21
May

Rehearsal blog – day 10 (17.5.2013)

Firstly we looked at the end of Part One 1785-193, and noted the proximity of the divine and the earthy in the words of Diligence – particularly towards the end of the section, where the official nature of his herald role is subverted when he commands the women in the audience to use the toilet during the break.

Much of this section is in the prosodic form we identified yesterday in the dialogue between Suiter/Suiter’s wife/Pardoner which we have started to call ‘Lyndsay ballad’ – consisting of alternating lines of iambic tetrameter with 1 line of iambic trimeter in a six-line stanza of aabccb rhyme scheme.  It’s interesting because this means that it is not therefore denotative of class (being spoken by Rex and Divine Correction in this scene) but must serve some other dramaturgical or dramatic function.  When the dialogue shifts into iambic pentameter, as Good Counsel’s does in this scene – it has the effect, as the actor Gerda Stevenson said, of an operatic “aria” – it heightens the dramatic stakes.

After lunch, we rehearsed the entrance of the Pauper and the sections between him and the Pardoner in the Interval play, which presented a number of challenges in terms of both the verse-speaking and the staging.  The day ended with a music call for the female Vices, during which Fund-Jonet was directed to “collect” men in the audience through her song.

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20
May

Rehearsal blog – day 9 (16.5.2013)

Lots of important discoveries today so a rather long blog…The_reformed_court

Today we worked on the first entrance of Divine Correction. What was interesting was the extent to which Tam Dean Burn’s entry created a whole new atmosphere within the world of the play. Good Counsel, Gerda Stevenson, Chastity, Cara Kelly, and Verity, Alison Peebles, had all tried to reform Rex Humanitus and had failed. Suddenly Divine Correction changed the dynamic. We spent a considerable amount of time on Divine Correction’s provocative question – What is a King? And his equally radical answer – Nought but an officer. Discussing this line in the context of a performance brought home to me quite how potentially dangerous and subversive the question is since what Lyndsay was doing here is asking a heterogeneous audience of people in Cupar and Edinburgh to reflect on the nature of kingship

It was interesting discussing with the actors and directors the nature of Lyndsay’s politics. It was a reminder at how impoverished, in some ways, modern political discourse is since during the discussion one was constantly tempted to separate moral, economic and social issues. Of course in Lyndsay’s world such a separation would have been meaningless, indeed it would have represented the worst behaviour of, as Lyndsay saw it, the clergy. Ane Satyre is concerned with the idea of a commonweal founded on equity where everyone lives within their bounds. In these terms it embodies a very similar approach to politics as that articulated in the C Text of Piers Ploughman. At one level this is a conservative model of politics since it looks back to a mythical golden age where the classes or estates each knew and respected the boundaries of appropriate behaviour. But it could also form the basis of a radical critique of society and in particular those in power. After all Divine Correction’s agenda is a restorative one but is it articulated through radical language and there is a constant sense that those who transgress against the social bond, disregard-less of status or position will be punished.

In the afternoon, we looked at the rooting out of Sensualitie from the realm of Scotland and it was really striking to see female figures of virtuous rule on-stage alongside Divine Correction.

There was a discussion of the unusual word ‘consociable’ – the term used to describe the relationship that the King is now to have with Verity, Chastity and Good Counsel – and its emphasis on ‘society’ as a result of having allegories embodied on the stage, figuring the relationship between king and virtue as interpersonal.   The same is true of the moment when Sensualitie gets absorbed into the Church, in our staging through being pulled onto Spirituality’s knee and pawed by the Abbot.

But the really interesting part was seeing the staging of Rex’s acceptance of Divine Correction’s Counsel and the departing of Sensualitie form the court.  As it is being performed, Rex listens to Divine Correction only as a secondary effect of Sensualitie leaving him, rather than from making a positive choice to do so.  The moment really strengthens the version of Rex we are building as a weak and easily-led King.  As the actor James Mackenzie said to me, he only listens to Correction because he realises he is “alone and Divine Correction is the only person who seems to be offering him any counsel” rather than through his recognition of God’s emissary’s authority.

The final call was with the Pardoner to look at the section where he divorces the Suiter from his wife during the ‘Interlude’ (what we call the ‘Interval play’).  The strong rhythm of this section was quickly identified, and the fact that all of the dialogue is divided into six-line stanzas, largely lines of iambic tetrameter followed by a line of iambic trimeter.  There are clear moments of flying in the piece, and the verse lets it build up to the arse-kissing divorce ritual.  It took quite some time to find the right rhythm and pacing of this section of verse and Greg Thompson noted the paradox of some of the most common characters in the whole play having some of the most technical prosody.

We also had the amazing realization today that we will be opening the play on the same day as the play was performed in 1552 – June 7th!!  It must be serendipity.

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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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30
November

The Scottish Style of Kingship

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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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14
November

Drama and Reforming Ideals in the 1530s

Whether David Lindsay can accurately be described as a Reformer or not seems to be a matter of some contention for critics and historians.  For Joanne Kantrowitz, Lindsay is a Reformer, while Carol Edington errs on the side of caution when assessing his position, noting Lindsay’s connection to Reformers at the court but falling short of numbering him among them.  For Edington, Lindsay is a reformer with a small ‘r’, outraged by clerical abuses and yet steering clear of doctrinal matters in his literary works.

What has struck me as interesting in my reading today is how Lindsay manages to criticise the Catholic clergy in 1540 in a way which enabled James V to exhort the Bishop of Glasgow to “reform their factions and manners of living”, when other playwrights of the 1530s were punished for the same thing.  In his section on ‘Performances and Plays’ in The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature, Volume One (2007), Bill Findlay relays  that:

In 1535, John Kyllour, a Dominican friar, wrote a Historye of Christis Passioun, performed in the Castlehill playfield, Stirling, before James V, his court, and the townspeople.  Kyllour employed the format of the passion play to criticise bishops and priests; for this, after a period as a hunted man, he was burned at the stake in 1539.  James Wedderburn of Dundee wrote, and had performed there about 1540, plays which satirised the Roman Catholic clergy: a ‘tragedie’, Beheading of Johne the Baptist, and a ‘comedie’, Historie of Dyonisius the Tyranne.  For these, he had to flee into exile in France. (p255-6)

How is it that Lindsay is not only able to attack the clergy, but has his play used as springboard for James to do the same, while contemporary dramatists suffer exile and execution for doing so?  Sadly, because neither Kyllour or Wedderburn’s texts survive, we will never be able to assess the qualitative differences between the forms and extent of reformation they advocate and how these differ from those that might have been suggested by Lindsay, if, indeed, Lindsay’s critique in the non-extent Interlude of 1540 bore any relation to that found in the Satyre of the 1550s.  It does seem astonishing that Lindsay’s attack on prelates and the “naughtiness in Religion” should have been sustained and vehement enough to justify James V’s response, while Kyllour and Wedderburn suffered such a fearful fate for their reforming ideals.

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