Talking of Shakespeare…
1580s London. John Brayne and James Burbage are business partners, co-owners of a theater. Of The Theatre, actually; we call them “theaters” instead of “playhouses” today because that was the name they chose. As usual for the period, their wives Ellen (who is John’s sister as well as James’s wife) and Margaret (John’s wife) are very much involved in the family business; we know that Margaret, and presumably Ellen as well, actually did some of the manual labor in building the theater.
John and James have a falling-out, as tends to happen when you go into business with your in-laws. John accuses James of financial shenanigans. (James has a pattern of similar accusations against him.) They get into a fistfight in a notary’s office. Eventually they reach an agreement, sort of. John goes off and gets in another fight with a man named Robert Miles, who beats him severely enough that he dies shortly afterward. Margaret tries to get murder charges filed against Robert. John and Margaret have no living children at this point. James and Ellen claim that despite their differences, John was always very fond of his nephews and nieces and wanted their children to inherit his half of the business. Margaret, who was pregnant at the time of her husband’s death, claims that she and her child are the legal heirs and manages to get a court order to this effect. James invites the man serving the papers to wipe his ass with them.
James seems like a pretty bad guy, right? Cheating a poor widow and orphan. Except … next thing we know, Margaret has taken up with Robert Miles, the same man she accused of murdering her husband. He and some of his buddies go to the theater to claim Margaret’s share of the profits. Ellen and her son Richard beat them up with broomsticks. Richard tweaks Miles’s nose and mouths off to law enforcement after they arrive. Ellen calls Miles and his friends “murdering knaves.” James goes a little farther and calls Margaret a “murdering whore.” This is starting to sound less like standard sixteenth-century misogyny than like a conspiracy accusation that may actually be true. (I think I’d want my movie version of this story to be very Rashomon-ish.)
Margaret dies of the plague a few years later, leaving all of her possessions and custody of her daughter to Robert Miles, while still specifying that John and not Robert was the father of said daughter – by which point it’s starting to sound like the lady is protesting too much.
Snarky, broomstick-wielding young Richard grows up to be a very famous and very beloved actor. Think someone like Tom Hanks, in terms of public persona. One of his best-known roles is Hamlet. A role written for him by his lifelong friend, who would, as a young actor, have had a front-row seat for the whole sordid saga.
Ellen lived to be about seventy; she would have been around through the whole of Shakespeare’s career, and had a ton of institutional memory. We know her sons consulted her when they made the decision to tear down The Theatre and build the Globe from its timbers, and we know she was on the scene for the actual tearing-down part (which had to be done quickly and in secret over the Christmas holidays, since they’d lost their lease and their ex-landlord had barred them from the property).
This is the story I really want to see about the women of the Elizabethan theater, but since it doesn’t involve forest witches or anyone acting in male disguise, I fear I’m out of luck.
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