The Esteemed Companie of Travelling Players

The Esteemed Companie of Travelling Players, Summer 1600

Born backstage during a particularly noisy Act 2 crowd scene, my first view of the unruly audience was from between my mother’s bountiful breasts in Act 6. Not liking what I saw, I vowed to join my father in the musicians’ pit. By the age of 2 ¾ I was deemed sufficiently proficient on my chosen instrument to swell the orchestral numbers. Accompanying my father on the lute and his lumpen second-cousin on the crumhorn, I added a certain ethereal quality, tapping out tunes between scenes on variably pitched vials of sunlight, my golden curls nodding in time.

Frances/Francis du Plessey; musician to actors, kings and courtesans (The Cock and Bull, Cheapside, 1699)

All the world’s a stage and we thank Rochelle for travelling (or if she prefers traveling) to its many corners, and all on an extended Friday. And thanks also to G.L. MacMillan for the luminous photo. You have bottled the dawn!

Meanwhile in another kettle of fish entirely, down another dark psychological alleyway, Dream Girl by Miranda Lewis is available to download on Kindle in the UK and US and many other parts of the globe. If it sounds like a rose-tinted/hormone-filled love story think again. I’ll let an independently verified reviewer describe it:

Dream Girl by Miranda Lewis is a compulsive page turner. She drew me in to her strangely entangled worlds of sleepless nights and dream filled days, where the lines of reality and dreams entwine. A great read, beautifully written.