WE ARE SUCH STUFF AS DREAMS ARE MADE ON
Lady Grace’s Revels came to me in a dream. I seldom remember dreams, but this one persisted, uncanny, clear, and haunting. Almost a nightmare. I have no idea what caused it. I was not reading Shakespeare at the time, nor watching swordfight movies. I may have been angry at bullies. But I usually am.
The idea of dueling viewpoints came while I was writing it. One just wasn’t enough. I intended no Rashomon, however. I am too stolid, too literal, to believe that, like Athena from Zeus’s, the entirety of existence exudes from one’s sweaty little forehead. Each re-telling in this case simply lifts another veil.
AY, IS IT NOT A LANGUAGE I SPEAK?
I am in fact such a literalist; I have this obsession with diction. I always find it disconcerting when some ancient Babylonian talks modern American slang. My obsession is, of course, absurd. If I wrote dialogue in ancient Babylonian, no-one could or would read it. Un-modern English is a little more plausible, but not much.
I once attempted and never finished a short story about Geoffrey Chaucer serving lunch to his friends John Gower and Ralph Strode, in his mansion in the walls of London above the Aldgate, a story in which the dialogue is in Middle English. In the climax they bore each other to sleep. I guess it was just as well I never finished it. It uses phrases like suppositio materialis.
Speak the speech, I pray you,
as I pronounc’d it to you,
trippingly on the tongue.
Did I learn my lesson? Do you teach the leopard to learn new tricks? Can an old dog change his spots? I just couldn’t write Lady Grace’s Revels without trying my darndest to Elizabethanize the dialogue. Obsessions don’t break easy. (Naturally, the theme of obsession had to worm its way into the story.)
I spent a long, hot summer typing away at my ancient, huge, white plastic computer on its wobbly table in the corner of my garret, with its DOS screen and where you had to hit the space bar three times and back-space once to get a regular space. All through that summer, to the echoing tarantara of gun-club fire echoing off the green mountain framed so picturesquely by my little window, I checked and re-checked and triple-checked every word and phrase and usage of the dialogue, and, as far as I can tell, the result is stringently idiomatic Elizabethan. Early Modern English, as they call it in the schoolroom.
It may sound a difficult task, but I had a great time of it. It was sort of like putting together a puzzle. And patience will reward the assiduous reader with a whole raft of jokes I stuck in amongst the orotund pronunciamenti and the rolling periods.
My lord, I love you;
And durst commend a secret to your ear
I have also added one other little piece of rigor to the dialogue of one particular character, which rigor I invite the kind reader to suss out, if the spirit so moves.
The poem, by the way, is supposed to be funny. I look at the thing now and I just shake my head in amazement. What is that? Where did that come from? Yikes.
SYNOPSIS:
THE QUICK COMEDIANS
EXTEMPORALLY WILL STAGE US
AND PRESENT OUR ALEXANDRIAN REVELS
“One of Lady Grace’s guests describes the play he is writing as, ‘a thing completely new, a thing never seen before, at once comedy, tragedy, history, romance,’ and this captures the tongue-in-cheek approach of Lady Grace’s Revels. The ‘period’ language in which the disastrous events are narrated is extravagant and frequently very funny. An entertaining winner.”
—Ruth Downie, Acclaimed New York Times Bestseller List Author of Vita Brevis, the latest installment in the Medicus series of novels about a reluctant detective in ancient Roman Britain.
It is Michaelmas in rural Renaissance England, and Thomas Smith and William Philpott, scriveners, cannot believe their luck. They have been invited to revels at the manor house of Lady Grace Atwater, Countess of Burnham. There will be food, drink, dancing, and gracious company culled from a diverse assortment of county society. Thomas has even written a poem for the occasion. All goes well until a certain Sir John, a master swordsman out to better himself by whatever means, makes an entrance. Soon, all is not well, and a cascade of revelations lays open the decadent underside of the glamourous aristocratic life.