contemplative,
Draws men to watch the bright web she can weave,
Till heart and body and life are in its hold.
The rose and poppy are her flowers; for where
Is he not found, O Lilith, whom shed scent
And soft-shed kisses and soft sleep shall snare?
Lo! as that youth’s eyes burned at thine, so went
Thy spell through him, and left his straight neck bent
And round his heart one strangling golden hair.
Title: “Body’s Beauty” (Lady Lilith)
Author: Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–82)
Background: Miriam and Marcus gave the name Lilith to the original witch ancestor they identified in their mitochondrial DNA study. This Lilith is the earliest female witch from whom modern-day witches could have descended. They chose the name in homage to the Lilith beloved of the Pre-Raphaelites, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, author of “Body’s Beauty,” and as a tip of the hat to older legends about female monsters of the night.
The Pre-Raphaelites were a group of idealistic, romantic English artists from the mid-nineteenth century who sought to reform English painting from late Renaissance influences, which they deplored as artificial and overly fond of commonplace subjects. In contrast, Pre-Raphaelites adopted the use of strong, natural colors and lines, and biblical, medieval, and literary subjects for their art.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti was a founding member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. He wrote “Body’s Beauty” to accompany and illuminate his painting Lady Lilith (1866–68), calling the two together a “picture-sonnet.” According to ancient Jewish myths, Lilith was the first wife of Adam and was formed from the earth, just as Adam was. She left Adam because she refused to be subservient to him and consequently became mythologized as a creature of the night. Over time Lilith came to be associated with crimes against men and children. In his picture-sonnet, Rossetti reminds his viewers about the generative and destructive powers of womankind, about which stories have been told since time immemorial.
See also: CREATURES: Daemons, Witches
Upon a great adventure he was bond,
That greatest Gloriana to him gave,
That greatest Glorious Queene of Faerie lond,
To winne him worship, and her grace to have,
Which of all earthly things he most did crave;
And ever as he rode, his hart did earne
To prove his puissance in battell brave
Upon his foe, and his new force to learne;
Upon his foe, a Dragon horrible and stearne. (from Book 1, Canto 1)
Title: The Faerie Queene
Author: Edmund Spenser (1552–99)
Background: An epic poem written by Edmund Spenser and published in two parts in 1590 and 1596, The Fairie Queene tells the tales of various Arthurian knights as they confront and prevail over a variety of temptations. In a letter to Walter Raleigh, Spenser explained that he intended to write a total of twenty-four books about King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table, each illustrating a different virtue; Spenser was able to complete only six books before his death in 1599.
These six volumes contemplated the virtues of Holiness, Temperance, Chastity, Friendship, Justice, and Courtesy. He hoped his poems would inspire and instruct his intended readers, primarily gentlemen and nobility, to live virtuous lives. Spenser, who had been a soldier along with Walter Raleigh in Ireland, wanted to earn a living from his writing, so he unabashedly sought the queen’s favor and patronage. Indeed, Elizabeth appears in various guises in the poem, including as Gloriana, the eponymous Fairie Queene. This appeal to her vanity seems to have worked, as the queen awarded Spenser the handsome sum of fifty pounds annually, though he later confessed privately that he would have liked a more sizable royal pension for his efforts.
Diana found The Fairie Queene a bit of a slog, and in this at least Kit Marlowe agreed with her. Marlowe blamed Walter Raleigh for meddling with Spenser’s tale and helping to turn the “perfectly enjoyable” story of King Arthur into “a calamitous blend of Malory and Virgil, [that] wends on and on, and Gloriana—please. The queen is nearly as old as Widow Beaton and just as crotchety.” Despite its faults, The Fairie Queene sealed Spenser’s success as a poet among both his contemporaries and students of literature hundreds of years after his death.
See also: CHARACTERS: William Ponsonby, Elizabeth Tudor
It lies not in our power to love or hate,
For will in us is overruled by fate.
When two are stripped, long ere the course begin
We wish that one should lose, the other win.
And one especially do we affect
Of two gold ingots like in each respect.
The reason no man knows; let it suffice
What we behold is censured by our eyes.
Where both deliberate, the love is slight:
Whoever loved that loved not at first sight?
Title: Hero and Leander
Author: Christopher “Kit” Marlowe (1564–93)
Background: Marlowe’s poem is a frisky tale of youthful tenacity and sensual love, the impassioned retelling of a much more ancient Greek myth of tragic, star-crossed lovers. In Marlowe’s story Hero and Leander are two impossibly beautiful young people living on opposite shores of a narrow sea who find themselves drawn together despite numerous obstacles. Hero is a beautiful acolyte of the goddess Venus who has sworn to remain a virgin; she lives in a tower on one shore. Leander, an equally beautiful man (Marlowe lingers lovingly on his physical charms), lived on the shore opposite her. But upon catching sight of Hero, Leander falls in love instantly. After some smooth talk, including the line that “the richest corn dies, if it not be reaped,�
�� Hero decides to abandon her vow of chastity, having fallen in love with him, too. She invites Leander to come to her room under cover of night. That evening the intrepid Leander swims across the sea to meet Hero in her tower, only to be captured midway by a lovestruck Neptune. Leander nearly drowns but is released and finally arrives at her door, stark naked and dripping wet. Hero lets him in, and they make love. In the Greek myth, the couple dies at the end, but Marlowe himself died before he finished the poem, leaving his imagined duo very much in the delirious throes of love. Five years after Marlowe’s death, his friend George Chapman finished the poem, albeit in a more formal and considerably less sensual style than Marlowe’s. It was finally published in 1598.
Go, soul, the body’s guest,
Upon a thankless errand;
Fear not to touch the best;
The truth shall be thy warrant.
Go, since I needs must die,
And give the world the lie.
The World of All Souls Page 50