What do you think?
Rate this book
Paint
Emilia Bassano is only a teenager when she's pitched among the poets, politicians, and painted women of the Elizabethan court. Withdrawn and pensive by nature, she devises a remarkable strategy to preserve her own solitude. At first it works. But she's soon shocked to find that, so far from truly hiding, she's attracted the gaze of every courtier and aspiring poet on the scene, including the canniest, hungriest, and strangest one of them all.
266 pages, Paperback
First published September 27, 2013
1 person is currently reading
547 people want to read
About the author
Grace Tiffany
13 books91 followersGrace Tiffany is an American writer who lives and teaches in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Her novels include MY FATHER HAD A DAUGHTER (2003), WILL (2004), THE TURQUOISE RING (2005), ARIEL (2006), PAINT (2013), GUNPOWDER PERCY (2016), and her latest, THE OWL WAS A BAKER'S DAUGHTER (2025). She has also translated writings by the Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges and the Mexican author Maria Luisa Puga.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
July 12, 2014
I won this from a goodreads giveaway. Paint is a fictionalized story about Emilia Bassano who was believed to be the Dark Lady of Shakespear's sonnets. Having never read a historical fiction before I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed it, I was drawn to the characters from the first few pages and whenever I picked the book up I found it hard to put down. I enjoyed the story of Emilia from struggling with her life at court to meeting Shakespear and trying to get her own work in print.
I would recommend this to anyone who is interested in the era and I can't wait to read more from Grace Tiffany.
I would recommend this to anyone who is interested in the era and I can't wait to read more from Grace Tiffany.
November 7, 2016
I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and would recommend to anyone interested in 17th century England or a deep love of poetry and art.
May 30, 2024
Paint, by Grace Tiffany (2013)
I heard Grace Tiffany speak at the Inkling Folk Fellowship on Guy Fawkes Day 2021, on her 2016 novel, Gunpowder Percy: religion and conspiracy in Jacobean England, and so was moved to borrow her 2013 foray into that era and region centering on a poet I was introduced to 2 years ago in an Osher class by Elise Lonich Ryan on “Shakespeare’s sisters.” I’m glad I did!
It’s a tale told from the first person present point of view with an occasional and unobtrusive authorial gloss, depicting wonderfully imagined relationships, conversations, manners, fashions (sartorial, cosmetic, and artistic), and environments (from palace to “the stews”), all enjoyed during a leisurely 35-year stroll through Elizabethan and Jacobean England (1581-1616 - ending with Shakespeare’s death), centering on the narrator Emilia Lanier (Aemelia Lanyer) (1569-1645), perhaps England’s first professional female poet, and (probably) the “dark lady” of some of Shakespeare’s sonnets (nos. 127-154).
I can’t possibly cite all the many references to poems and plays of the time, but here is a short index to quotations from, and discussions of, Shakespeare’s sonnets. All the poetical allusions are unsourced in the book, but your intrepid reviewer recognized a good many and looked up their provenance.
3 - pp. 97, 133
9 - p. 133
12 - p. 249
20 - p. 109
99 - p. 249
101 - p. 190
102 - p. 191
129 - pp. 110, 142,
130 - pp. 85, 206
132 - p. 74
137 - p. 145
https://shakespeare.folger.edu/shakes...
Living within the societal constraints of Tudor-Stuart fashion and hierarchy, Emilia craves love - and agency. Will she achieve either? Are both together even possible in her day and age? And what about revenge? Who has the capacity? When might it be appropriate? By what method?
Emilia pines, “The queen is the only woman she knows who, with perfect success, enacts Emilia’s private yearnings: to speak her mind, to make bawdy jokes in public if she pleases, to be the maker of manners, and not manners’ slave. And to write, and be read!” (p. 134) That, above all, is what Emilia comes to crave: “to write, and be read!” Throughout she makes her own decisions and acts on them: some decisions poor, leading to bitterness and self-pity (these feelings are never long-lasting, “As she looks out from the summit [of Cooke-ham manor] on this greening England, she finds bitterness difficult, and self-pity tedious” p.131); some decisions good, leading to a very “practical solution” (a catchphrase). Here’s a bit more on Emilia’s non-fiction life.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poet...
Tiffany wrote fiction, to be sure, but with great respect for history and its literature. Almost everyone in the story is an historical person familiar to students of Elizabethan England, including Lanier’s musical Italian family of Bassano’s: Baptiste, Margaret, Augustine, Angelica; Emilia’s cousin and homosexual husband-of-convenience Alphonso Lanier; Penelope Devereux Rich (1563-1607) and her lover (and later, husband) Charles Blount (1563-1606), Baron Mountjoy, later Earl of Devonshire (making Penelope Countess); references to Penelope’s “old adorer” Philip Sidney (1554-1586) (Astrophel and Stella); Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, Penelope’s brother and favorite of the Queen until he failed at conquest in Ireland and aspired too high and was executed in the last year of her reign; Elizabeth Throckmorton and her unapproved husband Sir Walter Raleigh (1552-1618); Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon, son of Wm. Carey (or of Henry VIII?) and Mary Boleyn; Henry Carey became Lord Chamberlain and Emilia’s quondam lover and father of her (apparently) stillborn son; it is he who brings her to Court and introduces her to nobility; also there's Henry’s wife Anne Morgan, mother of “Henry junius” (one of the few fictional characters in the book); Elizabeth Carey, Lady Berkeley, Lord Hunsdon’s granddaughter; Margaret Clifford née Russell, Countess of Cumberland and a patron of Emilia’s at Cooke-ham where Emilia was tutor to her daughter, Lady Anne Clifford (“Nan”); Margaret’s sister, Anne Russell, Countess of Warwick, who was married to Ambrose Dudley, brother of Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, and Anne too was a great literary patron and a close friend to Queen Elizabeth; Simon Forman, astrologer and alchemist; Lucy Russell née Harrington, Countess of Bedford; and Anne Shakespeare née Hathaway. It is one of Tiffany’s several graces in this story to paint each and every one as *likable*, one way or another (if not always and entirely).
In the arts there’s poet-playwright Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593); actor Edward Alleyn; miniaturist Nicholas Hilliard; William Shakespeare (1564-1616) as Emilia’s lover at Tichtfield, the hereditary estate of Henry Wriothesley (1573–1624), Earl of Southampton and Baron Tichtfield and Shakespeare’s patron and friend, and something more as the recipient of the sonnets in manuscript, and the object of those to the beautiful lord; Elizabeth Cary née Tanfield, Viscountess Falkland (1585–1639) (“Bess”), poet and author of The Tragedy of Mariam Fair Queen of Jewry, the first published play (1613) by a woman in English; Ben Jonson (1572-1637), who calls Emilia cousin through her mother, Margaret Johnson (many jokes about Ben dropping the “h” from his name because it is merely ornamental, and useless); Inigo Jones; John Donne; telling and intelligent mentions of the works of Castiglione, Machiavelli, Pico della Mirandola, John Skelton (“long dead”), Homer, Plutarch, Ovid, all “Englished” (by Chapman, Golding, North, Florio, et al.) for the men and women who read, but only English and some Latin, maybe some French; a nod to “the famed glass of Galileo,” p. 194,
Consistently strong prose throughout, in description, dialogue, and wordplay, often delightful, sometimes scintillating, and always with a gentle humor, occasionally pathos. In addition to meeting Will Shakespeare, his theater company, and his sonnets, we hear of plays by Dekker, Chapman, Peele, Marston, and Greene (sounds like a law firm, eh?), we’re told of the “rainbow portrait” of the Queen by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, we are ringside to apartments, intrigues, and entertainments in various palaces, manor houses, and middle-class leaseholds, we accompany Emilia on a hair-raising visit to Bedlam, we witness a clever (and lucky, in more ways than one) murder, we see “proof of the axiom that all lawyers love plays,” and she and her sister Angelica survive the death of the Queen in the plague-year of 1603 but her second child (Will Shakespeare’s in Tiffany’s telling) dies of it; in her grief Emilia finally says, “I am not the first woman to lose a child, and I won’t be the last,” after her friend Bess Cary recites these lines from from King John, Act 3 sc. 4 (p. 168):
Grief fills the room up of my absent child,
Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,
Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,
Remembers me of all his gracious parts,
Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form.
“For herself, she touches her lute, and turns her hand to poetry. Her sonnets turn longing and loss into cleverness, and she loses herself in the game of it, seeking apt rhymes, building conceits, until she comes close to forgetting the pain that launched their creation…. She hides her sonnets in a locked trunk, like the swaddling clothes of dead children. Still, she continues to write them. And she reads, and reads, and reads.” pp. 98, 99.
On Emilia’s re-reading Shakespeare’s sonnets to or about the dark lady (Emilia, in the story): “Mere colored panes (yes, pains) through which she might, if she squinted, see something real: true history, a man’s heart, some things that had actually happened. But the verses afford no natural perspective. She’s written enough sonnets herself, since then, to know love poems are never like that. Like all stained glass windows, they use what *is* natural — a woman, a young man, the sunlight — to illuminate themselves, their own images, and not to open a view on the untidy world outside…. Were the words all I loved in the first place? she wonders. Are we anything more than words?” p. 157
On the rebound from Shakespeare she becomes friends (or frenemies) with Ben Jonson, whom she meets for the first time since he dipped her braids in ink as school children, at the Twelfth Night (1605) performance of The Masque of Blackness at Whitehall, and whom she appreciates, “because he understood, because he was *interested* in what she wrote,” p. 186 - when he reads and praises the manuscript of her poem A Description of Cooke-ham:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem...
This poem was later published and is (AFAIK) the first “country-house poem” in English, predating by five years Jonson’s own To Penshurst, the second poem in a collection called The Forest, published in the 1616 Folio of the Poet's Works:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem...
Tiffany not unsuccessfully changes the order of publication of these poems to suit her plot - Emily’s poem was actually published in 1611, along with her major work, Salve Deus Rex Iudæorum, about women of the Bible with dedicatory letters in verse and prose to prominent women of the period (the piece also featured an angry verse letter “To all vertuous Ladies in generall,” accusing men of being ungrateful to the females in their lives), but in her story Tiffany has Emilia fly into a rage when she sees Jonson’s poem published to great acclaim without acknowledgement of his indebtedness to her. That experience motivates Emily to get her poems published under her own name despite the almost inviolable social prejudice against seeing a woman’s name as author.
There are more masques by Jonson and Jones because Queen Anne of Denmark likes to star in glorious costume, and Tiffany’s descriptions suggest to me a Busby Berkeley number in a 1930’s musical (if smaller scale with a only dozen dancers).
Another fun scene is a dinner party with Bess Cary, Ben Jonson (who calls Philip Sidney “a scholar by art and a fool by nature”), rising playwright Francis Beaumont (“painted women must beware, when they come to Heaven, that God not look at heir face and say, I never made *that* one”), lawyer-poet John (“Jack”) Donne (“art is a golden world of its own sufficiency”). Imagine the conversation! Tiffany does, and quite well too.
A lovely exchange between Will and Emilia, meeting after 10 years and much water under the bridge, professionally and personally: “I used to flesh out whole scripts and imagine the playing of them, when I first came to London …. And when finally a thing I wrote was put on the stage it was all wrong, not what I foresaw, the players, even the best ones, like pirates, saying things their *own* way, adding things *extempore*, misreading or plain forgetting — it drove me into a fury. I had birthed the things, and I could not make them … *mean* what I wished.” “Not like a sonnet.” pp. 192-93
But “Poetry grows whorish,” says savvy Ben Jonson, and Emilia, “To hell with a patron,” as she seeks out a printer, but even Thomas Thorpe, the “T. T.” who printed Shakespeare’s sonnets, is afraid to print a volume written by a woman, and Emilia is too proud to use a male pseudonym. pp. 188, 189. So she does something arguably unethical, but by rights hers to do. I shan’t spoil that plot point, except to say it’s another fun bit of playing with history to good effect. The novel’s only shortcoming, in my view, is it didn’t give enough prominence to the publication, in 1611, of her work. (There is one clear anachronism, when Emilia speaks a line from Milton’s Paradise Lost, his first edition was 1667.)
Some quotations from the early scene where Emilia, age 16, and Penelope Rich discuss her rape by, and continued attentions from, Lord Hunsdon, pp. 16-20:
Hunsdon’s post-coital blandishments to Emilia, “Ti amo, bella donna. Molto bella.” (Italian because at Penelope’s suggestion Emilia has been playing an Italian lass at court.)
Emilia and Penelope: “But what can be done?” “The world cares not.” “Lady, at least your gallant poet Sidney respected *your* chastity.” “Ha! This is what fools think, because of a few agonies set down in rhyme. [Sidney’s sonnet sequence Astrophel and Stella, wherein Stella is Penelope Rich.] ‘Respected’ is not the word I would —.” “He’s old.” “Good. Likely he’ll die. Before then — and even after — why shouldn’t you reap the harvest of his amorous dotage? … Love can wait…. You, my sweet, are a mere woman, and you’ve eaten of the tree.”
Astrophel and Stella, complete sequence:
http://www.luminarium.org/renascence-...
The penultimate scene is warmly told, and I’ll not deny a tear or two at the gathering to mourn to death of Shakespeare:
“So here they are joined in this night, a circle of mourners, come to grieve the passing of the swan, the soul of the age. Lighting the candles [in her home in St. Giles of the Fields], she thinks of that other life, of her blood’s heyday, when love was poetry and poetry love and both seemed a portal to eternity.
“Has the globe shrunk, or has she? She is glad, at any rate, that she’s come to this point, a natural perspective from which she can see and speak of *him* as he was, a falcon to her, the silk-spinning moth. He is hers as much as he’s anyone’s now. She can best possess him by sharing….
“They turn the pages of quartos they’ve bought over the years in the city. There are new ones this week; the bookstalls can’t keep them in stock. But the texts these people own are older, and more worn. Some, brought by Ben, are handwritten promptbooks of plays that have not yet been printed. They read. Hamlet’s speech to the players, which gets them all arguing. Bottom’s portrayal of Pyramus, which has them all laughing. Juliet’s love-smitten prayer, which leaves them all sighing.
“Prospero’s farewell.” (pp. 251-252)
Ben’s comment to Emilia when the others have all left: “Mark me. The moth spins its silk without knowing why it spins. It spins because it must. When it stops spinning, it dies…. Here’s the point, Melly. You must never stop writing. You see, he stopped. Then he died.” (pp. 254-255)
And the ending, although it ties up the several mysteries left in the plot, gives us solutions worthy of soap opera. Yet those solutions are somehow satisfying, and meaningful, like only good soap opera can be.
The novel is structured in five acts like an Elizabethan comedy with a plethora of recognizable characters and a plot that can turn to tragedy at any moment but never quite does for any length of time:
Part I Girlhood’s End, London, June 1581-November 1592
Part II The Maze and the Mirror, Tichtfield, Southampton, November 1592-April 1593
Part III Court, Tree, and City, London and Cooke-ham, May 1593-July 1599
Part IV The Face of a Poet, Longditch, Westminster, 1601-1613
Part V By Children’s Eyes, St. Giles in the Fields, 1614-1616
About the title, Paint, and the final scene of the book:
“Give me a look, give me a face,
That makes simplicity a grace;
Robes loosely flowing, hair as free :
Such sweet neglect more taketh me,
Than all the adulteries of Art ;
They strike mine eyes, but not my heart.”
~ From Epicoene, or The Silent Woman, by Ben Jonson (1609)
Penn’s review
I’ll not resist including here my notes and quotes on part of Emilia’s long poem, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, published in 1611, the same year as the King James version of the Bible; John Donne's “First Anniversary” poem; several printings and reprintings of quarto plays by Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Christopher Marlowe; George Chapman's translation of Homer's Iliad; and the first collected edition of Edmund Spenser's works; all of which figure in Grace Tiffany’s novel, but casually and sporadically, not part of what was truly an annus mirabilis.
IN DEFENSE OF EVE:
Aemelia Lanyer, or Emilia Lanier (1569-1645) defended Eve with a close reading of Genesis 2:15 - God’s command was to Adam alone, before Eve was created - and 3:6 - Adam was standing by when the serpent suggested the benefits of knowledge if Eve were to eat the fruit, but didn’t step in or even object, so it’s much more Adam’s fault; and yet now men brag of their knowledge - which they got from woman in the first place! From Salve Deus Rex Iudæorum, lines 777-816:
But surely Adam cannot be excus'd:
Her fault, though great, yet he was most too blame;
What Weaknesse offred Strength might haue refus'd,
Being Lord of all the greater was his shame:
Although the Serpents craft had her abus'd,
Gods holy word ought all his actions frame:
For he was Lord and King of al the earth,
Before poore Eue had either life or breath.
Who being fram'd by Gods eternall hand,
The perfect'st man that euer breath'd on earth,
And from Gods mouth receiu'd that strait command,
The breach whereof he knew was present death:
Yea hauing powre to rule both Sea and Land,
Yet with one Apple wonne to loose that breath,
Which God hath breathed in his beauteous face,
Bringing vs all in danger and disgrace.
And then to lay the fault on Patience backe,
That we (poore women) must endure it all;
We know right well he did discretion lacke,
Beeing not perswaded thereunto at all;
If Eue did erre, it was for knowledge sake,
The fruit beeing faire perswaded him to fall:
No subtill Serpents falshood did betray him,
If he would eate it, who had powre to stay him?
Not Eue, whose fault was onely too much loue,
Which made her giue this present to her Deare,
That which shee tasted, he likewise might proue,
Whereby his knowledge might become more cleare;
He neuer sought her weakenesse to reproue,
With those sharpe words wich he of God did heare:
Yet Men will boast of Knowledge, which he tooke
From Eues faire hand, as from a learned Booke.
If any Euill did in her remaine,
Beeing made of him, he was the ground of all;
If one of many Worlds could lay a staine
Vpon our Sexe, and worke so great a fall
To wretched Man, by Satans subtill traine;
What will so fowle a fault amongst you all?
Her weakenesse did the Serpents word obay,
But you in malice Gods deare Sonne betray.
http://www.luminarium.org/renascence-...
P.S.
Here is an article on the historical Emilia Lanier as the chief candidate for the “dark lady” of Shakespeare’s sonnets, which ties in pretty well with the personalities and events in Ms. Tiffany’s fun novel:
http://hudsonshakespeare.org/Shakespe...
I heard Grace Tiffany speak at the Inkling Folk Fellowship on Guy Fawkes Day 2021, on her 2016 novel, Gunpowder Percy: religion and conspiracy in Jacobean England, and so was moved to borrow her 2013 foray into that era and region centering on a poet I was introduced to 2 years ago in an Osher class by Elise Lonich Ryan on “Shakespeare’s sisters.” I’m glad I did!
It’s a tale told from the first person present point of view with an occasional and unobtrusive authorial gloss, depicting wonderfully imagined relationships, conversations, manners, fashions (sartorial, cosmetic, and artistic), and environments (from palace to “the stews”), all enjoyed during a leisurely 35-year stroll through Elizabethan and Jacobean England (1581-1616 - ending with Shakespeare’s death), centering on the narrator Emilia Lanier (Aemelia Lanyer) (1569-1645), perhaps England’s first professional female poet, and (probably) the “dark lady” of some of Shakespeare’s sonnets (nos. 127-154).
I can’t possibly cite all the many references to poems and plays of the time, but here is a short index to quotations from, and discussions of, Shakespeare’s sonnets. All the poetical allusions are unsourced in the book, but your intrepid reviewer recognized a good many and looked up their provenance.
3 - pp. 97, 133
9 - p. 133
12 - p. 249
20 - p. 109
99 - p. 249
101 - p. 190
102 - p. 191
129 - pp. 110, 142,
130 - pp. 85, 206
132 - p. 74
137 - p. 145
https://shakespeare.folger.edu/shakes...
Living within the societal constraints of Tudor-Stuart fashion and hierarchy, Emilia craves love - and agency. Will she achieve either? Are both together even possible in her day and age? And what about revenge? Who has the capacity? When might it be appropriate? By what method?
Emilia pines, “The queen is the only woman she knows who, with perfect success, enacts Emilia’s private yearnings: to speak her mind, to make bawdy jokes in public if she pleases, to be the maker of manners, and not manners’ slave. And to write, and be read!” (p. 134) That, above all, is what Emilia comes to crave: “to write, and be read!” Throughout she makes her own decisions and acts on them: some decisions poor, leading to bitterness and self-pity (these feelings are never long-lasting, “As she looks out from the summit [of Cooke-ham manor] on this greening England, she finds bitterness difficult, and self-pity tedious” p.131); some decisions good, leading to a very “practical solution” (a catchphrase). Here’s a bit more on Emilia’s non-fiction life.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poet...
Tiffany wrote fiction, to be sure, but with great respect for history and its literature. Almost everyone in the story is an historical person familiar to students of Elizabethan England, including Lanier’s musical Italian family of Bassano’s: Baptiste, Margaret, Augustine, Angelica; Emilia’s cousin and homosexual husband-of-convenience Alphonso Lanier; Penelope Devereux Rich (1563-1607) and her lover (and later, husband) Charles Blount (1563-1606), Baron Mountjoy, later Earl of Devonshire (making Penelope Countess); references to Penelope’s “old adorer” Philip Sidney (1554-1586) (Astrophel and Stella); Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, Penelope’s brother and favorite of the Queen until he failed at conquest in Ireland and aspired too high and was executed in the last year of her reign; Elizabeth Throckmorton and her unapproved husband Sir Walter Raleigh (1552-1618); Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon, son of Wm. Carey (or of Henry VIII?) and Mary Boleyn; Henry Carey became Lord Chamberlain and Emilia’s quondam lover and father of her (apparently) stillborn son; it is he who brings her to Court and introduces her to nobility; also there's Henry’s wife Anne Morgan, mother of “Henry junius” (one of the few fictional characters in the book); Elizabeth Carey, Lady Berkeley, Lord Hunsdon’s granddaughter; Margaret Clifford née Russell, Countess of Cumberland and a patron of Emilia’s at Cooke-ham where Emilia was tutor to her daughter, Lady Anne Clifford (“Nan”); Margaret’s sister, Anne Russell, Countess of Warwick, who was married to Ambrose Dudley, brother of Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, and Anne too was a great literary patron and a close friend to Queen Elizabeth; Simon Forman, astrologer and alchemist; Lucy Russell née Harrington, Countess of Bedford; and Anne Shakespeare née Hathaway. It is one of Tiffany’s several graces in this story to paint each and every one as *likable*, one way or another (if not always and entirely).
In the arts there’s poet-playwright Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593); actor Edward Alleyn; miniaturist Nicholas Hilliard; William Shakespeare (1564-1616) as Emilia’s lover at Tichtfield, the hereditary estate of Henry Wriothesley (1573–1624), Earl of Southampton and Baron Tichtfield and Shakespeare’s patron and friend, and something more as the recipient of the sonnets in manuscript, and the object of those to the beautiful lord; Elizabeth Cary née Tanfield, Viscountess Falkland (1585–1639) (“Bess”), poet and author of The Tragedy of Mariam Fair Queen of Jewry, the first published play (1613) by a woman in English; Ben Jonson (1572-1637), who calls Emilia cousin through her mother, Margaret Johnson (many jokes about Ben dropping the “h” from his name because it is merely ornamental, and useless); Inigo Jones; John Donne; telling and intelligent mentions of the works of Castiglione, Machiavelli, Pico della Mirandola, John Skelton (“long dead”), Homer, Plutarch, Ovid, all “Englished” (by Chapman, Golding, North, Florio, et al.) for the men and women who read, but only English and some Latin, maybe some French; a nod to “the famed glass of Galileo,” p. 194,
Consistently strong prose throughout, in description, dialogue, and wordplay, often delightful, sometimes scintillating, and always with a gentle humor, occasionally pathos. In addition to meeting Will Shakespeare, his theater company, and his sonnets, we hear of plays by Dekker, Chapman, Peele, Marston, and Greene (sounds like a law firm, eh?), we’re told of the “rainbow portrait” of the Queen by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, we are ringside to apartments, intrigues, and entertainments in various palaces, manor houses, and middle-class leaseholds, we accompany Emilia on a hair-raising visit to Bedlam, we witness a clever (and lucky, in more ways than one) murder, we see “proof of the axiom that all lawyers love plays,” and she and her sister Angelica survive the death of the Queen in the plague-year of 1603 but her second child (Will Shakespeare’s in Tiffany’s telling) dies of it; in her grief Emilia finally says, “I am not the first woman to lose a child, and I won’t be the last,” after her friend Bess Cary recites these lines from from King John, Act 3 sc. 4 (p. 168):
Grief fills the room up of my absent child,
Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,
Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,
Remembers me of all his gracious parts,
Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form.
“For herself, she touches her lute, and turns her hand to poetry. Her sonnets turn longing and loss into cleverness, and she loses herself in the game of it, seeking apt rhymes, building conceits, until she comes close to forgetting the pain that launched their creation…. She hides her sonnets in a locked trunk, like the swaddling clothes of dead children. Still, she continues to write them. And she reads, and reads, and reads.” pp. 98, 99.
On Emilia’s re-reading Shakespeare’s sonnets to or about the dark lady (Emilia, in the story): “Mere colored panes (yes, pains) through which she might, if she squinted, see something real: true history, a man’s heart, some things that had actually happened. But the verses afford no natural perspective. She’s written enough sonnets herself, since then, to know love poems are never like that. Like all stained glass windows, they use what *is* natural — a woman, a young man, the sunlight — to illuminate themselves, their own images, and not to open a view on the untidy world outside…. Were the words all I loved in the first place? she wonders. Are we anything more than words?” p. 157
On the rebound from Shakespeare she becomes friends (or frenemies) with Ben Jonson, whom she meets for the first time since he dipped her braids in ink as school children, at the Twelfth Night (1605) performance of The Masque of Blackness at Whitehall, and whom she appreciates, “because he understood, because he was *interested* in what she wrote,” p. 186 - when he reads and praises the manuscript of her poem A Description of Cooke-ham:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem...
This poem was later published and is (AFAIK) the first “country-house poem” in English, predating by five years Jonson’s own To Penshurst, the second poem in a collection called The Forest, published in the 1616 Folio of the Poet's Works:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem...
Tiffany not unsuccessfully changes the order of publication of these poems to suit her plot - Emily’s poem was actually published in 1611, along with her major work, Salve Deus Rex Iudæorum, about women of the Bible with dedicatory letters in verse and prose to prominent women of the period (the piece also featured an angry verse letter “To all vertuous Ladies in generall,” accusing men of being ungrateful to the females in their lives), but in her story Tiffany has Emilia fly into a rage when she sees Jonson’s poem published to great acclaim without acknowledgement of his indebtedness to her. That experience motivates Emily to get her poems published under her own name despite the almost inviolable social prejudice against seeing a woman’s name as author.
There are more masques by Jonson and Jones because Queen Anne of Denmark likes to star in glorious costume, and Tiffany’s descriptions suggest to me a Busby Berkeley number in a 1930’s musical (if smaller scale with a only dozen dancers).
Another fun scene is a dinner party with Bess Cary, Ben Jonson (who calls Philip Sidney “a scholar by art and a fool by nature”), rising playwright Francis Beaumont (“painted women must beware, when they come to Heaven, that God not look at heir face and say, I never made *that* one”), lawyer-poet John (“Jack”) Donne (“art is a golden world of its own sufficiency”). Imagine the conversation! Tiffany does, and quite well too.
A lovely exchange between Will and Emilia, meeting after 10 years and much water under the bridge, professionally and personally: “I used to flesh out whole scripts and imagine the playing of them, when I first came to London …. And when finally a thing I wrote was put on the stage it was all wrong, not what I foresaw, the players, even the best ones, like pirates, saying things their *own* way, adding things *extempore*, misreading or plain forgetting — it drove me into a fury. I had birthed the things, and I could not make them … *mean* what I wished.” “Not like a sonnet.” pp. 192-93
But “Poetry grows whorish,” says savvy Ben Jonson, and Emilia, “To hell with a patron,” as she seeks out a printer, but even Thomas Thorpe, the “T. T.” who printed Shakespeare’s sonnets, is afraid to print a volume written by a woman, and Emilia is too proud to use a male pseudonym. pp. 188, 189. So she does something arguably unethical, but by rights hers to do. I shan’t spoil that plot point, except to say it’s another fun bit of playing with history to good effect. The novel’s only shortcoming, in my view, is it didn’t give enough prominence to the publication, in 1611, of her work. (There is one clear anachronism, when Emilia speaks a line from Milton’s Paradise Lost, his first edition was 1667.)
Some quotations from the early scene where Emilia, age 16, and Penelope Rich discuss her rape by, and continued attentions from, Lord Hunsdon, pp. 16-20:
Hunsdon’s post-coital blandishments to Emilia, “Ti amo, bella donna. Molto bella.” (Italian because at Penelope’s suggestion Emilia has been playing an Italian lass at court.)
Emilia and Penelope: “But what can be done?” “The world cares not.” “Lady, at least your gallant poet Sidney respected *your* chastity.” “Ha! This is what fools think, because of a few agonies set down in rhyme. [Sidney’s sonnet sequence Astrophel and Stella, wherein Stella is Penelope Rich.] ‘Respected’ is not the word I would —.” “He’s old.” “Good. Likely he’ll die. Before then — and even after — why shouldn’t you reap the harvest of his amorous dotage? … Love can wait…. You, my sweet, are a mere woman, and you’ve eaten of the tree.”
Astrophel and Stella, complete sequence:
http://www.luminarium.org/renascence-...
The penultimate scene is warmly told, and I’ll not deny a tear or two at the gathering to mourn to death of Shakespeare:
“So here they are joined in this night, a circle of mourners, come to grieve the passing of the swan, the soul of the age. Lighting the candles [in her home in St. Giles of the Fields], she thinks of that other life, of her blood’s heyday, when love was poetry and poetry love and both seemed a portal to eternity.
“Has the globe shrunk, or has she? She is glad, at any rate, that she’s come to this point, a natural perspective from which she can see and speak of *him* as he was, a falcon to her, the silk-spinning moth. He is hers as much as he’s anyone’s now. She can best possess him by sharing….
“They turn the pages of quartos they’ve bought over the years in the city. There are new ones this week; the bookstalls can’t keep them in stock. But the texts these people own are older, and more worn. Some, brought by Ben, are handwritten promptbooks of plays that have not yet been printed. They read. Hamlet’s speech to the players, which gets them all arguing. Bottom’s portrayal of Pyramus, which has them all laughing. Juliet’s love-smitten prayer, which leaves them all sighing.
“Prospero’s farewell.” (pp. 251-252)
Ben’s comment to Emilia when the others have all left: “Mark me. The moth spins its silk without knowing why it spins. It spins because it must. When it stops spinning, it dies…. Here’s the point, Melly. You must never stop writing. You see, he stopped. Then he died.” (pp. 254-255)
And the ending, although it ties up the several mysteries left in the plot, gives us solutions worthy of soap opera. Yet those solutions are somehow satisfying, and meaningful, like only good soap opera can be.
The novel is structured in five acts like an Elizabethan comedy with a plethora of recognizable characters and a plot that can turn to tragedy at any moment but never quite does for any length of time:
Part I Girlhood’s End, London, June 1581-November 1592
Part II The Maze and the Mirror, Tichtfield, Southampton, November 1592-April 1593
Part III Court, Tree, and City, London and Cooke-ham, May 1593-July 1599
Part IV The Face of a Poet, Longditch, Westminster, 1601-1613
Part V By Children’s Eyes, St. Giles in the Fields, 1614-1616
About the title, Paint, and the final scene of the book:
“Give me a look, give me a face,
That makes simplicity a grace;
Robes loosely flowing, hair as free :
Such sweet neglect more taketh me,
Than all the adulteries of Art ;
They strike mine eyes, but not my heart.”
~ From Epicoene, or The Silent Woman, by Ben Jonson (1609)
Penn’s review
I’ll not resist including here my notes and quotes on part of Emilia’s long poem, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, published in 1611, the same year as the King James version of the Bible; John Donne's “First Anniversary” poem; several printings and reprintings of quarto plays by Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Christopher Marlowe; George Chapman's translation of Homer's Iliad; and the first collected edition of Edmund Spenser's works; all of which figure in Grace Tiffany’s novel, but casually and sporadically, not part of what was truly an annus mirabilis.
IN DEFENSE OF EVE:
Aemelia Lanyer, or Emilia Lanier (1569-1645) defended Eve with a close reading of Genesis 2:15 - God’s command was to Adam alone, before Eve was created - and 3:6 - Adam was standing by when the serpent suggested the benefits of knowledge if Eve were to eat the fruit, but didn’t step in or even object, so it’s much more Adam’s fault; and yet now men brag of their knowledge - which they got from woman in the first place! From Salve Deus Rex Iudæorum, lines 777-816:
But surely Adam cannot be excus'd:
Her fault, though great, yet he was most too blame;
What Weaknesse offred Strength might haue refus'd,
Being Lord of all the greater was his shame:
Although the Serpents craft had her abus'd,
Gods holy word ought all his actions frame:
For he was Lord and King of al the earth,
Before poore Eue had either life or breath.
Who being fram'd by Gods eternall hand,
The perfect'st man that euer breath'd on earth,
And from Gods mouth receiu'd that strait command,
The breach whereof he knew was present death:
Yea hauing powre to rule both Sea and Land,
Yet with one Apple wonne to loose that breath,
Which God hath breathed in his beauteous face,
Bringing vs all in danger and disgrace.
And then to lay the fault on Patience backe,
That we (poore women) must endure it all;
We know right well he did discretion lacke,
Beeing not perswaded thereunto at all;
If Eue did erre, it was for knowledge sake,
The fruit beeing faire perswaded him to fall:
No subtill Serpents falshood did betray him,
If he would eate it, who had powre to stay him?
Not Eue, whose fault was onely too much loue,
Which made her giue this present to her Deare,
That which shee tasted, he likewise might proue,
Whereby his knowledge might become more cleare;
He neuer sought her weakenesse to reproue,
With those sharpe words wich he of God did heare:
Yet Men will boast of Knowledge, which he tooke
From Eues faire hand, as from a learned Booke.
If any Euill did in her remaine,
Beeing made of him, he was the ground of all;
If one of many Worlds could lay a staine
Vpon our Sexe, and worke so great a fall
To wretched Man, by Satans subtill traine;
What will so fowle a fault amongst you all?
Her weakenesse did the Serpents word obay,
But you in malice Gods deare Sonne betray.
http://www.luminarium.org/renascence-...
P.S.
Here is an article on the historical Emilia Lanier as the chief candidate for the “dark lady” of Shakespeare’s sonnets, which ties in pretty well with the personalities and events in Ms. Tiffany’s fun novel:
http://hudsonshakespeare.org/Shakespe...
April 27, 2021
I'll admit, I had trouble progressing with the book. Mostly because I had no idea where the story was going. Only at like 3/4 I felt the need to continue reading (mostly because I wanted to read a different book with my friends).
When the rape first happens, I was inclined to put the book away, because rape is so much used in historical fiction, it just seems a lazy way to shock people. Especially with a female protagonist, it is almost obligatory (because every woman was raped in history I guess?). But I continued, because maybe it was important to the story? Yet at first it wasn't. The book is like a sea of red herrings, with events happening with no consequence for the story. It's like the author heard the advice 'kill your darlings' and just thought, nah. I mean, it's her book so good for her, but I honestly wondered all the way through what the point was. Especially the painting. Why did she start to paint herself all of the sudden like an Italian woman? She just heard it was possible and then went for it. Obviously, that had some consequence in the book, but the reasoning behind it was missing. (Also, I guess she either painted her whole body, or had sex with most of her clothes on, but shouldn't it have smudged?)
Then there is the almost casual mention that her child, whom she thinks is stillborn, may have been murdered, but she shrugs it off, and it seems like a red herring again (until the very end). The affair with Walter Rayleigh is a red herring as well. Also, the whole murder thing? She got away with it and just lived on. No consequences, not even moral ones.
I also didn't get why her husband referred to people by the opposite gender. It was very confusing, not explained and didn't seem to serve a purpose.
The whole Shakespeare thing annoyed me. Like, girl, get over it. Especially like 20 years later.
And the Ben thing as well, when he proclaims his love for her, and when she refuses calls her a whore. Although I like how they make fun of that later, but there is nothing about them reconciling. It's just skimmed over. Which I also found confusing oftentimes, the time that passed within a sentence. I have no idea how old Emilia was at the end, I guess 60-ish, which would make her son 40-ish, yet he was still called 'young Henry'. It was very confusing.
In all, I don't know. I guess the point of the story was to follow Emilia's life. So ok.
When the rape first happens, I was inclined to put the book away, because rape is so much used in historical fiction, it just seems a lazy way to shock people. Especially with a female protagonist, it is almost obligatory (because every woman was raped in history I guess?). But I continued, because maybe it was important to the story? Yet at first it wasn't. The book is like a sea of red herrings, with events happening with no consequence for the story. It's like the author heard the advice 'kill your darlings' and just thought, nah. I mean, it's her book so good for her, but I honestly wondered all the way through what the point was. Especially the painting. Why did she start to paint herself all of the sudden like an Italian woman? She just heard it was possible and then went for it. Obviously, that had some consequence in the book, but the reasoning behind it was missing. (Also, I guess she either painted her whole body, or had sex with most of her clothes on, but shouldn't it have smudged?)
Then there is the almost casual mention that her child, whom she thinks is stillborn, may have been murdered, but she shrugs it off, and it seems like a red herring again (until the very end). The affair with Walter Rayleigh is a red herring as well. Also, the whole murder thing? She got away with it and just lived on. No consequences, not even moral ones.
I also didn't get why her husband referred to people by the opposite gender. It was very confusing, not explained and didn't seem to serve a purpose.
The whole Shakespeare thing annoyed me. Like, girl, get over it. Especially like 20 years later.
And the Ben thing as well, when he proclaims his love for her, and when she refuses calls her a whore. Although I like how they make fun of that later, but there is nothing about them reconciling. It's just skimmed over. Which I also found confusing oftentimes, the time that passed within a sentence. I have no idea how old Emilia was at the end, I guess 60-ish, which would make her son 40-ish, yet he was still called 'young Henry'. It was very confusing.
In all, I don't know. I guess the point of the story was to follow Emilia's life. So ok.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
March 1, 2016
I won this book from Goodreads First Reads. When I first read the synopsis for this book, I was curious and quite interested, so I entered the giveaway. Awhile later, I received an email saying I won! I was ecstatic, so when I received the book in the mail, I stopped whatever book I was reading, and started reading this one. This all happened a year ago, and now you're probably wondering why I only wrote the review now. Well, that's because I only finished the book now. Let me explain why it took me so long...
I DISLIKED...
THE PACING. Maybe it was just me, but I found that the story was a bit choppy, and didn't quite flow enough for my liking. I know many books don't continue from one second to another, but for some reason, in this book, this really irked me.
THE SENTENCE STRUCTURE/LANGUAGE. I knew from the start that this book was from Shakespearean time, and that it was based off one of his poems(Dark Lady?), so I should have seen this coming. Maybe I kind of did, but I honestly didn't expect for the language to be that hard to understand. This was such a big determent for me. It was really hard to get into this book because of this...
These two factors were the main reasons why it took me so long to finish this book. After reading through the first few chapters, my excitement slowly decreased, and I was easily distracted by other books, which lead to other books, and so on. So a year later (a few days ago), I finally decided to finish reading this book.
I LIKED...
THE PLOT. Despite not understanding much of the language, I am proud to say that by the time I finished reading the last word in this book, I can confidently say that I understood the book as a whole, even if I didn't exactly understand every single word. I can also proudly say that I quite enjoyed the story, and how it ended.
Overall, not too bad, but I probably won't pick up another Shakespearean book for some time, at least until I can understand more of this strange, strange language. :)
I DISLIKED...
THE PACING. Maybe it was just me, but I found that the story was a bit choppy, and didn't quite flow enough for my liking. I know many books don't continue from one second to another, but for some reason, in this book, this really irked me.
THE SENTENCE STRUCTURE/LANGUAGE. I knew from the start that this book was from Shakespearean time, and that it was based off one of his poems(Dark Lady?), so I should have seen this coming. Maybe I kind of did, but I honestly didn't expect for the language to be that hard to understand. This was such a big determent for me. It was really hard to get into this book because of this...
These two factors were the main reasons why it took me so long to finish this book. After reading through the first few chapters, my excitement slowly decreased, and I was easily distracted by other books, which lead to other books, and so on. So a year later (a few days ago), I finally decided to finish reading this book.
I LIKED...
THE PLOT. Despite not understanding much of the language, I am proud to say that by the time I finished reading the last word in this book, I can confidently say that I understood the book as a whole, even if I didn't exactly understand every single word. I can also proudly say that I quite enjoyed the story, and how it ended.
Overall, not too bad, but I probably won't pick up another Shakespearean book for some time, at least until I can understand more of this strange, strange language. :)
February 4, 2014
Grace Tiffany’s depiction of seventeenth-century poet Emilia Lanier is by turns poignant and hilarious. This Dark Lady of Shakespeare’s sonnets will do anything to see her own work in print. Get set for a story of murder, blackmail, seduction — and makeup.
—Bonnie Jo Campbell,
Bestselling author of Once Upon a River and American Salvage, National Book Award Finalist
—Bonnie Jo Campbell,
Bestselling author of Once Upon a River and American Salvage, National Book Award Finalist
June 20, 2014
Received this book through a Goodreads giveaway. I liked the story of Emilia. Her relationship with not just Shakespeare but all the people in her life. I enjoy any historical book be it fiction or non-fiction.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews