Readthrough: The Player's Boy, Chapters 9-12
Thank you very much to lilliburlero for giving me the opportunity to guest-post this week -- the first two TPB recaps were fantastic and it's an honour to follow in her footsteps!
First chapter title this week is from Merry Wives. The chapter starts with a time-swoop, skipping over all Nicholas's earliest interactions with Will apart from those first meetings in Southampton's household. Will comes to Titchfield, in 'A Poor Player' (Chapter 8), in September: the first page of Chapter 9 takes us from September to Christmas, and the second page from Christmas to May. This is miles distant from the tiny, detailed canvases of the modern Marlows, where September-to-Christmas (a term) would constitute one whole book. How are you finding the difference in timescale and scope, now we're further into the book and the march of time has begun? I think it adds a dimension -- it lets Forest explore the themes she loves on a bigger scale -- but is much lost? There is, at least, a lot of space to fill: if anybody has itchy fic-writing fingers, I think the September-to-May adjustment period needs some stories. Nicholas continues to be adaptable and brave: 'Like the rest of them, Nicholas felt perpetually weary, cold, discouraged: since he was one of them, he put up with these things as best he could and, like them, asserted he was sure their luck must change.' I liked lilliburlero's suggestion that Nicholas is in the picaresque tradition; I think that for me, he inhabits a sort of shifting space, where he becomes conveniently less-realist and less-human (and more picaresque) whenever necessary for plot purposes, but then that aspect is blended with AF's hyper-acute -- and much more realist -- observation of humanness in some other scenes. More of this later!
In London. 'He can sleep in your chamber tonight, Master Shakspere, and tomorrow I'll put a bed in one of the attics.' -- more careful notation of who'll be sleeping where, even though Marlowe is out of the picture. Is this what Forest had to put in to get the largely-homosocial, periodically-definitely-queer book published? Guesses welcome. I really like the sense that AF creates of how Nicholas's education has shaped his thought: just as in previous chapters he's reached for classical examples -- a beautiful woman must be Helen; enemies must be Hector and Achilles -- Chapter 9 sees 'To make a book of them? Like Ovid?' And Will, like Kit Marlowe, is straightforward about the fact that literature has a monetary function: 'I wrote them as a get-penny'. It's not that TPB and TP&TR don't value, idealise and romanticise literature and words, because in a lot of ways they do, but AF holds that dimension in constant balance with their financial aspects. She sets up the two sides of the deal right away, at the very beginning, when Nicholas first recites Tamburlaine to save his family's house and it is so enthralling that his brother keeps on reading after the wager's complete. But that balance of ideas never goes away and she begins to bring it out more distinctly in today's chapters, with Will and Richard Burbage bargaining about the arrangements for Will's membership of the Company and the purchase of his plays even as Nicholas reads the verses from Lucrece that will leave him 'bemused, gorged, reeling word-drunk' (which bit do we think it was?).
Any thoughts on Will's 'wretched memory for faces', by the way? Is it a trait AF simply chose to assign to him, do we think? Clinical prosopagnosia, or not? I like to believe that his head is busy with words, and so he doesn't devote much brain space to visual memory, but YMMV. Any first reactions to Richard Burbage? His frankness seems appealing. But the rumour about the moment of Marlowe's death, innocently repeated in front of Nicholas, is a bitter moment when we've seen what really happened. Burbage 'truly' isn't hinting that Nicholas is Will's son. Or so he says. Will can't immediately remember the age of his own son, which might be natural enough when he's been on the road so long?
Will Shakspere: stealth Ricardian. I think this is sort of wildly ridiculous but also fun. Anyone else? I do like it, in a way: for the sense it gives of how frangible different histories (whether oral or written) can be. I like AF's sheer nerve in adumbrating the idea of a totally different Shakespeare-authored portrait of 'Crookback' than the one that has actually come down to us, and I think this openness, the sense of narrative possibilities not quite shut down, is reminiscent of Hilary Mantel (who as I mentioned in a previous post's comments, is the historical novelist par extraordinaire of the past 50 or so years). It's not Forest's 'thing' in the same way, but anticipating this move towards an un-banal, un-determinist style of historical fiction is part of what makes her so creative and effective. And Will's 'moment', reacting to Hola, ye pampered jades of Asia -- is he intimidated by Marlowe's 'mighty line', or thinking he can certainly overgo that if he keeps at it, or is it just echoing in his head? -- once again reminds me that I find virtually every instant Will is on the page fascinating and worthy of scrutiny.
The latter part of this long chapter is largely interested in Nicholas's learning of the craft. I've read a lot of boy player novels, and this (taking TPB and TP&TR as one book) is the only one that really pays sustained attention to the work of the actor. It's usually of much less interest relative to other plot elements -- emotional arcs, intrigue, etc. -- and the boy heroes are generally fairly uncomfortable with playing female parts. AF is unusual in portraying dedication and a long, specialised, emotionally engaging training. Of course she takes her artists fairly seriously in the 'modern Marlows' books too, but they are only able to do their thing now and then, apart from Lawrie's holiday practising with make up, personal imaginings of how she might play things, &c. The societal differences allowing for children to work at much younger ages offer AF a chance to write full-time professional children, and she does it well. The homosocial world of the theatre is compared to that of the grammar initially -- Nicholas is ignored by the other boys like a new schoolboy -- but my impression is that it's, in general, more humane: Nicholas seems to get a fair bit of credit just for doing his best, which would hardly have been the case with Master Stockwood.
Chapter 10: 'The Youngest of that Name' is from Romeo and Juliet, and the chapter begins with a reunion for Nicholas and Humfrey, during which Humfrey's account of the Danvers' brothers' killing of their neighbour provides some welcome material for Will, apparently mid-composition of R&J. Of course it would be impossible for Forest to do all the chapter titles like this, but it's fantastic when she can rise to such heights of deftness. Also, we have some clever narrative work going on all at the same time here: even though Forest is working with a timeframe that is so much bigger overall, the woman knows how to handle a passage. It is simply wonderful to see how, on the second page of this chapter, she interweaves foreshadowing of the major themes that will unfold through the rest of the entire arc of the whole double-book (TPB and TP&TR) via Nicholas's relatively naive claim that Lord Southampton had to help Danvers brothers to escape, set against Will's caution; alongside that, she harks back to the rumour-version of Kit Marlowe's death related by Burbage by giving us two different stories about what happened to the Danvers' victim. Lest we think this is a heroic and exciting account of nice Lord Southampton Helping His Friends, let us not forget, Forest quietly reminds us, that the story of a death isn't necessarily what a death was like: that you can be sitting on a horse hours afterwards, shivering. And this is all on top of the Romeo and Juliet material. I know some people in trennels have mentioned wanting to discuss Forest's writerly craft: I'm all for it. Women writers in particular don't get enough of this sort of detailed attention, and with AF it's nearly always rewarding to zero in on the technique of a passage.
Another quick movement of time. We're making fast progress. Think of Geoffrey writing in the farm log -- Nicholas has been gone a long while. Southampton's disfavour introduces the topic of Essex, so that Will and Nicholas can discuss him. Will's feelings for Essex are fascinating. 'And once I'd have given -- no, perhaps not my right hand -- but certainly ten years of my life to have him -- what was your word? -- familiar with me.' Gosh, what to make of this? AF rather did away with the sonnets as direct evidence of Shakespearean (Shaksperean?) queerness in the origin-story she assigned to them, but this sentence reads as homosocial-world-sliding-into-queer-inflected, to me. Ten years of his life! The book is so slippery, moving from apparently asexual hero-worship to allusions which inherently reflect queer sexuality (Achilles and Patroclus) but are somewhat submerged or flattened by their context in a children's book. And then there's the weird stuff like pederastic!Marlowe. Maybe we'll have been able to figure some more of it out by the end of the readthrough.
Edmund, with his face 'variable as a reflection in water' and his ready charm. Could he be this era's Tim? Or ... more of a Lois? And Nicholas's possible status as Will's illegitimate son comes up again.
And so we come to Chapter 11, 'Well-Grac'd Actor', its tite from Richard II. And oh goodness, here are some gender issues. Whatever was said to Robin is too dirty for the page, otherwise surely it would just be written down (although it's also something applicable to any actor, not just the boys). Even Robin -- the most instinctively stage-inhabiting of the boys who play women, the one who doesn't exist outside his [mostly female] parts -- is insulted by whatever reference has been made to him as a less-than-totally-and-ideally-masculine body or being. Perhaps a catamite? Or perhaps AF picked something that's fallen completely out of use now but still wasn't allowed to put it in. It would be interesting to look through a lot of surviving Puritan pamphlets and try to find what she might have meant: unless one of you enterprising spirits has already done this? Obviously I'm not trying to suggest that in the real world, any particular gender presentation means that a homophobic or transphobic slur would be less likely to be damaging; but I think it is rather surprising that self-confessedly conservative AF is writing such a nuanced portrayal of gender issues, whereby female parts are taken absolutely seriously as craft requiring multi-year commitment, but there is also quite a complex and plausible spectrum of aggressions and microaggressions directed at those in this somewhat nonconformist social role.
Nicholas's growing understanding of and emotional investment in his acting is shown in small ways through the book; before he even gets the part of Juliet, we have him looking at the cast-off gown: 'Nicholas eyed it admiringly, though it looked more Robin Goffe's style than his'. A more usual authorial line in boy player books, if they even manage to get the boy playing female roles at all (sometimes they just opt for Puck to avoid all those Girl Problems) is to focus on discomfort around the wearing of female clothes, eagerness to move onto male roles, &c. Of course it's partly AF's long timescale that allows her to show us Nicholas with plenty of time to have adjusted to clothes that would, once, have felt strange and new -- but she's certainly the only author of a book like this that I know of, to allow her boys to have a sense of what their style in dresses looks like, even though it's eminently plausible that they would!
Nicholas has really jumped up in the playing world: 'it was the first time his playing would make or mar the play'. But this is one of his hardest battles, one of the first times that craft isn't going to be enough. He has to unfasten something inside, is what I take from AF here. She's juggling with real emotion and stage emotion: it's craft, craft, craft -- until it isn't. Until you need more. Nicholas can't act as well as he will act, eventually, without everything that he's had to learn, and is still learning, through honest toil. But the opening and unfurling of self, and the breathing-in of life to the play ... it makes me wonder (and I know we'll never know!) how AF linked it up to novels and the writing of novels, which are in a sense just the words, the 'dry bones'. They can't live like a play does.
And it's when Nicholas loses himself and sees a girl that he finds that courage. Another mistaken-gender moment, connecting Nicholas and Southampton? But Nicholas gives his heart to the Queen in a chapter titled from Richard II -- and not just any moment of that play, but a moment of Richard's degradation. The play with which Elizabeth I is said to have identified the rebellious circumstances of this time close to the end of her rein: of which, doubtless more in a few weeks when we move onto TP&TR.
Chapter 12: the chapter title is from The Winter's Tale, which wasn't written around this time, but the choice is a significant one all the same. The chapter starts with a summer tour. Hamnet joining the Company is suggested and poor Nicholas is put on the spot about what it's like to be a boy player. How do the conversations between the boys compare to those between Kingscote girls, do you think? For me, the Kingscote ones probably squeak into first place -- it isn't the boy player group that I love best about the historicals -- but I still think the dialogue is compelling and witty. I do love the fact that the famous Faustus story makes it in there, and I love the quotation-capping! If anyone would like to share favourite moments or lines, please do.
One of Forest's strengths has to be shock. The horrible moments when things turn from okay and normal to very definitely not. Nicholas finding out about Hamnet's fall, and everything that follows, is up there with other examples in the AF canon, I think. Edmund's selfishness strikes a jangling, bitter note, and the blind feeing of Nicholas says everything that needs to be said about Will's state of mind.
Nicholas gets that high compliment from Burbage, after the impromptu Juliet in Oxford. And once again it's the power of words, the power of dramatic poetry, carrying him and us along -- just as it made Geoffrey keep reading when he'd nearly lost everything. Nicholas learns that no matter how great everything else might be, theatre and costumes and all, you can do it on the words alone. And then another turn, like the turn in a sonnet. It's been foreshadowed all along, if you know your Winter's Tale or your biography of Shakespeare, but it strikes fresh every time. Nicholas's guilt and sorrow is convincingly bizarre, irrational -- 'You must ask my father and Lawrence to look after you--' That's an impulse of charity, even if it comes from guilt, manifesting in the magical thinking of grief. And the last sentence, I think, is perfect, so I won't even quote it: I'm sure it sticks in many of your heads, as it does in mine.
***
A long summary of some PACKED chapters covering masses of time, professional formation, maturation, and much else besides. So that is more than enough from me -- over to you!
First chapter title this week is from Merry Wives. The chapter starts with a time-swoop, skipping over all Nicholas's earliest interactions with Will apart from those first meetings in Southampton's household. Will comes to Titchfield, in 'A Poor Player' (Chapter 8), in September: the first page of Chapter 9 takes us from September to Christmas, and the second page from Christmas to May. This is miles distant from the tiny, detailed canvases of the modern Marlows, where September-to-Christmas (a term) would constitute one whole book. How are you finding the difference in timescale and scope, now we're further into the book and the march of time has begun? I think it adds a dimension -- it lets Forest explore the themes she loves on a bigger scale -- but is much lost? There is, at least, a lot of space to fill: if anybody has itchy fic-writing fingers, I think the September-to-May adjustment period needs some stories. Nicholas continues to be adaptable and brave: 'Like the rest of them, Nicholas felt perpetually weary, cold, discouraged: since he was one of them, he put up with these things as best he could and, like them, asserted he was sure their luck must change.' I liked lilliburlero's suggestion that Nicholas is in the picaresque tradition; I think that for me, he inhabits a sort of shifting space, where he becomes conveniently less-realist and less-human (and more picaresque) whenever necessary for plot purposes, but then that aspect is blended with AF's hyper-acute -- and much more realist -- observation of humanness in some other scenes. More of this later!
In London. 'He can sleep in your chamber tonight, Master Shakspere, and tomorrow I'll put a bed in one of the attics.' -- more careful notation of who'll be sleeping where, even though Marlowe is out of the picture. Is this what Forest had to put in to get the largely-homosocial, periodically-definitely-queer book published? Guesses welcome. I really like the sense that AF creates of how Nicholas's education has shaped his thought: just as in previous chapters he's reached for classical examples -- a beautiful woman must be Helen; enemies must be Hector and Achilles -- Chapter 9 sees 'To make a book of them? Like Ovid?' And Will, like Kit Marlowe, is straightforward about the fact that literature has a monetary function: 'I wrote them as a get-penny'. It's not that TPB and TP&TR don't value, idealise and romanticise literature and words, because in a lot of ways they do, but AF holds that dimension in constant balance with their financial aspects. She sets up the two sides of the deal right away, at the very beginning, when Nicholas first recites Tamburlaine to save his family's house and it is so enthralling that his brother keeps on reading after the wager's complete. But that balance of ideas never goes away and she begins to bring it out more distinctly in today's chapters, with Will and Richard Burbage bargaining about the arrangements for Will's membership of the Company and the purchase of his plays even as Nicholas reads the verses from Lucrece that will leave him 'bemused, gorged, reeling word-drunk' (which bit do we think it was?).
Any thoughts on Will's 'wretched memory for faces', by the way? Is it a trait AF simply chose to assign to him, do we think? Clinical prosopagnosia, or not? I like to believe that his head is busy with words, and so he doesn't devote much brain space to visual memory, but YMMV. Any first reactions to Richard Burbage? His frankness seems appealing. But the rumour about the moment of Marlowe's death, innocently repeated in front of Nicholas, is a bitter moment when we've seen what really happened. Burbage 'truly' isn't hinting that Nicholas is Will's son. Or so he says. Will can't immediately remember the age of his own son, which might be natural enough when he's been on the road so long?
Will Shakspere: stealth Ricardian. I think this is sort of wildly ridiculous but also fun. Anyone else? I do like it, in a way: for the sense it gives of how frangible different histories (whether oral or written) can be. I like AF's sheer nerve in adumbrating the idea of a totally different Shakespeare-authored portrait of 'Crookback' than the one that has actually come down to us, and I think this openness, the sense of narrative possibilities not quite shut down, is reminiscent of Hilary Mantel (who as I mentioned in a previous post's comments, is the historical novelist par extraordinaire of the past 50 or so years). It's not Forest's 'thing' in the same way, but anticipating this move towards an un-banal, un-determinist style of historical fiction is part of what makes her so creative and effective. And Will's 'moment', reacting to Hola, ye pampered jades of Asia -- is he intimidated by Marlowe's 'mighty line', or thinking he can certainly overgo that if he keeps at it, or is it just echoing in his head? -- once again reminds me that I find virtually every instant Will is on the page fascinating and worthy of scrutiny.
The latter part of this long chapter is largely interested in Nicholas's learning of the craft. I've read a lot of boy player novels, and this (taking TPB and TP&TR as one book) is the only one that really pays sustained attention to the work of the actor. It's usually of much less interest relative to other plot elements -- emotional arcs, intrigue, etc. -- and the boy heroes are generally fairly uncomfortable with playing female parts. AF is unusual in portraying dedication and a long, specialised, emotionally engaging training. Of course she takes her artists fairly seriously in the 'modern Marlows' books too, but they are only able to do their thing now and then, apart from Lawrie's holiday practising with make up, personal imaginings of how she might play things, &c. The societal differences allowing for children to work at much younger ages offer AF a chance to write full-time professional children, and she does it well. The homosocial world of the theatre is compared to that of the grammar initially -- Nicholas is ignored by the other boys like a new schoolboy -- but my impression is that it's, in general, more humane: Nicholas seems to get a fair bit of credit just for doing his best, which would hardly have been the case with Master Stockwood.
Chapter 10: 'The Youngest of that Name' is from Romeo and Juliet, and the chapter begins with a reunion for Nicholas and Humfrey, during which Humfrey's account of the Danvers' brothers' killing of their neighbour provides some welcome material for Will, apparently mid-composition of R&J. Of course it would be impossible for Forest to do all the chapter titles like this, but it's fantastic when she can rise to such heights of deftness. Also, we have some clever narrative work going on all at the same time here: even though Forest is working with a timeframe that is so much bigger overall, the woman knows how to handle a passage. It is simply wonderful to see how, on the second page of this chapter, she interweaves foreshadowing of the major themes that will unfold through the rest of the entire arc of the whole double-book (TPB and TP&TR) via Nicholas's relatively naive claim that Lord Southampton had to help Danvers brothers to escape, set against Will's caution; alongside that, she harks back to the rumour-version of Kit Marlowe's death related by Burbage by giving us two different stories about what happened to the Danvers' victim. Lest we think this is a heroic and exciting account of nice Lord Southampton Helping His Friends, let us not forget, Forest quietly reminds us, that the story of a death isn't necessarily what a death was like: that you can be sitting on a horse hours afterwards, shivering. And this is all on top of the Romeo and Juliet material. I know some people in trennels have mentioned wanting to discuss Forest's writerly craft: I'm all for it. Women writers in particular don't get enough of this sort of detailed attention, and with AF it's nearly always rewarding to zero in on the technique of a passage.
Another quick movement of time. We're making fast progress. Think of Geoffrey writing in the farm log -- Nicholas has been gone a long while. Southampton's disfavour introduces the topic of Essex, so that Will and Nicholas can discuss him. Will's feelings for Essex are fascinating. 'And once I'd have given -- no, perhaps not my right hand -- but certainly ten years of my life to have him -- what was your word? -- familiar with me.' Gosh, what to make of this? AF rather did away with the sonnets as direct evidence of Shakespearean (Shaksperean?) queerness in the origin-story she assigned to them, but this sentence reads as homosocial-world-sliding-into-queer-inflected, to me. Ten years of his life! The book is so slippery, moving from apparently asexual hero-worship to allusions which inherently reflect queer sexuality (Achilles and Patroclus) but are somewhat submerged or flattened by their context in a children's book. And then there's the weird stuff like pederastic!Marlowe. Maybe we'll have been able to figure some more of it out by the end of the readthrough.
Edmund, with his face 'variable as a reflection in water' and his ready charm. Could he be this era's Tim? Or ... more of a Lois? And Nicholas's possible status as Will's illegitimate son comes up again.
And so we come to Chapter 11, 'Well-Grac'd Actor', its tite from Richard II. And oh goodness, here are some gender issues. Whatever was said to Robin is too dirty for the page, otherwise surely it would just be written down (although it's also something applicable to any actor, not just the boys). Even Robin -- the most instinctively stage-inhabiting of the boys who play women, the one who doesn't exist outside his [mostly female] parts -- is insulted by whatever reference has been made to him as a less-than-totally-and-ideally-masculine body or being. Perhaps a catamite? Or perhaps AF picked something that's fallen completely out of use now but still wasn't allowed to put it in. It would be interesting to look through a lot of surviving Puritan pamphlets and try to find what she might have meant: unless one of you enterprising spirits has already done this? Obviously I'm not trying to suggest that in the real world, any particular gender presentation means that a homophobic or transphobic slur would be less likely to be damaging; but I think it is rather surprising that self-confessedly conservative AF is writing such a nuanced portrayal of gender issues, whereby female parts are taken absolutely seriously as craft requiring multi-year commitment, but there is also quite a complex and plausible spectrum of aggressions and microaggressions directed at those in this somewhat nonconformist social role.
Nicholas's growing understanding of and emotional investment in his acting is shown in small ways through the book; before he even gets the part of Juliet, we have him looking at the cast-off gown: 'Nicholas eyed it admiringly, though it looked more Robin Goffe's style than his'. A more usual authorial line in boy player books, if they even manage to get the boy playing female roles at all (sometimes they just opt for Puck to avoid all those Girl Problems) is to focus on discomfort around the wearing of female clothes, eagerness to move onto male roles, &c. Of course it's partly AF's long timescale that allows her to show us Nicholas with plenty of time to have adjusted to clothes that would, once, have felt strange and new -- but she's certainly the only author of a book like this that I know of, to allow her boys to have a sense of what their style in dresses looks like, even though it's eminently plausible that they would!
Nicholas has really jumped up in the playing world: 'it was the first time his playing would make or mar the play'. But this is one of his hardest battles, one of the first times that craft isn't going to be enough. He has to unfasten something inside, is what I take from AF here. She's juggling with real emotion and stage emotion: it's craft, craft, craft -- until it isn't. Until you need more. Nicholas can't act as well as he will act, eventually, without everything that he's had to learn, and is still learning, through honest toil. But the opening and unfurling of self, and the breathing-in of life to the play ... it makes me wonder (and I know we'll never know!) how AF linked it up to novels and the writing of novels, which are in a sense just the words, the 'dry bones'. They can't live like a play does.
And it's when Nicholas loses himself and sees a girl that he finds that courage. Another mistaken-gender moment, connecting Nicholas and Southampton? But Nicholas gives his heart to the Queen in a chapter titled from Richard II -- and not just any moment of that play, but a moment of Richard's degradation. The play with which Elizabeth I is said to have identified the rebellious circumstances of this time close to the end of her rein: of which, doubtless more in a few weeks when we move onto TP&TR.
Chapter 12: the chapter title is from The Winter's Tale, which wasn't written around this time, but the choice is a significant one all the same. The chapter starts with a summer tour. Hamnet joining the Company is suggested and poor Nicholas is put on the spot about what it's like to be a boy player. How do the conversations between the boys compare to those between Kingscote girls, do you think? For me, the Kingscote ones probably squeak into first place -- it isn't the boy player group that I love best about the historicals -- but I still think the dialogue is compelling and witty. I do love the fact that the famous Faustus story makes it in there, and I love the quotation-capping! If anyone would like to share favourite moments or lines, please do.
One of Forest's strengths has to be shock. The horrible moments when things turn from okay and normal to very definitely not. Nicholas finding out about Hamnet's fall, and everything that follows, is up there with other examples in the AF canon, I think. Edmund's selfishness strikes a jangling, bitter note, and the blind feeing of Nicholas says everything that needs to be said about Will's state of mind.
Nicholas gets that high compliment from Burbage, after the impromptu Juliet in Oxford. And once again it's the power of words, the power of dramatic poetry, carrying him and us along -- just as it made Geoffrey keep reading when he'd nearly lost everything. Nicholas learns that no matter how great everything else might be, theatre and costumes and all, you can do it on the words alone. And then another turn, like the turn in a sonnet. It's been foreshadowed all along, if you know your Winter's Tale or your biography of Shakespeare, but it strikes fresh every time. Nicholas's guilt and sorrow is convincingly bizarre, irrational -- 'You must ask my father and Lawrence to look after you--' That's an impulse of charity, even if it comes from guilt, manifesting in the magical thinking of grief. And the last sentence, I think, is perfect, so I won't even quote it: I'm sure it sticks in many of your heads, as it does in mine.
***
A long summary of some PACKED chapters covering masses of time, professional formation, maturation, and much else besides. So that is more than enough from me -- over to you!