Review by Leslie Carroll, who writes under the pen name Juliet Grey
“O wonderful, wonderful, and most wonderful wonderful! and yet again wonderful, and after that out of all hooping!”
So exclaims Celia to her banished cousin Rosalind in Shakespeare’s AS YOU LIKE IT, both young women fending for themselves in the Forest of Arden, with Rosalind in disguise as “Ganymede,” (in Shakespeare’s day a boy playing a girl playing a boy.) AS YOU LIKE IT features prominently in Jinny Webber’s BEDTRICK, a “novel” novel of gender fluidity in an era when such behavior was popular in some situations and treasonous in others.
It takes at least five “wonderfuls” to praise BEDTRICK, this gorgeous and immersive novel of the final years of Elizabethan England, a world where, despite the decades-long reign of the wise and powerful Tudor queen, women were still not permitted to “strut and fret their hour upon the stage.”
“Amid this hurly-burly,” a cast of historical figures from the royal, political, and theatrical worlds, as well as those re-imagined from the pages of history, including our cross-dressing hero/ine with a lifelong secret, bring the era to vivid, roaring life.
Sander Cooke is an actor in Shakespeare’s troupe: one of the boys who play the women’s roles. But Sander has a secret that too many people know, which makes his situation not merely treacherous, but treasonous. He is a woman, born the country girl Kate Collins, who fled the prospect of a miserable arranged marriage in pursuit of a career as an actor on the London stage, all of which required her to assume a lifelong disguise.
In BEDTRICK, political and personal betrayals abound. Sander’s brother Johnny impregnates their mutual friend Frances, an enterprising businesswoman, and needlewoman to the queen; but he refuses to marry her. Up steps Sander, who urges Frances to marry him/her, in order to save Frances’s reputation and protect her unborn baby from the taint of bastardy.
Supporting the main character are William Shakespeare and the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (the actors in his company, including Sander’s feckless and faithless brother), Ben Johnson; the Jewish Italian poetess and musician Amelia Bassano Lanyer; the original “roaring girl,” the cross-dressing cutpurse Moll Frith; and the Virgin Queen herself, no stranger to crafting her own image for public consumption. The queen guesses Sander’s secret. Her Majesty’s moods are ever whimsical. At any moment, she could send him to the Tower not only for performing on the stage, but for marrying another woman and living together as man and wife.
Webber’s narrative unfolds so seamlessly and cleverly that Shakespeare continually appears to derive his ideas for his plays from incidents and events as they arise. In fact he uses the “bedtrick” (defined as sex with a partner who pretends to be someone else), to great effect to make things right with the world in more than one of his plays during the course of the novel.
Shakespeare understood the human condition arguably more than any other author writing in the English language. Webber not only understands the human heart and the transmutable nature of love; but in BEDTRICK, she also proves to be an astute Shakespeare whisperer. Through Sander Cooke she offers some new interpretations of scenes and fresh line readings that make most excellent sense. And when I read a novel there’s nothing I love more than to learn something I hadn’t known, or thought about, before I picked it up. As a reader, as a novelist myself, and as a Shakespearean actress, I can’t give BEDTRICK enough stars. Most wonderful indeed!!
~Leslie Carroll – author of the acclaimed Marie Antoinette trilogy (under the pen name Juliet Grey)