Love Disguised is a work of fiction, built on a few solid facts and fleshed out with airy imagination. While my earlier novels Ophelia and Lady Macbeth’s Daughter reimagine Hamlet and Macbeth, this is an original story featuring Will Shakespeare himself before he became a renowned playwright. Every author’s youth provides experiences that are later shaped—not always consciously—into art. This novel plays with that premise, inventing a youth for Shakespeare by looking backward from his best-loved comedies. Those who know his comedies might recognize elements of them here. Readers who are new to Shakespeare can enjoy this story on its own terms. If this novel were a play, it would be called a “city comedy,” for it deals with everyday life in London and often satirizes its citizens.
What are the facts behind my fiction? We know a fair amount about Shakespeare’s early life. He was born in 1564 and went to Stratford grammar school, which is still standing. There he would have studied the poetry of Ovid, which he loved. His father was a glovemaker and former alderman of Stratford who ran into financial troubles in the 1570s. John Shakespeare owed a debt to William Burbage, one of his tenants. No one knows if this Burbage was related to James Burbage, owner of the Theatre in Shoreditch where Shakespeare got his start in the 1590s. But for the sake of the story I assume they were brothers, and that Will traveled to London to settle the debt, where he met the theatrical Burbage and felt the first stirrings of his ambition. (Later, in 1598, Burbage lost his lease on the Theatre, and his men—Will included—dismantled the building, ferried the wood across the Thames, and used it it to build the Globe Theatre associated with Shakespeare’s greatest plays.) Before such playhouses were built, plays were performed in innyards. There were several inns named the Boar’s Head, one located right where I have placed it just east of Aldgate. It was first used as a playhouse in 1557.
We don’t know what occupied William Shakespeare between the time he left school in 1578 and turned up on the London theater scene around 1592. Scholars call these the Lost Years, because documentation is extremely scarce. At the time I have set this story, young Will was most likely an apprentice to his father. He was a long way from writing his first plays, but he surely knew Ovid’s tale of Pyramus and Thisbe (translated by Arthur Golding) and the history of ancient Rome from his schooling. Some of the verses my Will writes are my own invention; others are adapted from Midsummer Night’s Dream and Antony and Cleopatra to suggest very early drafts by a talented but inexperienced writer.
This is a documented fact: in November of 1582, eighteen-year-old Will married Anne Hathaway of Shottery, who was twenty-six and pregnant with his child. A bond, or assurance of the marriage, was posted by Fulke Sandells, a neighbor of the Hathaways.
It surprised me to learn (from Germaine Greer’s book) that Anne Hathaway had a younger sister, Catherine, who was Will’s age. I wondered if both sisters had set their sights on Will. This gave me the idea for the rivalry between them that culminates in the “bed trick” (see chapter 6), a dramatic convention of the time. Incidentally, vows spoken between a man and a woman, followed by consummation, constituted a legal marriage, though a somewhat irregular one. (Deception might complicate the matter.)
I employed several conventions of Elizabethan comedy. Perhaps the most obvious one is disguise: Meg pretends to be her brother, Mack, in order to befriend Will more freely. (No virtuous woman would freely roam about the city, except in the company of a male relative.) We may wonder how characters in disguise managed to pass undetected, but the illusion must have been convincing because audiences loved it. Disguise was common onstage anyway, for young men acted the female roles because women were prohibited from the stage. Or so everyone assumes, though I haven’t found any mention of an actual law to that effect. I think it possible—and some Shakespeare scholars agree with me—that women did act onstage (probably pretending to be boys pretending to be women). Imagine the gender confusion! (Thank you, Ellen Mackay, for our stimulating conversation on the subject.)
There is evidence that women in men’s clothing and men in women’s clothing did roam the streets of London, causing controversy. Satirists like George Gascoigne, writing in 1576, and Philip Stubbes, writing in 1583, denounced the wearing of doublets and jerkins by women as an extravagant fashion or worse, a sign of degeneracy. In 1620 two pamphlets were published, The Man-Woman and a reply, The Womanish Man, criticizing those who dressed and behaved like members of the opposite sex. In making Meg a cross-dressing heroine, I justified her behavior on the basis of her difficult past and her desire for freedom as well as secrecy.
I drew inspiration for Long Meg from two sources. One is The Life of Long Meg of Westminster (1635). Long Meg was a legendary figure born during the reign of Henry VIII, the subject of ballads and a play performed in 1590 but now lost. The second source is a 1662 account of The Life and Death of Mrs. Mary Frith. Born around 1580, Frith was “a very Tomrig or Rumpscuttle [who] delighted and sported only in boys’ play and pastime.” Known as Moll Cutpurse, she went to plays dressed in men’s clothing and was reputed to be, as her nickname implied, a thief. In 1608 Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker wrote a play called The Roaring Girl, with Moll Cutpurse as the main character, a prankster and defender of women against the slander of men. Most comedies end in marriage, but Moll vows she won’t be married until honesty and truth reign—which is to say, doomsday.
Like Portia in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, Long Meg takes the role of a lawyer. Although much has been written about Shakespeare and the law, finding out how an actual case was prosecuted in his day is no easy task. The handbook Will uses is an invention based on other sources. Shakespeare himself, judging from the courtroom scenes in his plays, was more interested in mocking the law than in representing it realistically. I’m grateful to Luke Wilson for his “legal advice” and terminology. Ultimately the legal scenes reflect what I was able to tease out of my reading on English common law, which was slow to change. Early modern England was a very litigious society and the education of lawyers not so formal as it is today, so it’s likely that a modestly educated man like Will would be capable of defending himself or an acquaintance in a legal matter.
It is possible to get a sense of what London was like at the end of the sixteenth century by reading John Stow’s Survey of London (1598) together with the fascinating Agas map, made between 1561 and 1570 (reprinted in The A to Z of Elizabethan London). It shows every church and street and gate, details such as cows, archers, and clothes drying in the fields, the steps leading down into the Thames River, armaments outside the Tower of London, and the great high houses along the London Bridge.
But don’t go to London looking for the city of Shakespeare’s day. It is completely overbuilt by modern London, though artifacts and displays in the Museum of London and in the Globe Theatre Museum are like tickets to travel back in time—so are the many sites associated with Shakespeare in and around Stratford-upon-Avon. If you have the good fortune to visit when these sites are not crowded, you can question the historical interpreters to your heart’s content, wander among the foxgloves in Anne Hathaway’s cottage garden, and even hear the cuckoo sing, announcing the coming of summer.
In such a setting it’s not hard to imagine that Will Shakespeare really did go to London in 1582 to settle his father’s debt, met the cross-dressing Long Meg of the Boar’s Head Inn, and embarked on adventures that drew them closer than the best of friends. Why not?
I am grateful to so many people who have helped make this a better book than it would have otherwise been. Thanks to Melanie Cecka, for her expert editorial guidance; to Michelle Nagler and Brett Wright, for bringing this project to completion; to Ken Wright and Michele Rubin for being in my corner and Susan Cohen, my safety net at Writer’s House. To Regina Flath, Jill Amack, Beth Eller, Katy Hershberger, Erica Barmash, and Patricia McHugh, who make and market such beautiful books at Bloomsbury. And to Rob, David, and Adam, for indulging my whims and making me laugh.