Seven Will Out: A Renaissance Revel (28 page)

As I perused the pages, familiar passages came and went: Polonius’s advice to Hamlet; Lear’s rant on the heath; Lady Mac’s OCD breakdown. Eventually I reached one passage that was such a favorite that I read it aloud.

I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.

“Dolly,” Jane said, “you read that with such feeling! Are you a Jewess, dear?”

“No,” I informed Jane; “Polish-American, and a proud Catholic school survivor. One doesn’t have to be Jewish to appreciate this passage. Anyone who has ever felt marginalized might identify. And anyone who values justice and equality cannot help but be stirred by such a simply but movingly phrased speech on the subject. It is probably my favorite speech in the entire Shakespeare canon.”

“I am flattered at your estimation of my work, Dolly,” Jane said. “That speech is one part of my play that has survived
verbatim. You’ve read the words exactly as I wrote them. The rest of the play, of course, is something of another story.”

Chapter Seventy-Five

Doggy Style for a Little While

Upon my complimenting her work, Jane had gone from demure English flower to incandescence in a moment, and the change enhanced her resemblance to her redheaded cousin, Elizabeth. Such happiness on a usually serious countenance emboldened me to vent my fulminating curiosity in a joke.

“‘’Splain please, Lucy!’” I begged, feeling a little like Ricky Ricardo, flummoxed at redheaded vagaries.

“We’ve heard that before,” Elizabeth said, chuckling inordinately.

“Well, Elizabeth, that may be so, but I don’t think it’s very kind of you to laugh at my being out of the loop,” I said. Since everyone else was laughing as well, I had to confess that my feelings were getting ready to be a little bit hurt.

“We are not laughing at your puzzlement, Dolly,” Catherine said, being the first of the group to regain her composure. “We are laughing because you’ve reminded us of our old friend, Mistress Lucy.”

“Lucy? You mean—Lucille Ball?”

“That’s right, Dolly,” Mary Tudor said.

“Lucy was here with you ladies? Whatever did she visit you for, Mary?”

“She was a career advice case, Dolly. She was a very young woman when she came to see us, an all-around performing artist. She was wondering if she should specialize in comedy.”

“I remember some of Lucy’s roles when she was a beautiful young movie actress in the 1930s; drama, melodrama, comedy, musicals. She did specialize in comedy once she went over to
radio and television, though. And what a good decision that was!” I said.

“I am glad she took our advice as to her career,” Mary, Queen of Scots, said, looking pleased. “Such a talented comedienne; I did want to see her get on.”

“Permit me to ask, Dolly, if Mistress Lucy took another piece of advice that was offered to her while she was here,” Elizabeth requested.

“Ask away, Elizabeth! I’ll answer any question I know the answer to. Are you wanting to know what happened with Lucy and her husband, Ricky? I mean, Desi?”

“No, Dolly, that’s not what Elizabeth was curious about. Romantic decisions were our mothers’ department, not ours,” Mary Tudor reminded me.

“That’s right, of course,” I answered.

“What I want to know,” Elizabeth said, preening a bit before a mirror that had come to her hand, “is if Mistress Lucy took my advice as to the coloring of her hair. I suggested she adjust her shade of red so that it would be precisely the same shade as my own. I was wondering if she had done so. All she would say about it while she was here,” Elizabeth said, looking chagrined, “was that she would think about it.”

I answered that Lucy had indeed taken Elizabeth’s suggestion and then burst into laughter myself.

“What is so funny, Dolly?” Elizabeth asked.

“‘If you tickle me, do I not laugh?’” I said. “It tickled me, Elizabeth, to think that Lucy turned the tables on you like that. You have gone down in history as the monarch least likely to commit to anything; you drove the statesmen of your era mad
with your shilly-shallying. Leave it to Lucy, the
Vitametavegamin Girl
, to give you a taste of your own medicine!”

I got myself a heaping helping of Elizabeth’s medicine in short order. “When I smack you,” Elizabeth said, suiting the action to the word, “do you not sting?”

“Well,” I said, rubbing the ear that Elizabeth had boxed, “I can see now why Lucy once said that she was not funny so much as she was brave.”

Mary Grey had quietly gone and gotten a glass of wine; she reached up and handed it to Elizabeth, who quaffed it with salutary effect.

“My apologies, Dolly,” said Elizabeth, extending me a friendly hand. “My efforts at improvement do fall short on occasion.”

“Apology accepted, Elizabeth,” I said, extending my own hand to her. “No worries, I assure you. I understand completely. Old habits die hard.”

“Yes, you know what they say about teaching an old dog new tricks,” said Mary, Queen of Scots, provocatively.

“And I shall refrain from smacking my Scottish cousin as well, in spite of her making a bitch of herself with that dog comment.”

“No pun intended, surely, sister?” asked Mary Tudor.

“Since, as Dolly pointed out, being a conundrum is my trademark, I will leave you to wonder about that, sister dear.”

“I wish I could be mysterious and cunning,” said the sweet and uncomplicated Catherine. “It’s a shame that Elizabeth should have all the fun that way.”

“Not being a dog in the manger, are you, Catherine?” Elizabeth asked.

“Not calling my little sister a dog, are you, Elizabeth?” asked Jane, her flashing eyes indicating active big-sister mode.

“Don’t get your hackles up, Jane. We all know Elizabeth’s bark is worse than her bite,” said Mary Tudor with what would pass, on this occasion at least, as sisterly affection.

“‘Cry havoc, and let loose the dogs of war!’” I said, wanting to be in on the fun.

“I think this conversation is going to the dogs, ladies,” said Mary, Queen of Scots.

“A real dog’s dinner,” Margaret Douglas offered.

Yet again, I got to watch these legendary relatives, embattled in life, dissolve together into giggles at shared silliness. However, all good things must come to an end, just as every dog must have his day.

The incandescence that my earlier compliment to Jane had brought about had not lasted long; the girl was looking downright hangdog.

“Why so sad, Jane? I mean, really—
Merchant of Venice
—what a play it was!”

“Well, I feel like such a slacker; each of my sisters wrote more than one play,” Jane confessed.

My heart broke for the poor, sweet overachiever who felt that writing
Merchant of Venice
at the age of sixteen made her an also-ran. The other women present clearly felt the same. There were even tears in the eyes of Margaret Douglas, Mary Tudor, Mary, Queen of Scots, and Elizabeth, all of whom, I knew, had lived in the pressure cooker of having to grow up as Tudor-era prodigies. Jane had clearly struck a chord.

Catherine and Mary Grey each grasped one of Jane’s hands consolingly as we all set out to show
Merchant of Venice
, and Jane, more than a little love.

Chapter Seventy-Six

Hypocritically, Literally?

“Since Dolly shared that the Tickle Speech was her favorite from among the Shakespearian canon, I suppose I shall share that my own favorite comes from
Merchant
as well,” said Mary Tudor.

“Really?” said Jane. “You never told me that before.”

“Well, the subject never came up,” Mary Tudor said.

“Let’s hear it, then,” said Margaret Douglas, passing the Shakespeare
Folio
over to her royal cousin.

“I don’t need that,” Mary Tudor said, her own inner overachiever shining through. “I can recite the passage by heart.”

The quality of mercy is not strained;

It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven

Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest;

It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:

‘T is mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes

The throned monarch better than his crown:

His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,

The attribute to awe and majesty,

Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;

But mercy is above this sceptred sway;

It is enthronèd in the hearts of kings,

It is an attribute to God himself;

And earthly power doth then show likest God’s

When mercy seasons justice.

The assembled Tudors applauded Mary’s feeling rendition of the speech.

As for me, I got up and got myself another goblet of wine; I felt like some fortification was definitely in order. After all, I had just heard the woman known to time as Bloody Mary, maker of nearly three hundred martyrs by fire, and executioner of the speech’s author, discourse with eloquence and a straight face on the subject of mercy.

I searched for the right words to say, and it wasn’t easy to find them. My hope that one of Mary’s relatives would start off the commentary died pretty quickly; they all looked at me expectantly.

“Some speech!” was what I eventually settled on, although, after all the wine I had taken on thus far, it came out more like
thum thpeech
. It did at least thtart, I mean start, the conversational ball rolling.

“I know what you are thinking, Dolly,” Mary Tudor began. “Bloody Mary, discoursing on mercy; she has one hell of a nerve!”

“Downright pharisaical, one might even say,” Jane ventured, coming out swinging with some of the best vocabulary of the evening. I wasn’t quite sure if pharisaical was actually a word but figured that as one of Mary’s first victims, she ought to know what she was talking about.

“Tartruffery would not be too far off the mark,” Elizabeth said, adding some Moliere and one-upmanship to the mix.

“Brass balls, if you ask me,” Mary, Queen of Scots, added. I wondered briefly if her experience with kilts informed this comment at all.

“A veritable whited sepulcher, to quote the Shakespeare canon,” said Mary Grey.

“That was the Bible, dear. Matthew, chapter twenty-three,” said Margaret.

“A wolf in sheep’s clothing, then,” offered Catherine, her inner animal lover shining through.

I expected Mary Tudor, aka Bloody Mary, to look crushed at all this, but she didn’t. My next guess would have been that she would look defiant, in defense of her actions, but that was not the case either. She looked like the chief mourner at the funeral looks, when the deceased has passed on after a long illness; pale, yet composed; sad, but resigned.

“I am afraid,” the woman said with feeling, “that you have all got the wrong end of the stick.”

Chapter Seventy-Seven

Remorse, of Course

“I think I know what my cousin means,” said Mary, Queen of Scots, walking over to her and standing behind her with her hands firmly on her shoulders. The Scottish queen’s perspective on this whole issue would certainly have been unique. She herself was an executed martyr—but also, like Mary Tudor, a devout Catholic.

“It’s all about nature versus nurture, isn’t it?” asked the queen of Scots. “I let my loving emotional nature lead me away from my strict Catholic nurture, to my own detriment. My cousin here let her Catholic nurture lead her away from her loving emotional nature, to
her
detriment. It’s easy for others to judge us on this, after the fact, without having to make the decisions themselves.”

“So true!” said Mary Tudor. “I never knew,” she said to her Scottish cousin, “that anyone understood my dilemma so well.” Mary, Queen of Scots, bowed her head forward to nestle it against that of her cousin for just a moment. “Bloody” Mary Tudor relaxed her face into blissful serenity with the gesture.

Mary Tudor’s face, in repose from the torments of conscience, was well worth a look. Contemporary portraits of her show the rigid funereal face of a frustrated, spinsterish extremist. None of them capture the beauty the woman had when she could share with a kindred spirit the blessed relief of acceptance.

“I was the child of Katharine of Aragon, who upended a kingdom in defense of her Catholic religious tradition,” Mary Tudor began. “I was a grandchild of Ferdinand, Isabella, and the Spanish Inquisition. My Catholic position had the support of the papacy,
which I had been brought up to respect as the highest authority on the planet. Those forces were constant in my world.”

“As opposed to the other force in your world—specifically, your father, Henry VIII,” I said.

“The next highest authority in my life—my father—cast nurture and Catholic tradition to the winds and followed his emotional nature,” Mary continued. “We all know how that worked out; the hell of abandonment for my beloved mother and myself, and shame and total loss of credibility for him.”

“Six wives and a historic weight problem to boot,” I added.

“Such were my examples when it came to making the choice between the option of following my heart and my nature, or that of falling in with the stability of the religious tradition of those who nurtured me. I chose the latter. In the tempestuous times for religion that I lived in, that meant hard, life-and-death decisions, and many of them. Each and every one of them that went in favor of execution and death for religious dissenters went against my nature, none more so than that which sent my cousin, Jane, to meet her maker, in order to stabilize the kingdom in my native faith.”

Jane walked over to Mary Tudor and pressed her head against her cousin’s, as Mary, Queen of Scots, had done before. The two looked into each other’s eyes and smiled. It seemed, unusual for here, that no words were needed for this cousinly détente and coming to terms. The professor in me almost swooned at the historical significance of it, and the woman in me simply melted. After a brief silence, Mary Tudor spoke once again.