The Secret Player
The backstage story of Shakespeare’s theatre is told by a village girl who, taking a boy’s name and disguise, escapes into the London of actors, poets, and playwrights where women are not allowed to perform onstage. The adventures of Alexander Cooke, player boy, involve challenges of gender, complications of the heart, and political turmoil during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I.
Closing of the press responsible for the first edition of The Secret Player necessitated a new and revised edition. The underlying theme remains: How could a young woman of courage and intelligence express her true self in a time when the prescribed role for females was obedience, chastity, and silence? William Shakespeare gives exceptional women a voice onstage, and so too does the daring Alexander Cooke, offstage and on.
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Dark Venus
The adventures of Alexander Cooke, a woman disguising herself as a boy actor in Elizabethan England, are woven together with those of her friend Amelia Bassano Lanyer, the presumed Dark Lady of Shakespeare’s sonnets in this novel of theatre, poetry, and love set during a volatile and dangerous era.
Both Alexander (Sander) Cooke and Amelia Bassano Lanyer defy norms of proper womanly behavior. Sander, born female, carries off a male disguise and makes her way as an actor on the London stage. Amelia publishes a book of poetry with a feminist slant in 1611, long after the end of her affair with William Shakespeare. Dark Venus depicts two women who refuse to be submissive—or silent.
Sander and Amelia’s friendship plays out amidst the political turmoil of the day, which leads to the murder of Sander’s friend and patron Ferdinando Stanley, the Earl of Derby. Plays of the late 16th century and the sonnets that Shakespeare wrote to his Dark Lady feature in the plot.
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Bedtrick
Once a boy player in Shakespeare’s company, Sander Cook is now a hired man playing female roles. When Frances Field reveals that she is pregnant by Sander’s brother Johnny, a fellow actor and aspiring playwright, Johnny makes it clear that marriage is not in his plans. But if Francis gives birth to a bastard, she’ll lose her shop on London Bridge and her position as one of Queen Elizabeth’s silkwomen. Sander would like to come to Frances’ rescue, but Sander has a secret kept onstage and off: she’s actually a woman. Even her friend Moll Frith, who goes about blatantly as a man, wouldn’t marry a woman, but she finds Sander and Frances a wayward, short-sighted priest to solemnize the union. It is a marriage of convenience, but can these two women make a true union of it? Winding around this unconventional marriage, the London stage of the period comes alive, along with political anxieties and rebellion, trouble in Ireland, the plague, and the aging Queen’s failure to name a successor.