History
and Love – how can we ever unravel the truth?
Today we welcome Jenny Barden who has written about love in historical fiction.
The historical records provide evidence of events
about which we are certain, but what of the feelings of those who lived long
ago – how can we know how they experienced love? Consider attitudes in the
Elizabethen era, when women were typically under the complete control of men,
could not own property or trade (except in widowhood), and could not even protest
if their husbands beat them because that was legal and expected in cases of
disobedience. Women were inferior to men so how could they be loved as equals?
Shall
I compare thee to a summer’s day? Shakespeare wrote of
his lover, Thou art more lovely and more
temperate. In language that has resonated through time with the power of
his feeling we all know how the sonnet ends:
So
long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
The words are beautiful, but it is Shakespeare’s
mastery with his pen that gives his lover immortality. In this, he possesses
her absolutely.
For historical novelists the recreation of emotion poses a dilemma. We want to accurately reflect the attitudes and mind-sets of the past, to make our characters convincing in terms of being true to their age, but we also want to show them experiencing emotion in a way that we can identify with in the here and now. They have to be empathetic to modern readers. How accurately can we conjure up the passion in relationships that flowered long ago? Is it possible to do this simply by transposing how we might feel now in similar circumstances within the framework of what actually happened according to historical sources?The difficulty is that while there are many accounts that deal with incident in time and place, there are few that document emotion, particularly genuine expressions of love. There is a wealth of Elizabethan love poetry, not least because declarations of love in rhyming couplets were expected of every gentleman of the time, but relatively little was written by women, and the stylised poetry that formed a conventional facet of courtship may well have had more to do with the idea of love than the reality.
Did Elizabeth I really love François, Duc de Anjou,
when she wrote:
…I am, and not; I freeze and yet am burned,Since from myself another self I turned.
My care is like my shadow in the sun --
Follows me flying, flies when I pursue it,
Stands, and lies by me, doth what I have done;
His too familiar care doth make me rue it.
No means I find to rid him from my breast,
Till by the end of things it be suppressed...
Follows me flying, flies when I pursue it,
Stands, and lies by me, doth what I have done;
His too familiar care doth make me rue it.
No means I find to rid him from my breast,
Till by the end of things it be suppressed...
The lyricism is captivating, and there will be a
part of any sensitive modern reader wanting to believe that Elizabeth was
heartbroken when the young Frenchman, who had steadfastly courted her for three
years, left England for the last time. But Elizabeth was playing a clever game
of political expediency by encouraging the courtship of her ‘frog’ as she
affectionately called him. For as long as the heir to the French throne was
courting her, France would not ally with Spain to England’s disadvantage.
As
Elizabeth approached her fifties she may well have dallied with the idea of
sharing a bed with a man, then in his mid-twenties, who had declared her to be
the object of his infatuation. But it was more fantasy than substance. Most
historians consider the poem to be a sophisticated conceit, on a par with the
£30,000 paid to the departing duke to sweeten his leave-taking along with bills
for £20,000 more. Pricking the fiction of her love came at a price.
Yet within the measured lines of Elizabeth’s poem is
there real feeling showing through; a deep sadness for the loss of a kind
admirer; a recognition that she would never find fulfilment as a mother; a cry
from a soul unable ever to commit to passion? ‘I freeze, and yet I burn.’
Perhaps the Elizabethans experienced love far more
intensely than most of us do now, in the way that love is often heightened in
wartime by stark confrontation with the fragility of life. For the Elizabethans,
life was often harsh, cut short by unexplained illness, afflicted by conflict
and vagaries of fortune. Perhaps they became inured to tragedy, or perhaps they
loved with a depth of feeling we can only guess at in looking back.
Towards the end of Elizabeth’s reign, John Donne
wrote The Good-Morrow in which his
love transcends reality and makes the world seem like a dream.
…And now good-morrow to our waking souls,
Which watch not one another out of fear;
For love all love of other sights controls,
And makes one little room an everywhere.
Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone;
Let maps to other, worlds on worlds have shown;
Let us possess one world; each hath one, and is one.
My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears,
And true plain hearts do in the faces rest;
Where can we find two better hemispheres
Without sharp north, without declining west?...
The subject may well be Anne More who John Donne
married in secret, leading to his ruin, imprisonment and penury at an early age,
before he began a new career in the church. Anne died in childbirth with their
twelfth or thirteenth child leaving Donne ‘by grief made wordless’. In The
Good-Morrow he wishes only to be close to his love and the room around them
becomes a universe beyond which all the drama of intrepid voyages to far-flung
lands is insignificant. There’s little evidence here of the commonly held view
at the time that men were the God-placed superiors of women who were born weak,
unstable, incapable of higher levels of thought, and were typically:
‘lascivious, crafty, whoorish, theevish and knavish.’
When men and women travelled together to the
New
World intent on founding the first English
colony in America could they have
loved as deeply
as Donne’s poetry suggests? We cannot know for
certain; the
records deal only with their names and
the events of the voyage. But perhaps
they did.
When Elizabeth locked herself in her room for days
following the
death of Robert Dudley, Earl of
Leicester, was she distraught at the loss of
the only
man she had ever truly loved or merely seeking
some privacy? Perhaps
the words on the letter she
kept in her bedside treasure box for the rest of
her life tells us all we need to know: ‘His last letter’.
Quotes are from: Shakespeare’s Sonnet XVIII; On Monsieur’s Departure (1581), reputed to be by Elizabeth I; The Good-Morrow by John Donne (c1592-5); and from Joseph Swetman in The Arraignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward and Unconstant Women (1617)
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Jenny Barden’s latest book The Lost Duchess
has just been released in paperback by Ebury Press. It features a love story at
the heart of the mystery surrounding the Lost Colony of Roanoke and the first attempt
to found an English settlement in America.
More about Jenny can be found on her website: http://www.jennybarden.com/
on facebook at jennybardenauthor
or on twitter @jennywilldoit
Thank you, Jenny for this most informative article.
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