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

[mrs_redboots]

I'm inclined to think that a lot of the work can be read on several levels - friendship, homosexual relations, whatever. Forest is writing, largely for children, in an age when homosexuality was still a criminal offence, and of an age in which women, except the Queen, were largely invisible. So one can read it either way, there are deliberate vaguenesses.

[oursin]

Yes, homosexual activity was still a criminal offence up to 1967 (and in quite a lot of circumstances remained so after then because of narrow interpretations of 'in private' and, of course, the very high gay age of consent).

However, by the mid-60s you are getting more and more open debate on whether it should be a crime, based on homophile campaigns going back (in the UK) at least to the 1890s and the works of J A Symonds, Edward Carpenter and Havelock Ellis. All of them leaning quite heavily on pointing out historical instances and societies which were, like the classical Greeks, much admired and not only didn't think male-male relationships were no big deal but the worthiest kind of love

[mrs_redboots]

Oh, indeed - "A bill called William", and all that. But most books aimed at what is now called a Young Adult audience had to make it clear that Nothing Improper Was Meant, even if it was.....

[highfantastical]

I think AF does work with ambiguities a lot -- and very effectively! -- not only in relation to sexual questions. (Not that you were necessarily implying that.) With respect to people's precise feelings for each other, often those can be very nuanced: Nicholas and Edmund, for instance. I don't mean that at all in a sense of 'is there any sexual aspect to either boy's feelings?', but that there is so much more involved! Jealousy, curiosity, security vs. insecurity, Edmund's superior social skill but Nicholas's greater importance to the Company as an up-and-coming skilled and trained boy player... There may also be some sexual element, on one or other side. But I think part of AF's skill lies in the fact that the interactions and relationships are almost invariably so multi-dimensional. On the other hand, there is strong textual evidence for some of the characters having same-sex sexual feelings; I don't think those moments are presented in a particularly ambiguous way. Nevertheless, the relationships still feel complicated and

Shakespeare and Richard

[ext_195770]

Amusing as it was, I thought it was a bridge too far actually to have the line from the city council archives brought in to Will's soul-searching over how he wrote Richard III. And I particularly like Burbage's tactless cheer that it'll all be stale in a month, and the fact that it's almost immediately proved false.

Re: Shakespeare and Richard

[ext_195770]

We're extremely good at bearing grudges in these parts (Cue for Treason which I've mentioned before, has Robert Cecil making an observation that a conspiracy which has been revealed contains "a fine list of North Country names."

You've also overlooked The Rising of The North of 1569-70 which lead to widespread reprisals and over 600 executions - ie, rather more than double the deaths of the Marian persecutions. That's only 24 years earlier than Shakespeare's visit to York, so plenty of people will have vivid memories of it.

Re: Shakespeare and Richard

[antfan]

I couldn't believe at all that Will would have scruples about Richard III - or would see him as anything other than copy. Mind you, I never believe that people can get so worked up about Richard now and they obviously do (preparing for an online lynching by Trennels Ricardians).

I do love that comment about the play soon being stale, though. It seems to me that Forest is having a little conspiratorial joke with the reader there - we all know better than you, Dick Burbage - and similarly I find it very amusing that a stagestruck Will basically wanted to be an actor first and foremost, and that the world's Greatest Playwright ended up writing almost accidentally. It's reminiscent of Renault and her references to that obscure Macedonian prince, and like Highfantastical says, kind of opens up possibilities in the readers' mind.

Can we talk about Hamnet?

[ext_195770]

That scene with Nicholas coming back from the stables holding the sixpence is the one which stuck with me from first reading to this. It's a brilliant moment of foreshadowing; one knows that there can be no good outcome, even if one's no idea of Shakespeare's family.

Re: Can we talk about Hamnet?

[ext_195770]

They were wonderful books to read as a child. I devoured historical fiction at that date, mainly Trease and Sutcliff but also things like Towers in the Mist and A Traveller in Time and then later things written for adults like Mist over Pendle and Alfred Duggan and, of course, Mary Renault and (equally of course) Hornblower and Georgette Heyer.

The Player's Boy and The Players and the Rebels seemed to have a level both of immediacy (real people) and periodicity (the shocking nature of grammar school violence, predominantly, but even more so the hours and actually having to talk Latin - obviously our grammar school only dated from 1908 or thereabouts, but the boys grammar in the same city was 16th century in foundation and would have been own cousin to the Colebridge one.)

Re: Can we talk about Hamnet?

[highfantastical]

I wish I had read them as a child. I never quite clicked with Sutcliff, but loved Hornblower and similar. Oddly (just a little odd considering the politics I've grown up to), one of my very favourite books as a much younger child was The Children of the New Forest! It worked on me so strongly that I've never quite been able to untangle the impact of Wrong but Wromantic from, ahem, ~what I think now~, meaning that I get cognitive dissonance when I try to discuss the English Civil War.

...possibly I was an unduly susceptible child. WOULD I NOW BE A CATHOLIC, if I'd been presented with complete works of AF.