Dark Aemilia (37 page)

Dark Aemilia
is a work of imagination, based on fact. I wanted to tell a story that was authentic and historically accurate. Equally importantly, I wanted to write about Shakespeare’s London as if I was there. If a time machine had been available, I would have used it.

Historical fiction writers sometimes disagree about the extent to which people have changed over the centuries. It is certainly not accurate to suggest that a woman in the Elizabethan or Jacobean period would be ‘feminist’ in any sense that we recognise today. But the poetry that Aemilia Lanyer wrote shows her championing the cause of Eve, and drawing attention to the role of women in the Passion of Christ. Academics have referred to her poetry as ‘proto-feminist’. So I felt I could work with that.

However, I believe that some aspects of human nature remain constant. Disease and death were part of everyday life in the past, but parents were still traumatised by the death of a child. There is certainly evidence for this, which ranges from the inscriptions and tombs in churchyards to the poem
Pearl
, a fourteenth-century allegory about bereavement and religious faith. And who can forget that most harrowing scene in all of Shakespeare – King Lear’s lament over the body of Cordelia?

The starting point for this novel was the life of a real woman. Aemilia Bassano (later Lanyer) was born in Bishopsgate in 1569 and buried in Clerkenwell in 1645. She became the mistress of Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon, in 1587. Six years later, she became pregnant and was married off to her cousin Alfonso, a recorder player in the Queen’s consort. Her son Henry, born in 1593, is presumed to be Hunsdon’s child.

There is no evidence that Lanyer was the lover of William Shakespeare, but she is one of the candidates for the shadowy role of the Dark Lady, the object of the later sonnets (127–154). However, there is no proof; only theory, opinion and the reinterpretation of existing facts. (The historian A.L. Rowse was one of the first scholars to suggest that Lanyer might be Shakespeare’s muse.) In fact, there is no evidence that Shakespeare dedicated the sonnets to anyone at all, and many academics believe that the Fair Youth and the Dark Lady are symbolic figures.

We do know that Lanyer was one of the first women in England to be a published poet, and the first to be published in a professional way, as men were.
Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum
(Hail, God, King of the Jews) was printed by Valentine Simmes in 1611 and sold in Paul’s Churchyard (the bookselling quarter of London) by Richard Bonian. Lanyer dedicated her collection, in a rather flamboyant manner, to a host of distinguished and wealthy women, starting with Queen Anne, the wife of James I.

Most of the surviving facts about Lanyer have been preserved in the notebooks of the physician and astrologer Simon Forman, who kept detailed accounts of his dealings with his clients. Forman was clearly fascinated by her, and hoped to seduce her. His notes indicate that, although he spent a night with her, she did not have sex with him. (Or ‘halek’, the word that Forman coined for sexual intercourse.)

Surviving church and court records provide the other information: her birth, marriage, death, the births and deaths of family members and her setting-up of a school at St Giles-in-the-Fields (1617–19). There is also a record of a legal dispute about her rights to Alfonso Lanyer’s income after his death in 1613. We do not know if Lanyer’s father, Baptiste Bassano, was murdered, but court records show that there was an attempt on his life a few years before he died.

There is no evidence that Lanyer wrote
Macbeth
, or any part of it. Forman does, however, mention that, on one of her visits to
him, she asked for advice about conjuring demons. The current consensus is that Shakespeare sometimes worked with collaborators, including Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker.

The dating of Shakespeare’s plays is an inexact science, and one of the themes of the novel is lost stories and knowledge and the frailty of the paper trail to the past. There are websites that give ‘exact’ dates for his plays, but academics are more circumspect.
The Taming of the Shrew
was probably written in 1590.
Othello
’s dates are very uncertain; the play could have been written and performed as early as 1600, or as late as 1604. The key issue with
Macbeth
is that academics now believe it was written after the Gunpowder Plot of November 1605, because it is agreed that there are references to the plot in the play. The date I have given in the novel is May 1606. There is no record of a performance of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
at the Globe after the death of Shakespeare in April 1616. But it is plausible that such a production might have taken place.

One of the ‘lost works’ is the book of sonnets that Will has published in 1605 while he and Aemilia are estranged. The sonnets which have survived were not published until 1609, and they do not refer to the ‘Dark Lady’. The title of the publication was simply
Shakespeare’s Sonnets,
the publisher was G. Eld for T.T. and the seller was William Aipley. It is thought that the sonnets could have been written as early as the 1590s, and that they would have been circulated in handwritten form, as suggested in the novel. Although the 1609 collection bears the promise ‘Never before imprinted’, as was customary at the time, it is plausible that some of the sonnets had been published before, and this was the first imprint of the whole collection.

At the end of the novel, Aemilia tells Ann Shakespeare that Will’s papers will be safe with her in Pudding Lane. As readers will know, fifty years after this conversation takes place, the City of London was devastated by the Great Fire of 1666. I liked the idea of suggesting that Will’s spoiled pages were somewhere in
that huge conflagration. Just as an afterword, it is interesting to note that the Great Fire took several days to take hold, and the booksellers and printers of Paul’s Churchyard and Paternoster Square stored their books, chap-books and pamphlets in St Paul’s Cathedral for safekeeping. The building was stacked to the roof with paper. Three days later, it went up in smoke.

William Shakespeare was born and brought up in Stratford-upon-Avon. At eighteen, he married Ann Hathaway and they had three children: Susanna, and twins H amnet and Judith. Few records of Shakespeare’s life have survived. There is evidence, however, that Shakespeare worked in London as an actor and playwright in the late 1580s and early 1590s. (The first reference to him in London was made in the pamphlet
Greene’s Groats-worth of Wit
published posthumously by his rival Robert Greene.)

Shakespeare became an actor, writer, and part-owner of the theatrical company the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, which became known as the King’s Men after James I came to the throne. Most of his surviving plays were written between 1589 and 1613. He is believed to have retired to Stratford around 1613 at the age of forty-nine, and he died there three years later. There is no evidence that Shakespeare was seriously injured in the Globe fire of 1613, but the theory has been put forward by Graham Philips and Martin Keatman in
The Shakespeare Conspiracy.

Elizabeth I was the last monarch of the Tudor dynasty, becoming Queen in 1558. The challenge with Elizabeth is that so much is known about her, and there have been so many fictional portrayals, that it is hard to find a new way of presenting her. I focus on her fragility and desperation at the end of her life.

The daughter of Henry VIII, she was born a princess, but was declared illegitimate after the execution of her mother Anne Boleyn. She had survived intense competition for the throne, and was imprisoned in the Tower for almost a year during her sister Mary’s reign, on suspicion of supporting Protestant rebels.

One of her first acts as monarch was the establishment of an English Protestant Church, of which she became the Supreme Governor. This Elizabethan Religious Settlement later evolved into today’s Church of England. It was a compromise between Catholicism and Protestantism.

Elizabeth I never married and became famous for the shrewd deployment of her virginity. In the novel, I make her the mother of Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex. The idea that Essex is not her lover but her secret, illegimate son links the themes of the novel together. It is a possible explanation for Essex’s arrogance, his unreasonable behaviour and Elizabeth’s inconsolable grief after his execution. There is of course no evidence for this, though there has been speculation that she may have had illegitimate children.

Most of what we know about Alfonso is taken from the notebooks of Simon Forman, and is based on his consultations with Aemilia. These state that Alfonso was her cousin and that he was a Queen’s musician. Church records also show Alfonso and Aemilia were married in St Botolph’s Church, Aldgate, on 18 October 1592.

It is known that the Lanyers were a French family, and that Alfonso was a profligate character. Aemilia told Simon Forman that he spent her dowry within a year. Even so, he does appear to have helped her in her quest for publication: the frontispiece of
Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum
includes a reference to ‘Captain Alfonso Lanyer Servant to the King’s Majestie’. We don’t know if Alfonso actively assisted his wife, but his status helped her assert her respectability.

Alfonso Lanyer died in 1613. The cause is unknown.

Henry was the son of Aemilia Lanyer. His father is assumed to be Lord Hunsdon. Henry became a recorder player at the court, and died in 1633. Aemilia then bought up his two children.

There is no historical evidence that his father was William Shakespeare.

Aemilia’s father Baptiste is another obscure historical figure, and he only appears in the novel in Aemilia’s memories of her childhood. As he is pivotal to the plot I think it is important to include a historical note which separates fact from fiction.

Baptiste came to England from Venice in the 1530s, and was certainly at Henry VIII’s court in 1540, playing the sackbut (a kind of trombone) in the service of Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford. He was the youngest of six brothers, who were originally from the town of Bassano del Grappa in the Veneto region. All of the brothers came to England, and only the eldest, Jacamo, returned to Venice. Henry VIII gave the brothers the right to live in apartments in the Charterhouse, a Carthusian monastery he had dissolved in 1537.

In 1563, conspirators Henry Dingley, Mark Anthony and a number of others were prosecuted for Bassano’s attempted murder, and were sentenced to have their ears cut off and to be whipped, pilloried and banished for plotting to kill him. Nothing further is known about the incident. The murder that Aemilia witnesses is a fictional event, however; we do not know how Baptiste really died. In the novel, Margaret keeps it a secret, fearing for the rest of her family.

Baptiste was not formally married to Aemilia’s mother Margaret Johnson, referring to her as his ‘reputed wife’ in his will.

In the novel, I make a reference to one of Margaret Johnson’s cousins, Robert Johnson, who composed ‘The Witch’s Dance’
(the tune that Alfonso is humming in Act II, Scene V). I liked the fact that he shares his name with the African-American blues guitarist Robert Johnson (1911–38) who is alleged to have sold his soul to the Devil at the crossroads. Popular myth has it that this is how Robert Johnson gained his phenomenal musical skill. He died in mysterious circumstances at the age of twenty-seven. In my story, Baptiste makes a similar pact with the witches at the crossroads at Tyburn, and then reneges on the deal, repenting and giving up his music.

Simon Forman studied at Oxford University, and later set up a medical practice in London, providing astrologically based treatments and predictions. Demand for his services increased after he (apparently) cured himself of plague. He was in dispute with the College of Physicians for many years, and the College banned him from practising as a doctor. He was eventually awarded this title.

Forman is one of the few people to have accurately predicted the date of his own death. His papers are now in the Bodleian Library in Oxford.

The distinction between ‘high magic’ and ‘women’s magic’ was not made explicitly at the time, but it is accurate to suggest that men developed the intellectual side of magic via experimentation, while women used old lore to cure common ailments for small sums of money. If you want to know more about the importance of ‘magic’ and its connection to belief systems during this period, I recommend
Religion and the Decline of Magic
by Keith Thomas, a truly magisterial tome.

Wriothesley (pronounced ‘Rizley’) is often identified as the Fair Youth of Shakespeare’s sonnets, though this is not a matter of historical fact. In addition, there is no evidence that Shakespeare
and Henry Wriothesley were romantically or sexually involved, though many novelists have suggested this.

In the novel, I suggest that Wriothesley is bisexual, though not that he and Will are lovers. We have no information about Wriothesley’s sexuality, though we do know that he was apparently happy with his wife, Elizabeth Vernon, and that they had several children. Surviving portraits of the handsome and highly elegant young man have been seen as evidence of his ‘effeminacy’ by some scholars, but his appearance could equally have been an expression of his interest in fashion, a widespread obsession at the Elizabethan court. Attitudes to sexuality were very different from today. Fulsome and seemingly romantic dedications, such as those made by Shakespeare to Wriothesley, were common. Young men were often physically affectionate towards each other. But male homosexuality was seen as a terrible sin, diverging from the natural order, and was a capital offence.

In the novel, I present Wriothesley as a young man intoxicated by his own power, who uses this to step beyond social norms. This is plausible, and fits in with the theme of over-reaching in the novel.