Dark Aemilia

by Sally O’Reilly

  ‘I have bedimm’d

  The noontide sun, call’d forth the mutinous winds,

  And ’twixt the green sea and the azured vault

  Set roaring war: to the dread rattling thunder

  Have I given fire, and rifted Jove’s stout oak

  With his own bolt; the strong-bas’d promontory

  Have I made shake and by the spurs pluck’d up

  The pine and cedar: graves at my command

  Have wak’d their sleepers, op’d, and let ’em forth

  By my so potent Art. But this rough magic

  I here abjure; and, when I have required

  Some heavenly music, which even now I do,

  To work mine end upon their senses that

  This airy charm is for, I’ll break my staff,

  Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,

  And deeper than did ever plummet sound

  I’ll drown my book.’

  The words are so clear and bright that my neck pricks at their sound, and I sit there with my box of foul papers and stare at the sorcerer’s wife in frank amazement.

  I want to speak, of Prospero and love and endings. I want to say – our love was insubstantial, but magical. Like Ariel. But I can’t. So I say, ‘You had the best of him. A family, and a life here, and a home together.’

  She stares at me. ‘The best of him?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What can you know of that? How can you presume to look into the minds or lives of others?’

  ‘I don’t presume to know anything, Mistress Shakespeare; you quite mistake me.’

  ‘No, Mistress Lanyer, you mistake me. Of your own life you may be the witness, though no one knows when you are true and when you play false.’

  ‘I am indeed the witness to it, mistress.’

  ‘Of the rest of us, you can know next to nothing. Don’t load us with your study, or your supposition. Do you hear me? Do you understand?’

  We sit in silence. I watch a log glow red then crumble to a spume of fine grey ash. After a while, it falls to pieces in a rain of crackling stars.

  Scene IV

  The Globe, London, April 1616

  Springtime, and the sky is streaked with fragile cloud. The meadows are white with lady smock and tender violets peer out from the hedgerow shade. Larks sing, cuckoos call, and a soft wind shakes the oaks which stand hard by the new-built Globe. The theatre is a splendid copy of its former self. But its roof is made from slate instead of thatch. God willing, this theatre will last longer than the old one.

  ‘It’s a fine thing,’ says Henry, squeezing my arm. ‘His work is born again.’

  I cannot speak, but squeeze his arm in return. I have not set foot in the theatre since the day that Tom Flood died. Yesterday Ann Shakespeare sent me word that Will is dead too. He breathed his last while he was sleeping.

  I am dressed in black. For Will would have his way, and this is his third present to me – a fine dress of ebony-coloured velvet. It was sent to me after I left Stratford, together with a caul of seed pearls. A single piece of paper was pinned to it, burned and charred so that at first the writing on it seemed illegible. Then I managed to make out two words: ‘Dark Aemilia’. Now, I am wearing it on a bright spring day in a world in which he does not exist.

  Henry persuaded me to come, full of pride for his dead father. He is wearing the Spanish doublet and the rapier is at his side. He is tall, and well-made, with thoughtful, shadowed eyes and a musician’s ear for poetry. I could not bear a tragedy, or a Roman rant, but the players are putting on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which I have never seen. A comedy for springtime, and for love, so Henry tells me, and the white flag that flutters over the theatre’s cupola confirms that there will be no blood today.

  We pass under the entrance, painted in myriad colours like the gateway to an ancient palace. Every detail of the old gate has been reproduced, even the likeness of Hercules with the world upon his shoulders. The world beyond the walls of the theatre is mutable and beyond our grasp. The world within is shaped and patterned for our understanding and diversion. We sit down in the gallery and Henry takes my hand. I look around at the pageant which surrounds me. The new pit is full to overflowing, and every seat on every tier of the gallery is taken. Those in the pit will find it hard to follow all the action, there is such a crowd of gallants seated upon the stage. The courtiers are rosetted and bombasted to the death, flaunting their warlike beards and girlish love-locks. The lesser folk are just as vivid in their cheaper finery, swarming together in a brawl of colour and vulgar show: yellow farthingales crushed by apple-women, stack-heels sinking in the mud. I wonder if the play-goers are wearing their finest clothing in Will’s honour, just as I have put on my widow’s gown.

  The seething crowd is chatting, munching, singing, dicing, gaming, smoking, and swigging small beer. There are law students, strumpets, apprentices and oyster-sellers. Choirboys, pickpockets, servant girls and foists. I see a blur of movement; but also a multitude of London faces, looming and vanishing in the mob. A pretty Romeo and his pale Juliet, arms twined together. A handsome Moor and his whispering, rat-faced Iago. A stout and jocular Falstaff, drinking from an ale-pot, while a young blade laughs at his side. A student, in a black cloak, frowning deep as Hamlet as he reads his book. The sun shimmers on every button and scarlet pustule, every scar and cross-stitched codpiece, every tooth-stump and curling smile. So that the scene is as vibrant as a palace portrait, preserved in oils and distemper.

  Here is Thomas Dekker, writing on his sleeve, head cocked to one side as if listening to the throng. Here is Moll Cutpurse, strumming her lute and singing out, full-throated. And see, there is my landlord Anthony Inchbald, propped high on one of the best seats, dressed in scarlet. Dogs run between the legs of the play-goers, snatching up the fallen chicken bones. The scent of tobacco smoke wafts into the balmy air. On the balcony above the stage, the musicians are playing. A nut-seller shouts for custom; a baby squeals; a drunk’s song rages and stops.

  And then I see them. A white-haired woman, overdressed in a tawny gown with a lace ruff. There is a younger woman next to her, with two little girls. They have black hair, wild and curly. The children are sitting side by side, so tight that they might be made of one flesh. I look closer. They are one flesh. It is Anne Flood, and Marie, and Anne’s grandchildren, the joined twins. Anne leans close to Marie and whispers something to her, and Marie throws her head back and laughs.

  I spring up, wanting to call to them, but Henry pulls me back into my seat. ‘Mother! Sit down, sit down…’

  Three trumpet calls blast out, to summon any latecomers. The musicians strike up a stately tune. Out comes Dick Burbage. He is head-to-toe in black: the only mortal here dressed as funereally as I am. His velvet cloak ripples behind him in the breeze. Behind him come two players. Oberon, in purple and cloth-of-gold, and his fair Titania in a gown of taffeta and toile d’atour. Their faces are painted white, their lips are scarlet, and the ostrich feathers in their jewelled crowns waft gently above their heads.

  The audience is silent. Kites wheel to and fro in the blue sky, wing-beats rapid, then still as they soar upon the breeze. A bear screams from the pit next door, and the sound of cheering follows. Henry is smiling with tears upon his cheeks.

  Burbage steps forward.

  Historical Note

  Dark Aemilia is a work of imagination, based on fact. I wanted to tell a story that was authentic and historically accurate. Equally importantly, I wanted to write about Shakespeare’s London as if I was there. If a time machine had been available, I would have used it.

  Historical fiction writers sometimes disagree about the extent to which people have changed over the centuries. It is certainly not accurate to suggest that a woman in the Elizabethan or Jacobean period would be ‘feminist’ in any sense that we recognise today. But the poetry that Aemilia Lanyer wrote shows her championing the cause of Eve, and drawing attention to the role of women in the Passion of Christ. Academics have re
ferred to her poetry as ‘proto-feminist’. So I felt I could work with that.

  However, I believe that some aspects of human nature remain constant. Disease and death were part of everyday life in the past, but parents were still traumatised by the death of a child. There is certainly evidence for this, which ranges from the inscriptions and tombs in churchyards to the poem Pearl, a fourteenth-century allegory about bereavement and religious faith. And who can forget that most harrowing scene in all of Shakespeare – King Lear’s lament over the body of Cordelia?

  The starting point for this novel was the life of a real woman. Aemilia Bassano (later Lanyer) was born in Bishopsgate in 1569 and buried in Clerkenwell in 1645. She became the mistress of Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon, in 1587. Six years later, she became pregnant and was married off to her cousin Alfonso, a recorder player in the Queen’s consort. Her son Henry, born in 1593, is presumed to be Hunsdon’s child.

  There is no evidence that Lanyer was the lover of William Shakespeare, but she is one of the candidates for the shadowy role of the Dark Lady, the object of the later sonnets (127–154). However, there is no proof; only theory, opinion and the reinterpretation of existing facts. (The historian A.L. Rowse was one of the first scholars to suggest that Lanyer might be Shakespeare’s muse.) In fact, there is no evidence that Shakespeare dedicated the sonnets to anyone at all, and many academics believe that the Fair Youth and the Dark Lady are symbolic figures.

  We do know that Lanyer was one of the first women in England to be a published poet, and the first to be published in a professional way, as men were. Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (Hail, God, King of the Jews) was printed by Valentine Simmes in 1611 and sold in Paul’s Churchyard (the bookselling quarter of London) by Richard Bonian. Lanyer dedicated her collection, in a rather flamboyant manner, to a host of distinguished and wealthy women, starting with Queen Anne, the wife of James I.

  Most of the surviving facts about Lanyer have been preserved in the notebooks of the physician and astrologer Simon Forman, who kept detailed accounts of his dealings with his clients. Forman was clearly fascinated by her, and hoped to seduce her. His notes indicate that, although he spent a night with her, she did not have sex with him. (Or ‘halek’, the word that Forman coined for sexual intercourse.)

  Surviving church and court records provide the other information: her birth, marriage, death, the births and deaths of family members and her setting-up of a school at St Giles-in-the-Fields (1617–19). There is also a record of a legal dispute about her rights to Alfonso Lanyer’s income after his death in 1613. We do not know if Lanyer’s father, Baptiste Bassano, was murdered, but court records show that there was an attempt on his life a few years before he died.

  There is no evidence that Lanyer wrote Macbeth, or any part of it. Forman does, however, mention that, on one of her visits to him, she asked for advice about conjuring demons. The current consensus is that Shakespeare sometimes worked with collaborators, including Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker.

  The dating of Shakespeare’s plays is an inexact science, and one of the themes of the novel is lost stories and knowledge and the frailty of the paper trail to the past. There are websites that give ‘exact’ dates for his plays, but academics are more circumspect. The Taming of the Shrew was probably written in 1590. Othello’s dates are very uncertain; the play could have been written and performed as early as 1600, or as late as 1604. The key issue with Macbeth is that academics now believe it was written after the Gunpowder Plot of November 1605, because it is agreed that there are references to the plot in the play. The date I have given in the novel is May 1606. There is no record of a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Globe after the death of Shakespeare in April 1616. But it is plausible that such a production might have taken place.

  One of the ‘lost works’ is the book of sonnets that Will has published in 1605 while he and Aemilia are estranged. The sonnets which have survived were not published until 1609, and they do not refer to the ‘Dark Lady’. The title of the publication was simply Shakespeare’s Sonnets, the publisher was G. Eld for T.T. and the seller was William Aipley. It is thought that the sonnets could have been written as early as the 1590s, and that they would have been circulated in handwritten form, as suggested in the novel. Although the 1609 collection bears the promise ‘Never before imprinted’, as was customary at the time, it is plausible that some of the sonnets had been published before, and this was the first imprint of the whole collection.

  At the end of the novel, Aemilia tells Ann Shakespeare that Will’s papers will be safe with her in Pudding Lane. As readers will know, fifty years after this conversation takes place, the City of London was devastated by the Great Fire of 1666. I liked the idea of suggesting that Will’s spoiled pages were somewhere in that huge conflagration. Just as an afterword, it is interesting to note that the Great Fire took several days to take hold, and the booksellers and printers of Paul’s Churchyard and Paternoster Square stored their books, chap-books and pamphlets in St Paul’s Cathedral for safekeeping. The building was stacked to the roof with paper. Three days later, it went up in smoke.

  Historical Characters

  William Shakespeare (1564–1616)

  William Shakespeare was born and brought up in Stratford-upon-Avon. At eighteen, he married Ann Hathaway and they had three children: Susanna, and twins H amnet and Judith. Few records of Shakespeare’s life have survived. There is evidence, however, that Shakespeare worked in London as an actor and playwright in the late 1580s and early 1590s. (The first reference to him in London was made in the pamphlet Greene’s Groats-worth of Wit published posthumously by his rival Robert Greene.)

  Shakespeare became an actor, writer, and part-owner of the theatrical company the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, which became known as the King’s Men after James I came to the throne. Most of his surviving plays were written between 1589 and 1613. He is believed to have retired to Stratford around 1613 at the age of forty-nine, and he died there three years later. There is no evidence that Shakespeare was seriously injured in the Globe fire of 1613, but the theory has been put forward by Graham Philips and Martin Keatman in The Shakespeare Conspiracy.

  Elizabeth I (1533–1603)

  Elizabeth I was the last monarch of the Tudor dynasty, becoming Queen in 1558. The challenge with Elizabeth is that so much is known about her, and there have been so many fictional portrayals, that it is hard to find a new way of presenting her. I focus on her fragility and desperation at the end of her life.

  The daughter of Henry VIII, she was born a princess, but was declared illegitimate after the execution of her mother Anne Boleyn. She had survived intense competition for the throne, and was imprisoned in the Tower for almost a year during her sister Mary’s reign, on suspicion of supporting Protestant rebels.

  One of her first acts as monarch was the establishment of an English Protestant Church, of which she became the Supreme Governor. This Elizabethan Religious Settlement later evolved into today’s Church of England. It was a compromise between Catholicism and Protestantism.

  Elizabeth I never married and became famous for the shrewd deployment of her virginity. In the novel, I make her the mother of Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex. The idea that Essex is not her lover but her secret, illegimate son links the themes of the novel together. It is a possible explanation for Essex’s arrogance, his unreasonable behaviour and Elizabeth’s inconsolable grief after his execution. There is of course no evidence for this, though there has been speculation that she may have had illegitimate children.

  Alfonso Lanyer (1570s?–1613)

  Most of what we know about Alfonso is taken from the notebooks of Simon Forman, and is based on his consultations with Aemilia. These state that Alfonso was her cousin and that he was a Queen’s musician. Church records also show Alfonso and Aemilia were married in St Botolph’s Church, Aldgate, on 18 October 1592.

  It is known that the Lanyers were a French family, and that Alfonso was a profligate character. Aemilia to
ld Simon Forman that he spent her dowry within a year. Even so, he does appear to have helped her in her quest for publication: the frontispiece of Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum includes a reference to ‘Captain Alfonso Lanyer Servant to the King’s Majestie’. We don’t know if Alfonso actively assisted his wife, but his status helped her assert her respectability.

  Alfonso Lanyer died in 1613. The cause is unknown.

  Henry Lanyer (1593–1633)

  Henry was the son of Aemilia Lanyer. His father is assumed to be Lord Hunsdon. Henry became a recorder player at the court, and died in 1633. Aemilia then bought up his two children.

  There is no historical evidence that his father was William Shakespeare.

  Baptiste Bassano (1520?–76)

  Aemilia’s father Baptiste is another obscure historical figure, and he only appears in the novel in Aemilia’s memories of her childhood. As he is pivotal to the plot I think it is important to include a historical note which separates fact from fiction.

  Baptiste came to England from Venice in the 1530s, and was certainly at Henry VIII’s court in 1540, playing the sackbut (a kind of trombone) in the service of Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford. He was the youngest of six brothers, who were originally from the town of Bassano del Grappa in the Veneto region. All of the brothers came to England, and only the eldest, Jacamo, returned to Venice. Henry VIII gave the brothers the right to live in apartments in the Charterhouse, a Carthusian monastery he had dissolved in 1537.

  In 1563, conspirators Henry Dingley, Mark Anthony and a number of others were prosecuted for Bassano’s attempted murder, and were sentenced to have their ears cut off and to be whipped, pilloried and banished for plotting to kill him. Nothing further is known about the incident. The murder that Aemilia witnesses is a fictional event, however; we do not know how Baptiste really died. In the novel, Margaret keeps it a secret, fearing for the rest of her family.