"You have a strong body, my love."

Books The Awl unfolds the publication history of actress Ally Sheedy. Before her book of verse, she was a novelist writing at the age of twelve an alternative history for Elizabeth I from the point of view of some mice:

QEI gets naked at one point (bald, too, and with no makeup) and then the Earl of Essex pops out from under the bed, where he'd been hiding for a while. Sheedy is far more explicit about this possibility than is Strachey, I must say, in Elizabeth and Essex: a Tragic History.

"Come," she said and took his hand and kissed it! And then she embraced him. She led him to the bed smiling. Elizabeth gracefully sank onto the silken cover.
Essex sat on the edge and took his boots, jacket, shirt and stockings off. He stood up and removed his pants and was there in his underwear. Then he turned, and went about the room blowing out the candles.

It was very dark now and I couldn't see anything. But I heard.

Elizabeth said to him, "You have a strong body, my love."

And Essex said, "Have I, now? You really think so?"

Anonymous would later put such shenanigans on screen I hear. Not that I'd know since I'm still boycotting the thing.