Roaring Boys (23 page)

It is therefore hardly surprising that the female characters in the Jacobean plays, with few exceptions, fall into recognisable categories reflecting, the writers might have said, the general attitude towards women in the society of the day. Shakespeare is exceptional, his female characters throughout the canon of thirty-eight plays unique. From Queen Margaret, the tigress of the early
Henry VI
plays, through to the naive Miranda of
The Tempest
, taking in en route women as diverse as Kate, Juliet, Viola, Beatrice, Isabella, Lady Macbeth, Cressida, Desdemona, Cleopatra, Hermione and Paulina, Shakespeare’s women are very much themselves, no one of them is like another and almost all, during the course of the action, are changed by the experiences they undergo during the course of the action. They are real people who one feels had a life before the play began and, if they survive, one that continues after the story comes to an end, which is why actresses love to play them.

This might also be said of some of Middleton’s women and a handful of others, but on the whole the female roles in Jacobean theatre are stereotypical. Most sympathetic are the feisty like Doll, one of the rogues in Jonson’s
The Alchemist
, and the widow in Middleton’s
A Trick to Catch the Old One
, who successfully does just that. They are likeable because at least they hold their own in a man’s world. Bess, in Heywood’s
Fair Maid of the West
, fearing that her lover has been captured by the Spaniards, fits out a ship and takes to the seas as captain of a privateer, a role accepted by the men under her command. Prior to this she has made an example of a swaggering rogue who made a pass at her by disguising herself as a young man and challenging him to a fight which she wins – after which she literally walks all over him. She is that rare thing, a successful woman, and by the end of the play her privateering has proved profitable and she has rescued her lover from Barbary pirates, tactfully avoiding the advances of their leader, Mullisheg. Many sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century women must have enjoyed seeing women portrayed on stage in such a way for in real life there were plenty of independent-minded women. Shakespeare’s Merry Wives are based firmly in the world of the Stratford in which he grew up; they are not creatures of fantasy.

But far more women are presented in drama as ever compliant, doing their duty by their fathers, brothers or husbands whatever sacrifice it might entail. In Middleton’s
A Chaste Maid in Cheapside
Allwit’s wife, at his express order, agrees to become the mistress of filthy rich Sir Walter Whorehound and even bears him a child, Allwit content for the situation to continue indefinitely so long as Sir Walter keeps the money pouring in. Meanwhile in the same play, the character of Touchstone, having passed himself off as a doctor, steps in to rescue the bullied Lady Kix from the apparent infertility which is ruining her marriage as her husband, who can only inherit a fortune if he has an heir and blames her for not providing him with one, goes along with her being impregnated by ‘the doctor’ under cover of supposed medical treatment.

Then there is woman as victim: we first meet Vendice in
The Revenger’s Tragedy
cradling the skull of his fiancée who has been poisoned by the Duke after refusing to sleep with him, and as part of his strategy of revenge persuades his mother to procure his sister for that same Duke. Webster’s
Duchess of Malfi
(based on a real event in medieval Italy) is murdered simply for marrying outside her station in life. Having married the first time to please the family, on her husband’s death she marries her steward for love, thus bringing down on herself the wrath of her brother who considers she has dishonoured the family name and so must be disposed of. The Dutch courtesan in Marston’s play of that name is the mistress of a young and upwardly mobile Londoner to whom she has been totally faithful. He, however, decides he must make a good marriage if he wants to continue to live the life to which he has become accustomed and to that end hands her over to an unpleasant friend, a character who offers a study in sexual repression and sadism well ahead of its time. At the end of the play the unfortunate woman seeks out her original lover and physically attacks him for what he has exposed her to, as a result of which she is sent to prison for an indefinite time while he marries a pretty young woman with a large dowry. In Heywood’s
A Woman Killed with Kindness
, an erring wife is treated by her husband (who considers he is acting from the best of motives) in such a way that she literally dies of shame.

Lastly there are the wicked, scheming,
evil
women: in Beaumont and Fletcher’s
The Maid’s Tragedy
, Amintor, at the suggestion of the King, has jilted, almost at the altar, the long-suffering Aspatia (yet another victim) in favour of his friend’s sister, Evadne. But on his wedding night his Evadne informs him that theirs will be a marriage in name only as she is the King’s mistress and that he has married her off so that any child she might bear the King will be born in wedlock. When the King demands to know if she will stay faithful to him she answers that she will – so long as no one even richer and more powerful than he is comes along. Eventually she is persuaded to murder him in a scene worthy of a handbook on strange sexual practices: when she ties him to the bed he assumes it is foreplay for some strange sex game.

However one of the most fascinating women in this genre and an exception to typecasting is Beatrice-Joanna in Middleton and Rowley’s
The Changeling
. Having persuaded her steward (long in love with her) to murder her fiancé so that she can marry the man of her choice, she imagines he will be satisfied with being well paid for what he has done: ‘Belike his wants are greedy, and to such gold tastes like angels food’, she tells herself and the audience. Only after the deed is done does she discover that it is not money he wants but her and that she has no alternative but to give in. Faced then with the prospect of her new husband discovering on the wedding night that she is not a virgin, she embarks on yet more murders, finally having to face at the end of the play that she has indeed become, in the steward’s words ‘a woman dipped in blood’.
The Changeling
is a great play.

Faced with the confines of the society in which they lived and portrayed in popular entertainment in the way they were, it was a rare soul who not only broke the mould but is actually recorded as having done so. Yet two most unusual women did, in their different ways, manage it. Their lives overlap both the late Elizabethan and Jacobean ages and both are linked in their different ways to theatre and the playhouses. One, just possibly, provided the inspiration for Rosaline in Shakespeare’s
Love’s Labour’s Lost
, the other certainly inspired Middleton and Dekker’s play
The Roaring Girl
.

The first, Emilia Lanier née Bassano, came to light during the late Dr A.L. Rowse’s search for Shakespeare’s Dark Lady of the Sonnets and his conviction that he had finally found her brought down on his head both controversy and derision from a variety of academics during his lifetime, an argument that has raged ever since. It is difficult to understand how his suggestion should have created such animosity since the various previous contenders would appear to be considerably less likely.
¹
For a long time the prime favourite was a court lady, Mary Fitton, yet anyone visiting the home of the Newdigate family, Arbury Hall in Warwickshire, will see from the portrait of her which hangs in the picture gallery there that she bears no resemblance whatsoever to Shakespeare’s lady whose hair, we are told, was like ‘black wires’ and who had dark eyes and dun-coloured skin. Mary Fitton’s hair is red-gold and she has blue/grey eyes and a white complexion, though she was certainly promiscuous enough to fill the role, taking several lovers at Court before running off to Plymouth to live with a privateer. The Arbury portrait is quite eerie for it shows her wearing a magnificent brocade dress which appears to be crawling with spiders, beetles and other insects.

Dr Rowse ‘found’ Emilia in the Simon Forman manuscripts in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Forman, with whom Emilia had a brief affair, described her at the time of their liaison as having been ‘very brave’ (that is, dashing) ‘in her youth’. The Bassano family originated in Venice, coming to England towards the end of the reign of Henry VIII, and they must have been talented for they were soon Court musicians. Emilia was the daughter of Baptisto Bassano and his common-law wife Margaret Johnston, and the family lived in the parish of St Botolph in Bishopsgate alongside many theatre people with whom they must certainly have become acquainted. In 1576 Bassano died leaving two daughters, Angela and Emilia, who was only six. By 7 July 1586, when Margaret Johnston died, Angela had long been married to Joseph Holland, ‘gentleman’, and Emilia, just seventeen, was on her own.

Her father had left her £100 in his will, to be paid to her either at the age of twenty-one or when she married – but as she did not fancy any of the men who were offered for her, this meant a four-year wait. So what was there for an intelligent, ambitious girl with neither background nor money who did not want either to go into ordinary service or marry the first man who came along? Emilia was nothing if not pragmatic. A third option was that of the kept woman. She was aware she had undoubted gifts; her dark good looks were attractive to men, she was a talented musician in her own right and was fluent in Italian. But being a kept woman by any man who could afford her was not enough; her aim was to go to Court, which she did by finding employment in the household of the Countess of Kent. The countess took Emilia with her to Court where her undoubted musical ability brought her into the public eye, for she was sufficiently proficient at the virginals to play for the Queen, no mean practitioner herself.

It was then that she caught the eye of Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon, the Lord Chamberlain, who was old enough to be her grandfather but who was by that time (the early 1590s) the patron of Burbage’s company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. One of the reasons for believing that she might have been the Dark Lady is that if she was not acquainted with Shakespeare before she became involved with his patron, then she must certainly have met him after for he was also an actor and would have taken part in performances not only in the playhouse but at private parties given by the Lord Chamberlain and also, as we know from the records, at Court. But there is unlikely ever to be proof.

From what she later told Forman, the Lord Chamberlain was very generous to his young mistress, keeping her in great style and lavishing on her both jewels and money. She remained his mistress for some time, but all good things come to an end and in spite of the disparity in their ages she became pregnant by him, or claimed that she had. Much as Henry VIII had married off his own mistress, Mary Boleyn, to William Carey, his son Henry Carey arranged a marriage for Emilia with another court musician, Alfonso Lanier. He was three years younger than she was and neither pretended it was anything else but a marriage of convenience. Her son by Carey, baptised Henry after his father, later became a Court musician to Charles I. Forman describes her situation bluntly: ‘She was paramour to old Lord Hunsdon that was Lord Chamberlain and maintained by him in great pride; then, being with child, she was for colour married to a minstrel.’ She told Forman that she did not reckon much to the bargain that had been made for her.

It is hardly surprising therefore that, soon bored with her husband, she took lovers, but if Forman’s experience is anything to go by, she led them a merry dance. Over a period of weeks she consulted him on both medical and astrological matters. Regarding the latter she wanted to know if Alfonso, who somewhat surprisingly had gone off with the Earl of Essex on his venture to Cadiz, was likely to survive the voyage and return home. Forman told her that he would; also that it was unlikely that he would ever achieve much or bring her wealth or improved status (she had dreams of being a titled lady). It is hard to decide, from Forman’s account, which of them then made the first move but after some dalliance during visits to him in his consulting room, she invited him back to her place for supper. But he was to discover, when he eagerly took up her invitations, that even if the evening ended with her inviting him into her bed, he did not necessarily always have what he wanted. She would grant him much, take off her clothes and invite him to fondle any part of her body willingly ‘but then would not do it in any wise’. Finally, frustrated and cross, he had had enough and the affair ended. This certainly has overtones of the Dark Lady who was also, if the Sonnets are to be believed, a considerable sexual tease.

Her career up till then is not all unusual, other than the fact that her existence is at least recorded. It was when she was older and had possibly given up men that she became known for something altogether different. She reinvented herself as a poet. Although written considerably earlier, Shakespeare’s Sonnets were first published in 1609, her own in 1611. Just as the male poets and dramatists had acquired patrons, so too did Emilia and her poems are dedicated to, among others, the Queen, Arabella Stewart, Susan, Dowager Countess of Kent, and the Countesses of Suffolk, Cumberland and Dorset.

It cannot be said in truth that Emilia was a good poet. What makes her work of considerable interest is that in her poetry she puts up a stout defence of women and their place in the scheme of things, especially those she considers have been treated unfairly by history. She begins at the beginning with Eve. Eve, she writes, was deceived by cunning and intended no harm when she handed Adam the apple to eat. Indeed it was more fool him for taking it:

But surely Adam cannot be excused
Her fault, though great, yet he was most to blame;
What weakness offered, strength might have refused,
Being Lord of All, the greater was his shame:
Although the serpent’s craft had her abused,
God’s Holy Word ought all his actions frame,
For he was Lord and King of all the earth,
Before poor Eve had either life or breath.