Amelia Bassano

A mistress at thirteen. Shocking for you – now. Not so for me – then. Juliet was only thirteen when she met, fell in love, and all too hastily, married Romeo. Perhaps that’s where life and art merge? The cloudy yet wholesome translucency of writing from experience. It isn’t a myth. All the greats do it. I, very surely, know.

My family, Bassanos, were court musicians who had come to England from Venice at the end of Henry VIII’s reign. I was young when I first pressed ink to impressionable parchment, preferring writing to music. A Jewish girl: bright, well-educated, naturally astute. All-seeing, my mother would say. She spied my intellect as an infant and nurtured it. My father, often absent, performing musical renditions at court, chose to turn a blind eye. He never thought I’d amount to much. I was a mere girl, meek and mute. Why would I have climbed, soared as the falcon flies?

Mother, naturally intuitive and exacting, coaxed and encouraged my learning. She knew that I was not moulded for domesticity: its clay-stiff mundanity swayed me not. To be lost in embroidered webs where the exit is unfathomable was not a prospect. No dispelling enlightenment nor heady breaths would have awaited me – only a dark labyrinth.

I was tutored in father’s study with him often absent. I was taught Latin, geometry, French, Greek and Latin, Spanish and Italian. My adolescence was rich, heady as mead, including musical lessons. I became intrigued by both the violin and the harp – the harp particularly. It has a raw beauty to its playing – a lacy bond warps parts of me within its strings. My mother has favourite songs. I played them for her in early evenings once my studies were complete, as moths wings extended, fluttering free in dusky twilight.

I was fostered into the household of the Countess Dowager of Kent when my father died and was educated alongside the noble girls whom I attended. Critics will say of my latter work that it shows familiarity with poetic genres, verse forms, and the Bible, perhaps this is why. My wings would not remain clipped as a kept dove in Elizabeth’s court, to fawn at and coax to submission as my father, bending wilfully to each of her musical whims. Instead, I took every opportunity to build towers of the mind, straight and predatory, living by my innate foresight, along with a quick-witted spirit that I knew Elizabeth possessed herself and greatly admired in others. My fate had painted visits to court on a futuristic canvas. Through my musical line I was bound to make her acquaintance as I grew, but I knew not if my skills and demeanor would please the Queen of England, renowned to be hard to please, although, she possessed a love of the arts. There was a slither of silver poking its curious head forwards, wanting to travel away from obscurity. I may not have impressed her with musical talent, but would she be intrigued by my penned words? As a female monarch, there was a chance that she may be lifted by my poetics, removing her to shimmering golden sands and distant places, transported by words as she sat upon her regal throne in Whitehall Palace.

I must return to matters of the heart as they often proceed feminist musings, transpiring as limitations to literary art. Men had the power to curtail my inked nib, preventing it altogether if they so chose. Sometimes it baffled me, and I struggled to contain its growing stature beneath low ceilings and to prevent it from sweeping up within the peat smoke fires, and fleeing, as a caught bird of prey desperate to soar independently over glen and glade.

My suitor, thirty-three years my senior, Hunsdon, a courtier and cousin of Elizabeth I, tired of me eventually. I was nothing more than a high-class whore, pimped out to please his white flesh, shaking joy into his portly frame. A very good whore, he often complimented. Although, he was more than old enough to be my father. The thought of his demands sicken me now, sinking deep to the pits of bile that protest against such servitude, but I am a mere woman. What choice did I have but to be handed to my father’s friend? The whims of men proceeded all else, tightening and piercing as the corset threads pull sharper as women round with pregnancy.

I had such need of concealment as whispered confessions into saintly ears at church for I was carrying Hunsdon’s child.

Did he love me? I was his longest-serving mistress. He left me a pension of £40 a year which speaks of love or its likeness. He had useful links. He was the man in charge of the English theatre and the patron of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. Perhaps that’s why I tried to love him. It took me years but eventually, I told him my greatest secret. He read some of my early work, even suggesting that history plays were performed at court, but the crux, the knotty complexity, was that each was coined by me: a woman. Shakespeare had yet to make an appearance in London, so I had no frontman to hide behind. Oftentimes, when deeply enamored, we’d read parts, always after sex, in the intoxicating throes of passion when he almost convinced himself of love. He’d run his fingers up and down my ebony skin, coursing the pattern of my spine, intrigued by my otherness, and seduced by my skin’s luminous sheen, laying naked under beeswax candlelight.

My most honeyed memory was when we read lines from Antony and Cleopatra. It was one of my earliest plays written between the winter of 1605 and early 1606. The all-consuming love the characters share, perhaps Hunsdon tried to emulate, believing me his Egyptian queen, although the darkness of my skin color prevented him from ever marrying me. I knew, like Cleopatra, that time with him would be curtailed, not able to elongate its ribbons into futurity. He was titled, and I, a castaway, a Jewish orphan, and concubine. A prized concubine: one with rotating clogs for a brain, which is what ultimately bonded him to me, but a concubine just the same. The tarnished stains last long, never fading in exposed sunlight.

I was married off at twenty-three, quite an old maid, and concealing a pregnancy. Too long had I played mistress. On October 18, 1592, at St. Botolph Aldgate, I married Alphonso, my first cousin. Heads nodded within the church of approval, ignorant of the swelling child growing to fruition behind my swaying skirts. Twenty-one years, our marriage endured. The vows finally broken by Alphonse’s death. It was an unhappy marriage and is documented by historians as such. Even they appreciated my pain.

He fathered a plethora of my children yet only two survived. I endured multiple miscarriages, some in the last stages of pregnancy, where adventurous feet kicked at the fences of my ribs, spinning around in my womb like eyeless fish. The stillbirths were worse, beyond heart-wrenching, even for a wordsmith, past human reckoning to cast into even shadows of words. To survive the grueling days of labour, to bear forth only a static, limp child, is soul-crushing. A once hopeful blossom dissipates into sharp shards whose edges rotate perpetually, nudging the selfsame ribcage where tiny feet and hands once explored, searching for a worldly outlet. He stomached each loss easily, swallowing it as seasoned soup, not allowing the heat to scorch his tongue. Whereas, I was a scorched snake, driven mad with the growing line of absentee babes, left to writhe in a snake pit where kindness evaporated on the breeze. Grief is a place of fang and claw; no solitude or empathy flows its river there. Only boiling hot coals, tormenting feet and wrecking inceptions, as I endeavoured to pull myself from deep pits of longing. No loving hand helped me to climb the black, slippery-sleek walls. The loss of a child is seen as purely and exclusively women’s work.

Hamlet was written with my multiple losses in mind, weaving my grief into Hamlet’s mourning for his murdered father at the hand of his traitorous uncle, brandishing his own soul with onyx bars of fortified, steely melancholy – too ready yet paradoxically poorly armoured to avenge his father or to flee from his mostly self-imposed caverns of doom.

During my early married life, losses plagued me not. I was at liberty from their burning heartbeats for nearly two years before the blood started to flow and the cramps prodded their malevolent fingers into the very fabric of my womb. Before all the blood-stained days, I yearned to learn. I’d sneak home regularly. My mother was happy to enlist the help of an occasional tutor. In my confined situation as a bride to Alphonso, I learned to write more frequently. The ink nib moved slowly at first, hitching on the fabric of parchment, as clothes snag on fence posts in the breeze, yet with satiny time, mere scribbles and inklings of poetics expanded. I began with ditties that spoke of travel: ones my mother would enjoy.

With the boredom that drapes itself upon matrimony, I became interested in writing longer pieces: epic poems, fables, and the emerging ribbons of plays. Ideas, even from an infant, locked and whirled amidst my evolving mind, accepting of storylines and emerging characters; I held on to them as bedposts in childbirth, eager to stomach the strength needed to birth such crucial creations. My clutch was tight and fixed. Childbirth in some ways was easier than the fragile growth of literary works, where curious eyes courted an interest. I mostly adhered to an indifference, quick to dismiss scribblings and frenetic outpourings when summoned by my lascivious husband or by demanding children. My quickness to leave my enterprises kept them blinkered, believing that my pursuits were benign, not presenting enough of a threat to investigate. I liked it that way – thrived.

Sometimes I prayed to return to those near-virginal days when the sun set higher and the light from the moonlit stars pierced farther, finding my uplifted eyes, filling with hopeful rays.

Being a woman, I learned through trials and tribulations, adopting invisibility with men, believing that I was not enough of a challenge to threaten male dominions, so they allowed me to morph to shadowy tendrils – ones that blow in the nocturnal breeze, fanning men’s sweltering, wide faces. Patriarchy makes their power as sturdy legs upon a reckless horse with a frantic will. They bend, melt, and reduce women into a mould that suits.

I am a twenty-three-year-old bride, admired for my dark beauty, exotic otherness, and perceived innocence. Ironically, Hunsdon had already taken away said innocence, nightly, sometimes more often, perceiving me as a virgin, for the ten years of our affair. Alphonso similarly shaped me to a preconceived vision of a wife, allowing all else to fall to charcoal dust. My mutely demure, girlish smile, always lured him to still his tongue, never asking how I filled my hours. My smile, even in the latter parts of our marriage, was winning. I possessed a deceptive weapon of cushiony down, with concealed, duplicitous roots of steel, that hang upon men’s hearts, his particularly.

I continued to smile which meant that I was free to write – the two becoming happy bedfellows: a symbiotic union of demure beauty and academic pursuit. They coexisted peacefully. My days were spent gleefully penning lines that swerved in bands of dappled daffodil light, and by nightingale night, I allowed my sinews to shape to my husband’s needs, sheltering his male ego. He was easy to dupe, morphing unbeknown and unconsciously to my will, making him subservient to my needs, without a glimmer of recognizance.

Sex and silence. Lethal weapons.

They combatted me stealthily, each and every time, resulting in an extenuating wingspan as a golden eagle soaring high above mountainous peaks of the Cairngorms in Scotland. I equally glided high over the most precarious mountains, caring not for the sudden drops or precipitous peeks that sneered at me as the ugly face of misogyny itself, sharp, honed, and unfeeling. My most loved occupation was sitting atop the most insurmountable summit, unreachable by man. I would sit proudly drinking in the wealth of the vivid vista before my tenacious talons, allowing its bounteous palette to satiate an unsaid hunger that hollowed and plummeted to troughs when in his predictably bland company. Writing allowed me to succumb to metaphorical shackles, displacing myself of the dreary drudgery and monotonous mounds of domesticity.

Being well married, my husband kept servants and a maid named Emilia to tend to my needs. You see the link. Of course, you do. The hard put-upon wife of Iago, my Machiavellian fiend from Othello. I saw part of myself in Emelia, both she and I were trapped by men, so many countless women of my time were. Mostly, women were mere trophies.

When I first met Shakespeare (I realize that you have waited too long for my confession), the throbbing heart of my success as a writer met its pivotal point through his obliging, shrewd nature. He was the puppet from which I cut my own strings, allowing my hands and legs to dangle loosely and untamed, learning to dance to a rhythmic beat, that only I could read the musical notes for. He had dabbled with poetry and had primitive ideas for plays, having come to London, like so many others, to seek his fame and fortune.

We met originally through Hunsdon, a pioneer of the theatre, but we had never exchanged words, not even a mere sideways glance. I was a mere foal at the time and lacked the granite fist that is required to write, especially the valour needed to showcase your work. We met again at an inn near to The Rose Theatre. It was many moons later. My husband had passed away. Hunsdon was there with his good friend, and fellow writer, Christopher Marlowe, after attending a play. I had drunk too much wine, tiring of limited company in the full bloom of a late summer evening. My old lover thrived when amongst fellow thespians, and he made the acquaintance between myself, William and Christopher, little knowing how the fledgling feathers of such an inconsequential greeting would grow to a towering phoenix: a bird of perpetual rebirth, as my plays proved to be.

Christopher had garnered success, although felt hesitant about the complexities of writing too political a play. Elizabeth I held tight reigns to the material she was willing to allow her public to see, impressing them as a glassmaker’s mould. I talked about my writing, timidly, barely a whisper at first, but grew bolder through their genuine interest and buoyed by the uplifting, swelling tides of free-flowing wine. I recited the prologue of Romeo and Juliet, having committed it to memory. They sat dumbfounded.

The match was lit. The spark was cast.

Fired tendrils of possibility coursed their way around my figurative quill and a deal was struck. I would write. William would be my frontman, paid handsomely at a determined monthly rate of £20. The salary would grow if the plays proved successful. He was more than content with the terms having a family to support in Stratford-Upon-Avon. A bond was pledged between us, securing it with a gentlemen’s handshake.

Christopher eyed me with an unspoken chemistry that fermented as he heard more of my work: the soliloquies of Henry V; the morbid thoughts of Hamlet; the disgruntled lot of Shylock and the melancholia of Ophelia. At one point, Christopher reached his hand across, stroking the hue of a Moor with nothing but lustful want. Hunsdon remained drinking with his theatrical friends in an opposing nook of the inn, well into the night, no doubt enjoying the brothel above stairs in my wake. I made excuses of a turned stomach and made my leave.

Christopher followed.

 I had known sex, and was adept at pleasing my late husband, but had little knowledge of pleasure. Christopher was skilled, thinking not only of his own pleasure, in fact, garnering more satisfaction in the throes of my ecstasy. We made love for hours, until the disruptive calls of dawn from the stirring of the servants below. I never wanted to leave his embrace or disentangle my legs from around him. I had no awareness of the intensity of love up until this moment. He lay in awe of me requesting that I speak words of my sonnets which he inhaled breathlessly as liquid gold.

The ‘dark lady’ sonnets, William became so famous for, were actually crafted by Christopher and me. I proved to be the only muse required. He did not want to publish the sonnets in his name. The exposure could reveal our secret love, so we kept them private, asking William to publish them, earning himself a small fortune when combined with the sale of each play. Comedies grew in popularity alongside tragedies and histories which persisted to be favoured so we amassed a fruitful sum, enough for William to buy New Place by the latter years of his life.

Christopher and I proved to have a time-worn existence. His love of ale and brawls after gambling his fortune proved to be his death mark. After sadly squandering most of our collective earnings and chipping away at profits from The Globe until it dwindled to meager husks. A gamble cost him his life. Unable to pay his full debt at the end of the night, he argued and ended up brawling with a competitor. Tired of his excuses of “I’ll pay you later”, he removed a penknife from his breeches and stabbed Christopher hard and fast through the heart.

I died penniless, alone, and unrecognized for the Canon that I produced, barely able to pay for my burial.

Love is costly. Fatal.

Photo by Adryan RA on Unsplash