by Bart Casey
Finally, there is a lot of uncertainty about when each of Shakespeare’s plays was first performed. Queen Elizabeth I’s Court Calendar and the payment records of her Treasury and Office of the Chamber and Revels show acting troupes being paid for putting on performances on certain dates, but the records do not always note the name of the play. In The Vavasour Macbeth, I have sided with the experts who theorize that Macbeth was first performed during the summer of 1606 as an entertainment during the state visit of King Christian IV of Denmark and Norway, who was the brother of King James I’s wife, Anne of Denmark.
Like James, Christian was fascinated by witches and actually had more than 1,300 of his Scandinavian citizens burned for that offense at home during his reign. The actors probably would have been told to keep the performance short—just under two hours—because Christian and his court did not speak fluent English. But they would have all appreciated the scenes with the witches, the songs, the drunken porter scene, and all the blood connected with the murder, the battles, and so on. Another reason to be quick was the fact that there was prodigious drinking on all sides during that visit, and things tended to be moved along quickly during the entertainments. After his four-week stay, King Christian and his court left for home on their ships a few days later, to everyone’s relief.
So, as you can see, there is indeed fiction about the Macbeth treasures described in the novel, but not wildly improbable inventions.
Additional information. If you want to know more about all of the history and problems in The Vavasour Macbeth and around the whole “Shakespeare authorship question,” here are some recommendations:
Further reading:
1. Anne Vavasour and Sir Henry Lee, by Bart Casey (New York, Post Hill Press, 2019).
This is a short ebook telling the complete non-fiction story of the lives and romance of Anne Vavasour and Sir Henry Lee.
2. Sir Henry Lee, by Sir Edmund Chambers. (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1930).
This is the same biography that book character Stephen requests through an inter-library loan to find out more about Sir Henry Lee and Anne Vavasour. You’ll probably have to get it the same way, by asking your local library to order it from a nearby university’s collection, which they can do for you.
3. Sir Henry Lee (1533-1611): An Elizabethan Courtier, by Sue Simpson. (Surrey, England, Ashgate Publishing, 2014).
This biography retells the story of Sir Henry in a more modern style with illustrations.
4. Shakespeare’s Lives, by S. Schoenbaum. (Oxford University Press, 1993).
This masterful summary of the evolution of the many diverse and often wacky theories about the “Shakespeare authorship question” was written by the Distinguished Professor of Renaissance Literature at the University of Maryland. It was widely praised and became an international bestseller.
Reviewing it for the British newspaper The Sunday Telegraph, Frank Kermode wrote, “It is not often research as vast and minute as Schoenbaum’s produces such good fun.”
5. Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, by Stephen Greenblatt. (W. W. Norton & Company, 2004).
Harvard professor Stephen Greenblatt makes the best possible case for how Will Shakespeare, the boy from Stratford, could have become the real Shakespeare—without a university education or a legal degree.
Further movie viewing:
6. Shakespeare in Love (1998).
Winner of seven Oscars, this fictional comedy is about a young Shakespeare, out of ideas and short of cash, who meets his ideal woman and is inspired to write one of his most famous plays, Romeo and Juliet.
This farce probably comes close to the truth about the collaboration of the Elizabethan writers desperate to produce popular plays to pay the rent.
I particularly like the pub scene in which Shakespeare tells Christopher Marlowe he is working on a play called Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate’s Daughter, about a pirate. Marlowe suggests it might be better to make it about an Italian boy who’s always in and out of love and who falls for his enemy’s daughter...or something.
And the rest is history.
Acknowledgments
For the first journeys into this project, I would like to thank the late professor Betty Bandel of the English Department of the University of Vermont graduate school in the early 1970s for driving me farther than ever into little explored territories around the facts and problems surrounding Shakespeare.
Then, more importantly, I am grateful for the navigational sense of my wife, Marilyn, who insisted we turn away from the well-worn highway pursuing Master Shakespeare, to go instead down the small country lane leading to the virtually forgotten story of Anne Vavasour and Sir Henry Lee.
As we amassed more and more information about that story over the years, we were lucky that our three children are all excellent writers and critics. Matthew, Lauren, and Michael never failed to give us excellent feedback on ideas and drafts as the story took shape.
Research forays into primary manuscripts and other obscure sources were always at the heart of the information gathering parts of this project, and I would like to thank the following resources for giving me access to rare materials:
•In the UK: The British Museum, The British Library, The National Archives in Kew, the Buckinghamshire County Museum, the Centre for Buckinghamshire Studies, the National Portrait Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the library at Westminster Abbey, and the Royal Archives at Windsor.
•In the USA: the New York Public Library, the Morgan Library and the Harvard University Libraries.
Many individuals were extremely generous in sharing their knowledge, resources, and advice with me along the way. I would like to thank Mr. Peter Bateman, Clerk of the Armourers and Brasiers’ Company in London for sharing his knowledge about the story of Anne Vavasour and Sir Henry Lee, and for allowing me to reproduce the cover images of their portraits on the cover of this book. Mr. Miles Young, Warden of New College Oxford, helped me understand the experience and training Oxford students such as Margaret and Stephen would have had at that wonderful university. Mr. Richard Bonner-Davies generously refreshed my schoolboy familiarity with cricket enough to avoid the most serious mistakes. And British researcher Susan Moore was brave enough to dive into boxes of ancient documents at the National Archives in Kew and to re-surface with understandable translations and summations of previously unpublished Elizabethan English and Latin documents she had resurrected relating to the adventures of Anne Vavasour and Sir Henry Lee.
When the final draft was taking shape, I am indebted to my early readers who provided invaluable feedback and suggestions on how to improve the storytelling—especially Laird Stiefvater, Angela Johnson, Garth Hallberg, Chuck Guariglia, Tom Vincent, Linda Jackson, Sheila Morse, Peg Brown, Karla Kirby, Ian Latham, and Virginia Doty.
And finally I want to thank the publishing team who worked so diligently with me from the earliest stages of development through to the end: my editors Paul DeAngelis, Trent Duffy, and Madeline Sturgeon; my agent Lynne Rabinoff; and the entire professional staff of Post Hill Press in New York and Nashville who delivered the final product.
For all of this help and encouragement along the way, I am truly grateful.
Bart Casey
Brattleboro, Vermont, USA
2019
About the Author
Bart Casey grew up in London, studied Literature at Harvard, and trained as a professor before switching to an advertising career, living many years amidst the settings for The Vavasour Macbeth. His recent biography of Victorian Laurence Oliphant was chosen by Kirkus for its Best Books
of 2016.
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