Like Billy Riddoch, Jimmy makes suggestive links between the pantomime tradition and his approach to performing the role of the Vice, calling Flatterie, Falset and Dissait, “little panto creatures, they’re pixies”.  His assessment of the moral scale of the play is also interesting.  He says that while the Vices are impish, it is Divine Correction who is truly frightening.   My apologies for the terrible camera work at the start of the interview!

Today we had the first full fitting of the costumes, allowing us for the first time to see the magnificent work of Hilary Lewis and her team. The courtly costumes are sumptuous, and the vices, with their scaly legs and huge tufted ears both comic and slightly sinister in their animalism. Correction’s wings were again a highlight, as was the Abbott’s strikingly oversized mitre. Special work was spent in the morning on the tricky scenes in which the clergy were disrobed, which need to be swift and comic.

The seating in parliament for part two was rearranged to have the three estates alone sitting alongside Rex and Correction, with the other clergy placed behind Spirituality and the Courtiers and Good Counsel behind the secular estates. This made the power politics of the session more starkly evident, giving graphic evidence for Temporality’s defiant claim to Spirituality that ‘ye are but ane estate and we are twa’.

We also worked on the final lines, and the singing that will accompany Folly’s sermon and provide the play with a resounding climax and the cast with a curtain call.

Lots more work on the Vices today. In the afternoon the company looked at the part of the play where the Spirituality enter and Verity is hurled into the stocks 1077-1178.  The implication in the text is that the Spirituality are on-stage throughout the first a thousand lines because the stage direction before their first speech reads ‘Here they [the Vices] come to the Spirituality’ (1096 sd).  However, in our version the audience will see the men of the kirk for the first time as they enter on this stage direction, and are met by the Vices on what we call the punishment stage (the quarter to 12 stage of the round).   This is certainly a scene where the in-the-round staging comes to the fore as Verity will make a journey almost the entire way around the encircling walkway from the time of her entry to her imprisonment.

The need to combine action and words in order to keep a long show moving along at pace is becoming obvious.  However a moment will be taken to create a tableau during Verity’s speech in the stocks of the Spirituality gives the Vices their reward for putting her there, which really helps to focus the juxtaposition between her words and the churches’ deeds.  Greg Thompson also set up a convention whereby every time someone says a prayer or is sincere about religion, the Spirituality “get a slight migraine”.

We then looked at the Vices’ exit 1516-1579.  The fact this starts on the punishment stage but that the Vices move away from it nicely materializes their avoidance of retribution in the first half of the play.

If you’re coming to the production look out for Deceit’s stabbing out of  Falset’s eye –it’s going to be quite a moment!

Greg T gave the actors an introduction about the sort of research project they will be working on – saying that the type of knowledge yielded through rehearsal and performance is a different but as important form of knowledge as that gained by scholars through literary research. Tom Betteridge added that it’s just as valid, and should be valued as much as archival and traditional scholarship.

Greg T told the actors “We have one job.  We have to make the text sing”, saying that every single word is as important as the next in the creation of David Lindsay’s story. He told the cast that they will be at a technical disadvantage as they will lack lighting and sound, but said that they will have music and what he called, the ‘human spotlight’, the rule by which an actor only looks at the person to whom they’re speaking to help focus the audience’s attention.

Greg Walker and and Tom explained the importance of performing this play in its entirety from a historical and cultural perspective, and Greg T suggested the research significance of asking the question, ‘what is this play’ and seeing it as a much more sophisticated piece of work than recent productions might suggest when compared to other sixteenth-century drama. But he also claimed that our purpose is to ‘delight and intrigue the audience, and give them a sense of what it might have been like to see this play in the sixteenth century’.

The actress Gerda Stevenson, playing Good Counsel, brought up a recent Sunday Herald article on the commonweal which she had found of interest, and Tom responded that the very concept of the commonweal is a difficult one, meaning common-wealth but also -weal, with the health connotation that this entails. Therefore it is not just geographical or ideological but also about a sense of collectivity, raising questions about authority and its distribution.

We moved on to a read-through, managing to cover Part One (split into a more manageable 2 parts) and what we call the ‘interval play’ (otherwise known as the ‘Interlude’ in morning, and part 2 in the afternoon (split into 3 parts). Despite the text unsurprisingly representing something of a struggle at points in terms of some of its obscure meaning and construction, it was exciting to see life breathed into it by the actors. Part One was especially lively and the comic potential of the Vice triad became obvious.  However, it was also evident that this is a difficult and occasionally clunky script which will need a good amount of actorly resource and skill to make it work as a piece of drama.  Greg W said that the ‘scale of the task ahead’ was shown by the reading, while Tom thought it was primarily the end that presented a the most difficulty theatrically.  Tomorrow we will start closer textual analysis on the play to start making sure every actor knows exactly what they are saying.

Due to practicalities of performance the set has now been modified and, as it stands, the audience will still be enclosed within a ’round’ but the majority of the action will occur end-on. Here’s a sneak preview for you:

While the classical ‘in-the-round’ configuration with a central stage has been altered therefore, the form largely remains, and this raises issues of where the characters both enter and exit from. Do they come from behind the end-on stage – appearing before the audience – or are we still able to use the ‘field’ as an route to the stage – so that characters come through them? Below is the research team’s response to the director’s question: ‘Do the characters make their first entrance from the ‘field’. And Rex specifically – where does he enter from at the beginning of Part 1?’

Greg Walker – I think it matters where people come on from, as it indicates who and what level of society they are from. Those who come seemingly from out of the crowd, like John or Pauper, or the sowtar and tailor and their wives are reps of the people. Others clearly come TO the crowd and platea from outside – from outwith Scotland, whether villains like the Pardoner, or Flattery, or virtuous figures like Good Counsel, Verity, Correction, etc. Shouldn’t Rex emerge from out of his seat (as it were). He’s not from us – we don’t elect him or have a choice of who gets to be king. It’s decided for us by the powers that be.

Tom Betteridge – I think if characters come from outside Scotland they need to come through the field / audience – the only two places that people can enter are effectively from the field or from the court. As Diligence says when Pauper enters, ‘Quhair have wee gottin this gudly companyeoun? Swyith out of the field, – Pauper is a companion who has entered the world of the play from the field – but note that field is not a non-performing area – rather it is one that can be part of the ‘stage’ and at the same time it is the stage’s border or enabling frame. The characters who should not come from the field are, as Greg suggests, Rex but also the other courtly characters – I don’t think Diligence should come from the field since, I would suggest, part of his weakness is that he lacks the authority implicitly given to those characters who can come from the field but transgress its limitations – i.e. Divine Correction and John the Commonwealth.

Ellie Rycroft – I agree with the above, especially that Rex shouldn’t come through the field, but I think the fact that members ‘ride’ into parliament complicates things to an extent. I think there’s something compelling about the display of the parliament during the riding – it’s as if they are saying ‘you can see us, we’re off to do something important, but you’re not allowed to see what’, fully materialised when the Lyon King fences the space off. See images of parliamentary processions below.

John McGavin – I agree with the above. Some characters definitely do not come in through the audience. I do not see Diligence as coming through the audience: he can talk to them up close but he is a higher man’s functionary. Others definitely do. Some actions, however, are intended to be spectacular; they are public theatricality within theatre, and they constitute one of those elements of 16th century drama where the drama self-reflexively stages its own essential foundations – like the thematic use of disguise and impersonation or the moral staging of emblematic tableaux (such as the king and ladies lolling about in the first part described by Verity). This is an instance where the drama gives special force to the notion of watching: spectating becomes ‘witnessing’ in the sense of bearing witness. Although Ellie’s image do not depict the crowd, we as lookers at the image are part of that crowd. Wherever the thrie estaitis come from (the palyeon) on their way to the parliament, their proximity to the people en passant is vital – they are coming backward ‘throw this toun’. James was later to ‘stage’ the nobles in a banquet at the Cross precisely so that the people could act as witnesses to it and so put the nobles under the pressure of public scrutiny and public memory. I would be inclined to start Part Two with Diligence announcing the thrie estaitis and getting the spectators to rise and take their hats off. The surprising entry from the pavilion of the backward estates would then be a shocking blow to the spectators who had been prepared to honour this event.

Sarah Carpenter – I suppose I’d assumed that ‘courtly’ characters – king, three estates etc – come from the ‘pal3eoun’ when they need to ‘enter’. That’s formally stated for the three estates at the beginning of act 2, but I can’t see where else the king would exit to (or therefore enter from). There are some characters who specifically seem to need to come from the audience, people like John the Commonwealth, the tradespeople, some of the vices. And they often are said to come ‘through the water’, which might suggest from the audience side of the platea? Although in fact some of them are said at times to ‘pas to the palyeoun’, like the Taylor’s wife at 1395. It seems important to be able to signify characters who come from ‘abroad’ as different from either of these groups. But they often establish this themselves through their entrance speeches, wherever they arrive from physically.

Jamie Reid-Baxter, the early theatre and Scottish literature expert, discusses his previous experience of working on productions of A Satire of the Three Estates, focusing on his part of Folly, a character who was cut out of the famous Edinburgh University productions. Jamie says that that this was wholly wrong, as he serves as the “mirror image of Diligence in the play” suggesting that “both Diligence and Folly are David Lindsay’s alter egos”.

Jamie speaks about his excitement at a full, unedited version being performed in June, particularly the political urgency of the piece that will be revealed as a result.  He also discusses the “fundamental” place Lindsay holds in the Scottish canon, in that his work looks both backwards and forwards.  As a former translator at the European Parliament, Jamie helpfully discusses the dramatic appeal of the Middle Scots tongue, talking about the “roughness of Scots, the Germanic side of Scots, what you call in France the terrien, the clods of earth, the earthiness of it… but also the grandeur of those harsher consonants and pure vowel sounds”.  Reid-Baxter finishes by putting Lindsay in the literary tradition of William Dunbar, Gavin Douglas, Alexander Scott and Alexander Montgomerie, saying his work can “shed light right across the canon”, but is also innovative, discussing how Lindsay extends the Scottish tradition of flyting in this play.

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?

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

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

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:

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.