Here are some of my finds about the seventeenth century. I'm adding new discoveries all the time, so please e-mail your suggestions to me from my Contact page.

Shakespeare Without the Beard?

	Amelia Bassano Lanier

The most recent contender for the authorship of Shakespeare's works, put forward by John Hudson in the latest issue of The Oxfordian (November 2009), is minus the traditional beard. Amelia Bassano (also known as Emilia Lanier) was the daughter of Venetian Jew, a musician who was brought to England by Henry VIII. Her Mediterranean skin makes her the favourite for the Dark Lady in Shakespeare's sonnets, and Hudson is now contending that she didn't just figure in them--she wrote them! Giving some credibility to this notion is that fact that Bassano wrote Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, the first published book of poetry by an Englishwoman. Educated by the duchess of Suffolk in the classics and the Bible, she was much more likely than William Shakespeare to have had the knowledge exhibited in his plays, particularly the 2,000 references to music. Still in the running for the authorship of the plays are Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, Edward de Vere, and William Stanley.

	Linnaeus Flower Clock

Telling Time by Flowers
guest post at wondersandmarvels.com

Recently, when I was reading from my novel Conceit, an experienced gardener asked whether the flower clock, used by Ann More to tell time, would actually work. In Conceit, it's summer 1599, Ann is living in York House on the bank of the Thames in London, and she is having an erotic conversation with the poet John Donne.

I was inspired to write the scene by reading two of Donne's poems. In Elegy 7, the poet says, "I had not taught thee then the alphabet of flowers." In "A Lecture upon the Shadow," the lovers take a long walk, discussing "love's philosophy," in which "our infant loves did grow." Investigating further, I discovered that some flowers are aequinoctales that wake up and go to bed at the same time each day. I assumed that Ann, a well-bred girl of fifteen, had time to observe the opening and closing times of flowers, as well as the visiting times of bees, whereas the 27-year-old Donne, a secretary to the Lord Keeper of England, was too busy with affairs of state.

Before I named any plants, I had to be sure that they actually existed in England in 1599, so I paid a visit to the chronological bed in the Cambridge University Botanic Garden to check. I also researched the common names and habits of English flowers in John Gerard's Historie of Plants, published in 1597. Some of the plants have charming names, such as Lady's Nightcap and Jack-Go-to-Bed-at-Noon. From these and other sources, I chose several flowers that suited Ann and John's love talk and the scene in chapter 8 of Conceit was born.

Not long after Ann and John took that walk in the York House garden, they eloped. Her father was incensed and she forfeited her dowry. Donne lost his job and was thrown in Fleet jail. It was then he was rumoured to say, "Ann Donne. John Donne. Undone."

	Donne's Poems 1633

Sources for my novel Conceit
guest post at wondersandmarvels.com

In writing Conceit, I drew mainly on primary sources. I was happiest when I found eye-witnesses, for instance Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn, who wrote about the Great Fire of 1666 in their diaries, which I consulted for the prologue. Izaak Walton was very helpful also, with his book on fishing and his biography of Donne. He wormed himself into my affections so fully that Pegge became infatuated with him. I have written separate posts on Izaak Walton, John Evelyn, and Samuel Pepys below.

Donne's own works were invaluable, for instance the sermon he preached just before he died, "Death's Duel" (available in the searchable digital collection of John Donne's sermons). During an earlier illness, he wrote Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, in which he penned the words, "No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. . . . never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee." These famous lines appear in Meditation 17 on pp. 415-6 of the tiny duodecimo of 630 pages. This book was a great source of information about spiritual belief and 17th-century medical practice, such as putting dead pigeons on the patient's feet to "draw the vapors from the head"!

By far the most useful source for Conceit was Donne's love poetry. We don't know the chronology, or which women he wrote them to, but we like to think that the most sincere love poems were written to Ann More, who became his wife. Although most of Donne's writings survive, there's no trace of the voices of Ann or her daughter Pegge. The women in Donne's life are known to history only through church records (births, marriages, deaths) and letters written by male relatives. However, piecing Donne's love poems together into a chronological story, as Pegge does--becoming more obsessed and jealous in the process--gave me insight into John and Ann's extraordinary love--the fictional narrative that is at the heart of Conceit.

Izaak Walton - Fisherman and Biographer

	Izaak Walton When Older

	The River Darent in 1800

Those of you who've read Conceit will know that Pegge, when she's a teenager, is infatuated with Izaak Walton, best known to us as the fisherman who wrote The Compleat Angler, which I dipped into frequently when writing the novel. Pegge's attempt to seduce Walton by finding a new stream, and their trip to fish along the River Darent, is fictional, though. When Walton points out "dry patches of riverbed and the obstructions, built by ignorant men, that slowed the trout on their journey upstream," he is observing disastrous changes that will eventually dry up the river.

After John Donne's death, his friend Henry Wotton was preparing to write a biography, but died in 1639 before he could do so. Walton took on the task, pulling together "The Life and Death of John Donne " in time to be printed in Donne's LXXX Sermons in 1640. This first biography of Donne was full of intriguing half-truths and editorializing that suggest that, although Walton attended some of Donne's sermons, he didn't know Donne or his family very well. For a novelist, this was a boon, since his mythologizing started me off on my own journey into the intimate life of the Donne family.

Shakespeare Portrait Found--or Not?

	Cobbe Portrait of Shakespeare, 1610

A painting of William Shakespeare has recently been found in Newbridge House, a manor outside Dublin that belonged to the Cobbe family. Amazingly, they did not know that the portrait was of Shakespeare until a family member saw a copy on exhibit in the National Portrait Gallery in London. Experts now say that it's the only portrait of Shakespeare painted during his lifetime, around 1610 when he was 46. But here's the fine print, according to the curator of the Folger Library, which owns the copy: while the Cobbe painting is undoubtedly the original of the Folger one, there's no way of telling "for certain" that Shakespeare himself sat for the painting.

See "John Donne in the News", at the bottom of this page, for a similar story about a painting by John Donne found at Newbattle Abbey. One of the reasons the Donne painting is so valuable is that it is one of the few authenticated portraits of an Elizabethan writer.

The Tudors Plunders History--and Art!

British historian David Starkey has blasted the costume drama The Tudors for falsifying history, calling it "a brutal dumbing down" and "armpit TV."  Even the costumes are faux: more Elizabethan than Tudor. Sure The Tudors plays fast and loose with the facts, but David Sessions chides us for our naivety in expecting truth from television in "So everyone is saying The Tudors isn't historical. Why should it be?" Tudors creator Michael Hirst admits he turned it into a soap opera to get people to watch. Viewers are not only "eating it up," but are dressing in costume to join Henry VIII (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) or Anne Boleyn (Natalie Dormer) in a clinch in the show's Portrait Gallery.

	Gabrielle d'Estrées and One of Her Sisters

The Tudors plunders art as well as history. Early on, Anne's brother propositions two of the queen's maids of honour, using some frank modern language (season 1, part 6). Not long afterwards, he enters his bedchamber to find the two girls perched on top of his bed in the nude. One sister is tweaking the other's nipple, an image stolen from a late 17th-century painting, Gabrielle d'Estrées and One of Her Sisters. The Louvre wasn't blind to the power of this gesture either, since this was the image chosen for its Carte Louvre Jeunes in 2007.

According to historian Starkey, the academy-award winning film, A Man for All Seasons (1966), is also "terrible history, but at least it has a point." Paul Scofield turned in a virtuoso performance as Sir Thomas More and Robert Shaw is an equally masterful Henry VIII--substantial in frame, though still light on his feet. Check out this conversation between them on YouTube. Conceit takes place in the next century,but I mention Sir Thomas More in it since John Donne was a distant relation. Although his wife Ann More was not, her maiden name was too tempting, so I invented a connection, hinting that their daughter Pegge's unusual character might result from this commingling of blood. At the end of Conceit, I acknowledge my own departures from history, saying that this is my seventeenth century, and in a recent guest blog at Sandra Gulland's Baroque Explorations, I talk about the way facts bred, producing fiction as I wrote my novel.

	Mary in Louvre

Pegge's Breasts: From the Louvre to YouTube

When I returned to Paris for the month of September 2008, my first cultural jaunt was to the Louvre to revisit the Guérin painting of Pegge in room 54 of the Sully pavillion.

I didn't have to go that far. Inside the pyramid, plastered all over the walls, were Pegge's breasts! Turned into a tempting concoction by the young French artist Marcelline Delbecq, they were enticing youths to purchase a Carte Louvre Jeunes for a mere €15. Across her breasts were emblazoned the words, "Puisque la beauté est aussi dans les yeux de celui qui regarde." I wasn't the only one who was gazing lovingly at the image. Truly, as Plato said, "beauty is also in the eye of the beholder."

	Pegge by Marcelline Delbecq

Just now, googling the artist, I discovered that the image comes from a YouTube video that Delbecq created from the Guérin painting. In the video, the camera caresses Pegge's hair, neck, shoulder, nipples, arms, even her ragged, dirty fingernails as Delbecq's words unfold on the screen. Truly a love poem to the artist and his youthful model, whom I will forever associate with Pegge, my main character in Conceit. For more on this story, and on Marcelline Delbecq, see my blog for October 13 and 23, 2008.

	Jeune fille en buste, 1794

Jeune fille en buste

A year or so before I finished writing Conceit, I was in Paris and stopped in front of a painting in the Louvre by Pierre-Narcisse Guérin. I was immediately struck by the resemblance of the girl to my main character, Pegge. Called "Jeune fille en buste" (Portrait of a Young Girl), it was painted in 1794 when Guérin was about twenty. I loved the way the nude girl, on the verge of adulthood, was both covering and drawing attention to her breasts. When I told Conceit's designer, C.S. Richardson, he said he had also been struck by the painting's charm when he was in the Louvre, a lovely synchronicity. Richardson wrapped the painting deliciously around Conceit's spine, and won an honourable mention from the Alcuin Society for the book's exterior and interior design.

	Napoleon I, 1812

For me, the short boyish haircut captured Pegge just after she'd had the pox, at age fourteen. The Louvre website says that the girl is coiffed à la Titus. I knew that Titus was a Roman emperor, and thought no more of it until a few days ago when I decided to check further. Apparently, the Titus was the short haircut given to the condemned before being guillotined, so as not to restrict the downward action of the blade. It was all the rage for both men and women during the French Revolution, and the most famous person with this hairstyle was Napoleon himself.

17th-century Diarists

	Evelyn's Plan for Rebuilding the City of London

Although Samuel Pepys is far and away the best-known diarist of the 17th century, John Evelyn is more historical. Pepys is gossipy and personal; Evelyn is more dry and circumspect and his diaries cover a longer period, from his birth in 1620 until 1704, just before his death. Friends and contemporaries, they were both members of the Royal Society established in 1660. Pepys was a dilettante and Evelyn was a genuine virtuoso, learned in the classics, the sciences, even horticulture, as his manuscripts at the British Library show.  Like Christopher Wren, Evelyn drew up a plan for rebuilding the City of London after the Great Fire of 1666, but neither plan was accepted. Because of all the small owners, and the difficulty of determining "to whom all the houses and ground did in truth belong", the City was rebuilt on its old foundations, though the streets were wider and the buildings were constructed of  brick and stone, not combustible materials such as wood.

The City of London Destroyed by Fire a Second Time

Miraculously, John Donne's effigy survived not only the burning of the medieval St Paul's in 1666, but also the bombing of Sir Christopher Wren's cathedral during the London Blitz. My uncle, Ned Young, writes:

	St Paul's during London Blitz, December 29, 1940

"Reading in your synopsis about the great fire in London, and in particular about St Paul's, reminded me of my first visit to that great edifice. It was during the war, but subsequent to the fire storm that raged in the area during the bombing raids. As I walked down Fleet Street it was amazing to see the church standing there, seemingly untouched, while all the buildings around it were burned to shells--just their brick walls remaining. Actually the church was not untouched, however. Last year I saw a dramatization of those raids, based on survivors' recollections. Many incendiaries were dropped on the great dome, lighting a number of small fires, as it was made of wood. The wardens who were stationed inside up there had to put them out with buckets of water carried up from the main floor, as there was not enough pressure in the hoses to reach the top. If they had not been successful the entire dome would have collapsed. I wonder if John Donne's effigy would have survived."

The film Ned saw is The Blitz: London's Longest Night, a documentary about December 29, 1940, the night when 136 German planes dropped incendiary bombs on the heart of London. A square mile of the City was burned, including a giant book warehouse on Shoe Lane. Miraculously, St Paul's survived. Film clips from that night show the dome of St Paul's rising triumphantly--a symbol of national pride and hope--out of the smoke and flames. More survivors' stories appear in the WW II People's War archive at the BBC.

Literary Fathers and Sons

Dmitri Nabokov, the son of Vladimar of Lolita fame, has been dithering in public again about whether he should publish his father's last "novel"--actually 50 index cards with notes that Nabokov ordered destroyed upon his death. The Times calls it "a story about a son caught between a powerful urge to go against his late father’s wishes and an equally powerful urge to carry them out".

This reminds me of another literary father and son. In an emotional slump, years before he became a priest, John Donne wrote Biathanatos, in which he defended suicide, admitting that "I have often such a sickly inclination" because he came from a Catholic family, "hungry of an imagined martyrdom".  Years later, he entrusted his only MS to a friend, calling it "a book written by Jack Donne, and not by Dr Donne. Reserve it for me if I live, and if I die, I only forbid it the press and the fire; publish it not, but yet burn it not, and between those do what you will with it." After Donne's death, his son took it upon himself to be his literary executor, with mixed results.  When his study was raided twice by the Commonwealth army, John Donne Jr gave in to the urge to publish his father's book, reasoning, with more than a little sophistry, that if it was not safely in print, the soldiers might return to consign it to the flames.  

	Shakespeare and His Friends at the Mermaid Tavern

Were Shakespeare and Donne Friends?

This 1850s painting by John Faed is known as Shakespeare and His Friends at the Mermaid Tavern and features a "Tudor hall of fame." Shakespeare, seated in the centre dressed in black, resembles the First Folio engraving of him by Martin Droeshout.  Ben Jonson's biographer Gifford wrote that around the year 1603 Sir Walter Raleigh "instituted a meeting of beaux esprits at the Mermaid, a celebrated tavern in Friday Street. Of this club, which combined more talent and genius, perhaps, than ever met together before or since, [Jonson] was a member; and here, for many years, he regularly repaired with Shakespeare, Beaumont, Fletcher, Selden, Cotton, Carew, Martin, Donne, and many others, whose names, even at this distant period, call up a mingled feeling of reverence and respect."

Is that Beaumont and Fletcher waiting in the wings for their turn on stage and Sir Walter Raleigh leaning on the "lovely boy" to Shakespeare's left, the Earl of Southampton? There are far too many men sporting pointed beards to tell, but the best candidate for Donne is the head above and to Shakespeare's right. However, there's no evidence that Donne knew Shakespeare and it's unlikely that these men of letters were ever in the same inn at the same time, let alone in the storied Mermaid Tavern. For more on what Shakespeare looked like, a good place to start is Stephanie Nolen's book Shakespeare's Face.

	John Donne as a melancholy lover about 1595

John Donne in the News

When a cache of old letters was recently found in a laundry room in Switzerland, a letter by John Donne was estimated to be worth $250,000. Donne was something of a specialist in writing letters to great ladies in order to win favour, and the letter was penned to Lady Kingsmill in 1624 to console her on the death of her husband.

Unlike Shakespeare, whose portraits are always being discredited, we have no doubt what John Donne looked like at various stages of his life since he was fond of having his image captured. He had himself etched, sketched, engraved, miniaturized, painted in flamboyant costumes, and even carved in marble for his great effigy in St Paul's cathedral in London.

This sexy picture of "Jack Donne" as a melancholy lover in a big floppy hat, open collar, and crossed arms has been called "the most famous of all Elizabethan love portraits." The Latin inscription translates as O Lady Lighten Our Darkness, suggesting that Donne had himself painted for one of his mistresses around the time that he wrote his most famous elegy, "To His Mistress Going to Bed."

	Queen Elizabeth
Portrait of Samuel Pepys

Donne died in 1631 and his picture in the shadows, as he called it, was lost from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. It eventually came to light at Newbattle Abbey in 1959. The name had been written Duns, and mistaken for Duns Scotus! In May 2006, the painting was bought by the National Portrait Gallery in London, after an enthusiastic campaign to raise the £2M. BBC News covered the fundraising step by step, announcing triumphantly at the close, "John Donne Portrait Saved for Nation". The restored painting has just been hung in Room 2 of the National Portrait Gallery with portraits of Queen Elizabeth and Elizabethan courtiers and poets.

A 17th-century Blog

Ready for your daily dose of Samuel Pepys? Read Pepys's diary for this day in 1664. This marvellous website posts a new entry from the 17th-century diary each morning. Pepys was a bit of a philanderer, but to see just how far he indulged his libido, you will have to read through the million-and-a-quarter words of his famous diary, which ended soon after his wife Elizabeth caught him in flagrante with her maid. For years these diaries sat undeciphered in Pepys's own library, bequeathed to his alma mater, Magdalene College at Cambridge, until someone found the key to the shorthand sitting in the same bookshelves. Pepysdiary.com posted Pepys's first diary entry of January 1, 1660 on New Year's Day 2003 and will continue until the last entry of May 31, 1669 has been reached in 2012. If you can't wait that long, look for the print edition by Robert Latham and William Matthews, since Victorian editors omitted the unprintable passages. If the twelve Latham & Matthews volumes are too daunting, try The Illustrated Pepys, which has one-fourteenth of the diary accompanied by charming period illustrations.