Gillian has a fondness for Nell and her life story and after reading The Darling Strumpet, you will too.
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| Published in UK by Avon (4th October 2011) ISBN 978-1847562500 |
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| Photo credit - Brendan Elms |
Nell Gwynn’s London
When I was a wild-eyed and ambitious young actress of twenty-three, just finishing a year-long professional acting training program at The Drama Studio London at Berkeley, one of the teachers, a young British actor who had recently come to California to teach, got an astonishing amount of notice for his performance in a one-man show. In fact, that work catapulted him into a career that has kept him busy ever since.
I thought he had a good strategy, and decided I’d write a show for myself to perform. But what to write about? My father suggested Nell Gwynn. I began researching her, and the more I learned, the more I fell in love with her and her story. She was a scrappy little kid born into poverty and rose to great heights by using what she had: smarts, determination, charm, humor, and a very likeable sex appeal. She never put on airs or pretended to be other than what she was, and the people loved her for it.
I worked on the script but never finished it to my satisfaction, realizing it wasn’t possible to do justice to Nell’s very eventful life in such a limited format. I got busy pursuing an acting career, and later began directing and producing, founding the Pasadena Shakespeare Company and running it for nine years. There was no time for writing during those years, but Nell stayed in my mind and heart and sometimes at the back of my mind I could hear her whispering “Someday….”
In January 2005, I learned that my mother, living alone in London, was terminally ill, and went over to take care of her. As it turned out, I was in London for almost a year and a half, and for the first time in my adult life, I had no career demanding my attention and no creative focus.
So I decided that the time had come to turn my attention to Nell again, and present her life in a way that would do it justice, as a novel. I read biographies of her that had been published since I had first learned about her, reread the famous diaries of Samuel Pepys, which not only gave a vivid picture of daily life in London in the 1660s, but also preserved for posterity Sam’s reviews of Nell performing some of her most famous roles as well as their occasional friendly encounters. I scouted out the sites of the old theatres where Nell had performed, and walked the streets that she had known.
In much of central London, the layout of the streets is pretty much the same as it has been for centuries; even millennia. After the Great Fire in 1666, there were grand plans to create a street design that was more organized and formal, but it didn’t happen, because people couldn’t wait long enough for that to happen – they had to get on with their lives. So they built houses and shops and everything else in exactly the same places they had been.
So in most of the areas that Nell knew well, where she lived and worked and performed, the footprint is not much changed from her time. This is particularly true in the places where many of the theatres were. Before Nell began acting, the King’s Company and Duke’s Company were both performing in converted tennis courts just off Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The location of the Duke’s Company theatre is at the back of what is now the Royal College of Surgeons, in a space that, at least as of the summer of 2008, was let to the London School of Economics.
On a trip to London years ago, I was walking near Lincoln’s Inn Fields, felt impelled to turn down a certain street, and had a sense that somehow the place was very significant. When I looked at my books, I discovered that I’d found my way to the site of the Vere Street Theatre, where the King’s Company played from 1660-1663. 1660. It’s on another site that is now occupied by the LSE, near Portugal Street and Clare Market. In fact, oddly, the LSE seems to be occupying several places that were the sites of old theatres, including the site of the old Cockpit in Drury Lane.
Nell’s theatrical life began when she got a job selling oranges in the brand new Theatre Royal, and that was where she worked throughout her acting career. The theatre that Nell knew burned down in 1672, and the present Theatre Royal in Drury Lane is in the same spot, but it’s about the third building on the site.
The Red Bull, where the King’s Company performed briefly before moving to Vere Street, was on land that had belonged to St. John’s Priory, and was right about where St. John’s Square now is, just north of Clerkenwell Road.
No one knows exactly where Nell was born, but it was likely in what was then the maze of slums around Covent Garden, and her early life didn’t take her far from there.Lewkenor’s Lane, the site of Madam Ross’s brothel, is now Macklin Street, just off the north end of Drury Lane. Drury Lane. The Maypole in the Strand stood just about in front of the church of St. Mary Le Strand, which is still there, and Maypole Alley, which led to Drury Lane, would have passed through approximately the location of Bush House, which used to house the BBC and still houses some parts of it, I believe.
Nell’s first house of her own, which Charles rented for her when she was going to have their first child, was in Newman’s Row on the northeast corner of Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Newman’s Row is now little more than a passageway to High Holborn, but the layout of the streets is pretty much unchanged. I stood there and could feel very clearly how it must have been for her to look out over the square, where duels and executions occasionally happened, although it was a very posh area with many noble residents, and that Whetstone Park, a little street running along the top of the square, which was pretty unsavory, must have been noisy and squalid
There is a blue plaque on the house at 79 Pall Mall, which is where Nell lived from 1671 to the end of her life, but that, too, is a different building. The Banqueting House is all that remains of Whitehall Palace, but Nell certainly knew that building. By comparing old maps with contemporary maps and the layout of the ground, I’ve come to the conclusion that Charles II’s bedroom, the site of so much intrigue, was probably right about at the location of the statue that stands behind the Ministry of Defense, just off the river.
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Excerpt from The Darling Strumpet
Nell picked up her already-damp handkerchief and blotted it across her forehead and chest, then dusted powder across her face, hoping that it would dull the sheen of sweat without caking. She glanced in the mirror. Her hair was as good as it was like to get, the ringlets and curls pagan-wild in the damp heat of the tiring room.
Well. He had asked to see her, not she him. He had just had as good a view of her as anyone could desire, and she had been at her best today, she knew, carrying the house to wave after wave of laughter. So she had nothing to fear.
Lords were nothing new to her now, she reflected. And yet – the Duke of Buckingham. A duke was one step only below a prince, and some said he was less than that step, having been raised as he had almost as brother to the king when his own father died. What was it Hart had said once? “Like one of the royal pups.”
To counter her nervousness, she leaned back in her chair and breathed deeply of the familiar mixture of smells – sawdust, paint, tallow candles, gunpowder, dirt, and sweat, overlaid with the sweetness of face powder and perfume. Motes of dust drifted in the rays of summer evening sunlight that came through the high window.
She heard a footstep in the hall and half rose, then forced herself to sit again. She’d meet him like a lady. Or as close to that as she could manage. She turned as she heard the rap of his stick against the door, and then found herself rising, unable to keep her seat in his overwhelming presence.
He was very big, this duke – tall and broad, and his height and breadth emphasized by the fullness of his wig and the feathered broad-brimmed hat that topped his finery. The richness of the burgundy fabric of his coat and breeches, the fall of soft lace at his throat and wrists, the gold buttons, and the gloss of the fine leather of his high boots over-shadowed any show of wealth the gawdy costumes of the theatre had to offer.
His eyes met Nell’s and she felt her stomach lurch. With fear? Desire? For what? Surely not a carnal craving, but a coursing flame of longing to possess that assurance, that unquestioning belonging in the world. Though she’d bed him right enough, Nell thought, and think it no drudgery.
“Mistress Nelly.” His voice was deep, the accent not striking in any particular way except that it was somehow free of the cramped quarters of London
“Your Grace.” Nell dropped her eyes and swept him a low curtsy, taking the opportunity of the break in eye contact to compose herself, to will her heart to slow and her damp palms to dry. As she met his eyes again, Nell found that he was smiling faintly and it steadied her.
“Will you not join me for supper?” So she was to be fed, any road. “You must be famished after your labours.”
Was he mocking her? This man who had never known a moment’s labour in his life? Perhaps he caught a flash of something behind her eyes, for he bowed again and gave her a smile that seemed to light the room. “After your enchanting labours, which so deliciously relieve the daily dreariness of our lives.”
Nell suddenly felt that she stood on more solid ground than she had a few moments before, and smiled back at him. “It would be my great pleasure, Your Grace.” ******************
You can find out more about Gillian Bagwell here
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