Abstract
Lady Rachel Fane (1613–1680) (Figure 7.1), later Countess of Bath, was born into a theatrical family. One of the fourteen children of Sir Francis Fane (1581/2–1640) and Mary Mildmay (d. 1649), Rachel’s eldest brother was the poet and playwright Mildmay Fane (1602–1666).1 Her parents were keen participants in the Jacobean culture of performance. They entertained James I at their home, Apethorpe Hall in Northamptonshire, numerous times during Rachel’s childhood: James I is said to have met one of his favorites, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, on one of his visits.2 The library at Apethorpe contained many dramatic volumes, including Ben Jonson’s Works (1616) and plays by Davenant, and Beaumont and Fletcher.3 The Fanes made various additions to the house to make it more suitable for dramatic entertainments, including decorating their Long Gallery with images of musical instruments.4 Lady Rachel Fane’s writings, which include dramatic scenes or sketches, some poems, and a complete entertainment known as May Masque (1627), are the product of a childhood that encouraged dramatic and literary expression, and they reflect her family’s investment in the theatrical tastes of the Jacobean court.5 Negotiating the traditions of the public theatre and the private court masque, Rachel’s May Masque transforms her own reading, knowledge, and experiences into a dramatic work that reflects and affirms her own world and its values: the bonds of family and friends, strengthened by a shared love of reading, writing, and theatre.
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Notes
Marion O’Connor, “Rachel Fane’s May Masque at Apethorpe, 1627” English Literary Renaissance 36 (2006): 90–104 at 92.
Caroline Bowden, “The Notebooks of Rachael Fane: Education or Authorship?” Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Writing ed. Victoria E. Burke and Jonathan Gibson (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004): 157–80.
Randall Martin, “The Autobiography of Grace, Lady Mildmay” Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et réforme XVIII (1994): 33–81 at 33.
Northampton Central Library, Northamptonshire Studies Collection, “Lady Grace Mildmay’s Meditations.” See Martin, “Autobiography,” 33 and Linda A. Pollock, With Faith and Physic: The Life of a Tudor Gentlewoman, Lady Grace Mildmay (London: Collins and Brown, 1993). References to Lady Grace Mildmay’s meditations are to Martin’s edition.
Bowden identifies the precise source as Le neufieme livre d’Amadis de Gaule, traduit d’Espagnole en Francois par C. Colet (1561) in “The Notebooks of Rachael Fane” 170. On the humanist response to romances see Robert P. Adams, “‘Bold Bawdry and Open Manslaughter’: the English New Humanist Attack on Medieval Romance” Huntington Library Quarterly 23 (1959): 33–48.
See Jennifer Summit, Lost Property: the Woman Writer and English Literary History, 1380–1589 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000) and Korda, Labors Lost: Women’s Work and the Early Modern English Stage.
Anston Bosman, “Renaissance Intertheatre and the Staging of Nobody” ELH 71 (2004): 559–85 at 571.
Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merrie England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).
Alison Findlay situates Lady Rachel Fane in the context of domestic spaces of home and garden in Playing Spaces in Early Modern Women’s Drama, 40–3 and 96–103, while Caroline Bowden regards her as an important example of the history of girls’ education in the early modern period. See Bowden, “The Notebooks of Rachael Fane,” “Female Education in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries in England and Wales: A study of Attitudes and Practice” DPhil. University of London 1996, and “Parental Attitudes Towards the Education of Girls in Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth-Century England” Education and Cultural Transmission: Historical Studies of Continuity and Change in Families, Schooling, and Youth Cultures ed. Johan Sturn. Paedagogica Historica: International Journal of the History of Education vol. 2, Supplementary Series (Gent: Paedagogica Historica, 1996): 105–24. Brief discussions of Lady Rachel Fane may also be found in Alison Findlay and Stephanie Hodgson-Wright with Gweno Williams, Women and Dramatic Production 1550–1700 (Harlow: Longman Pearson, 2000): 52–4, and Higginbotham, The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines, 172–4.
On Fane’s treatment of the character Cupid, see Kate Chedgzoy, “Playing with Cupid: Gender, Sexuality, and Adolescence” in Alternative Shakespeares ed. Diana Henderson (London: Routledge, 2007): 138–57.
Dryden’s Aeneid (London, 1697). On Dryden’s rich use of his sources, see L. Proudfoot, Dryden’s Aeneid and its Seventeenth Century Predecessors (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1960).
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© 2014 Deanne Williams
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Williams, D. (2014). My Lady Rachells booke. In: Shakespeare and the Performance of Girlhood. Palgrave Shakespeare Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137024763_8
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