Readthrough: The Player's Boy, Chapters 9-12

[highfantastical]

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!

Comments

" ... to get the largely-homosocial, periodically-definitely-queer book published ..."

[mheloyse]

It's worth noting that RMF was published in 1967, and The Player's Boy in 1970 - AF was inspired to write TPB in Shakespeare's quartercentenary year, 1964 - so in all probability, when AF wrote these scenes, homosexuality even between consenting adults was still a criminal offence. In this context, the laboured explanations of who's sleeping where are hardly surprising, even disregarding Nicholas's age.

Re: " ... to get the largely-homosocial, periodically-definitely-queer book published ..."

[highfantastical]

I'm surprised she is anything like as frank as she is about male-male desire, especially given the date of writing and publication.

Re: " ... to get the largely-homosocial, periodically-definitely-queer book published ..."

[mheloyse]

Yes - and she doesn't appear to have been a person who sought to present herself personally as outrageous or bohemian, or even particularly liberal - quite the opposite. I envy AF's ability as a writer to detach herself so thoroughly from the perspectives of her time; it's what enables the total immersion quality of her historical fiction.

Re: " ... to get the largely-homosocial, periodically-definitely-queer book published ..."

[jackmerlin]

Given that AF was a very traditional Catholic who believed that the rules of the Church should be set in stone for ever, and seemed to despise any idea of abandoning the bits one didn't agree with, she must have accepted, at least theoretically, that homosexual physical relationships were 'wrong'. And yet the way she writes about feelings in same sex relationships suggests otherwise

" How are you finding the difference in timescale and scope ...?"

[mheloyse]

My immediate thought is, how much better AF handles the difference in scope in the Players novels than she does in The Thursday Kidnapping (given that they were both intended to be single books) - and I think it's the extended story arc allowed by the lapses in time in the Players novels (which TTK lacks) that enables AF to make the Players novel(s) succeed.

TTK gives me the impression that AF is trying to cram far too much characterisation into a small space (the opposite of making a pint of ignorance fill a hogshead of knowledge, to borrow an analogy from PR) - had TTK been the only AF non-series fiction I'd read, I'd have felt she was struggling to make the transition - but the Players novels suggest to me that it's not word count that AF needs, but sufficient fictional time to play out a story arc.

(Apologies for straying slightly off-topic with TTK references - hoping we will have a read through of this one later!)

[edited for ridiculously-late-night typos - befuddled my inner clock by staying up last night to watch election

Juliet: beauty and emotion.

[jackmerlin]

I love the Juliet chapter - it's my favourite chapter so far. I like the fact that for the first time Nicholas can't do something easily and has to worry about it, and the reactions of the other players and Burbage's wife

Re: Juliet: beauty and emotion.

[learnsslowly]

I don't know how it would feel to be beautiful, but being plainer than average, I had, from the time I was quite a small girl, the background feeling that I had to be more helpful, pleasant, politer, good-tempered to make up for it. (At which I'm sure I failed.) Perhaps this explains why, despite myself, I imagine Ann as the least pretty of the modern day Marlows.
Even as an adult, I think there is an something of expectation that an ugly person has to "make up for it" in some way, or morally offends by failing to please the eye. The expectation is more or less from different people, of course, and the expression of it varies considerably too.

Re: Juliet: beauty and emotion.

[antfan]

Is it so much that Nicholas sees that he looks beautiful, though, or is it that sees he looks 100% convincingly somebody else? I think it's maybe the security he has that he's already so disguised - and won't look remotely like Nicholas Marlow - that frees him up to "be" Juliet.

Re: Juliet: beauty and emotion.

[ext_195770]

Yes; he looks convincingly like a young noblewoman, and that allows him to inhabit the role.

Re: Insulting Robin

[ext_195770]

The obvious taunt (which would cause that much trouble) would be to tie their patron into the homophobia; ie suggesting that they were the Lord Chamberlain's boys as opposed to the Lord Chamberlain's men.

It's interesting that a book/duology which is all about the power and majesty of language is also intimately concerned with all the numerous ways in which using the wrong language or not remaining silent can lead to trouble.

"What the apprentices said" also loops nicely back (or forward, given both the chronology and the publication order) into the material "deemed either treasonous or blasphemous" which Nicola would have liked to know

Though part of it is Forest's aristry; like Lawrie and the Regent's tortures, the reader/listener can imagine much worse things than one can say, especially than one can say in a way which is both period-appropriate without being incomprehensible ("It is a criminal libel to call a lawyer a daffy-down-dilly") and can get past a children's book publisher in the mid 1960s.

Re: Insulting Robin

[intrepid__fox]

"It's interesting, in the vague context of unspoken (possible) treason, that Edmund then seems to use the opportunity as a fairly callow attempt to seduce Nicholas"

Could you expand on this? Reread as I may, I can't see that in the scene at all, nor in any of the rest of the interactions between Nicholas and Edmund. But I've known the books almost inside out since my early teens, and have difficulty seeing them except through the squint of early adolescence. It's one of the reasons I'm finding this read through so particularly fascinating.

[coughingbear]

I love Nicholas's transformation scene too - the moment when he discovers that although the work is always necessary, he can be touched by the magic of the theatre too. It is where he belongs. And having had that experience he can draw on it again, even 'cold, in your breeches'.