A Few Ground (not really) Rules

The moment you start rehearsing a production (or in our case record one) from any distant epoch, you have to start making decisions.  How slavishly do you stick to the text?  And, for that matter, which text?
Where the texts are as old as ours the questions mount up.

1. How closely do you stick to older word forms?
I like old words.  I like old words that are almost exactly the same as their modern equivalent but are a bit not, as it were.  However, I appreciate I'm in a minority here - some people would find slavish following of basically modern words said funny quite annoying.  So, there will be a balancing act between keeping the sense of the power of the original words, their rhythms, their purely sonic power, and clarity and understanding.  We may get it wrong.  Where there are rhymes we will tend to stick to the original...

2. Do you use original spelling to guide pronunciation?
Covers similar ground to above and also overlaps with accent below.  Broadly speaking, yes, though we're not here to create recordings of funny voices speaking funny words - we've got to balance the interests of drama and history.

3. Do you update/change names from history?
I've just been recording/editing Act Seven of John Bale's God's Promises, in which John the Baptist lists many characters from the Bible, sometimes with variant spelling to the modern.  On the one hand there was something nice about the sound of some changes, others were just unclear.  Where it was still clear who he was talking about we left it as writ, where the name was substantially different we allowed a change.

4. What about lines in Latin?
Do you leave them in / leave them and add a translation as repetition in the next line / translate?  We can assume that many in the original audiences, as today, would not understand Latin, so should what is clearly an artistic decision be ignored for ease of understanding?  In the case of God's Promises I erred on the side of clarity.  John the Baptist had a line 'as I am child' which sounded so much better in English - beautiful - that to not use it felt wrong.  A later line by God I've removed as it was repeated in English anyway and it sounded wrong - but I may put it back in at a later date.  Which brings us to...

5. Do we cut?
Any director likes the option of cutting, but part of the point of this project is to create a resource which has relatively 'clean' recordings of all the words.  It isn't difficult to find a recording or production of a Mystery play - it is difficult to find one that hasn't been substantially altered by an author or director.  (This isn't a judgement - for example, I love the version of The Mysteries Tony Harrison created in the late seventies/early eighties - but it is substantially his version.)  So, occasional minor cuts may happen, but they will be occasional and will be mentioned in any accompanying blog.

6. What about accent?
This shouldn't be tricky for me, as, though not a native or a speaker of the accent, I'm based in Suffolk and East Anglia was a centre for a lot of medieval and Tudor drama - in part compounded by the fact that a couple of collections survived in East Anglia and so survived East Anglian texts.  John Bale, who I'm looking at at the moment, was based in Suffolk and there are clues to accent in versions of the text.  However, I doubt we're going to have the time, resources or skill-set to comprehensively look at detailed work on accent at this time, so unless the text is incredibly forceful in its accent (the York Cycle for example) we will use an accent/s - but any text where the accent isn't overly defined, we're going to suck it and see.

7.  Music.
I'd love to use music throughout these recordings, especially where it is referenced in the text.  Two difficulties arise. One. we don't always know what the music was, or precisely how it was orchestrated when we do.  Two: at this stage I'm not in a position to commission or pay for music, so where music is indicated it will be referred to in any narration and maybe at a later date we will reedit with a music cue.  At the moment I'm focusing on the words.

All these are thoughts and artistic decisions that occur as the work begins.  Other questions will arise, other ways of dealing with them will occur, rapid u-turns may happen.  There is no reason why any of these recordings will stand on their own, or unaltered.  If something hasn't worked, we can go back and do it again.  Why not have several different versions of the same text, done differently?  And you out there could do your own.  I'll post a link, even host it for you if you don't have the facility.