Seven Will Out: A Renaissance Revel (26 page)

“Elizabeth takes after her mother when it comes to having her say,” quipped Mary Tudor. “And, she takes after her in another way as well—a propensity to stealing other people’s thunder.” It occurred to me that as the daughter of Katharine of Aragon, Mary ought to know about the stolen thunder. “Really, Elizabeth! Let Mary Grey tell her own tale, in her own way,” Mary Tudor continued.

“I was just going to take exception to her comment about me,” Elizabeth said. “The insinuation that the standards I set for my ladies were unrealistic is quite uncalled for. I mean, really—a little sexual tension never hurt anyone.”

“Elizabeth takes after her mother when it comes to her philosophy on human relations as well,” said Mary, Queen of Scots.

“I’ve never had much patience when it comes to sexual tension,” I confessed.

“Neither have I,” admitted Mary, Queen of Scots, perhaps unnecessarily. I wondered briefly what the Renaissance equivalent of
hot pants
was;
farthingales afire
came to mind.

“I also have no patience when it comes to having secrets revealed,” I continued. “I want to hear the rest of Mary’s tale!”

“Thank you, Dolly,” Jane interjected. “Now, Elizabeth, please let my sister have her say.” This time it was Jane who was rubbing Mary’s shoulders, getting her ready for the next round. Mary went in gamely.

“My second play,” she continued, “involved the hypocrisy of someone who held others to a strict standard of sexual conduct while being far from beyond reproach oneself.”

Elizabeth bridled, but remembering, perhaps, her farthingale of iron, said nothing. I could tell it pained her though; her face got redder and redder.

“‘Hail, virgin, if you be, as those cheek-roses proclaim you are no less,’” I said, bringing a little bit of the Bard into the conversation, a bit cheekily, I must confess.

Elizabeth lunged as if to box me on the ear, but in reaching down to the floor to do so, lost her balance, and landed on her bottom beside me. Mary Grey, standing now, was just tall enough to look down on both of us. She got between us and held us apart from each other at arm’s length, going from protagonist to referee in an instant. The feeling of power, one she’d had so little experience with, seemed to do her a world of good.

“Elizabeth, control yourself! Remember your farthingale pledge. This is no time to go backward in your efforts at being kinder and more salacious.”

“You mean solicitous, surely, Mary. And while I may have pledged to try to be more solicitous, I certainly never pledged to be downright servile. I think Dolly owes me an apology.”

“I do not agree, Elizabeth,” said Mary, bringing Elizabeth to a state of complexion that made it pretty much impossible to tell her skin from her trademark red hair. “Dolly was not making a comment about you, Elizabeth. She was simply quoting
from that second play of mine,
Measure for Measure
. Weren’t you, Dolly?” said Mary sweetly, turning to me.

“
So Love
’
s Labour’s Lost
is yours, and
Measure for Measure
is, Mary, as well?”

“Correct,” Mary confirmed. “And both must have turned out to be quite well-loved and familiar plays, for you to have identified and quoted them so easily. Is it so, Dolly?”

“Two of my favorites,” I said, stretching the truth more than a little bit in what I trusted was a good cause.

“And the favorites of others as well? Of others,” Mary asked hopefully, “who were inspired by them to write beautiful songs, like those that were inspired by Margaret’s plays? Please, Dolly, tell me it is so!”

Jane and Catherine, in serious big-sister mode, gave me the “you’d better not let her down, or you’ll have us to deal with” look. Fortunately, I am able to think fast in a crisis.

“Absolutely!” I said, finding the truth amenable to a little further stretching. “One of the favorite songs of my childhood, in fact, comes from
Love
’
s Labour
’
s Lost
. It is called
Jacquenetta
, after the sweet country girl in the play.”

“Sing it please, Dolly,” Mary requested.

I am also, fortunately, able to riff on a tune at short notice. And so I sang:
Ja-que-net-ta, Ja-que-net-ta—dormez vous? Dormez vous? Sonne le matina, sonne le matina, ding dong ding, ding dong ding
. My vocal range allowed me to do full justice to the old “Frere Jacque” tune, even if my French was not quite up to the lyrics.

“Your French, Dolly!” said Elizabeth. “We’d heard it was bad, and I can see why.”

“Farthingale pledge!” Mary Tudor called out.

“You carry a lovely tune though, Dolly,” Elizabeth said, gamely getting back on track.

“I am not so bothered by bad French,” said Mary, Queen of Scots, former resident of France. “One had to get used to it, living at the Scottish court.”

“I think it is a lovely song, and I am so glad that Jacquenetta has been immortalized in song. Dolly,” Mary said, hugging her sister Catherine. “Has Julietta from
Measure for Measure
been likewise immortalized?”

I wondered why Mary should be worried about one of the down-the-list supporting characters in the play. However, mine was not to question why, and I broke into song once more.

“
Julie, Julietta, do you love me? Julie, Julietta do you care?”
I sang, as Mary and Catherine clapped and smiled at my slightly adulterated cover of Bobby Sherman’s bubblegum classic.

“I am so glad about that!” Mary said. “The character of Julietta, you see, was my tribute to my sweet sister Catherine, her giving nature, and her trials and tribulations. There was a lot more of her presence in my original draft of the play than survives in the final version; the play was heavily edited, I’m afraid.”

“The same thing happened with the character I used to pay tribute to my sister Mary in one of
my
plays,” Catherine said. Her moue of disappointment was nothing compared to the drop of my jaw, as I awaited the explosion of yet another Tudor literary bombshell.

Chapter Seventy-One

Time for Catherine to Chime In

“Let’s cut right to the chase,” I suggested to Catherine, earning a beam of approval from the time-conscious Elizabeth. “Are your works part of the Shakespeare canon as well?”

“They are: one a drama and the other a comedy,” Catherine said.

Remembering the “though she be but little, she is fierce” line from
A Midsummer Night
’
s Dream
, I asked Catherine Grey a question.

“Is
A Midsummer Night
’
s Dream
the comedy currently in question? And is the character of Hermia based on your little—I mean younger—sister?”

“You’ve got the right idea but the wrong play,” Elizabeth commented, rising. “Surely even on short acquaintance you can tell that Catherine is hardly up to the subtlety of
Midsummer
, and Mary an unlikely Hermia. Where is your head, Dolly?”

“Elizabeth, really! I wish you’d be more decapitation-sensitive with your language when I am around,” said Mary, Queen of Scots.

“Ditto, Ditto!” said Jane Grey, grasping the hand of the Scottish queen approvingly.

“And should you really hold it against Dolly if her literary judgment is somewhat deficient in this case?” Margaret asked. “After all, the character of Hermia, being so notably, shall we say, petite, is an understandable red herring.”

“I don’t appreciate being called unsubtle, either, Elizabeth,” Catherine complained.

“And I can’t help but wonder if that
short acquaintance
crack was aimed at me,” Mary Grey said. Such was her ire and her simple dignity that she was actually able to stare down Elizabeth while only coming up as high as her chest.

Elizabeth seated herself again on her cushion. She looked so dejected by the group disapprobation that I felt sort of sorry for her. Putting my pride in my pocket over her doubts as to my intelligence, I tried to pour some oil on the rough waters.

“Ladies,” I began. “I made a wrong guess about which play was Catherine’s comedy, and I was called on it. It happens. Let’s not make much ado about nothing.”

My companions broke into laughter, and it was wonderful. A room full of royal women, mutually touched by violence, tragedy, imprisonment, and profound disappointment, were giggling like schoolgirls and, for another one of those magical moments, just being cousins together.

I cracked up as well, when I realized what they were laughing about.

Chapter Seventy-Two

Character Building and Gilding the Lily

Having established that
Much Ado about Nothing
was the work of Catherine Grey, my task was now to figure out which of the characters in the play was based on her sister Mary. Neither the confident, spiky, and clever Beatrice nor the circumspect Hero seemed to me to have much in common with Mary Grey. I put up my hands in a gesture of defeat.

“Which of the lovely ladies in
Much Ado
is your sister Mary in disguise, Catherine?”

“Neither, Dolly. I told you that the play was heavily edited. Well, the Mary character and her presence in the play were greatly abridged.”

“Not just abridged,” Mary Tudor pointed out.

“No, indeed,” said little Mary Grey. “My character was emasculated as well.”

“I think you mean quite the opposite, Mary dear,” Elizabeth said. “Emasculated means a man hasn’t got the use of his own balls.”

I thought about poor old Dudley for a moment and his relationship to his inamorata, the termagant Elizabeth. Mary Grey seemed to read my mind.

“You ought to know, Elizabeth,” she said. “About the grammar, I mean of course.” Mary was looking all innocence as she said it, but her arm reaching down to mine, her pinky linking victoriously with mine in an old-fashioned pinky promise hidden in the folds of our gowns, belied the guilelessness. “Do I perhaps mean masculated?”

“If that’s the word for having balls put on,” Catherine said, “then perhaps you do.”

“Mary’s tribute character in
Much Ado
is a male?” I said.

“Yes. But even so, one aspect of Mary’s personality survived the editorial depredations: the duality of the wily if misdirected mind at work behind the deceptively bumbling exterior.”

“That and one other thing,” said Elizabeth, looking like she was getting ready to ride herd over the unsuspecting Mary Grey. Fortunately Jane Grey, big sister extraordinaire, headed her off at the pass.

“That,” she said, “and Mary’s occasional
lapsus linguae
.”

My Latin was a little rusty, and I was embarrassed to admit it. Fortunately, Mary Grey was likewise challenged but much more humble.

“Translation, please, Jane; you know how musty my Latin is.”

“It is a reference, dear,” said the gentle and quick-thinking Jane, “to the robustness and creativity of your vocabulary.”

“Horse hockey,” Elizabeth said under her breath. The passive-aggression may have been deplorable on Elizabeth’s part, but it made a lightbulb go off in my head.

“Dogsberry!” I said aloud, naming one of the most engaging of the Shakespearian supporting characters.

The main action in
Much Ado
, of course, is about two sets of lovers. The supporting set, Beatrice and Benedick, get together after some Tracy-and-Hepburnesque verbal sparring and initial friction. The primary protagonists, the lovely Hero and the stalwart Claudio, likewise get together once Hero has been cleared of false accusations of easy virtue. Dogsberry, local law enforcer and man of many malapropisms, catalyzes some of the important action of the play.

“Even with their mutual, er, robust and creative vocabularies, it seems quite a leap from Mary Grey, English flower, to Dogsberry, Italian cop on the beat. Although, as the man himself says, ‘Comparisons are odorous.’”

“As I explained to you, Dolly,” Catherine said, “my comedy was heavily edited. My drama was as well.”

Chapter Seventy-Three

Confinement, Wine, and On Down the Line

“Your life and times certainly gave you plenty of material for drama, Catherine. You were, as a Tudor cousin, very arguably next in line to the throne of Elizabeth I; you were rumored at one point, in fact, to be named as heir. Then you clandestinely and without royal permission married Edward Seymour, first Earl of Hertford—an act that was treasonous. Within months of the wedding, the only witness to the ceremony was dead, your husband was abroad on a grand tour, the clergyman who performed your ceremony had very sensibly gone to ground, and you were heavily pregnant.”

“Yes, and I was desperate with it. I did not know where to turn for guidance on how to break the news to Elizabeth. I turned first for advice to Bess of Hardwick. The woman seemed to have the answer to every question.”

“Whether you asked her or not,” added Mary, Queen of Scots, no doubt basing her comment on her long acquaintance with the lady during her days as royal prisoner on the woman’s premises.

“Well, I did ask Bess, but she refused to help based on the fact that to do so would be foolish at best and treasonous at worst. She said that
she
wasn’t going to have the queen cross with
her
, just because
I
didn’t know when to keep
my
legs crossed.”

“That sounds like Bess. Perhaps she believed, as the Bard did, that ‘discretion is the better part of valor.’”

“Well, whatever she believed, she feared the queen’s wrath most frightfully,” Catherine said.

“Well, in Bess’s defense, as the Bard also reminds us, ‘Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.’”

“I think you will find that that was William Congreve, Dolly,” said Mary Tudor.

“Well, he was right about the fury part, anyway,” Catherine said. “And fearing that fury myself as well, I eventually turned to the person I felt would be best at appeasing the fury of my cousin Elizabeth.”

“Her beloved Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester,” I recalled.

“Yes, and he wasn’t best pleased to have a heavily pregnant and hysterical female enter his chamber in the dead of night, especially when she was a political as well as gestational time bomb. But at least, unlike Bess of Hardwick, he had the sense to immediately apprise me of what was going on,” Elizabeth said.