Just what is The Pride of Life?
What is the text even? We don't have the original manuscript, which is conjectured to be a rushed copy of an original play. It was copied by two men, one by sight, one by dictation. It is written on the back of something else. It sits, unremarked and unstaged, for hundreds of years, is copied and then is lost in fire. We have this copy of a copy.It was copied in Ireland, but was it a script from a touring company? A script from England or Ireland? A few English place names in the text suggest England, but it isn't absolute. The copying of the text may have altered the original, disguising any linguistic clues as to provenance.
It's old, it's about as old as drama gets in English (1350ish) and, even in its damaged state it is still performable. The story is simple. The King of Life boasts his mastery over all things. His soldiers, Strength and Health agree with him, his Queen does not, and warns him that death will take him. He rejects her and calls on his messenger Mirth (or Solace) to cheer him up, which Mirth does and is rewarded for his pains. The King then leaves with his knights and the Queen sends Mirth to the Bishop, hoping that the Bishop will change the King's mind. The Bishop laments the loss of faith in the kingdom and goes to the King, exorting him to turn to God and prepare for death. The King rejects him as well, and sends Mirth out to with a challenge to anyone who might try to best him - even Death himself - that he is King over all. There the text ends, but we know from the prologue that the King is then visited by Death who kills him.
The dramaturgy is deceptively simple. Characters enter, state who they are, state where they stand in the play and then, by and large, shut up. There are two set piece dialogues - exchanges between the King and Queen and the King and Bishop. The Bishop also gets a long set piece monologue. There the text ends and though we know broadly how the play ends, we don't know how the action would have been treated. The play could be viewed as a fairly simple demonstration of an argument.
Prologue - this is what will happen.
Main Body of Play - it happens.
Probable Epilogue - it happened.
It is unlikely that the play developed themes beyond the main - that man will die and should prepare for death/Death. The play was written not long after the Black Death had swept across Europe and reached England - preparing for death was a very pressing matter. The play doesn't engage in debate. The Queen warns the King he will die, his rebuttal is all bluster. He has no counter argument. Rather than engage with the issue he insults her, saying she wants him dead so she can marry another. The King leaves her to engage in more play and distraction from his end, possibly more than he would have done had she not spoken. She sends for the Bishop, who similarly warns the King to look to God. Again, the rebuttal is the same - he just insults the Bishop as a 'babbler' and questions his motives for speaking up. The King acts up even more and directly sends his messenger out to challenge Death - with predictable results. The argument lost, all that remains is for the King to die.
However, I used the word deceptively above for good purpose. The dialogue - repetitive though it is - is heartfelt. The King maybe a type, but he isn't a cardboard cutout. He rejects the Queen by having a temper tantrum, calling her a 'whore'. His speeches are emotive, violent and unfair, but in performance suggests fear. If he were really confident in his position he might laugh off the suggestion that Death would get him. As he isn't, he blusters.
When the Bishop enters he makes a long speech which is the only time that the outside world is expressly referenced. He talks of how the land is corrupt, the rich eating the poor. Again, though the text is corrupt, and very long, the speech is brilliantly constructed. A general lament about rich and poor, the unbalance in the land bleeds into anger - as his ire gets more direct and more pointed. The speech pulls back and he looks to God, offering a final prayer, at which point the King enters. The Bishop is now in the right frame of mind to make a reasonable, yet impassioned plea to the King, which is rebuffed.
Of the other characters, the King's knights have no inner life, they speak when commanded to and are yes men to the King. Mirth, the messenger, is different. It's a double role as a fool who sings and generally amuses, as well as serving the practical purpose of being the messenger sent after Death. He has two speeches that survive and possibly more that don't. Firstly the King calls him up, asking him to generally cheer him up - he appears to the King and gives a fairly grovelly speech saying how wonderful the King is - and, in passing, how great a servant he is as well. The King rewards his sycophancy with a title and lands and then leaves. I would suggest that possibly there is something missing in the text at this point - something lost during the initial copying - perhaps a song from Mirth, something more for which he deserves reward. It follows the rejection of the Queen by the King, who demands something to change his mood, but nothing in the text shows this to actually happen, beyond a fairly short bit of grovelling.
Mirth is then sent by the Queen to the Bishop. Questions arise as to loyalty of Mirth - he is clearly the Kings servant, but he goes to take the message for the Queen anyway. He is presumably mostly in it for the money, following whoever pays him. He sings as he goes - though no song is in evidence - the song helpfully covering a scene/location change. The beginning of Mirth's scene with the Bishop is missing, so we can only speculate how this might have run. A speech reiterating the words of the Queen, or some kind of back and forth?
Mirth reappears when the King has dismissed the Bishop - he is tasked with calling out Death and his speech to the people is not dissimilar to other messengers in Herod plays. The relationship between the King of Life and Herod and their messengers is marked. Though the King is nowhere near as violent or prone to ranting as a Herod, he is as proud and as changeable in his mood. Mirth clearly isn't keen on the message and I would like to image a scene where, having made the speech to the people, Death approaches Mirth and has a conversation with him - leading to the first death of the play. But I doubt that would have actually have been in the original play.
Making absolute conclusions about the play is difficult because of the half state it reaches us. The original copy was incomplete and difficult to read, and even this is now lost, so it is difficult to do more analysis of the text than was done when it was first transcribed. I've suggested that there may be other minor absences from the text, beyond those we know about. The King and Queen suffer from the first missing passage, where the Queen swears some kind of fealty to the King. We have the last four lines of this and this loss is felt. Here they are -
QUEEN: Baldly thou art my boot,
[remedy]
Trusty and full true -
Of all my rest thou art root,
I nill change for no new.
Of all my rest thou art root,
I nill change for no new.
Interestingly this promise, that she wouldn't change him for another (i.e. remarry should he die) is one of the first things he will throw back at her when she defies his pride later - perhaps a clue to what the rest of her speech would have said lies in what he turns against her later? In so formal a play it is likely that repetition would be used throughout.
The next lost passage, as discussed above, is the relaying of the message to the Bishop. I suspect this would have told us more about Mirth than the Bishop and is no where near as keenly felt a loss as the earlier section.
The final lost passage is the death of the King. It is difficult to know precisely how this would have worked - the prologue speaks of the King dreaming about Death coming for him, slaying both father and mother and then him. Were we to be treated to a dream sequence? Or do we think this is beyond the dramaturgy of the play? More plausibly the King would enter having awoken from the dream, telling his court what he saw. Perhaps reports would come of the death of his family? Would Death come for him alone or kill the whole court? And then what? Death says goodbye or an Angel appears? A full trial for the King's soul in Heaven a la Castle of Perseverance seems unlikely, I would suspect it would be something reported. But all of the above is speculation, we don't know.
Staging Pride:
I was asked to produce a community production of something medieval for the Magna Carta in Clare celebrations for 2015 and I suggested Pride as the earliest example of its kind. This approved, I started to produce a text.
Firstly there were questions of clarity - it's an early play, so the incidence of unusual words was great. Then there were questions of distortion to the text - inferred lines and what to do with them. Then there was the question of what to do with the lost passages.
The last was the most pressing (and I've covered the earlier textual issues in an earlier post). For the first gap I decided to do next to nothing - I looked through passages of medieval verse and comparably lines of love, but decided to just use the remaining lines of the Queen - using a gesture from the King to indicted she come to him, her four lines being a neat and short summary of her feelings. All that was needed to tidy up the exchange was to compose the concluding two lines of the King's opening speech, so that the pattern of the stanza and the rhyming scheme remained intact - I cribbed from similar commonplaces in other texts to create a reasonable approximation.
Lords of land beith at my leading,
All men shall a-bow in hall and in bower.
No man shall ever dismiss my heeding
Not of field, village, town or tower.
Finally we come to the lost ending. How to deal with that? The BBC Radio version from the 1950's used the prologue to great effect, using it as a running narration throughout the play, taking up the storytelling for the end when the text ran out. This worked on radio where words and music are the complete world. But on stage it would feel half formed and also would make the play far too short. (Also, I hate just stealing someone else's idea - it's lazy.)
Using the prologue as a guide I looked for suitable substitutions in medieval drama - rather than writing a cod medieval text of my own. There are two good possibles. One is from The Castle of Perseverance, where we had the appearance of Death and the option of the soul in an afterlife. But I felt it didn't follow the theme of the punishment of pride enough and I dismissed it quickly. The other possible was from The Death of Herod of the N Town plays. A prideful King acclaims victory over a foe (Jesus in this case) and Death arrives to ruin the party. With a few adjustments to the King's line about who his foe was and some moving around of dialogue the scene runs well, ending with a repeat of the King's first lines defiantly claiming he is King over all, just as he is about to die. We then repeated the final lines of the prologue about his soul and ended the play with an Epilogue from a lost play, which deserves an airing - it is possible this is the first performance of this Epilogue in a production since the middle ages.
It was surprising how well the two texts flowed together, specially when, formally, they are very different. The Herod play is later, has a more sophisticated verse structure and longer lines, but the sentiments were very similar, so it worked well. The only real failure was joining the new ending to the older play. Mirth makes his speech to the audience, relating the King's challenge. He is then killed by Death - but I should have made that clearer, using a different approach to break into the new ending. There was a sense of losing the flow of the play at this point - especially as I was using a chorus of actors to play Death, rather than a clearer more traditional figure in a big cloak.
My initial staging decisions didn't help the staging either. The acting area was narrow and long and this cat walk style thrust made the play function in a very different way to it's original outdoor scaffold performance. I made a benefit of this by using the length of the space to create long 'walks of shame' whenever a character was made to choose who they supported. The Queen goes to the King at the start, joining him at his throne, taking a long walk to get to him. When she questions him she ends up the other end of the room to him and his two knights choose to move from her and walk to the King's end. This pattern was repeated with the Bishop. He was found in the centre of the room and the King's knights again decide to walk the length of the room, past the Bishop, to show loyalty with the King. Death's approach to the King was similarly long, killing his court one by one as Death processed down towards him.
Additional I tried to repeat these images several times in the course of the play - both during the action but also before hand, during the prologue. I broke the prologue up into sections for the whole company to say, and as they spoke, the action of the play were demonstrated - not quite a full dumb show, but near enough. This way the audience had some chance of following the story should the ancient dialogue be a bit much for them.
I'll be posting video and audio of the production online - though the quality of these recordings varies. The space had a difficult echo and the shape of the staging made it very difficult to document. The configuration of the play made it next to impossible to film or record a good audio copy. What I have will be online as soon as possible - I will also make available my version of the text so that others can plunder what is good and what is bad.
The Pride of Life: Surviving Text - from rehearsals of the reconstruction, this recording features only the surviving text, with white noise to indicate the breaks in the original manuscript.
The Pride of Life: Annotated Video Version
The Pride of Life: A Reconstruction (Single shot video of the performance, including additions)
Additional links: The Pride of Life is available in a number of editions and collections. I haven't come across any text that is ever less than massively intimidating to the general reader, but persevere and it will reward. Hopefully our flawed recordings will help - I've always found listening to the version of an early play whilst looking at the text immensely helpful to understanding, if only to reject the decisions of producers or editors. For an e-edition there is a fully edited text online on the University of Rochester website - and an introduction here.
The Pride of Life by Anonymous - Edited and reconstructed by Robert Crighton
Cast:
King of Life - Haydn McCabe
Queen of Life - Esme Stanway
Bishop - Robert Myson
Mirth - Clarissa Seeley
Strength - Michelle Allen
Health - Pat Curtis
Chorus - Katie Landon, Beth Norris & Kate Terry
Costumes by Mary Denton
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| Ian McCabe as the King of Life, at the dress rehearsal. |
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