Alexander Cooke is listed as one of the players in Shakespeare’s First Folio and appears in various other sources of the time. His death in 1614 is documented, the fact that he fathered children, and the speculation that he played Shakespeare’s principal female roles. Even his nickname is recorded: ‘Saunder’ as originally spelled by the eighteenth-century critic Edmond Malone. Cooke was apprenticed to John Heminges and later became a share-holder in Shakespeare’s company, the King’s Men. We do not know where or when he was born or who he married.
Before I came across Cooke and his nickname Sander in Andrew Gurr’s The Shakespearean Stage, 1574-1642 and Jonathan Bate’s Soul of an Age, I’d drafted a novel about a girl who flees her village to avoid an unwanted marriage, disguised as a boy. She joins up with a troupe of travelling players, where only her fellow boy actor knows her true identity. Eventually the two of them make their way to London and join Lord Strange’s Men, the company Shakespeare was then associated with. No one has suggested that Alexander Cooke was born female, but why not?
That could be the mantra of historical novelists: why not? Play with facts for entertainment and new angles on history, which, depending on who recorded it, may or may not be accurate anyhow.
Charlotte Wightwick quotes James Shapiro in ‘What’s Past is Prologue’ in the Historical Novel Review, May, 2016: ‘I’m deeply jealous of historical novelists, who derive pleasure from their research but then are free to go beyond where I permit myself to go, exploring the interiority and motives of their characters and reshaping stories into compelling plots. I’m keenly aware that this is what Shakespeare himself was doing when, for example, he invents for Brutus such remarkable soliloquies in Julius Caesar, or imagines the love-affair of Antony and Cleopatra.’
Writers reshape stories for entertainment and, perhaps, new insights. Such creative freedom is not without controversy, particularly when it deals with those still living, such as ‘The Crown’s depiction of England’s royal family. Others in the more distant past can delight, e.g. the multiculturalism and sexual freedom in ‘Bridgerton’. Viewers supposedly recognize these as fictions, but exactly how fictional can be a question.
Similar invention abounds in novels. Sometimes readers must shift traditional sympathies, as in Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy, which shows the faults of Sir Thomas More and arouses sympathy, or at least understanding, of the traditionally more thuggish Thomas Cromwell. Other novels offer little known perspectives, as we see in the range of untold stories of the past now being published.
A reader needn’t know what isn’t historical in Bedtrick, as the basic chronology is accurate. The Globe Theatre opened in 1599; the Earl of Essex was executed for treason in 1601; Queen Elizabeth died in 1603; King James I named Shakespeare’s playing company the King’s Men soon after arriving in London. So too the chronology of Shakespeare’s plays as far as we can determine during the tense late days of the Queen’s reign. I’ve played with less significant dates, however, some not known, such as when Alexander Cooke and Mary Frith were born, or slightly altered, like details of Cooke’s acting apprenticeship and the final scene of the novel, which took place a little later.
In historical novels, whether or not the protagonist is based on a real person, we care about their inner struggles and conflicts with their times. Sander Cooke (born, in my version, Kate Collins in the village of Saffron Walden in 1576) resists the rules binding women. Sermons reminding them to be chaste, obedient, and silent seem absurd to a motherless girl who runs wild, absorbing her brother’s lessons, keeping company with her Gran, a healer, and doing the absolute minimum cooking and housework. Her father decides marriage to an oafish sheep farmer will tame her. At the very last minute she escapes in her brother’s clothes, taking the name of Alexander the Great and her Gran’s maiden name.
Several years later when Bedtrick opens, Sander Cooke is an established actor on the London stage, with only a handful knowing her secret, including William Shakespeare. The playwright composed roles with company members in mind. Richard Burbage had the stage presence to play leads from a young age; the clown Will Kemp was replaced by Robert Armin, in part because Shakespeare had a new style of clowning in mind. Thus Sander Cooke’s true sex could well have influenced his powerful female characters. Rosalind, in As You Like It, is his second longest role after Hamlet. Was this written for a mere boy?
In fact, that play inspired the first novel I wrote about Sander, The Secret Player, taking Kate Collins from girlhood to the London stage. What if Rosalind, who spends most of the play disguised as the boy Ganymede, was born female? A girl plays a boy who plays a girl who disguises herself as a boy! Why not? Shakespeare wrote As You Like It after that novel ends, but there’s a similar disguise in his early play, Two Gentlemen of Verona, so Sander has a chance as Julia, who disguises herself as Sebastian to pursue her lover to Milan.
Although Sander plays Rosalind in Bedtrick, its plot moves in another direction. Historically Alexander Cooke fathered children. A female Sander would have to leave the stage if she become pregnant. Earlier she’d given up the man she fell in love with (the dashing John Donne, why not?) rather than sacrifice her career. But her friend is pregnant and the father refuses to marry her. Dare Sander become a husband? The big reason not: they’d be cried for witches if discovered. A risk worth taking? The answer prompts ongoing conflicts through the novel, on and off stage.