4
April

Haggis Hunting: 50 Years of New Playwrighting – day 1

Tomorrow our reconstruction of the 1540 Interlude will get it’s first airing at Edinburgh University’s Haggis Hunting: 50 Years of New Playwrighting conference taking place at the Traverse theatre:

http://www.traverse.co.uk/whats-on-buy-tickets/haggis-hunting-50-years-of-new-playwriting-in-scotland

Rehearsals started today with a stellar cast of Scottish actors including Tam Dean Burn, Gerry Mulgrew and Alison Peebles.  Our version is composed of a dramatic arrangement of  the historic documents concerning this lost play, excerpts from the 1552/4 play that relate to the description found in William Eure’s letter to Cromwell, as well as new writing which contextualises the various historic figures and events behind the performance.  Eure, for instance, explains that he is “Governor of Berwick, but I was Deputy Warden of the East March until James V replaced me with a Scot.”  I’m particularly pleased that some compelling historical detail uncovered by Greg Walker has made it into the play when Solace explains to the audience:

Interestingly there was a time, when James was a child, when these three men shared a bedroom.  The boy king, James V, and his tutors, his guardians, Lindsay and Dunbar, sleeping together peacefully, and now they’re governing Scotland.

Dunbar is the Archbishop of Glasgow berated by James V following the performance of 1540.  It’s one of those strange moments which reveals just how small the Scottish political centre was.

I will be playing the Scribe in the reading – the documenter of the political process; a role with affiliations to the documenting I’m undertaking during the project.  In fact, at this very moment, the actors are tackling the script for the second time today…

Come along to the reading if you can! Tickets are £6 or £4 and can be obtained by following the link above or calling the box office on 0131 228 1404.

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3
April

Where does Diligence speak from?

Középkori színház

Building on our discussions about locus and platea staging (see blog post dated 18th March below), the next question the team considered was where Diligence speaks from.  Is he a platea character – on the threshold of performance and situated in the liminal space between spectator and actor – or is he a locus character and ensconced in the action?  Diligence is a character who performs important functions in the play such as proclaiming the parliament, keeping the parliamentary space clear of undesirables such as the Pauper, and bringing in others such as John the Commonweal.  Here’s what the team thought of his spatial relationship with audience and actors in performance, a subject on which they were largely in agreement:

Where does Diligence Speak From?

Greg Walker – Isn’t he pretty mobile – a creature of the acting space as a whole? When he speaks for the king or the estates, I guess he is in parliament, but when he speaks to the audience as the voice of the play, he can be anywhere, locus or platea. When he reads the acts he comes from parliament to the platea, as he is ‘crying’ the acts to the nation at large.

Tom Betteridge – at the opening of part 2 Diligence tells the audience, ‘Famous peopill, tak tent and ye sall se’ – here he speaks as a master of ceremonies / chorus figure – his response to the Pauper, however, suggests he also has a role of policing the performance space. I think that he is a figure for Lyndsay in the play but it is also important that he lacks the power / authority of Divine Correction or the insight of John the Commonwealth ( or indeed in a different way Pauper ) – Diligence at one level is an Everyman figure since his engagement with what is happening on stage does not got ahead of the action – i.e. he seems a part of the process of reform / critique not something sitting above or in judgement to the world of the play.

Ellie Rycroft – Diligence is a perfect example of a platea type character in his movement between the world of the play, and the play in the world, so it depends where we site the platea in a sense.  At the same time, the Lyon King sat at the feet of the King in parliament so, if we do envision him as a Lindsay figure (and the herald costume Hilary is proposing heads in this direction – although the image we have is of a much lower status than Lindsay/Lyon King), we need to show where his allegiances are even if he does not sit in judgement on what occurs during the play.  I think it is interesting that one of the Lyon King’s functions, after the members has ‘ridden’ or processed into parliament, was to ‘fence’ the parliament off, so that he sets the boundary of the space, policing it, as Tom said.

John McGavin – All the above seem right to me: mobility; multiple, shifting functions, and a ‘functionary’ in both social and theatrical terms. In my view, Diligence is the means by which you can define the separateness of court-parliament and people wherever they are located (question 1); it’s his movement across the total playing space which marks the divisions between the different loci.

Sarah Carpenter – yes.  Though in fact in the text Diligence doesn’t do the fencing himself but calls on the ‘Dampster’ to do it (2396).  The script doesn’t give the Dampster any words to do it, though.  It just says ‘Thay ar set doun’.  I feel, like Ellie, that Diligence is a character who more than any other can move between loci and platea, and can establish which is which simply by his demeanour.  After all, these spaces are themselves fluid?

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21
March

Was the 1540 Interlude authored by David Lindsay?

Before further posts detailing our discussions about the staging of the outdoor version of the Satire in June, here is another essay from Greg Walker about the feasibility of the Interlude that was performed before James V on Epiphany in 1540 being an earlier version of the Lindsay’s play and authored by him.

The relationship between the ‘lost’ interlude played in Linlithgow in 1540 (which is accessible only through the ‘notes’ and description sent to Thomas Cromwell by the English agent William Eure), and the full version of The Thrie Estaitis (which I will refer to here as the Satire), for which we have two surviving texts, has always been a matter for debate among scholars. Lyndsay’s first editor of the modern era, Douglas Hamer, argued in the 1930s that the 1540 Interlude was an earlier version of the Satire (Hamer, Works, II, pp. 1-6), but critics have not always agreed. Angus Calder thought the Interlude ‘had one or two features in common with the Satire’ (‘Introduction’ to Spence, p. vii), John MacQueen that the 1540 interlude ‘was only generally similar to the…[text] which has survived’ (p.135). Perhaps most powerfully, R.J. Lyall, while acknowledging that ‘the affinities between the interlude and The Thrie Estaitis are striking enough for the former to be widely accepted as the original version of the latter’, was nonetheless troubled by the ‘many differences’ he also saw between the two, and so on balance concluded with cautious pessimism about our ability to connect them.

William Eure’s letter and the ‘nootes of the interluyde’ mentioned by Greg can be found in the Documents section of the website incidentally –

The Description of the 1540 Interlude
The Description of the 1540 Interlude

William Eure's 1540 letter to Thomas Cromwell and the 'nootes of the interluyde'

 

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18
March

Can parliament happen on the platea?

I thought it might be interesting to share some of the discussions the team have been having about the set and use of space in the forthcoming performances, as these  are informing how we design the outdoor productions.

This first question concerns what sort of dramatic action can or cannot happen on the platea.  The platea is an area of the stage in the medieval period, whose theatre often used locus and platea staing.  The locus was an area which very much concerned the world of the play, a tree on the stage, for instance, by which characters would stand to show they were in the forest, or the sign of an inn, to demonstrate that characters were in a pub – these are all examples of loci.  The platea, by contrast, is a threshold space which is neither fully immersed in the world of the play, nor outside of it and in the audience – it is somewhere from which characters may talk to the audience, but may also withdraw back into the play itself.

How and where we site the platea is especially important for A Satire of the Three Estates because of the sorts of questions we want to explore about political space and its accessibility/inaccessbility to the public or commonwealth.  There are definitely transgressions of space in the play. The Pauper, for instance, is told be Diligence on his entry (1938-1941):

Where have we gotten this goodly companion?                                 

Swyth out of the field, false raggit loon!                                     

God wait if here be ane weel kept place,                            

 When sic ane vile beggar carl may get entries.

Here the Pauper is being told that he cannot even be among the audience in the field in which they stand  But not only does he transgress Diligence’s command by getting up on the stage, in an intensely radical moment he even jumps up onto the King’s throne – an area that we may imagine is one of the play’s loci.

Moments such as this, and when John the Commonwealth jumps the ‘stank’ to enter the parliament, foreground the importance of who is and who isn’t allowed to inhabit the various parts of the stage in this play.  A key question for the team has been whether the parliament staged in Part Two of the play should be conceived of as a loci or as part of the permeable space of the platea.  Please see below for the research team’s debate about this and feel free to contribute your thoughts:

Can parliament happen on the platea?

Greg Walker – It could, perhaps. But the point of the play is surely that Parliament doesn’t really represent the people (and audience) until John and Pauper get in and John joins the estates with his gay garmoun at the end. If it was all happening in the platypus, then the visualisation of the idea that the audience is part of the excluded ‘people’, and parliament is happening somewhere else doing its business might get lost. We surely want to avoid the modern sense of parliament as a representative body of the people. The 16th century parliament is a gathering called by the prince to advise him. He chooses who comes, when and if it gathers, and when it is dismissed.

Tom Betteridge – when the three estates enter they come from the pavilion [Heir sall the Thrie Estaitis cum fra the palyeoun, gangand backwart, led be thair Vyces ] this suggests a sense in which entering Parliament is equivalent to entering the space of the play – I am assuming that ‘the palyeoun’ in this stage direction is the place from which the actors enter. In these terms I think Parliament could take place in the platea – it should not be in the field since that is where the people are but equally it should not be in the court since it has to be a space whose boundaries are up for debate or at least can be suspended / staged.

Greg Walker’s response – I suppose it is possible for the Parliament to take place in the platea, but it would have to be clear that this isn’t the same space where the tailor and sowter and their wives, and all the other representatives of the people do their thing. We’d have to have a separate acting space for them distinct from the parliament space.
Parliament is summoned by the king (or regent) to them, wherever they happen or want to be, so it would be more likely to happen in or around a palace or seat of government. We’d be making quite a statement about the accessibility and willingness to listen of the king at the end of part one if he came into the platea and summoned the estates to him there. Which might clash a bit with the notion that then Pauper and John have trouble getting in. But it could be done, I suppose…

Ellie Rycroft – As Greg has said, the Scottish parliament happens wherever the King is, whether this is a palace or the Tolbooth in Edinburgh.  The Tolbooth was the most common venue so parliaments were not usually at the court. The platea in theatre history is the permeable space in which characters can address the audience but still be part of the play, so it is not somewhere where I think we would find the Estates or Rex as they don’t do that sort of thing, but I agree with Tom that the permeable space has shifted to some degree into the ‘field’.  Might it be useful to think about the stage we propose to have in front of the semi-circular area of loci not as the platea at all but an extension of the locus, and imagine that there is a continuum from the definite audience interaction of the field, through the spaces we have set up towards the King? Or does this fudge the matter?

John McGavin – I think that the separation of the parliament from the people is important for the reasons Greg and Ellie suggest, but the connection with the people can be achieved on the awful parodic ‘riding’ to Parliament, and then the parliament is held in a location theatrically between the ‘court’ and the space into which people might go. John the Commonwealth has to cross that area so I agree with Greg’s final comment on divisions of theatrical space. I do also agree with Ellie and Tom that the meaning of space changes in relation to the nature of the action: it is John the Commonwealth’s having to cross a space that defines the separation of the parliament from the people.

Sarah Carpenter – is the ‘fencing’ of the parliament crucial here?  It’s a formal part of establishing the parliament (according to late records generally done by the Lyon King), and it seems to establish the parliament as a parliament wherever it is sitting.  (Learney’s article on parliamentary ceremonial quotes that the person fencing:  ‘biddis and defendis that ony man dystrobill this court wranguisly’ (134) see SHR 21, 61.  And SHS Sheriff Bk of Fife, 406)  That suggests that the parliament could sit anywhere, but that once it’s sat that place is formally established as a locus by the fencing?

The picture I find useful is this one – even though it’s not Scottish, and is a council rather than a parliament.  It does offer that sense of being visible to, but closed off from the ‘people’, which seems quite important:

fenced council

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7
March

Director, Gregory Thompson, on the revealing process of rehearsing A Satire of the Three Estates


Gregory Thompson, director of the productions this June, talks about his experience of working on the text for the first time and his realisation of the truly political nature of the play, saying that he recognised that this was as much a ”party political broadcast” as an entertainment.

The challenges of the play, according to Gregory, are its historic distance from us as well as the changing nature of theatre over time – now we see plays almost entirely as entertainment.  The other major difference is the play’s staging which is so remote from modern techniques.  Moreover, the shadow of Shakespeare looms large over sixteenth-century theatre in general, so zoning in on the peculiarly Scottish, as well as the pre-Shakespearean character of this play, will present a challenge.

Gregory also discusses the Interlude of 1540 – its separateness and its connectedness to the Satire.  Many of the entertaining digressions from the hard politics of the Satire are missing, giving the Interlude a sense of a being a “dramatized green paper”.  This could, of course, result from the fact that the only source we have for the Interlude, a letter from William Eure to Thomas Cromwell, necessarily emphasises the aspects of the drama that would have been interesting to the English King’s chief minister. Greg Walker has recently written about the differences between the two texts of the Satire and the Interlude and his paper will be uploaded to the website very soon.

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11
February

Gerry Mulgrew reads Folly’s sermon… and a diary of the rehearsal period

HolbeinFollyImage 1

For those of you interested in the sorts of discussions that occurred during the rehearsal period with Alison Peebles, Tam Dean Burn, Gerry Mulgrew and Gregory Thompson, today you’ll be able to find a diary in the documents section which reveals our preoccupations during that week in January.  Please do have a look and offer suggestions for any of the unanswered questions the readings provoked, the key ones being:

1. What are the differences between the 1540 and 1552/4 pieces, and between the Satire and other drama of the period?

2. What is the role of Diligence?

3. To modernise or not to modernise?

Rehearsal Diary

Here, also, is a video of Gerry Mulgrew reading out Folly’s sermon at the very end of the play.  As it says at the beginning of the rehearsal diary, this is where we started, because Gregory Thompson found it very strange that such an episode should happen after the seeming climax of the play – the enactment of the laws discussed by the parliament.  Yet Folly comes on and undermines this apparently ‘serious’ conclusion by delivering a speech which states ‘Stultorum numerus infinitus’ - the number of fools is infinite.  His monologue takes the form of a sermon joyeux, a mock-sermon delivered by someone who is not a preacher.  In it, he distributes a number of folly hats to society’s fools and his targets are merchants, old men who marry young girls, the clergy, and kings.  The section on kings moves his sermon from the general to the specific as he laments Scotland’s foreign policy and discusses current European conflicts.   He ends by invoking the souls of two contemporary court fools, Gilly‑mouband and ‘good Cacaphaty’, continuing to locate his words in the Scottish present.  The whole speech destabilises any tidy conclusion to the play by shifting responsibility back to the royal spectators and the audience themselves.

The image at the top of the page, incidentally,  is Holbein’s depiction of a fool’s sermon to an audience of fools from Erasmus’ In Praise of Folly.

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4
February

Gerry Mulgrew on A Satire of the Three Estates

Another treat from the recent script work undertaken with Scottish actors – this time an interview with legendary actor and theatre director, Gerry Mulgrew.  Having served as Artistic Director of touring theatre company Communicado for the last 30 years, if anyone can talk about the significance of the Satire for Scottish theatre history, it’s Gerry.

Of particular interest is his claim that the very local and seemingly historically specific concerns of the play in fact become “timeless and universal” because they concern the poor, social reform, and the corruption of the state – issues which still affect us today. He says that his prior belief that the play  was “stuffy” was challenged by the rehearsal process, and that the actors “have been rather impressed and surprised by how modern some of the ideas seem to be for the middle of the sixteenth century.  It is a great, passionate, humanist piece.”  Like Tam, Gerry picks up on the language of the play; both actors found Robert Burn’s poetry a useful gateway for undertanding it, although Gerry sees it as more of a challenge in terms of its orthography and rhythms.  But he also celebrates its uniqueness and its richness which he says produces a Scottish voice that is “glorious”.

Enjoy.

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28
January

Tam Dean Burn on A Satire of the Three Estates

We hit the ground running in 2013 with a series of production meetings at Stirling Castle followed by nine days of intensive script work with actors Alison Peebles, Gerry Mulgrew, Peter Kenny and Tam Dean Burn.  It was the first time we had really tackled the play in its full, rich, and complex entirety… more of which later.

In the meantime, here’s TV and film actor Tam Dean Burn talking stirringly about his experience of working on the text, with academics, and his thoughts on the Satire‘s themes and language.  (The above image is the view he mentions; the panorama of Arthur’s Seat and the Salisbury Crags from Greg Walker’s office window!)

 

 

 

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21
December

Who is John the Commonwealth?

highland

A central question the project will need to address in the New Year is the costuming and appearance of Satyre‘s characters.  Chief among these will be John the Commonwealth, and to do so, the team will first have to decide who, or even what, he is.  Information in the play is hardly indicative.  He bursts on to the stage much like the Pauper – “Out of my gate, for God’s sake let me ga!” (2422) – and yet does not suffer the abuse that Pauper does on the basis of his physical presentation, who is subjected to a litany of name-calling such as “False whoreson raggit carl” and told to leave “the field” (1946, 1939).  So is John not “raggit” then?  How does he demonstrate the necessary authority for Diligence to immediately smooth his path towards conference with the king (2434)?  A significant sartorial transformation occurs when his suggested reforms are passed by Parliament at the end of the play and he is absorbed into them – “Here shall they clothe John the Commonweal gorgeously, and set him down amang them in the Parliament” (3802 s.d.).  John now wears a “gay garmoon” but what did he wear before?

Jean E. Howard and Paul Strohm argue that John is the “indigenous voice of reform” in Ane Satyre and that both he and Pauper are “imagined from within, as internally self-regenerating forces”.  Does this direct us towards some sort of native tradition of Scotland – tartan, kilts. etc – or perhaps even a connection with nature?  John himself says that the commonwealth “want[s] clais” (2445).  As it’s embodiment, does John too? Perhaps he occupies a similar position to the wild man of prose romance on the border between society and the wilderness, his liminal energy informing his ability to tell truth to power.

As a representation of the ‘commonwealth’, Carol Edington has argued against situating John in terms of class, rank or occupation, writing:

As much psychological and political, the ideal of the commonweal conveyed very real feelings of organic unity, physical dynamism, and a very emotive patriotism,  Nowhere is this more vividly conveyed than in Lindsay’s dramatization of John the Commonweal.  It should perhaps be stressed at this point that the character of John, despite his often hungry and ragged appearance, was not a symbolic representation of “the poor” or even, more specifically, of the rural poor.  When Lindsay required such a figure he introduced the Pauper or the traditional “John Upland”.  John the Commonweal on the other hand represents the universal and public good of the entire community and not the interests of any single element.  He is the dramatic embodiment of a principle, not a party, an ideal and not an individual.                                                                                                              (p120, my itals)

It is certainly true that if John is clothed as a member of the Scottish citizenry then this will have a knock-on effect in terms of all of the represented social relationships in the play, something we should be very wary of.  But, for John to be “not an individual” is fine in theory, however theatre requires the practical expression of such interpretations.  If John embodies a principle then how can that principle in turn be embodied?  When the team gather at Stirling Castle early in 2013 to begin fixing aspects of the performance, such questions are sure to be hotly debated.

 

References:

Carol Edington, Court and Culture in Renaissance Scotland: Sir David Lindsay of the Mount, University of Massachusetts Press, 1994

Jean E. Howard and Paul Strohm, The Imaginary “Commons”, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 37.3, 2007

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30
November

The Scottish Style of Kingship

View Post

The last fortnight has been spent trying to get to grips with how Scottish kingship differs from the English style of monarchy in order to understand its representation in Ane Satyre.  This is not just for the production but to go towards a paper being delivered on the panel ‘Sexuality and Sovereignty in the Early Modern Drama’ at the Shakespeare Association of America conference next year.

Political differences between the England and Scotland came to the forefront after the Union of the Crowns in 1603, when James was roundly criticised for using Scottish methods in the English parliament and at court, as Jenny Wormald has incisively examined in her essay, ‘James VI and I: Two Kings or One?’.    She reinforces the notion that there was less constitutional sophistication in Scotland writing that, “this less developed government did less governing” (1983, p193).  In line with arguments made by Roger Mason she claims that when Scottish political philosophy did develop during the sixteenth century, it was due to “the appearance of professional lay lawyer-administrators, [a] product of over a century of growing lay literacy, [which] substantially widened interest in central government beyond the circle of literate clerics” (1983, p194).  Yet she denies that the lack of legalistic underpinning of theories of Scottish government prior to this led to it being ineffective.  To the contrary, in Scotland stuff gets done, and often more quickly than in England, just in a different way.

The way in which laws are passed and rapprochement between political parties is attained in Scotland can seem fairly radical, however the methods do not in fact detract from the “patriotic conservatism” that Mason contends was the predominant feature of late medieval Scotland’s political ethos (1987, p146).  Decisions were reached through debate and argument rather than precedent and law, meaning that parliamentary processes were active, lively and reciprocal.  Nevertheless Wormald says that such political events as the argument between James VI and I and Anthony Melville in 1596 are frequently misinterpreted as a sign of backwardness and impropriety: “The point of that debate, in which Andrew Meville seized the king’s sleeve, calling him ‘God’s silly vassal’, is entirely lost if it is seen to exemplify the lack of respect with which Scotsmen supposedly treated their kings” (1983, p197).  The Scottish system rather existed in stark contrast to the hierarchical and, since Henry VIII and the Reformation, increasingly absolutist monarchy of England.  While some of the addresses made to power in Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis may seem surprising to readers of early English drama therefore, they should in fact be interpreted in light of a Scottish political philosophy which did not view dissension, and even outright hostility, as unpatriotic.

References:

Roger Mason, ‘Kingship, Tyrannt and the Right to Resist in Fifteenth Century Scotland’, The Scottish Historical Review 66, No. 182, Part 2 (1987) pp.121-151

Jenny Wormald, ‘James VI and I: Two Kings or One’, History 68 (1983) pp.187-209

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