Blog Tour Guest Post: The Dark Lady's Mask by Mary Sharratt

Please join me in welcoming Mary Sharratt to Let Them Read Books! Mary is touring the blogosphere with her new novel, The Dark Lady's Mask: A Novel of Shakespeare's Muse, and she's here today with an awesome guest post about America's love for Renaissance fairs and our quest to recreate Merry England. Read on and enter to win a copy of The Dark Lady's Mask!

Shakespeare in Love meets Shakespeare’s Sister in this novel of England’s first professional woman poet and her collaboration and love affair with William Shakespeare.

London, 1593. Aemilia Bassano Lanier is beautiful and accomplished, but her societal conformity ends there. She frequently cross-dresses to escape her loveless marriage and to gain freedoms only men enjoy, but a chance encounter with a ragged, little-known poet named Shakespeare changes everything.

Aemilia grabs at the chance to pursue her long-held dream of writing and the two outsiders strike up a literary bargain. They leave plague-ridden London for Italy, where they begin secretly writing comedies together and where Will falls in love with the beautiful country — and with Aemilia, his Dark Lady. Their Italian idyll, though, cannot last and their collaborative affair comes to a devastating end. Will gains fame and fortune for their plays back in London and years later publishes the sonnets mocking his former muse. Not one to stand by in humiliation, Aemilia takes up her own pen in her defense and in defense of all women.

The Dark Lady’s Mask gives voice to a real Renaissance woman in every sense of the word.

American Renaissance Festivals and the Yearning for Merry England

by Mary Sharratt

When I was a student in the 1980s, I spent my late summer weekends in another realm. Donning a green gown I had sewn myself, I became a Renaissance woman, or a low-budget facsimile thereof, my cheap, silver-plated goblet hanging from my belt to save me from the indignity of drinking from a paper cup.

For three summers from 1983 to 1985, I was a performer at the Minnesota Renaissance Festival, in those days a much more low-key and grassroots affair than it is today. My character was a historically inaccurate hybrid between a village minstrel and a faery queen out of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  (I was trying very hard to channel Stevie Nicks.) I even spoke in a fake British accent, largely informed by Monty Python.

For the most part, I was unpaid, although I did earn minimum wage the summer I worked in the information booth. This involved giving directions and handing out site maps. The most exciting part was when some unsuspecting person asked the way to the restroom.

Leaping out from behind the counter, I’d grab my victim’s arm and race off, hell for leather, with them in tow. “Make way!” I’d yell, compelling the crowd to part for us. “Privy run!”

After depositing the blushing and winded individual in front of the plastic Portalet, I’d dash back to the information booth. As minimum-wage jobs went, it was far more amusing than fast food.
When I wasn’t working at the information booth, I played Elizabethan music on my violin, but this proved far less interesting for the paying crowd. The most enthusiasm I could drum up was some drunk guy asking me to play Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon.”

I soon learned to leave the violin at home and focus on street theatre, which is what most people seemed to be coming for. Having my picture taken with festival goers’ children who thought my dress was pretty. Joining my fellow peasants under an oak tree in the late afternoon. Sitting in the grass with floral garlands in our hair, we would sing ballads of such yearning that they would transport us to another time and place. This transpired late afternoon when everything seemed suffused in golden light. Such pastoral bliss! As a Reagan-era teenager, this was the closest I ever got to the Woodstock experience.

Our singalong closed with the Peasant Parade, in which we merrily sang and danced our way around the entire site to escort the crowd to the gates at closing time. But the real magic transpired after-hours, when the “tourists” had all gone home. Then the festival grounds really did turn into something out of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The guitars and wine bottles came out. Most of us camped overnight, but I never got much sleep.

Ah, the revels and trysts we had, still in costume but no longer quite in character. The Renn Fest was, and undoubtedly still is, the converging point for so many different countercultures. I hung out with fortune tellers, Morris dancers, feminist folk singers, and herbalists. Before the internet, Renn Faires were a locus for all kinds of alternative-minded souls to connect.

Apart from Renn Fest, my summers were fairly dull. After a weekend of singing and cavorting, I was almost literally asleep on my feet while working my full-time summer job as a cashier in a discount clothing store. Despite my fatigue, the allure of Renn Fest made the boredom of my job more bearable. I lived from one weekend to the next. The closing day of Festival was always bittersweet, with many hugs and tears.

These weekends were some of the happiest in my youth and ended only when I went to study, and then to live, in Germany. In a country filled with actual Renaissance buildings, who needs a Renn Faire? Instead, Germans seemed far more interested in re-enacting the American Wild West. To truly offer a magical escape, one’s historical weekend fun must draw on a cultural context as far removed as possible from one’s day-to-day life.

Meanwhile, back in America, Renn Faires have boomed. There are festivals across the United States, Renaissance Magazine attests.
even in Alaska. My old haunt, the Minnesota Renaissance Festival, now boasts an annual 300,000 visitors. For many of the performers and vendors, the festivals have become a way of life, as

But why, out of all the ages of world history, are Americans so fixated on Elizabethan England? Why not Byzantine Constantinople or—given Minnesota demographics—Viking-age Norway? What is it about Tudor England that so captures the American imagination? Is it because of our love affair with Shakespeare? Because the garb is so sexy? If you’re a curvy female, Elizabethan costume will make you look like a goddess. Men can have all sorts of interesting experiences while sporting a codpiece. The clothes alone can put you in a completely different frame of mind. Shakespeare said it first: “Clothes maketh the man.”

Many Renaissance festivals provide costume rentals at the entrance gates so everyone can have the chance to be a Renaissance man or woman for a day. Kitted out in period attire, you can watch the jousting matches while sipping mead or nibbling on a turkey leg. You can leave behind your worries while immersing yourself in an idealized version of village life, a world as far removed from modern cares as it is from the actual historical Renaissance with its witch hunts and religious wars that tore Europe apart at the seams.

In my mind, this dream of unbridled revelry hearkens all the way back to a time and place historian Ronald Hutton calls Merry England, a period of peace and stability before the Reformation and its aftermath created a reign of chaos, uncertainty, and radical social change.

In his book, The Rise and Fall of Merry England, Hutton places the halcyon days of Merry England in the late medieval period, between 1350 and 1520. This era enjoyed the most splendid pageantry, with a yearly procession of sacred and secular feasts that bound all levels of society together and connected them to the cycles of nature. During holidays (literally holy days), people really did put their work aside and make merry night and day. Established religion even encouraged such hedonism. Churches hosted ale feasts, both to raise money and to build a sense of social cohesiveness. Living from harvest to harvest, it was nigh on impossible for people in small agrarian communities not to acknowledge these bonds of deep interdependence, both with each other and with the earth that sustained them. And it didn’t just happen in England—Pieter Bruegel’s paintings of partying Flemish peasants are full of raucous, bawdy, earthy delight.

This lost world seems a universe away from our own hyper-accelerated 21st century existence of the Puritan work ethic in overdrive. Just for one day, let us sit in the grass and sing ballads and eschew social media. I know that for my three summers at Renn Fest, I thought that I had discovered my secret passage into a realm of jubilant freedom.

Mary Sharratt now lives in rural England and, puritanical nanny-state notwithstanding, seeks to engage in revels whenever possible. The Dark Lady’s Mask: A Novel of Shakespeare’s Muse, her novel drawn from the dramatic life of Renaissance poet Aemilia Bassano Lanier, is published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Visit her website: www.marysharratt.com. 

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