Category Archives: Drama

A Different Trinity: History, Law & Drama

Posted on by under Academic Curiosity, Drama, Farces, History

#FridayFarces is back, this time with a consideration of how history, drama, and legal proceedings can interact to instruct as well as entertain us.

You’d be hard-pressed to find a person who doesn’t enjoy drama in some form or another. For most people these days, it’s television and cinema; whether you love television or going to the opera, the point is that the very idea of drama is something that virtually everyone finds appealing. (Tell anyone that you work in theatre or television and watch their reaction.) Law seems to come in for a similar, probably equally misplaced, aura of glamour: scroll through your television menu and I think you’d be hard-pressed to find any hour of the day when some legally-based show isn’t airing- in some places there are entire channels dedicated to airing legal cases. Law is drama, in most people’s eyes. 

History sadly comes in for a different response. Only yesterday, a young family friend still in university was saying how much she “can’t get into” history. I understand where she’s coming from: in school, we teach historically abominably, a list of tedious facts purged entirely of humanity and intrigue. But history is all about drama, people, and law; and the drama of law can be a gateway drug when it comes to learning to love history.

I was fortunate to discover this young, entirely unintentionally. A favourite book from my high school years (still on my shelf!), Mary S. Hartman’s Victorian Murderesses, uses famous, well-documented trials to shine light on the often hidden realities of women’s lives, and public responses to them. My brilliant freshman year university course “The Historian as Detective”, gave me books like Natalie Zemon Davis’s enjoyable (and short!) The Return of Martin Guerre* and Words and Deeds in Renaissance Rome, by Thoms V. and Elizabeth S. Cohen, both of which rely heavily on trial records to illuminate rural French and urban Italian society, respectively. What I learned then is that the law leaves a detailed record, in a way that very few other historical records can, showing ordinary people caught unexpectedly, made suddenly visible, their everyday lives in captured in metaphorical amber, and set down on paper. Moreover, while trials may be representative more of the “outliers” than their more “ordinary” contemporaries, by showing what was unusual, or not permissible, or in debate, we can understand what was normal, permitted, and accepted by society.

This is one reason why the history-drama-law triad is so important to both the casually curious and serious scholarship. Our farces aren’t quite in this category- there is of course much very erudite research about them!- but primarily they are, to an audience, merely fun. But they reveal other ways that this trio present themselves and talk between themselves.

Both Master Pierre Pathelin and Le Cuvier (to give The Washtub its French title) may have been written and performed by lawyers: The Society of the Basoche, the company of law clerks in medieval Paris. The Basoche are a fascinating group, and I hope to dedicate a day to talking about this most unusual medieval guild at a later date, but for now it’s enough to say that their evolution was an entirely logical phenomenon. The law is full of emotional highs and lows, triumphs and tragedies, justice and injustice- literally the things that define drama, even if there is no stage in sight. Moreover, the Basoche had its own internal jurisdiction, which allowed its students to practice some form of “real” law, the way a mock trial team at a university may do today. If there weren’t any cases on the go, they wrote their own, including causes grasses, mocking lawsuits for Carnival, which allowed them to create “cases” that were particularly absurd or scandalous. Writing true farce, then, without the necessity of a legal framework, may have been an entirely foreseeable next step. By the mid-fifteenth century, the time at which both of our plays were likely composed, the Basoche were working with the company that staged fully religious plays, to contribute to a full day of every sort of drama: morality, mystery, sottie and farce all going on a shared playbill for the public’s day of entertainment. Indeed, the Basoche is today remembered more vividly as a comedy-dramatic enterprise than its actual purpose within the legal-education system. (Thus, to further our theme of interconnectivity between our three themes: the law gave us drama, and today the drama has preserved for us something of the history of law.)

In addition to this very real tie to actual attorneys and clerks, both Pathelin and The Washtub contain aspects of law within the narrative of the drama. The Washtub deals with a contract between a man and his wife, one they draw up in full view of the audience, who functionally serve as “witnesses”, creating what would, in effect, have thus been considered a legally binding document. (One could imagine a sequel in which both husband and wife seek out attorneys to argue about the validity, or amendment, to the contract they have somewhat carelessly drawn up!) In Pathelin the connection to law is still greater: Pierre Pathelin claims to be a lawyer, and the final scene of the play is a trial in a courtroom before a judge. It’s unclear if Pathelin is any sort of attorney at all: Howard Graham Harvey, whose book Theatre of the Basoche is enormously helpful in making sense of the legal aspects of Pathelin, says that “Pathelin’s lack of education raises the strongest presumption that he is nothing more than an unlicensed village practitioner.” In cities, legal training and licensing was becoming more rigorous, as the very existence of the Basoche shows, but in rural areas, the bar to setting oneself up at the bar of law was low; as with Pathelin, cleverness could substitute for a real education. If the play was indeed created by members of the Basoche, perhaps they were making a crack at untrained people who claimed the same mantle of “lawyer” that they so painstakingly studied to achieve. That said, the play also leaves us rather liking and admiring Pathelin, his trickery and audacity, so perhaps it’s less a critical dig and more a nudge and wink- lawyers appreciating that their profession often rewards finding ways to be clever that are just barely, but technically, within the bounds of the law. The play thus gives us a window, however distorted through comedic exaggeration, into village legal practice of the times, while also using it as a source for commentary and comedy. 

One need not, of course, be a student of all three disciplines. But the lawyer needs to understand precedent, or what happened in the past. The historian benefits from understanding the legal framework that shaped and was shaped by the society he or she studies. And those who appreciate the drama of both have a unique opportunity towards making material that might otherwise seem dull as fascinating, alive, and vibrant. We get to take the idea of drama and make it literal drama. Ours must surely be the best of all three worlds.

*Martin Guerre has been dramatised for the stage in multiple versions. The musical version, written by the same people who created Les Misérables, is an extremely interesting study in creating drama by marrying up different aspects of history, effectively destroying much strict historical veracity in pursuit of revealing a completely different aspect of history. I belive some of the women from Victorian Murderesses have also been turned into at least television drama, although I haven’t seen them and cannot say how closely they hewed to the historical record. Still, the fact that these stories were intriguing enough to become drama in the literal sense proves the point that legal history is ripe pickings for history-via-performance!

Two Medieval French Farces: A Reading – the Details

Posted on by under Drama, Farces, French Farces, Historic, News, Production

We’ve talked a lot about what’s in our farces, their history, and similar things, but it’s time to reveal the actual details of what we have planned to present Master Pierre Pathelin and The Washtub.

This will be a laid-back, fun, and free, event for anyone with an interest in comedy, medieval drama, theatre, or even none of the above!

Anyone who is interested in taking part should sign up and, nearer the date, we’ll send scripts along for you to read, so you can get familiar with the plays. We won’t be auditioning. We won’t be pre-casting. We’ll gather for a couple of hours before the performance to read together, to assign parts, and hopefully have a good laugh. We’ll also be taking drop-ins on the day, for both participants and audience- if you can’t get in touch with us ahead of time, we’ll still be happy to hand you a script so you can take part! (Please note that, while we believe this event is suitable for most ages, anyone under 16 wishing to participate will need to be accompanied by an adult, and material may not be appropriate for young children.)

Then, when an audience has gathered at the set time, we’ll perform the reading, with our scripts, for their entertainment as well as our own! Hopefully it’ll be a good laugh for everyone, and a chance to get to know some very funny plays that aren’t especially familiar to an English speaking audience. (In case you are worried, we will be reading English translations so you won’t be expected to tackle Medieval French!)

Tickets- did we mention it’s FREE, by the way!- are available via Eventbrite. Please sign up there to be either a participant or an audience member, and get in touch with us if you have any questions.

Participants should join us at the Black Swan Inn, 23 Peasholme Green, York, YO1 7DE at 17.00 on Saturday 9th May; we’ll be meeting upstairs.

Audience are invited to arrive for a 20.00 start at the same location.

Drinks will be available at the bar.

Director’s Notes: Comedy Tonight!

Posted on by under French Farces, Historic, Musings

It’s #FarcesFriday, and our director, Laura-Elizabeth Rice, is back with reflections on choosing to work with medieval French farces, and how we chose our plays.

Two memories:

I’m six years old, listening to a group of boys sitting around one’s school desk. One of them is using a hand under his armpit to make noises that mimic gas, and they’re laughing like it’s the funniest thing they’ve ever heard. And I find myself thinking, I can’t wait to be an adult, so people won’t find fart jokes funny anymore, because they aren’t! (Oh, the innocence of youth!)

I’m eighteen and in university, in a class that’s supposed to be on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, but our professor has decided that, instead, we’re going to be focusing on the question of “what is comedy?” He’s a young, early-career lecturer; it’s painfully obvious that he’s anxious to spit out the silver spoon he was born with, and his way of doing this is to argue strenuously that slapstick is the only valid form of comedy, because if you like anything else, you’re being a snob. I don’t think slapstick is funny at all. I’ll spend the semester arguing that watching someone be injured or made to feel embarrassed isn’t amusing, and that I don’t think that inherently makes me stuck-up.

I’m sharing these memories because it’s deeply ironic that I, of all people, should be spending time working on farces, a genre that relies heavily on physical and/or bodily humour… and irony is often a foundational part of comedy. Moreover, it’s worth knowing a little bit of that background, to help explain why, of all the farces in all the theatre in all the world (or at least, in France!), we should have settled on Master Pierre Pathelin and The Washtub for our upcoming reading.

Medieval comedy isn’t absent from the English canon of dramatic literature, but it’s quite limited, and exists entirely within wider dramatic genre that aren’t focused on laughs. Joseph’s Trouble About Mary is pretty funny, because it’s a pragmatic look at a Biblical moment that is usually held in pure reverence. The Second Shepherds’ Play is a strange combination of comedic folk play married to the more standard Christmas story. Our old friend, Mankind, has much bawdy humour, but its purpose is to be held up as an example of what not to be. There just isn’t a vast body of secular comedy from medieval England that exists solely because people wanted a laugh. 

It’s different in France. There are hundreds of farces from medieval France. Unfortunately, the majority aren’t available in translation; if you don’t read French- and medieval French at that!- these plays remain largely a literal and metaphorical closed book. This is changing (most notably, several collections translated and adapted by Jody Enders, which I highly recommend as entertaining reading even if you have zero interest in putting a farce onstage), but a lot– the majority- of the enormous body of farce remains just out of reach. So while I knew that, in deciding to present a comedy, we would be looking past English borders, the language question meant limitation among riches.

That said… once you start reading what is available in English, you confront the challenge of translation that isn’t about language or even France vs. England, but about cultures across time. My undergraduate lecturer was correct that slapstick has indeed stood the test of chronology- medieval people would have understood those six year old boys!- but the line of what is acceptable has definitely shifted. It’s quite shocking to realise that a significant percentage of medieval comedy is about violence, particularly domestic. Imagine watching a “Punch & Judy” show but with actors instead of puppets; men and women may give as good as they get, but the violence is unrelenting. There are those who argue that it is so exaggerated that it becomes comic, because it’s completely unrealistic, but we still felt it was over the line where we felt comfortable. 

The Washtub is marital comedy, but it still works as comedy if one ignores or excises stage directions that indicate the couple being violent towards one another- that is a disposable “extra” that isn’t necessary dramatically. Even without that, there is physical comedy, and it follows the slapstick trope of exaggeration of physical events: it’s unlikely that a grown, fully conscious woman would drown by falling into even a large medieval washtub in her own home; all she has to do is stand up! Thus much of the comedy centres around the absence of injury that the audience appreciates, but the character doesn’t; the rest is clever one-upmanship between spouses, of the sort that is still a staple of television sitcoms.

Pierre Pathelin is probably the best-known medieval French farce- possibly the best-known medieval French play, full stop, and I suspect that one of the reasons this is true is because it almost totally lacks violence-as-humour, so it hasn’t turned the corner into being more offensive than funny. It pokes fun at lawyers (another tradition that has carried on!), at unearned pomposity, and the idea of the clever scoundrel getting away with one-upping those considered his “betters” still resonates. It also includes a twist at the end that reminds me that my university lecturer did make some good points: reversal of expectation can be one of the criteria for defining comedy. In Pathelin, everybody is trying to cheat everyone else, and virtually everyone has some comeuppance along the way. 

I suspect that the same thing that made me read these plays and say, I want to do this!, is the same thing that has made them the best known among a fairly obscure genre: their surprisingly delicate balance between the hyperbolic actions of slapstick, and the jokes that ask the audience to contribute some thought or knowledge. You can appreciate them for exactly what they lay out in front of you- isn’t a man bleating “Baaa” in a courtroom ridiculous?- or you can be entertained because you know something about law and what Pathelin is faking. Or both. Meet them where you are. The medieval French writers gave us plays which understood what neither a younger version of me, nor my university teacher, did: that “funny” needn’t have a hierarchy; there are only different, and complimentary, ways of making an audience laugh.

Another get together for York’s Theatre People – Saturday 12th November 1.00pm

Posted on by under Academic Curiosity, Casting Call, Drama, Musings, News, Production

Following the success of our impromptu get together for members of York’s Theatre community last month, we are running the event again – this time with a little more notice!

This is a chance for anyone involved or interested in theatre to chat and network with like-minded people and we are considering making it a regular occurrence.

Check out the event on Facebook – we hope to see you there!

York Theatre Meet & Greet, Saturday 8th October 2pm

Posted on by under Casting Call, Drama, News, Production

We’ve all come up against obstacles when working on projects.  Many of us have shows and the like that we are working on – be they in production or still at the idea stage – that we would like to either market or ask for help with.  Some people may even want to get a foot in the door of the York theatre scene.

So, we have decided to throw an impromptu get together for the theatre people of York; partly to have the chance to introduce ourselves to some new people but also because we know the theatrical community has a lot of knowledge and willigness to share, but not everyone knows how to approach those in the know.

Check out the event on Facebook – we hope to see you there!

Historic Drama: an invitation or too big a challenge?

Posted on by under Drama, Historic, Musings, News

Our Artistic Director shares her opinions on the willingness of others to tackle historic drama.

Because we like to take an interest in theatre beyond our own four walls, and be part of the wider York theatre community, we recently attended the AGM for another local theatrical organisation. Among the interesting moments was their discussion of the inclusion of classical (read “historic”) plays in their repertoire. Although some people seemed quite keen on the idea, it was noted that the more recent occasions when a historic play was calendared, finding a director proved unusually difficult. I had seen notices for those plays and, had I not been tied up with academic commitments, would have jumped on the opportunity, so it had never really occurred that other directors didn’t feel the same excitement.

Is there something about historic plays that directors in particular find intimidating or uninspiring? I don’t really know the answer for sure. Inarguably, there are possible aspects to approaching historic plays that might give someone pause – but it’s hard to talk about historic plays as if they are monolithic. Medieval dramas will present an obvious challenge with language… Renaissance, perhaps, with poetry… the Victorians with a sensibility which seems melodramatic and over the top today… but these are different issues, and any director might be intimidated by one set of circumstances while feel totally okay with another.

One thing which might be universal to historic plays is the feeling that you have to do something “innovative” with them. After all, they’ve been done (and in some cases, done and done and overdone) before, so there is an additional pressure to be ‘clever’. There is also the pressure to create ‘relevance’, rather than letting what relevance is present in the play itself pop to the surface and speak to you. And yet there are an awful lot of directors who are thrilled to tackle Shakespeare, whose plays have some of the densest performance history (and therefore really require something special to stand out). They may feel this is mitigated, ironically, by its very familiarity: if you can be reasonably sure the audience already knows the story of Romeo & Juliet, you might think that you can and should push the boat out pretty far, and clarity is less necessary. (I passionately disagree with that theory, by the way, but I’ve seen enough productions which clearly relied on foreknowledge by the audience to know that sometimes, whether deliberately or not, a dependence on audience awareness is taken for granted.) Conversely, I wonder if some directors feel that ‘classic’ plays require a certain degree of reverence, and therefore circumscribe creativity.

Of course, there is also the possibility that directors don’t have an aversion to historic plays, so much as a preference for modern ones. If you’re hooked on contemporary theatre styles, or plays dealing with contemporary matters, then obviously a call to direct a three-hundred-year-old play might not be particularly exciting to you.

I can’t really speak to the motivations of others, only speculate; because I find historic plays fascinating, it’s hard for me to get into the mind-set of avoiding them. Ultimately, however, I wonder if (perhaps ironically, all things considered) categorising plays by the date they were written isn’t missing the point. A story is interesting to you, or it isn’t, and perhaps by emphasizing the date of writing blinds people to that. Naturally directors need some form of filter to decide what projects they wish to pursue and which ones aren’t for them, but I’m not sure if using a date is the best one possible. Do we do a disservice to historic drama by focusing on that aspect, rather than other ways of describing plays? I really don’t know. A feature which I find attractive may be the opposite to someone else, and anyway you couldn’t get rid of the knowledge that an older play had a long history even if you didn’t describe it primarily as ‘historical’.

I don’t have all of the answers. The only one that I firmly believe to be true is that, if indeed there are people who have an aversion to plays of or about the past, the only way to convince them otherwise is to keep putting them on, continuing to make them as interesting as possible, every chance we get.

So, What Do You Really Think?

Posted on by under A Journey with Jonson, Ben and Steenie, Ben Jonson, Drama, Musings, Production, The Devil is an Ass

As both a theatre director and historian, our Artistic Director has a variety of experience looking at the sincerity and manipulation of beliefs – themes which are present in both parts of A Journey with Jonson. Here are some of her thoughts.

Among the many things that is shared by theatre and studying history is the challenge of getting inside someone else’s head. Both often involve trying to come to terms with the possible reasons why people do certain things. In theatre about the past, there is an extra difficulty: not only is it a matter of trying to make sense of another person’s thinking, but it is about doing so when their entire world view, the matrix of their society and culture, was different. And yet, there are questions about what people actually thought which were probably just as valid in earlier times as now; the difference, perhaps, is that we are more comfortable with articulating them.

One of these unspoken questions is at the heart of Ben and Steenie, and is further explored in The Devil is an Ass: what do people actually believe, when are they putting on the appearance of a belief for their own personal agenda, and when are they using the belief of others for pragmatic reasons? If you’re a political or religious leader, do you truly buy everything you say? Or, with your “behind the scenes” knowledge, is true belief set aside for political reality?

Few occasions in history illustrate the possible views on these questions as well as the issue of witchcraft in the early modern period, and an accusation of witchcraft is one of the significant plot threads of Ben and Steenie. There seems to be a general consensus that many people of the era very sincerely believed in the presence and malevolence of witches among ordinary citizens – including, for at least some of his life, King James I/VI. But those frequently accused of being witches tended to be those (largely women) who in some way didn’t conform to community norms, so their accusations could be either the assumption that this nonconformity in some way truly indicated an evil presence, or was a more cynical attempt at bringing recalcitrant neighbours to heel through fear (without the actual belief that they were dabbling in black magic). Revenge for perceived wrongs – a direct abuse of the system – is another possible reason why someone might be accused, as is the case in Ben and Steenie, although in the play it isn’t entirely clear that this is in opposition to genuine belief; most of these situations aren’t mutually exclusive.

While Ben and Steenie silently posits these questions, and gives the audience different answers, The Devil is an Ass is Jonson’s more overt iteration of the issue. The play rolls its eyes at those who would believe anything and everything, but it also pokes fun at those who would take advantage of that blind belief. The fact that Fitzdotterel’s desire to meet a devil is patently ridiculous is also turned on its ear somewhat by the fact that, in the world of the play, devils are real, and Fitzdotterel’s wish is – unbeknownst to him – granted; Merecraft’s schemes sound absurd but aren’t as far off from real ventures as might be assumed.

One play approaches the questions of belief, sincerity, gullibility, and manipulation from a gleefully comic standpoint and the other from a more serious angle. There are no definite answers, as one can only know the answers within their own personal experiences. From our standpoint in production, the functional question is what an actor makes of these matters, and what answers he or she assigns to the part being played. These are the kind of choices that make acting the craft that it is. And the chance to explore different potential permutations of these questions is one of the great joys of working on plays about past eras. It may never give any definitive answers, but it offers insight into possibility.

Director’s notes: Visiting Bottesford

Posted on by under A Journey with Jonson, Academic Curiosity, Ben and Steenie, Ben Jonson, Drama, Historical, Musings, News, Production

In preparation for our upcoming production of Brean Hammond’s Ben and Steenie our Artistic Director took a trip to one of the locations featured in the play.  She reports back and shares her thoughts on the practice of visiting the locations of events when working on dramatised history.

Recently I had the chance to visit the village of Bottesford as research for Ben and Steenie. I’d been there once years before, but this time I was looking with theatrical eyes: the goal this time was not to commune with dead ancestors but to get ideas about the place where the play is set.

There is a lot to be said for seeing the places where a history-based play “really happened”. The obvious assumption might be that this would be to get ideas for how to recreate those locations onstage, and to some extent getting inspiration along those lines does happen at times. This was less at the heart of the Bottesford trip, though, because we had already decided that the play would not benefit from too heavy a hand in terms of design. I am not a big fan of “heavy” designs for productions; “you shouldn’t go home whistling the scenery” is one of my oft-repeated beliefs. “Just because you can doesn’t mean you should” is another. In short, I believe that the design should serve the play, not overtop it.

This would be easy to do with a play set in Jacobean England, because the style of the time, for those with the wherewithal, was ornate and extravagant. ‘Conspicuous consumption’ was the word of the day, and this is visible even in death: the chancel of St Mary’s in Bottesford is crammed with glorious examples of sixteenth – and seventeenth – century tombs, multi-levelled and effigied. As much as I’d love to build the tombs of St Mary’s and give audiences the chance to imagine that space, the truth is that there’s not really any reason for it. Quite apart from the fact that at least one of them postdates the events of the play (in fact, some of them are explicitly referenced on it), they simply aren’t important to the drama. What matters is that certain events take place in a church: it could, conceivably, be the most humble local parish church or Westminster Abbey, the moment and meaning in the drama would be the same.

By the same token, there are some stunningly picturesque views of the churchyard from various places around the village, but they would require a West End budget and stage size – and then, too, it would be an act of self-indulgence, for that wouldn’t serve a dramatic purpose either. Beautiful vistas just aren’t what the play is about.

The other location in the play which features prominently is Belvoir Castle. Unfortunately, the Belvoir Castle of Ben and Steenie’s time is long gone, replaced by a crenellated Victorian pile. I didn’t visit it, since nothing of its fabric would be appropriate to the play. Any replication of the castle or its interior would always be of the imagination, although certainly there are other contemporary castles in Great Britain one could turn to for similar inspiration.

What this trip was actually about was just getting a sense of the place: how its various locations are laid out, and how the people of the play would have moved through and related to those spaces. It was very helpful to get a sense of where all these places are in relation to one another. The early scenes of the play have Ben Jonson upon the road toward Belvoir, and I now have a better idea of what that distance and terrain is like, and what sort of countryside he would have encountered that day. The relationship of the castle to the village was one I didn’t have a sense of prior to this trip. Some of the play’s characters who live in the village work as servants in the castle, and it would have been a bit of a walk, albeit over easy, flat terrain. Despite the distance, the castle dominates the landscape, and understanding that juxtaposition helps make sense of its relationship to the Bottesford inhabitants as they transpire in Ben and Steenie. It must have loomed in importance – and must have been an awesome thing to people who were living in one- or two-room cottages.

Getting a sense of the village as it must have stood is more difficult, because much of today’s Bottesford consists of modern developments. The fact that St Mary’s is as big as it is suggests that the village was larger than just a few houses or families. And its distance from the castle might suggest that the majority of its inhabitants weren’t directly dependent on employment there, which helps to make sense of the character Joan Flower in the play and her pride in her relationship as a servant to the local nobility.

Like so much research, it’s difficult to say how any of this will manifest itself once we get into rehearsals. But when approaching historical dramas, one would be remiss in not at least attempting to get a closer look at what remains. After all, although for our purposes they are characters in a play, many of them were real people, and trying to make sense of them and their world just seems a way of respecting that fact. Most of them didn’t leave any physical traces, but in Bottesford (as with Jonson’s visit to York) walking in their footsteps brings them, and the events of the play, just a little bit closer.

Someone in a Tree, History’s Audience

Posted on by under A Journey with Jonson, Academic Curiosity, Ben and Steenie, Ben Jonson, Drama, Musings

This week our Artistic Director considers the role of those who view and recall or record events in history – an audience of sorts.

In the musical Pacific Overtures (which, I think, is a brilliant piece of theatre about history, though it is not performed often), there’s a song called ‘Someone in a Tree’. It deals with an episode where no records were kept, and writers Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman had to find a way to both show this gap, and also make sense of it to the audience. Much of it is sung by a character who claims to have been a witness to these lost events, but at a distance, while hiding in a nearby tree, and so he can offer no details. The result is a song which says something incredibly interesting about history and the act of witness:

And there’s someone in a tree

Or the day is incomplete.

Without someone in a tree,

Nothing happened there.

I am hiding in a tree,

I’m a fragment of the day.

If I weren’t, who’s to say

Things would happen here the way

That they happened here?…

In a way, ‘Someone in a Tree’ is a brilliant reiteration of the hoary old question “if a tree fell in a forest and no one was there to hear it, would it make a sound?” Of course the obvious answer is yes, because sound waves and physics don’t require participation by outsiders to occur – just as events and lives happen even if no one documents their stories – but then, the question wasn’t really about a tree in the first place.

History isn’t about what actually happens, because only those who are present in any given moment can know that, and even then an event or experience is interpreted by those individuals, filtered through their perspectives. The reality of history is that it is determined by what is documented and that documentation can build its own story, its own momentum, and effectively become known as “the true history” when there are no surviving witnesses. In essence, if no one records that a tree fell in the forest, it doesn’t make a sound across time, because there will be no way to know that it happened. (I do not, in this instance, mean “document” in a strictly paper sense: archaeology might tell us that this hypothetical tree had fallen; dendrochronology might tell us when; but if no archaeological research was ever conducted on that forest, the fact of the tree’s demise would be lost to us.)

What brought this to mind was reading about Ben Jonson’s walk from London to Edinburgh, which has been a point of inspiration and departure for our A Journey with Jonson, particularly in the play Ben and Steenie. That he went on this journey has been long known; that someone went with him to record the journey is a relatively new discovery (by James Loxley in 2009). It certainly stands to reason that he would have had a companion: not only would such a journey have been much more pleasant, and safer, in company, but if the walk was indeed part of a bet Jonson had made, as has been suggested, he would have needed someone to go along to make sure he did complete it to the terms set down. If Jonson had travelled alone, the lack of record certainly wouldn’t negate the fact that he did walk to Edinburgh, but Loxley’s discovery of his companion’s account means that we now know details of the trip that had, heretofore, been lost – and in being lost, they had effectively not happened to our knowledge. Historical discoveries are like that, a resurrection of sorts; they seem to bring to life events that had “unhappened” by virtue of being unknown.

While Jonson’s travels weren’t technically a performance, his companion acted as an audience. And this is a point where history and drama connect. The metaphorical tree falls whether or not there is witness and record, but it only leaves traces and continues to impact the future if it does in some way have, or creates, an audience. We are conscious of this sort of ephemerality in the performing arts but tend to forget that aspect when considering the past. We know more about Jonson now than we did twenty years ago, because his “audience” was rediscovered.

In Ben and Steenie, writer Brean Hammond has chosen not to include a character as Ben Jonson’s travelling companion. This character isn’t necessary, because the audience, in effect, becomes that extra entity. It stands in as witness to his experiences – and its participants get to see some events that Jonson does not, which adds an important layer to the question of what “really” happened. While there are elements of the play which are fictionalised, putting the audience in that all-important role as witness (as audiences, by definition, always are) becomes a reminder that even if our role in history is only to see it as it happens, that act carries weight. Whether onstage or in real life, we are part of the history happening all around us.

Difficulty with Theatrical Eras

Posted on by under A Journey with Jonson, Academic Curiosity, Ben Jonson, Historic, Musings, Production, Shakespeare

Our Artistic Director gives some of her views on Theatrical Eras, and the idea that William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson are sometimes viewed as from different times.

Many of our brains like labels; box-like systems of organisation. It’s no accident that we usually divide history into defined periods – we have the idea that the years which fall within a certain era have some similar qualities, and are distinct from other periods. In a purely organisational sense, it gives us points of reference – for example, some historic records are organised by the year of a monarch’s reign, rather than the calendrical date. Americans might speak of “the Reagan years” or “the Clinton years” as a shorthand for the 1980s or 90s, and the assumed cultural aspects which are often associated with those times are often thought to have been reflected by those leaders.

Theatre is not exempt from similar concepts, but it is sometimes more complicated. For example, in my PhD thesis I had to argue that The Satire of the Three Estates, which dates from the mid sixteenth century – chronologically quite late to be considered ‘medieval’, should for the purpose be considered a medieval play. Part of my argument was that the people who were staging it in Edinburgh in 1948 considered it to be medieval, and they advertised it as such. This perception (probably due to it containing certain elements which were, and still are, often associated with medieval plays) influenced their decisions about staging, publicity, and probably audience reception.

Which brings me to Ben Jonson. In scholarly circles he would be comfortably considered an ‘early modern’ playwright, which is a nicely wide label. More generally, however, we tend to think of Jonson in two different ways. One is as a Jacobean writer. The other is as a contemporary of Shakespeare – who is generally associated with the Elizabethan period. Which appears to directly contradict that part about Jonson being a Jacobean playwright.

Apart from the monarchs who give their individual names to these eras, a lot of people naturally straddle two (or more) eras if one understands them in terms of who was sitting on the throne of England. Queen Elizabeth died in 1603 – Shakespeare (born in 1564) outlived her by thirteen years; Jonson (born in 1572), by thirty-four. Both men were Elizabethan as well as Jacobean in their timeframe, and in their lived experience. After all, while that change in monarchy was in many ways a significant shift, the world simply did not alter completely overnight; it, and the culture around it, evolutionary processes took place over time.

Over the course of their lives, both men would have seen their world change, and the practices of theatre as well. And yet we (inevitably, but understandably) have popular ideas associated with these eras that colour our thinking about anything connected to them. Elizabeth’s long reign has the patina of success, of ‘Gloriana’, and the forward movements that we tend to call “The Renaissance”. “Jacobean England” seems less familiar (it hasn’t enjoyed the same profusion of exposure through films and novels, for example), harder to define, probably because King James himself was a very different personality, and ruler, than his predecessor. Offhand, Elizabeth’s life might be thought of as the era of the playhouse, where buildings were springing up devoted to performance, and a space where they could be enjoyed by all classes of people. Plays were becoming something you could read and own a copy of, rather than something you could only see once and that was it. By the time James VI/I appeared on the throne, neither the playhouses or the style of plays that had been written for them were quite such a new phenomenon; at court, the masque was the thing. Jonson wrote both plays and a great many masques, so perhaps this is part of why he seems to be more “Jacobean” than Shakespeare, who did not.

In terms of how we view them in the present day, I think how and of when we consider these men and their work to exist colours how we feel about their plays, and perhaps how they are approached. It’s possible that Shakespeare’s association with the Elizabethan era, the apogee of England’s experience of the Renaissance, is one of the reasons he has come down to us as our greatest playwright of all time. Jonson, more connected to James’s era, is associated with a time when the theatre was being questioned, when the Puritans were gaining ascendance, a timeless theatrically celebratory, and perhaps that has helped to keep him somewhat more shadowed: we may appreciate his plays less today because the people of the era could be considered to have appreciated them less. (This is not to suggest that this is the only reason, just a possible one of many.) Shakespeare’s “earlier” era gets the credit for innovation; Jonson’s, merely the carrying on thereof.

The question of eras and periodisation is all, ultimately, so much perception. One of the best descriptions of this I’ve ever found was about the fact that Persia and Iran are the same piece of rock: geographically identical, yet the cultural baggage and perception we often have of each is radically different. Where these early modern dramatists differ, I am inclined to think that, while we may want to assign different eras to them to try to make sense of the ways that Shakespeare and Jonson are different, it has less to do with their time periods, which were after all shared for many years. It was not their times which were so distinct and separate, it was their personalities and individual experiences which made them the playwrights that they were, and gave their voices such distinction.