The bedtrick: sex with a partner who pretends to be someone else. [Introduction, Wendy Doniger, The Bedtrick: Tales of Sex and Masquerade, University of Chicago, 2000.]
Two of Shakespeare’s plays, All’s Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure, make use of the plot device called a bedtrick, an ancient motif in stories—and occasionally in life, according to Wendy Doniger’s study which shares a title with my novel. Like me, Doniger is intrigued by masquerade and pretense in sexual encounters—for her, from a mythic point of view. Thus her definition of the term “bedtrick” is broader than that in Shakespeare’s plays, whereby a man sleeps with the woman he rejected believing she’s the one he lusts after. The overall definition of a bedtrick is a lie about sex, whatever form that lie takes.
In Shakespeare’s two so-called problem comedies, the man sleeps with a woman who gives him her virginity while he believes she’s someone else. We’re left to imagine how successful their marriage will be. Helena, in All’s Well, and Mariana, in Measure for Measure, each loves her misbehaving partner more than he deserves. Perhaps each man will, as Bertram says at the end of All’s Well, come to love her dearly.
According to Doniger, this sort of bedtrick was legal, and she documents cases to prove it. She adds that in fact, such a deception could be regarded as a valid way to secure a husband. Some men may agree with Stanley Wells’ assertion in Shakespeare, Sex, and Love that a bedtrick is tantamount to rape: the man does not desire union with this particular woman.
I encountered Doniger’s book after I devised the plot—and title—of this novel and was relieved that her analysis is inclusive enough that my fictional bedtrick warrants the name. Those perpetrating the bedtrick in my version are both women, fully aware of who slept with whom: the lie is to the world.
The historical actor Alexander Cooke, protagonist of my two earlier novels, The Secret Player and Dark Venus, fathered children. Here, Sander Cooke was born female. Pregnancy would destroy her male persona and her acting career, so another means is needed for her to become a parent. A bedtrick.
My novel Bedtrick had reached the copy editing stage when the publisher, George Spitzer of Nebbadoon Press, suddenly died. The cover, above, was designed and publication date set. All came to a halt; at the close of probate all rights reverted to me.
Exciting new development: I’ve turned the novel into a play, just submitted to the Ashland New Plays Festival competition for 2019. The book was structured around conversation and conflict, so the transition to play script was relatively easy. The plot’s the same: the marriage of two women in the waning days of Queen Elizabeth I, set against a background of plays Shakespeare was writing and Sander Cooke performing. A couple of big sequences and a plot line involving Amelia Bassano Lanyer had to be cut. Bedtrick, the play, is now a finalist in the Ashland New Plays readings which will take place in Ashland, Oregon next October. Four plays will be chosen from the shortlist..