The Dark Lady's Mask (58 page)

Her son nodded as though he couldn't wait to return to London and put this strange pilgrimage into his mother's past behind him.

A
FTER BIDDING
H
ENRY GOODNIGHT
, Aemilia shut herself in her chamber. With the midsummer sun still blazing in the western sky, she'd no need to light a candle. Breathless, she unlocked the box and opened the lid to see a letter resting on a sheet of foolscap, which hid what lay beneath.
Yet one more secret concealed inside another.
When she broke the letter's seal, she couldn't say what she hoped to find. An apology? An explanation for his cold shunning of her? Poetry even? What message did Will have for her after these twenty-one years of separation?

Though she still recognized his handwriting, she could tell it was a weak and ailing man who had gripped the quill. His missive consisted of four words.

For my eternal Muse

From the folded paper, a gold ring tumbled into her palm. She held it aloft in the shaft of sunlight streaming through the open window until her tears blurred her vision. This was the ring he had given her in Verona those many years ago and that she had returned to him after Odilia's christening. She clasped it in both hands before setting it carefully aside, then she lifted the foolscap to see what was underneath.

Despite the bright daylight illuminating the chamber, she did not trust her senses. The stack of papers was high and densely packed, all in Will's handwriting. She had to take them from the box and leaf through them from top to bottom before she believed what her eyes saw. His plays, the oldest at the top and the newest toward the bottom. His histories, comedies, and tragedies. Some were flawless or near-flawless fair copies while others appeared to be working drafts with scribbled corrections and crossed-out lines. She found the early comedies that they had written together and that he had gone on to revise and make wholly his own, as if to erase her.

Yet, as she scanned his plays and their lists of characters, she saw variations of her name in three other pieces she'd had no hand in. Here, in
A Comedy of Errors,
was Aemilia, the long-lost wife of Aegeon. Husband and wife had been severed from each other in a shipwreck. In the end, Aegeon finally found his Aemilia, who had been living as an abbess.

When the midsummer sun finally sank into the whispering trees, she lit a candle to read on. She remembered
Othello
's Emilia, wife of the villainous Iago who slew her for her loose tongue. Yet as she began to reread Emilia's lines, she discovered that Will had rewritten them since she had seen the play performed at Shoreditch those many years ago. Emilia was much more eloquent than she remembered, lamenting the injustices that women suffered:

'Tis not a year or two shows us a man.

They are all but stomachs and we all but food.

They eat us hungerly, and when they are full,

They belch us.

Lines that cut so close to what she had endured after Will cast her off, she might have written them herself. Had he allowed her, his banished mistress, to speak through his own heroine? This Emilia even spoke in defense of women who commit adultery.

I do think it is their husbands' faults

If wives do fall . . .

Their wives have sense like them. They see and smell

And have their palates both for sweet and sour

. . . And have not we affections,

Desires for sport, and frailty, as men have?

. . . let them know

The ills we do, their ills instruct us so.

But it was Emilia's devotion to her lady, Desdemona, that moved Aemilia most, for it reminded her of what she and Margaret shared. When Emilia learned the full breadth of her husband's evil plot against Desdemona, she proclaimed his culpability to all. As Emilia declared her truth, her husband murdered her.

I will speak as liberal as the north,

Let heaven and men and devils, let them all,

All, all cry shame against me, yet I'll speak.

So come my soul to bliss as I speak true.

So speaking as I think, alas, I die.

Lines so passionate, they might have come from her own
Salve Deus.
Aemilia cradled the pages to her heart. Emilia's speech read as though she were Will's immortalized memory of
her,
Aemilia, as she truly was. Not the lascivious tigress of the sonnets but a woman who was passionate, free-spoken, intelligent, and brave. His lost love. Her own best self.

Taking the gold ring he had returned to her, she threaded it on the silk cord around her neck so it would rest there beside Margaret's ring.

By candlelight, she nestled in bed and read
The Winter's Tale,
probably one of his later works since she'd found it near the bottom of the stack. Here Emilia was a minor character with only a few lines, maid to the much-wronged Hermione. Leontes, Hermione's husband, spent sixteen years repenting his cruelty to his deceased wife. He had falsely accused her of adultery, imprisoned her, even wrenched her newborn daughter from her arms and ordered the infant to be abandoned. Everything was poised for irredeemable tragedy and yet, in the final act, the lost daughter, Perdita, returned. Reunited, father and daughter stood before a statue of the dead Hermione. Faced by their grief and love, the effigy revealed itself as the living woman, Hermione restored.

If this be magic, let it be an art

Lawful as eating.

Aemilia wept to imagine that
The Winter's Tale,
written in the winter of Will's life, resurrected both their love and their lost daughter.
Let Odilia live again in Perdita.
Had he spent the past twenty-one years rueing their estrangement?

Before the candle burned itself out, she set to read
The Tempest,
which she had discovered at the very bottom of the stack—presumably the last play he had written. She expected tragedy or tragicomedy, but, no, this was an Italian comedy concerning a magician and his only daughter. Here she saw her father brought back to life with none of the viciousness of
The Merchant of Venice.
Ariel, his spirit-servant, even uttered the line Papa had once whispered in her ear, “Hell is empty.” All the devils roved here on earth, in plain sight, which explained the many enchantments Prospero wove to protect his treasured Miranda on their island stronghold before he set her free to explore her brave new world.

Will's poetry sent her heart brimming with a lifetime's yearnings.

Full fathom five thy father lies,

Of his bones are coral made,

Those are pearls that were his eyes.

Nothing of him that doth fade

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.

Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell.

“Rest you gentle, my love,” she whispered to Will, who slumbered now with the rest of her beloved dead: Papa, Odilia, Henry Carey, Margaret, and Alfonse.

We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.

In the last minutes before the candle guttered out, Aemilia found Will's letter, that single line:
For my eternal Muse.
Finally, she understood. He hadn't needed to say more—the plays said it for him. Those four words were his dedication, his revelation that she had been his inspiration even after their love had turned to pain, even when he hated her and had written his tortured tragedies. This was his confession that his plays were written to her and for her long after they had ceased to be lovers.

Let us not burden our remembrance with

A heaviness that's gone.

In the depths of his heart, he had never stopped loving her, and this had been his most anguished secret, which he hadn't been able to admit even to himself until the very last. All those years, he had held on to her ring. In death, he entrusted his life's work to her.

Like his plays, their intertwined lives had moved from comedy to tragedy to tragicomedy and back to comedy once more. Reconciliation transformed the tragedies of human existence into a divine comedy—what life, at its core, truly was—as she had tried to tell him in Verona all those years ago.
What could touch the spirit more deeply than the triumph of love and goodness?

To insure Will's posterity, she must see these plays published. But she would have to keep her hand in it secret in respect to the promise she had made to Susanna Hall. If Will's work were to be published under the auspices of the King's Men, it would seem both natural and fitting. Ben would write the preface, his immortal tribute to his rival and friend. Once more, men would be her mask and she would be erased. Yet she was the indelible thread woven into Will's great tapestry. Long after she was buried, future generations might read of questing girls who dressed as boys, of a Jew's daughter, of Emilia who died speaking her truth.

In her last letter before her death, Margaret had predicted that Aemilia would survive to a venerable age and remain in robust health until her black hair turned as white as a swan's feathers. The ghosts of her past laid to rest, Aemilia could embrace her future with courage.

“So speaking as I think,” she whispered to the wheeling stars outside her window, “I live, I live, I live.”

 

 

T
O THE
V
IRTUOUS
R
EADER
:

T
HIS IS A WORK OF FICTION
. There is no historical evidence to prove that Aemilia Bassano Lanier was the Dark Lady of Shakespeare's sonnets. The late A. L. Rowse was the first to identify Lanier as the Dark Lady; however, most academics have dismissed his theory. Lanier scholars in particular find the Dark Lady question an unwelcome detraction from Lanier's own literary achievements. Aemilia Bassano Lanier has earned her place in history not by any alleged love affair but by becoming the first Englishwoman to aspire to earn her living as a professional, published poet, one who actively sought a community of women patrons to support her writing.

Having established these facts, I must confess that as a
novelist
I could not resist the allure of the Dark Lady mythos. As Kate Chedgzoy points out in her essay “Remembering Aemilia Lanyer” in the
Journal of the
Northern Renaissance,
this myth draws on “our continuing cultural investment in a fantasy of a female Shakespeare and reveals some of the anxieties about difference that haunt canonical Renaissance literature.” My intention was to write a novel that married the playful comedy of Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard's
Shakespeare in Love
to the gravitas of Virginia Woolf's discussion of Shakespeare's “sister” in her extended essay
A Room of One's Own
. How many more obstacles would an educated and gifted Renaissance woman poet face compared to her ambitious male counterparts?

I am deeply indebted to the scholarship of Susanne Woods whose books
Lanyer: A Renaissance Woman Poet
and
The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer: Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum
proved indispensable, both for my research into the documented facts of Lanier's life and my appreciation of her poetry. I was also hugely inspired by the work of Lanier scholars Barbara K. Lewalski and Lynette McGrath.

Readers may wish to know that Lanier did indeed go on to run her own school in Saint Giles-in-the-Fields from 1617 to 1619. However, she faced difficulties with her landlord in a dispute over rent and repairs, and this appears to have put a premature end to her venture. Financial problems followed Lanier for the rest of her life. Her son died in 1633, leaving behind two small children. Lanier then litigated against Innocent Lanier, her brother-in-law, to whom she signed over her late husband's hay and straw patent with the understanding that Innocent would get it extended and share the proceeds. It appears her brother-in-law did not honor his side of the bargain. Lanier presented herself as petitioning on behalf of her orphaned grandchildren, so it appears that she was supporting them.