by Judith Cook
Of the women who were actually involved with our playwrights and actors we know hardly anything, which is scarcely surprising as the dramatists themselves merit little in the way of contemporary biographical information unless, like Marlowe, they ended up spectacularly dead. The exception is Ben Jonson, who was a great self-publicist but had little or nothing to say about the women in his life. We know that Shakespeare’s mother was considered sufficiently capable by her father to be left the family estate but Anne Hathaway will remain forever a shadowy figure, and it seems unlikely that there will ever be agreement as to the identity of the Dark Lady of the Sonnets. Of his daughters we know that Susannah was literate, respectable and married a doctor and that Judith was probably illiterate, not at all respectable, and married Quiney’s son, a marriage which proved anything but happy. Then there is poor Emma Ball (and her ironically named lovechild, Fortunatus), mistress first to Tarlton, then to Robert Greene who lived off her, then treated her so badly, as indeed he did the flaxen-haired wife he had married for money, while Jonson dismissed his wife, the mother of his children, as an honest shrew. Middleton had a strong-minded mother, older sisters and an educated wife from a good family but we know nothing more about her than that.
As for the actors, a ‘Mistress Burbage’ who might well have been Richard’s wife (although it cannot be proved) consulted Forman on both health and astrological matters in the 1590s, and we know something of Edward Alleyn’s wife Joan through their surviving correspondence. They were obviously fond of each other but the marriage was childless and when she died he swiftly took another, much younger wife, the daughter of the poet and divine, John Donne. We also know, apart from the anecdote featuring William the Conqueror and Richard III, that much like today good-looking and charismatic actors had no shortage of offers even from ‘respectable’ women. But apart from the Dark Lady, it is impossible to know how much any of their relationships influenced the writers concerned.
From various official records and lists of trades we know that there were extremely efficient women who, if their husbands were away for a considerable time or had left them widowed, were quite capable of running the family business. Also, from the Forman diaries it is clear that, at least throughout the 1590s, women from the merchant class or those married to successful artisans had a considerable amount of freedom and relative independence. But to be recorded in the histories of the late Elizabethan or early Jacobean age, unless you committed a really serious crime or were tried for witchcraft, you needed to be aristocratic, eccentric, notorious or all three for history to remember you. For instance Mary Herbert, a noted wit, was the Earl of Pembroke’s second wife (his first had been Catherine Grey, the sister of Lady Jane Grey) and Sir Philip Sidney’s sister. She and her brother were very close (he dedicated his Arcadia to her) and had been pupils of Dr Dee, inspiring in Mary a lasting interest in mathematics and the new sciences, so much so that she later had her own laboratory. Then there is the stunningly beautiful courtesan Venetia Stanley, who drove men mad and who expected any lover to lavish a fortune on her in the way of clothes and jewels, while for both high status and notoriety there is Frances Howard, Countess of Essex, best known for wrecking her marriage to the Earl by falling in love with King James’s favourite, James Carr, alongside whom she later stood trial for the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury.
Parents of girls born into comfortably off families had always been seen as marriage bargains, but from the commentators of the time it does seem that the position of such girls and women after James came to the throne worsened. They became, like the knighthoods and baronetcies, saleable commodities. Ambitious fathers rushed to take their pretty daughters to Court, wealthy businessmen sought out the newly ennobled, offering cash in exchange for status, all of which provided the dramatists with material for the new ‘city comedies’ and ‘satires’ which were proving so popular. Women with any position at Court easily acquired doubtful reputations. Commentators thundered against the morals of both sexes but most especially the women since, as is ever the case, double standards applied. Of the Queen’s own ladies the Earl of Worcester wrote: ‘the plotting and malice amongst them is such that I think envy hath tied an invisible snake about most of their necks to sting one another to death’. It was a place full of ‘persons betraying and betrayed’. They, too, provided role models for a new wave of writing.
However, for those at the bottom of the heap, life was hard indeed. At the turn of the century the average wage was about seven pence a day in old money, even less for agricultural labourers and the unskilled. Wage rates were set by the justices, and employers who paid more could actually be sent to prison; thus a significant proportion of the population lived below the poverty line and, as always in such circumstances, some women turned to prostitution, especially those who through no fault of their own found themselves unemployed and penniless; the Jacobean Court attracted pimps and procuresses in droves, only too eager to run professional operations in this new and merciless commercial world. Marston in his play The Dutch Courtesan presents just such a character in the Mistress of the Brothel. During a discussion on various types of city trade and who is presently making the most money, she points out that in strictly financial terms hers is the most soundly based trade of all as there is always a demand for ‘such divine virtues as virginity, modesty and such rare gems’, which she now sells ‘not like a petty chapman, by retail, but like a great merchant, by wholesale’. Outside the orbit of such professionals, there were the hundreds of freelancers who operated like Dr Forman’s ‘Julia in Seething Lane’, possibly taking clients home, more often accommodating them up against a wall in an alley. Child prostitution too was rife and there was little attempt at concealment. The young rake, Sir Pexall Brockas, is said to have ‘owned a young mignon . . . whom he had entertained and abused since she was twelve years old’.
Women before or since have rarely had a worse press. Misogynists and moralists had a field day, among them the King himself, whose general distaste for the female sex led him to order the clergy ‘to inveigh vehemently against the insolency of our women’. Joseph Swetnam in his cumbersomely entitled The Arraignment of Lewd, Idle, Forward and Unconstant Women: Or the Vanity of Them: Choose you Whether writes: ‘Moses describeth a woman thus: “At the first beginning a woman was made to be a helper unto man”, and so they are indeed: for she helpeth to spend and consume that which man painfully getteth.’ Later, after stating that most women are only after money, he continues: ‘. . . but if thy pockets grow empty, and thy revenues will not hold out longer to maintain her pomp and bravery, then she presently leaves to make much of thy person, and will not stick to say unto thee that she could have bestowed her love on such a one as would have maintained her like a woman.’
It is therefore hardly surprising that the female characters in the Jacobean plays, with few exceptions, fall into recognisable categories reflecting, the writers might have said, the general attitude towards women in the society of the day. Shakespeare is exceptional, his female characters throughout the canon of thirty-eight plays unique. From Queen Margaret, the tigress of the early Henry VI plays, through to the naive Miranda of The Tempest, taking in en route women as diverse as Kate, Juliet, Viola, Beatrice, Isabella, Lady Macbeth, Cressida, Desdemona, Cleopatra, Hermione and Paulina, Shakespeare’s women are very much themselves, no one of them is like another and almost all, during the course of the action, are changed by the experiences they undergo during the course of the action. They are real people who one feels had a life before the play began and, if they survive, one that continues after the story comes to an end, which is why actresses love to play them.
This might also be said of some of Middleton’s women and a handful of others, but on the whole the female roles in Jacobean theatre are stereotypical. Most sympathetic are the feisty like Doll, one of the rogues in Jonson’s The Alchemist, and the widow in Middleton’s A Trick to Catch the Old One, who successfully does just that. They are likeable because at least th
ey hold their own in a man’s world. Bess, in Heywood’s Fair Maid of the West, fearing that her lover has been captured by the Spaniards, fits out a ship and takes to the seas as captain of a privateer, a role accepted by the men under her command. Prior to this she has made an example of a swaggering rogue who made a pass at her by disguising herself as a young man and challenging him to a fight which she wins – after which she literally walks all over him. She is that rare thing, a successful woman, and by the end of the play her privateering has proved profitable and she has rescued her lover from Barbary pirates, tactfully avoiding the advances of their leader, Mullisheg. Many sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century women must have enjoyed seeing women portrayed on stage in such a way for in real life there were plenty of independent-minded women. Shakespeare’s Merry Wives are based firmly in the world of the Stratford in which he grew up; they are not creatures of fantasy.
But far more women are presented in drama as ever compliant, doing their duty by their fathers, brothers or husbands whatever sacrifice it might entail. In Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside Allwit’s wife, at his express order, agrees to become the mistress of filthy rich Sir Walter Whorehound and even bears him a child, Allwit content for the situation to continue indefinitely so long as Sir Walter keeps the money pouring in. Meanwhile in the same play, the character of Touchstone, having passed himself off as a doctor, steps in to rescue the bullied Lady Kix from the apparent infertility which is ruining her marriage as her husband, who can only inherit a fortune if he has an heir and blames her for not providing him with one, goes along with her being impregnated by ‘the doctor’ under cover of supposed medical treatment.
Then there is woman as victim: we first meet Vendice in The Revenger’s Tragedy cradling the skull of his fiancée who has been poisoned by the Duke after refusing to sleep with him, and as part of his strategy of revenge persuades his mother to procure his sister for that same Duke. Webster’s Duchess of Malfi (based on a real event in medieval Italy) is murdered simply for marrying outside her station in life. Having married the first time to please the family, on her husband’s death she marries her steward for love, thus bringing down on herself the wrath of her brother who considers she has dishonoured the family name and so must be disposed of. The Dutch courtesan in Marston’s play of that name is the mistress of a young and upwardly mobile Londoner to whom she has been totally faithful. He, however, decides he must make a good marriage if he wants to continue to live the life to which he has become accustomed and to that end hands her over to an unpleasant friend, a character who offers a study in sexual repression and sadism well ahead of its time. At the end of the play the unfortunate woman seeks out her original lover and physically attacks him for what he has exposed her to, as a result of which she is sent to prison for an indefinite time while he marries a pretty young woman with a large dowry. In Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness, an erring wife is treated by her husband (who considers he is acting from the best of motives) in such a way that she literally dies of shame.
Lastly there are the wicked, scheming, evil women: in Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Maid’s Tragedy, Amintor, at the suggestion of the King, has jilted, almost at the altar, the long-suffering Aspatia (yet another victim) in favour of his friend’s sister, Evadne. But on his wedding night his Evadne informs him that theirs will be a marriage in name only as she is the King’s mistress and that he has married her off so that any child she might bear the King will be born in wedlock. When the King demands to know if she will stay faithful to him she answers that she will – so long as no one even richer and more powerful than he is comes along. Eventually she is persuaded to murder him in a scene worthy of a handbook on strange sexual practices: when she ties him to the bed he assumes it is foreplay for some strange sex game.
However one of the most fascinating women in this genre and an exception to typecasting is Beatrice-Joanna in Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling. Having persuaded her steward (long in love with her) to murder her fiancé so that she can marry the man of her choice, she imagines he will be satisfied with being well paid for what he has done: ‘Belike his wants are greedy, and to such gold tastes like angels food’, she tells herself and the audience. Only after the deed is done does she discover that it is not money he wants but her and that she has no alternative but to give in. Faced then with the prospect of her new husband discovering on the wedding night that she is not a virgin, she embarks on yet more murders, finally having to face at the end of the play that she has indeed become, in the steward’s words ‘a woman dipped in blood’. The Changeling is a great play.
Faced with the confines of the society in which they lived and portrayed in popular entertainment in the way they were, it was a rare soul who not only broke the mould but is actually recorded as having done so. Yet two most unusual women did, in their different ways, manage it. Their lives overlap both the late Elizabethan and Jacobean ages and both are linked in their different ways to theatre and the playhouses. One, just possibly, provided the inspiration for Rosaline in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost, the other certainly inspired Middleton and Dekker’s play The Roaring Girl.
The first, Emilia Lanier née Bassano, came to light during the late Dr A.L. Rowse’s search for Shakespeare’s Dark Lady of the Sonnets and his conviction that he had finally found her brought down on his head both controversy and derision from a variety of academics during his lifetime, an argument that has raged ever since. It is difficult to understand how his suggestion should have created such animosity since the various previous contenders would appear to be considerably less likely.1 For a long time the prime favourite was a court lady, Mary Fitton, yet anyone visiting the home of the Newdigate family, Arbury Hall in Warwickshire, will see from the portrait of her which hangs in the picture gallery there that she bears no resemblance whatsoever to Shakespeare’s lady whose hair, we are told, was like ‘black wires’ and who had dark eyes and dun-coloured skin. Mary Fitton’s hair is red-gold and she has blue/grey eyes and a white complexion, though she was certainly promiscuous enough to fill the role, taking several lovers at Court before running off to Plymouth to live with a privateer. The Arbury portrait is quite eerie for it shows her wearing a magnificent brocade dress which appears to be crawling with spiders, beetles and other insects.
Dr Rowse ‘found’ Emilia in the Simon Forman manuscripts in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Forman, with whom Emilia had a brief affair, described her at the time of their liaison as having been ‘very brave’ (that is, dashing) ‘in her youth’. The Bassano family originated in Venice, coming to England towards the end of the reign of Henry VIII, and they must have been talented for they were soon Court musicians. Emilia was the daughter of Baptisto Bassano and his common-law wife Margaret Johnston, and the family lived in the parish of St Botolph in Bishopsgate alongside many theatre people with whom they must certainly have become acquainted. In 1576 Bassano died leaving two daughters, Angela and Emilia, who was only six. By 7 July 1586, when Margaret Johnston died, Angela had long been married to Joseph Holland, ‘gentleman’, and Emilia, just seventeen, was on her own.
Her father had left her £100 in his will, to be paid to her either at the age of twenty-one or when she married – but as she did not fancy any of the men who were offered for her, this meant a four-year wait. So what was there for an intelligent, ambitious girl with neither background nor money who did not want either to go into ordinary service or marry the first man who came along? Emilia was nothing if not pragmatic. A third option was that of the kept woman. She was aware she had undoubted gifts; her dark good looks were attractive to men, she was a talented musician in her own right and was fluent in Italian. But being a kept woman by any man who could afford her was not enough; her aim was to go to Court, which she did by finding employment in the household of the Countess of Kent. The countess took Emilia with her to Court where her undoubted musical ability brought her into the public eye, for she was sufficiently proficient at the virginals t
o play for the Queen, no mean practitioner herself.
It was then that she caught the eye of Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon, the Lord Chamberlain, who was old enough to be her grandfather but who was by that time (the early 1590s) the patron of Burbage’s company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. One of the reasons for believing that she might have been the Dark Lady is that if she was not acquainted with Shakespeare before she became involved with his patron, then she must certainly have met him after for he was also an actor and would have taken part in performances not only in the playhouse but at private parties given by the Lord Chamberlain and also, as we know from the records, at Court. But there is unlikely ever to be proof.
From what she later told Forman, the Lord Chamberlain was very generous to his young mistress, keeping her in great style and lavishing on her both jewels and money. She remained his mistress for some time, but all good things come to an end and in spite of the disparity in their ages she became pregnant by him, or claimed that she had. Much as Henry VIII had married off his own mistress, Mary Boleyn, to William Carey, his son Henry Carey arranged a marriage for Emilia with another court musician, Alfonso Lanier. He was three years younger than she was and neither pretended it was anything else but a marriage of convenience. Her son by Carey, baptised Henry after his father, later became a Court musician to Charles I. Forman describes her situation bluntly: ‘She was paramour to old Lord Hunsdon that was Lord Chamberlain and maintained by him in great pride; then, being with child, she was for colour married to a minstrel.’ She told Forman that she did not reckon much to the bargain that had been made for her.
It is hardly surprising therefore that, soon bored with her husband, she took lovers, but if Forman’s experience is anything to go by, she led them a merry dance. Over a period of weeks she consulted him on both medical and astrological matters. Regarding the latter she wanted to know if Alfonso, who somewhat surprisingly had gone off with the Earl of Essex on his venture to Cadiz, was likely to survive the voyage and return home. Forman told her that he would; also that it was unlikely that he would ever achieve much or bring her wealth or improved status (she had dreams of being a titled lady). It is hard to decide, from Forman’s account, which of them then made the first move but after some dalliance during visits to him in his consulting room, she invited him back to her place for supper. But he was to discover, when he eagerly took up her invitations, that even if the evening ended with her inviting him into her bed, he did not necessarily always have what he wanted. She would grant him much, take off her clothes and invite him to fondle any part of her body willingly ‘but then would not do it in any wise’. Finally, frustrated and cross, he had had enough and the affair ended. This certainly has overtones of the Dark Lady who was also, if the Sonnets are to be believed, a considerable sexual tease.