The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #43112 Message #628460
Posted By: Peter T.
15-Jan-02 - 02:43 PM
Thread Name: FICTION: Under the Sign of the Unicorn
Subject: RE: FICTION: Under the Sign of the Unicorn
Once, when we were out, to say the God's truth, poaching, and were upon the verge of being taken, though we outran the wind, my brother roared out into the night – "Is this not fine, Judith, for how else would we know how it fareth with the hare?" Such is my brother, and beloved of me, though there is pain in the knowing that he hath pathways and advantages untreadable by me, or all of our sex, save only Her Majesty, who is fast becoming a law unto herself since she is become the law almost, and of other ladies only the richest of the land, such as the Countess of Pembroke. Nor do I hold it against my brother, no, for he hath since we two came almost as one from the womb cherished and upheld me, even to his peril: I lay to his account one such occasion when, as was our practice, he would rush from his schooling, and like some desperate seeker after treasure who has found a golden hoard, spread out before me for our joint sweetness rifts of Ovid and Horace, new realms of Latin hard conned and memorized by him so that he could in turn teach me, and, again, as was our practice, we hid ourselves in a corner of the house away from all others; but on this day we were of a sudden confronted by two manservants, and hauled up before our longsuffering father who inquired, his face black as storm, as to what we were occupied about, and William replied that he was teaching me, and our father said, to what purpose? And he replied, To any purpose she chooseth, she hath an excellent wit that withereth from lack of watering. And he outfaced our father, though another portion of his being suffered manfully for his insolence.
When my brother married, to his unhappy cost, and fled from schoolmastering into that realm wherein he is beginning to emulate the late comet in the firmament, what had been a vast empire of imagining shrank back into a walnutshell of a town, and I was left caring for little, except our parents, who soon thereafter were taken by the plague; which left house and land to myself (my brother having little interest at that time in returning to our town, in part because of his termagent wife), but even that soon palled, in especial case because our house became a sort of market day week round, as bumpkin suitors from the villages and towns round about got wind of opportunity. So dreary were all prospects that I came to a determination to change my horizons, and further, recollecting many a comedy by Plautus and Terence, and having at hand a copy of that excellent play, La Calandria, first performed at the court of Urbino to great acclaim in the time of Castiglione, wherein the humour and pathos depended upon the determination of the lady in the play to disguise herself as a boy, I resolved to undertake the same, to pass beyond the irksome chains of convention. This was all the easier because my features and figure were, though not uncomely – at least such was the report among the rustics who lived in hope, though they had little to compare me with, beyond Sarah, the innkeeper's daughter, who was a comely springe to catch woodcocks if there ever were such – of a boyish cast. I had also, from my brother's earliest days as a player in the touring company, been adept at disguise and paint.
And so it was that, having left our home in the hands of a trusted family friend, and with a warning message to my brother that he might expect me a se'nnight upon urgent business, I, Judith Shakespeare, now Jude Shakespeare, set out upon the open road towards the lodestone, the cynosure of all eyes in our kingdom, London.