1900 Oscar Wilde Dies

(Another non-early modern post, but seriously, can you blame me? He’s brilliant!)

Today in 1900, Oscar Wilde passed away. Celebrate with a Green Carnation in your lapel.

The Green Carnation

“A really perfect buttonhole flower is the only thing to unite art with nature.”

In cultures and periods where homosexuality has been outlawed, covert signifiers have been developed to communicate one’s sexual preferences.  Wilde’s habit of wearing a green carnation in his lapel became a signifier for homosexuality in the late 1890s, early 1900s.  The green carnation was a mixture of the colour green, which had been associated in classical Rome with homosexual acts and pederasty, and the carnation, which had been associated with Oxford’s student life.

1854 Oscar Wilde was Born

(Yes, another non-early modern post… Sorry, but I love this guy!)

Today in 1854, Oscar Wilde was born. Celebrate with a green carnation in your lapel!

DOB: 16 October 1854
Birthplace: Dublin (at that time, part of the UK)
DOD: 30 November 1900
Place of Death: Paris

Marriage/Major Relationship(s):

• Constance Lloyd (Married 1884)
• Lord Alfred Douglas (Met 1891)

Major Works:

• The Picture of Dorian Grey (1890)
• Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892)
• Salome (1893)
• An Ideal Husband (1895)
• The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)
• The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898)

 

Biographical Notes:

Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde was born to Sir William Wilde and Jane Francesca Elgee, Lady Wilde.  His mother was a successful writer and his father a successful doctor, thus Wilde was brought up in what amounted to a middle class, bourgeois life in Dublin.  He excelled in his studies and eventually went to Trinity College, Dublin where he was awarded many prizes and eventually went to Oxford.

At Oxford, Wilde was exposed to the ideas of William Pater and the aestheticist movement, of which he eventually become one of the leading proponents.     His writing talents garnered him the Newdigate Prize as he completed his degree and he moved to London to begin his career as a writer.

Wilde was already a celebrity.  Within the first year of his being in London, he was lampooned on the stage as a comic character in Gilbert and Sullivan’s play Patience was clearly based on Wilde.  He published a book of poems and then toured Canada and the United States, lecturing on “The English Renaissance” and “Decorative Art in America.”  His early attempts at the stage (The Nihilists, The Duchess of Padua) were written during this time and, though they weren’t as successful or as critically praised as his later works like Salome and The Importance of Being Earnest, they set him up as an important playwright/poet/critic.

In 1884, Wilde married Constance Lloyd.  Just over a year later, she had given birth to a son, with another son coming the same day one year hence.  It was his growing family that probably convinced Wilde to take on the position of editor for Woman’s World magazine in 1887.  Throughout this period, he wrote primarily prose and journalism.

In 1890, Wilde’s first great masterpiece, The Picture of Dorian Grey, was published.  Critics were quick to pounce on the homosexual subtext and the decadence/aestheticist nature of the novel and dismiss it out of hand.

The 1890s began with success after success for him professionally, as his work was produced to large houses on the stage.  In 1891, however, Wilde met and began an affair with Lord Alfred Douglas. When the Marquess of Queensbury (Douglas’ father) found out about the affair, he accused Wilde publicly of being a “somdomite” (sic) and Wilde laid libel charges against him.

The ensuing trials, first for libel and then for homosexuality, saw Wilde lose both times and have his sexual tastes displayed before refined London society.  Wilde’s carefully cultivated performance of self or character as an aesthete came to haunt him as his sexual tastes were presented as the dalliances of a man wholly devoted to the pursuit of pleasure.  Wilde was convicted of indecency and sentenced to two years hard labour.

In gaol (jail), Wilde’s spirit was broken irretrievably.  When he was released in 1897, he left England, never to return.  He died in Paris in 1900.

 

Medieval Guilds

A discussion of the role of medieval guilds in the creation of drama.

So, if these plays were put on by guilds, who were the guilds and how did it work? What was a guild and how did they become responsible for the different parts of the performances? Further, why would a guild, which we might think of as an economic organization of labour, even be interested in the presentation of plays? After all, today economics and culture tend to be contrasting rather than complementary discourses… not so back then.

10 Early Modern Plays That You Should Read – Non Shakespeare

Usually, I avoid the whole top ten list format, but this is a topic that was suggested by one of my students and I thought, hey, why not?  Let’s make this fun.  The early modern period is fairly arcane, so most people don’t know where to start.  I know I thought that back in the day.  So, first off, start by reading all of Shakespeare.  I’m just going to assume that you have read all of Shakespeare.  If you haven’t, you should read it all now.  Go ahead.  I’ll wait.

You are done?  Even Timon of Athens?  C’mon, give it a chance.  It gets better, I swear!

Did you remember The Double Falsehood?  OK, yeah, there I am being pedantic, I admit it.  But there’s probably some Shakespeare in there somewhere, right?

Anyhow, now that you are done reading all of that, let’s look at some of the big plays from the period that you OUGHT to read.

#10 & 9

Tamburlaine, Part 1 (Marlowe)

Tamburlaine, Part 2 (Marlowe)

These plays are huge.  Huge in the sense of scope and huge in the sense of importance.  The first read through tends to be a bit misleading or confusing if only because these plays have a heavy focus on spectacle – battle scenes, grand entrances, coups de theatre.  If only because of those, you should stop every so often and ask yourself, how would this be done on an unlimited budget?

Now add about 100 000 angry swordsmen

Imagine if you could use CGI monsters like George Lucas in Star Wars and grand sweeps of the beautiful desert landscape like David Lean in Lawrence of Arabia while getting the grittiness of Stephen Spielberg in Saving Private Ryan… but all in the same production.  Then, add in the best poetry that the period had to offer and you have a beginning of what this would have been like.

The basic story is the history of the late medieval central Asian potentate, Timur the Lame, who began life as a humble shepherd until he realized that tending sheep for the rest of his life would be interminably boring, so he decided to conquer the world.  Seriously.  The whole world.  Tamburlaine is not just like your cousin Jeff who woke up one day with that great idea to declare his farm independent from the government.  Tamburlaine actually ascends from shepherd, to bandit, to general, to king, to hyper conquerer.

Now, add more blood.

Oh, and did I mention that the main character is a psychopath?  Like, a legit psycho who at the end of part two says that being a king of, like, Asia, isn’t good enough and launches an all out assault on God?  WHY HAS THIS NOT BEEN MADE INTO A MOVIE ALREADY?

#8
Bartholomew Fair (Jonson)

When this play was first performed in the early modern period, it was a flop.  A tremendous flop.  If it were made today as a movie, it might compete with Gigli for worst moneyloser in history.  Why study it then?

Acted in the year 1614, but not again until the twentieth century.

For one, Ben Jonson is at the end of his height in Bartholomew Fair.  He’s still at the peak of his powers, but whereas in other plays he is obsessively sniping at other playwrights, or desperate to show how much Latin he has read while his audience was out drinking and whoring, here, he’s just happy to stick to the world of London itself.

The play itself lampoons the pretensions of the middle classes in London as it follows a motley cast of characters around the eponymous market fair.  The characters cheat each other, steal, whore, drink and eat too much, and generally act awfully.  For all of the satire though, Jonson (perhaps strangely for him) shows a real tenderness for some of the characters.  He actually seems to like some of the ne’er-do-wells and the buffoons.

Wrong period, but you get the sense of energy and movement.

I think the thing that really gets me about this play every time I read it, however, is the attention paid to the language of the citizen.  It is impossible to know what early modern Londoners sounded like as they were going about their business, but there’s something so terribly colloquial about Jonson’s prose.  If this isn’t what they sounded like, it must be at least very, very close to it.

#7
Arden of Faversham (Anonymous)

People used to argue about who wrote Arden of Faversham, like somehow who wrote it mattered.  Shakespeare, some claimed.  Kyd, others.  I don’t care.  Fact is, here, you have the first “true crime” drama in English history, pre-dating Dragnet by 357 years.

The moral of the story?  Don’t play backgammon.

The play ostensibly sets out to show a moral tale of deceit and treachery – how Arden’s wife, Alice, sets about to kill him and is eventually caught.  Thing is, it is remarkably sophisticated in its presentation of Arden himself.  He’s not an innocent victim and in many ways the audience is invited to, if not sympathize then at least, understand the murderous actions of Alice.

So many tropes of crime and detective fiction/drama are set up here for the first time.  The morally compromised victim, the confession, the hired murderers, the almost farcical repeated attempts on Arden’s life – all can be seen in later dramas.

That said, I don’t see Veronica Lake as Alice Arden.

Thing that always gets me is that everyone in the audience would have known the story behind this play and thus how it ended.  The idea of novelty was never one that was chief in the minds of the early moderns, but here, they would have been expecting and anticipating the eventual ghastly murder.  Does this render them (and us) a little complicit?

This is the play that never ends.

This play was so popular throughout the period that you had revivals of it thirty, forty years later.  It was the early modern version of Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap.

#6
The Roaring Girl (Middleton and Dekker)

Students often come into university with a progressive model of history – that, for instance, women have it better now than they ever have, and this has been achieved through increments that will continue to grow towards greater and greater equality.  Usually this is accompanied by the idea that anything before 1950 was a horrible time for women when they couldn’t do or say anything.

Which will kill faster, the pipe or the sword?

The Roaring Girl gives the lie to this vision of history, if nothing else.  It tells the story of Moll Cutpurse, a cross dressing woman who, over the course of the narrative, moves between the underworld and the legitimate middle classes of London to eventually ensure that a marriage plot is brought about.  A crazy story.  An unbelievable story.

A story based on a real woman.

I don’t know what is up with the bird… seriously, any ideas?

Moll Cutpurse was another name for the woman Mary Frith who, we know, attended the productions.  She was not only IN the audience, but she got up on stage and spoke TO the audience.  She was a smoker, a swearer, a woman who wore a sword, and (if the play is to be believed) could use the sword!  She was in every respect not what a woman was “supposed” to be in the period.

The play itself is fascinated with the liminal positions that can be occupied within the gender roles that were available at the time.  Moll could be a woman who acted like a man – a virago – and still be a heroic character.  Other viragos, such as Bonduca from the play of that name, were more roundly criticized.

It’s been done recently with increasing regularity and appears on university syllabi fairly commonly, but not nearly enough for my tastes!

#5
Knight of the Burning Pestle (Beaumont)

There are a surprising number of comedies on this list.  Strange.

Anyhow, this comedy can be described as the early modern postmodern.  It plays with levels of narrative and self-referentiality more than Hamletmachine and does so with more of a sense of humour too!

In my day job, I sell oranges.

The basic storyline is that of a play company trying to put on a performance of a city comedy, yet being interrupted by a noisy and entitled grocer, who demands that his apprentice be put into the play.  Not only will the grocer not let the actors perform the play that they want to perform, but he insists that they perform a chivalric romance.  So at any given moment the play is generically a chivalric romance, a city comedy, a metatheatrical farce, and a satire on all three.

In many ways, Beaumont was well ahead of his time with this daring and, frankly, hilarious production.  It is one of the comedies from the period which will genuine make you laugh, not just smile wryly because you got one of the penis jokes.

Besides, how can you not like a play whose title is a pun about syphilis?

#4Duchess of Malfi (Webster)

Ahhh, back to the tragedies.

As if you didn’t know, it is a TRAGEDY!

Perhaps oddly for this play, The Duchess is never given a name.  She exists only as a title rather than as a human being.  I say oddly because it is her very human emotions of sexual desire and love that are the engine of the tragedy.

The story, in brief, is that the Duchess falls in love with her servant and marries him in secret.  They have a few happy years, even having several children together, before her brothers find out.  At that point, the shit hits the fan and the tragedy really begins.

Did I mention that one of her brothers is a clergyman?

Based on a real story, this story extends well beyond the true crime reportage of Arden of Faversham and moves into the near-mythic.  The cruelty of the brothers of the Duchess is unbelievable in its viciousness, while their near obsession with her sex life borders on the incestuous.

The play presents a complex female character, but one whose life, sadly, is doomed from the start.  Still, great reading!

#3The Shoemaker’s Holiday (Dekker)

The place: London.

This is the city.

The time: Now.

The hero: A shoemaker…

This play was the first (and some say the best) of the city comedies – a genre of play that arose in 1599 and lasted well into the first decades of the next century.  These plays were stories that showed the audience of the theatres back to themselves.

The middle class could be a subject of interest – not everything had to be about knights and kings.  Sometimes, you could tell a story about a tradesman who, by pluck and hard work, could rise up to become the Mayor of the city of London.

What?  No Crocs?

The play is a genuine “feel good” piece.  It reminds me of nothing so much as, say, Forest Gump, where simplicity and honest work come to rule the day.  Read this one when you are feeling low.

#2
The Witch of Edmonton (Rowley, Dekker, Ford)

I used to live here… a long time ago.

No.  Not THAT Edmonton.

Edmonton is ALSO a village that existed north of the city of London, though now it is inside London itself, not far from Chingford and inside Enfield.  In the early modern period, the village had a reputation for the supernatural.

Here we have another case of drama following on the heels of a true crime of sorts.  In this case, the story is based on a pamphlet that described the trial and death of a woman who was accused of being a witch.  For the period, it showed a remarkable subtlety and compassion to Mother Sawyer, the witch character.

Sign #32 your life has turned for the worse: talking to dogs and having them talk back.

Ostracized from the village for being old and a bit odd, Mother Sawyer is effectively pushed into a pact with the devil by the villagers’ unrelenting cruelty.  Add to this a unconventional City Comedy plot involving a love triangle, a talking dog, and a morris dance or two and you’ve got yourself a play that you will remember, if nothing else.

#1
Doctor Faustus (Marlowe)

I didn’t want to put any more than one play per playwright on this list (except in cases of multiple authorship), but Marlowe has got to be an exception.  As he starts the list, he’s got to end it.  Whereas Tamburlaine ends his career trying to take on God in a holy battle, Faustus begins his career utterly turning his back on his own salvation.

Semper ubi sub ubi

Damnation, miracles, madness, Helen of Troy – all in one play!  What more could you want?

Like many of the other entries on this list, Faustus is based on a “true” story.  Here, it is the story of a man who lived in Germany and whose pact with the devil gave him occult powers beyond mortal ken.  The thing is that this story has not only a keen sense of tone, swerving deftly between base comedy to high art, it is also a deeply philosophical work.

No matter what you are looking for, it is in Faustus, so long as what you are looking for is Hell.

I’ve always wanted to teach Faustus by starting off class drawing a magic circle and beginning the incantations to call up a demon.  My more sober minded friends have reminded me that even though I may not believe in the devil and his minions, it is probably better to wage with Pascal and not tempt fate.  Still…

Imagine him as the original George Clooney

There is the story that when Edward Alleyn was playing Faustus once upon a time, he was in the magic circle and counted the devils that he saw before him onstage.  There was one more devil onstage than there were actors in his company.  The devil himself stood before Alleyn.  Ever after that performance, Alleyn wore a gigantic cross on his chest when playing the role because, after all, the part was cursed.

That the devil helped bring people to the theatre couldn’t have hurt at all.

1601 The Essex Rebellion

The following is an excerpt from a lecture that I deliver on the topic from time to time…

Essex was a dashing young man, cousin to the queen and in 1588 she gave him one of the more lucrative monopolies in England – the right to collect taxes on the importation of sweet wines.  Indeed, by the close of the 1580s, he was one of the most powerful men in England and some were talking about him either becoming the Queen’s consort, or possibly becoming King after her death.  Throughout the early 1590s, however, Essex suffered political setback after political setback as William Cecil, Lord Burghley blocked his candidates for even relatively minor political offices.  Francis Bacon, one of Essex’s followers, was blocked in his attempt to become attorney-general by Cecil.  Indeed, the Privy Council became a bit of a partisan match between the new man, Essex, and the old guard, represented by Burghley.  Essex cultivated an association in the popular imagination in the late 1590s with Henry IV.  A history of the reign of Henry IV was published in 1597 with a dedication to Essex and the Latin inscription:

Futuri temporis expectione.
“On the expectation of future times.”

Clearly he was expecting great things for himself, no matter what Cecil, Lord Burghley thought of him.

It didn’t help that over the course of the 1590s, Essex’s initial glories had seriously faded and that he was kept out of the country a lot of the time.  In 1588, he had participated in the English attempt to get back at Spain for the Armada.  He had fought in the Low Countries and in France with some distinction.  In 1596, he even captured Cadiz.  Problem was, he was never one for taking orders.  He disobeyed the Queen’s direct orders several times by attacking or not attacking whoever he wanted when he felt it was most advantageous to him.  At home he was a political liability for the Queen as his presence solidified opposition to the old boy’s club with which Bess surrounded herself; abroad he was something of a loose cannon.  So what did she do with him?  Send him to the one place he couldn’t make the situation any worse: Ireland. Making Essex Lord Lieutenant of Ireland couldn’t possibly hurt the situation – right?

Wrong.

When he left, he was cheered in the streets and it was expected that he would return victorious over those barely civilized Irish in short order.  Most of you would probably have watched as he departed.  In the streets, the people are worried about trade and commerce – as was usual for London – but in the halls of power, people were wondering whether or not Lord Burghley (Elizabeth’s right hand man) would have his way and the long war with Spain would come to an end.

The first thing he did was not to crush the Irish rebellion but to make a humiliating peace treaty with the Earl of Tyrone which granted him a full pardon.  This was humiliating if only because the Earl of Tyrone had gone through the motions of appearing to be loyal in the past and then started the rebellion all over again.  With the peace treaty signed, however, Essex decided to scamper back to England.  This wouldn’t have been so bad, perhaps, if it weren’t for that Elizabeth had forbidden him to return.  It is perfectly possible (and has been suggested) that by this point Essex was suffering from some form of paranoia or schizophrenia as his actions from 1599 on are… not quite connected to reality.  So he comes back from Ireland, hops on a horse and within 4 days arrives in London (that was speedy travel back in the day).  When he gets to London on September 24, 1599, rather than requesting an audience with Queen Liz, he bursts into her private chamber (her bedroom) before she had put on a wig, a gown or anything.  So here he is, his boots still muddy and wearing a sword by his side, standing before the elderly queen in her nightgown, begging her forgiveness for having botched the Irish affair so badly.

Essex, after this, is in the political doghouse.  He was confined to house arrest rather than anything more scandalous.  In the fall of 1600, when his monopoly on the taxation of sweetwines is up for review, it is taken from him.  This is a problem as it is his main source of income and he had spent much of the 1590s racking up massive debts on the expectation that he would become consort or king or some kind of well established member of the govt.  By the opening of 1601, he had no income, no influence at court and was a clear rallying point for all of the disenfranchised young men of the nobility.  Men like Rutland, Sussex and Southampton (who was, by the way, Shakespeare’s patron), had no influence at court and couldn’t get a leg up.  These deeply disenfranchised nobles flocked to Essex’s side and promised their support in anything that he would do, if, you know, he decided to do something about this queen.  The supporters of Essex have often been portrayed as either being young and foolish or a gang of unorganized thugs, or something in between.  I am not so sure either of these really works.  That is, the supporters of Essex were largely young aristocratic men who had been brought up in a society that valorized a certain kind of courtly life.  This courtly life privileged the active young (male) knight in both literature and in the historical acts in the real world.

That is, Sir Philip Sidney was seen as the ultimate exemplar of the perfect Elizabethan knight in the world in which these guys grew up.  He was a poet, he was a general, he was a courtier.  He took the initiative and lived a life that was like something out of a storybook.  So when these guys are growing up, they are being told tacitly to “Be like Sidney;” write the great poem, fight the great fight, be the most powerful courtier.  Indeed, in this world view, the people barely mattered.  The great battles of history were not fought between two opposing armies, but between two opposing generals.  You court the people and make them like you because, of course, that is a form of political power – but it wasn’t the ONLY form.  But when Elizabeth changed the conditions of accessing her magisterial power in the early 1590s (probably not even knowing she was doing so), these guys were left without the ability to do that which they had been taught their whole lives that they should be.  They couldn’t be the great general because they had to listen closely to Elizabeth’s Privy Council orders.  Break the chain of command at your peril.  They couldn’t be the great poet because, let’s face it, not everyone is a great poet.  Many of them ended up as patrons (like Southampton) or writing their own fairly poor erotic poems.  They weren’t dumb and they weren’t violent by nature – they had just been brought up in a culture that told them that they should want to be X, but told them when they grew up that X was not an option.  Of COURSE they were frustrated.

Of course, it helps, if you are going to have a rebellion, to have an army.  Or just a few hundred men with guns.  Or at least a few people with sticks.  Anything.  Essex didn’t have this.  OK, no problem.  Put on a propaganda campaign to market your cause to the people.  Make sure that they realize that Essex is in the right in his dispute with Elizabeth and that the people would be much better off with the old biddy off the throne.  Here is perhaps where the whole thing went terribly terribly wrong… Their marketing campaign consisted of one performance of ONE play.  On Feb 7, 1601, Essex’s faction tried to get the sympathy of the people of London by hiring the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (Shakes Co.) to perform Richard II.

The Lord Chamberlain’s Men (or so they claimed) baulked at the idea of putting on Richard II. It wasn’t a popular play anymore – it wouldn’t draw a crowd.  After all, the play had been written at least 5 years previously.  Everyone had seen it. Heck, there had even been 3 quarto editions of the play in 1597-8.  Yeah, it was popular back then, but in 1601 people could just read the play, why would they come to see it. Well then, Essex’s supporters said, we’ll cover your losses.  We’ll give you 40 shillings.

Just to give you an idea of what that meant – there were 12 Pennies to the Shilling, 20 Shillings to the pound.  The Globe Theatre could hold roughly 2000 people, both seated and standing, if you really stuff it cheek by jowl.  The groundlings paid a penny to get in, then an extra penny to sit in one of the galleries and so the more you paid, the higher up you could sit and if you really paid well, you could sit on stage and they’d provide you with a chair.  So, the conspirators say that they will offer 40 shillings; that translates to 480 pennies, so let’s say about a quarter of the total possible box office.  It’s not actually that much.  It’s not insignificant, but it sure isn’t a lot of cash.  It’s one of those historical titbits that makes you wonder what the political leanings of the Lord Chamberlain’s men actually were.  They had close ties with Essex’s supporters, after all.  Were they accepting a loss to strengthen ties with a group of people who they were politically tied to?  Were they playing both sides of the fence?  Were they just trying to play the money card retroactively when they were interrogated by the authorities in the aftermath of the failed coup?

Richard II is put on.  Nobody comes.  I love this image of the performance going on the just a few people in the audience – the die hard Essex supporters.  I have had the privilege of being on the stage of the New Globe at dawn before anyone else was in the theatre, and that is all I could think of.  It is such a lonely experience, b/c the Globe is designed so that if you are on stage, you are surrounded by audience.  Without an audience, it just seems kinda spooky.

Now, what happened with the Essex rebellion?

It was a spectacular failure.

You know the old saying, what if they threw a war and nobody came?  That’s sort of what happened.  On February 8, he and his friends rode out of his house and tried to raise Londoners in a rebellion against the Queen, but no one came to their side.  Everyone stayed inside.  By the end of the day, after a few scuffles in the streets that were far less violent than the yearly May Day celebrations (Heck, less violent than most football matches of the period), the Essex conspirators were brought into custody.

Essex himself was beheaded – the last person ever to be beheaded in the Tower of London and the only person beheaded in the Tower itself in Elizabeth’s reign.  The executioner took three swings to get his head off.  In the trials that followed the abortive rebellion, many of the rebels were actually shown a remarkable amount of mercy.  Lords were not attainted (meaning that their titles and lands were not taken from them) and it was only the ringleaders and the rank and file who were executed in some way or another.  People like Henry Wroithesley, the Earl of Southampton (Shakespeare’s patron), were given a slap on the wrist and went on to have a long career under James I.  Others ended up getting themselves involved in the Gunpowder Plot a few years later and were executed in the aftermath of that equally ill planned rebellion.

Augustine Philips’ deposition before the Privy Council

The Lord Chamberlain’s Men were brought before the Privy Council  to answer for their performance of Richard II.  To explain themselves, the Co. sent Augustine Phillips, an actor who specialized at the patrician’s roles, but also the member of the company who kept the accounts.  He was the guy who minded the money, so he could show the Privy Council just how much they were paid to put on Richard II.  Whatever else you may think about the accountants of the world, this particular actor-cum-accountant managed to save the bacon of The Lord Chamberlain’s Men.  Instead of being punished for their close association with the rebels and for putting on a play that could have been seditious, they got off scot free.  There wasn’t even a hint of displeasure from the Queen.  The Lord Chamberlain’s men played at court the day before Essex’s execution on Feb 25, 1601.  Some scholars have suggested that this (coupled with a lot of other facts) may indicate that the whole thing was a plot to get Essex to goad him into rebelling just so they could execute him.  Knowing the Cecil faction, there is something perhaps to this.  Further, considering the 40 shilling price that the Lord Chamberlain’s Men got for the performance of Richard II, one wonders if perhaps, upon hearing that Essex’s followers were going to go to the players and ask them to put on Richard II, the government told them to do it and goad on the rebels.  Do it “over the top” – get that Shakespeare fellow to write a deposition scene.  Make it really good and fire these rebels up.  If you do a good job, when this is all over, we, the government, won’t execute you for treason.  If you fuck up… well…

Catching Hamlet

I put together a short video of five different actors performing “To be or not to be” at the same time as an experiment to hear how pacing and delivery has changed over the course of the past 100 years. It’s fascinating to hear how Gielgud clearly influenced Shatner, who, I think, is somewhat more typical than you might expect. Take a listen/look and see if you can identify the actors before the end credits.

Oh, and a “catch” was a song sung where one person would pick up the line of the last person and repeat it back. Putting together the video I couldn’t help but think that is what these five voices were doing.

1567 Richard Burbage Born

A Funeral Elegy
On the Death of the Famous Actor, Richard Burbage,

Some skilful limner help me! If not so,
Some sad tragedian to express my woe!
Alas! he’s gone, that could the best, both limn
And act my grief; and ’tis for only him
That I invoke this strange assistance to it,
And on the point invoke himself to do it;
For none but Tully Tully’s praise can tell,
And no man act a grief, or act so well.
He’s gone, and with him what a world are dead,
Friends, every one, and what a blank instead!
Take him for all in all, he was a man
Not to be match’d, and no age ever can.
No more young Hamlet, though but scant of breath,
Shall cry “Revenge!” for his dear father’s death.
Poor Romeo never more shall tears beget
For Juliet’s love and cruel Capulet:
Harry shall not be seen as king or prince,
They died with thee, dear Dick, [and not long since]
Not to revive again….
Tyrant Macbeth, with unwash’d, bloody hand,
We vainly now may hope to understand.
Brutus and Marcius henceforth must be dumb,
For ne’er thy like upon the stage shall come,
To charm the faculty of ears and eyes,
Unless we could command the dead to rise.
Vindex is gone, and what a loss was he!
Frankford, Brachiano, and Malevole.
Heart-broke Philaster, and Amintas too,
Are lost for ever; with the red-hair’ d Jew,
Which sought the bankrupt merchant’s pound of flesh,
By woman-lawyer caught in his own mesh.
What a wide world was in that little space,
Thyself a world the Globe thy fittest place!
Thy stature small, but every thought and mood
Might throughly from thy face be understood;
And his whole action he could change with ease
From ancient Lear to youthful Pericles.
But let me not forget one chiefest part,
Wherein, beyond the rest, he mov’d the heart;
The grieved Moor, made jealous by a slave,
Who sent his wife to fill a timeless grave,
Then slew himself upon the bloody bed.
All these and many more are with him dead.
Hereafter must our Poets cease to write.
Since thou art gone, dear Dick, a tragic night
Will wrap our black-hung stage: he made a Poet,
And those who yet remain full surely know it,
For, having Burbage to give forth each line,
It fill’d their brain with fury more divine.
Oft have I seen him leap into the grave,
Suiting the person, which he seem’d to have,
Of a mad lover, with so true an eye,
That there I would have sworn he meant to die.
….And now, dear Earth, that must enshrine that dust,
By heaven now committed to thy trust,
Keep it as precious as the richest mine
That lies entomb’d in that rich womb of thine,
That after times may know that much lov’d mould
From other dust, and cherish it as gold:
On it be laid some soft but lasting stone,
With this short epitaph endors’d thereon,
That every eye may read, and reading, weep
‘Tis England’s Roscius, Burbage, that I Keep.

Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim

Bodies in The Second Shepherds’ Play

 

So, the social world echoed the cosmic world echoed the domestic world echoed the internal world of the individual. This is an example of what can be called allegorical or analogical reasoning.

 

The medieval and early modern periods understood the world (and of course this is a generalization but it is a justifiable one) in terms of analogy.  The best minds of the day understood the world not necessarily in terms of discrete bits of matter and/or energy interacting but as composed of mutually sympathetic materials that echoed each others states.  That is, if you are a Scorpio, like me, and Mars (which rules Scorpio) is in the House of Cancer (which is a domestic sign, but also a water sign), then today might be a good idea to take on some plumbing tasks around the house.  The sympathy between my birth sign, the element of water, the association of domesticity all come together to create an auspicious relation for the early modern mind.  Because they understood the world in terms of analogy, relations between the cosmos and the individual, the astronomical and the microscopic, the domestic and the international were fundamentally aligned in ways that we might not recognize today.

 

In this play, the representation of the body, and in particular of Mak’s body, is informed by an interpretive system that saw any particular body as being an analogy to the cosmic or transcendent body of Christ. That is, given the immense importance of the body of Christ within medieval culture and within the Feast of Corpus Christi specifically, we really have to pay attention to how bodies are shown in this play. What happens to them? What can bodies do? How do bodies act?

 

When we ask these questions, we start to see how Mak/Mak’s body as the representation of all that is wrong with the fallen world,  and the body of the sheep, as symbolic of Christ as sacrificial figure, are almost grotesque or cartoonish figures of the need for redemption in the world.

 

How to read Mak’s body is put front and centre in the play when he arrives on the scene as Mak initially tries to pass himself off as one of the functionaries of a landowner or yeoman of the kind that the first shepherd talked about in his opening monologue. Mak speaks with a “southren tooth” (215); that is, at this time in England the accent in the south, around London, used “ich” for “I” and used “-eth” endings for what are now “-es” endings. When Mak appears around line 200, he is misrepresenting himself as a southerner.

 

What! Ich be a yeoman, I tell you, of the king;

That self and the some, sent from a great lording,

Und sich,

Fie on you! Goeth hence!

Out of My presence!

I must have reverence.

Why, who be Ich? (201-207)

 

The shepherds are immediately able to read Mak’s body and identify him as the local ne’er-do-well, Mak, but that sequence centres our attention on bodies and how they signify in this play. Mak, rather than being a rich southerner, is in fact a poor man. The fact that the shepherds share a meal immediately before Mak’s entrance suggests that Mak, perhaps, is unable to afford to join them in their meal. That is, Mak is hungry and poor, yet tries to present himself as a nobleman. He tries to make his body signify in ways contrary to its “natural” signification, though the shepherds see through his subterfuge.

 

Later, when Mak has stolen the sheep and Gill is pretending it is their child, the shepherds still see through Mak and Gill’s attempt to re-coordinate the signification of the body of the sheep. The implicit comparison between Mak and Gill’s sheep-baby is with the reality of the coming Christ within the Nativity sequence, of which this scene was a part. The sheep Mak stole is a stand in or an uncanny double of the coming Christ, who was called the Lamb of God. Both the stolen sheep and the newborn Jesus in the play are called “little day-star” (577 and  727). Even the suggestion Gill makes about eating the sheep-child is an oblique reference to the ceremony of the Eucharist where Christians were expected to eat the literal body of their saviour.

 

In other words, the body of the sheep, like the body of Mak, is presented as a complex signifier. Whereas Mak’s body is subject to punishment (like Jesus), this is a world where the punishment doesn’t take the form of crucifixion, but tossing Mak around in a blanket, like a carnival game. Whereas the sheep is explicitly and implicitly compared to Jesus as the Lamb of God, in this world, the sin of the theft of the sheep is righted by the coming presence of God. The presence of God, which could be felt for every Christian in the Eucharistic wafer that was at the heart of the Corpus Christi feast.

Twelfth Night and Shakespeare’s Career

https://www.youtube.com/embed/2ePHP2uQBvQ?feature=player_embedded

In 1599, after the lease on the ground upon which The Theatre had expired and the landlord refused to renew it, Shakespeare’s company, The Lord Chamberlain’s Men, just decided to do the obvious thing. They tore down the building and carried everything – nails, planks, costumes and all – across the river to a new site on the South Bank. There they constructed The Globe Theatre out of the salvaged bits of The Theatre. Shakespeare, along with his partner Richard Burbage, who probably played Orsino in Twelfth Night, was becoming an impressario.

How Shakespeare began in the theatre industry is lost in the realm of myth (there is the story that he began by holding the horses of the more well-to-do patrons), but by the early 1590s he was an actor and jobbing writer, working corporately (that is, with other playwrights) on several plays including all the parts of Henry VI, Titus Andronicus, and possibly Love’s Labour’s Lost. Then, when he became a founding member of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in 1593, he was in a position unique among playwrights of the time. He was the only playwright who was actually a sharer (a kind of stockholder or owner) of a playing company. Everyone else worked contract by contract, but Shakespeare had the luxury of writing for a specific group of actors whose skills he knew and whose expertise he could play to.

At this point in his career, Shakespeare was known primarily as a comedian who had written some particularly good poems, though what we today consider his great tragedies were to come in the next few years. We know this because there is a reference in a book called Palladis Tamia from 1598 where the author, Francis Meres, describes Shakespeare as “honey-tongued” and lists his great comedies and several of his histories as examples of his excellence. Shakespeare had clearly done well by playing to the strengths of his actors in his plays.

By 1599, however, Shakespeare’s company was undergoing a few changes, not least of which was the move to Southwark I mentioned. They were about to lose their resident comedian, Will Kemp, who specialized in acrobatic physical comedy – a loss that you can see literalized in Hamlet from 1600/01 in Yorick’s skull. The company replaced Will Kemp with the comedian Robert Armin, whose style was based on wordplay and song. This you can see Twelfth Night (from around 1601) in the character Robert Armin played, Feste – he is a singer and a wit, not an acrobat.

It is around the turn of the century that Shakespeare’s plays change in terms of tone. For one, it is following this move to Southwark that Shakespeare writes the great tragedies – Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, Macbeth – and the romances – Pericles, Cymbeline, The Tempest. Also, at this time, his comedies begin to strain against the bounds of generic prescription. That is, they don’t really look or act like what we think comedies should be. Measure for Measure, for instance, is notoriously problematic in terms of the bleak tone of what is structurally a comedy. Twelfth Night comes at that crux moment, just before Shakespeare starts pushing the genre to the edge of what it is to be a comedy.

Emma Smith actually argues that the play that Twelfth Night is most closely related to from Shakespeare’s canon is Hamlet, and I have to admit that I agree. It is certainly the case that both Hamlet and Twelfth Night were written around the same time, but more importantly, the central hinderance to the plots of both plays is grief and the ways in which we can get over grief. In the case of Hamlet, the tragic vision has it that obsessive performance and reperformance of grief ends up with the culminating atrocity of the fifth act and a questionable justice attained through horror. In the case of Twelfth Night, grief is overcome through love, but importantly not through erotic desire. “Love” here is kind of companionate love, a divine or agapic love (from the term “agape” which the Greeks considered the highest form of love).

This has led to some people suggesting that these plays, Hamlet and Twelfth Night, are Shakespeare’s responses to the death of his only son, Hamnet, in 1596. Though this is certainly possible, I strongly discourage you from investigating this too much for this class insofar as you can never possibly provide any direct or unequivocal evidence for the state of mind of a writer. As Plato pointed out, writers lie. That’s what they do. It’s literally their job. To say that Twelfth Night’s investigation of grief stems directly from Hamnet Shakespeare’s death is to commit the logical fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc or after the fact therefore because of the fact. A playwright can investigate grief, after all, and not have it be a personal psychodrama.

So, by the time Shakespeare is writing Twelfth Night, he is at the top of his career. He’s about to write the great tragedies and is a sharer in the most profitable playing company of his day. He is well-respected at court and by writers like Frances Meres. So if he is so well respected… why is this play so dirty?