Shakespeare - A Complicated Relationship

The Deathday has been and gone.  I was in Stamford doing a show about the 'authorship question' and so I missed it.  My connection to the events were mostly via my phone with facebook and twitter.  The general reaction on my twitter feed was interesting, because most of the people I follow or who follow me have a similar relationship with the bard.  For example I tweeted:
"Happy n-day wishes to all the great anonymous writers of early English drama, who never get celebrated because we don't know who they are."
And this was retweeted many, many times and favourited and generally went down well - and many other people posted similar things.  I think this shows rather well the complicated relationship we all have with Shakespeare.  On the one hand, I do like his work and would happily bite off the hand that offered me a good part in any of his plays (for example, I'm currently in a production of The Tempest).  On the other hand, I'm generally disenchanted with the pure mass of Shakespeare now available.  In the last three years, from the build up of the last big anniversary to this one, from birth to death, we've had more than one complete works season, several history cycles and countless other productions.
Obviously, I have a bias.  This little project is focused on the work prior to Shakespeare, but it is also partly named after him - because I acknowledge that Shakespeare is the marketing buzz word I need to get anyone to take even a moments notice.  If I called this the Early Modern Drama Club then... well, I suspect I'd get fewer hits.
I also have to acknowledge that part of the point of my work is to illuminate the work of Shakespeare, to make the references in his work a little less strange, to give the bard some context.  Some of the long term projects I would like to get off the ground would be back to back productions of source plays and Shakespeare's rewrites.  On a smaller scale, I'm in the process of creating a storytelling show with Rosalynde by Thomas Lodge as text (touring 2017), partly because I think it'll be fun and partly because I'm directing As You Like It next year.  Once again, Shakespeare is the excuse for a widening of the repertoire and an exploration of earlier (and contemporary) work.  My work is, in a tiny way, part of a general trend in an extended interest in early English drama - there is more on offer and being produced by bigger companies too.  But still in comparison with the bard, it seems like meagre scraps
Every so often people look at the mass of Shakespeare on offer and suggest a moratorium.  'Let's not do Shakespeare for a few years,' some wag says.  I've suggested this myself.  I've also suggested that the government should order the paying of 'royalties' for Shakespeare production - all funds to be used to fund new writing and theatre production - it would balance the field a bit.  But, beyond being impossible and counter productive, it isn't really necessary.  These trends come in cycles.  Once these anniversaries are over, the major players will probably pull back a bit and look for something else - there'll still be a lot of Shakespeare out there, but maybe not quite so all encompassing.  And it's in the interest of the big players to open out the repertoire.  In basic economic terms, they need to diversify (with the emphasis perhaps on verse) or die.
The major players in the UK, the RSC and the Globe, have already opened up their programming to other writing from the period.  Certain contemporaries of Shakespeare get a look in.  A mixed season will get a Marlowe, Jew of Malta or Doctor Faustus perhaps, thrown in, or a bit of Jonson, Webster or even Ford.  And it's great.  I love it.  The only problem I have with this is the lack of follow through.
Recently The Globe released in a box set all the DVD's of productions from the past ten years or so.  They've all been released separately and many are ones also screened live in cinemas.  Of the twenty plays in the box, nineteen were Shakespeare and one was Doctor Faustus by Kit Marlowe.  The RSC has been more modest in output, so far.  But both the RSC and Globe have produced dozens of plays by other playwrights, in just the last few years, and some of those productions were very well reviewed - so why not distribute them further?
There is a good reason why not and these companies are not run by idiots.  They will only market the plays they think will sell.  I balk slight at trying to tell the Globe to try harder because they are a purely commercial outfit, but the RSC is heavily subsidised and, more importantly, I think they're missing the long term view of building interest in other writers.  The Globe has released half of the Shakespeare canon on DVD, the RSC is working on it.  Once they have released the whole canon once, maybe twice, maybe three times, where do they go?
Whilst I agree that a DVD of The Jew of Malta, say, will not sell brilliantly, it gives students and schools (and dare I say it, people generally) the same opportunities to watch rather than just read a play.  It could be sold as a two pack with The Merchant of Venice, which is a logical pairing - and something that might interest schools.  Mixing Shakespeare with his contemporaries in box sets is a really great way of mixing the interest out a bit, especially if the plays have references to each other.
Part of the reason Shakespeare has exploded in the world is due to film and television.  By releasing a play, making it more familiar, you generally make it easier to sell a new production.  The text becomes less scary and more familiar, and then productions can explore them further, open them up to a little expansion.  (There is a point of overkill, as mentioned above, but you can only reach that after general success.)
We've got Shakespeare, everyone does Shakespeare - if you don't just mix it up a bit, but actively push and sell his contemporaries and predecessors, then you risk a debt spiral of never ending repeats of Hamlet till we all lose the will to live.  If we can make these lesser known plays into as popular a ticket as Shakespeare then there's room to programme not just great other drama, but also have good houses for them.
I'm not even asking these companies to do more other work than they're already doing, just to risk showing it to more people than a few hundred a night for a few months.  I've wanted to watch all the non Shakespeare plays the Globe and RSC have produced over the last few years - well received productions mostly, but I can't get there.  Just one a year.  Maybe two.  That's all I ask.
Obviously, I would like you to do something from a bit earlier in the canon, but hey, one thing at a time.

God's Promises - Act Six

Mark Holtom reading for Esaias...

It's been a long time since I recorded this act, covering the prophet Esaias - as Bale writes it.  This is Act Six of Seven, this prophet being the forerunner to the forerunner John the Baptist, who I've posted previously.
These recordings are very basic, they've been produced largely on the hoof, but they are I hope moderately clear.  Whilst I'm going to get a move on an record the remaining five acts this year, they won't deviate from this template - narration, text.  It's beyond my budget to have a score at this time, and that does limit the effect the words have.  This isn't, as I'd first assumed, the easiest of plays to translate to audio - without music or a visual set of cues, it is quite difficult to keep focus.  But one day I may get around to a more detailed production.
As I say, I hope to have this piece completed over the next few months - I might then create a shorter and more accessible version, to go with this no-frills approach.  Who says we can't be playful?

God's Promises by John Bale - Act Six - Esaias

Narrator - Annie Eddington
God - Robert Crighton
Esaias - Mark Holtom


And below is a player with all the parts recorded so far - at time of posting this includes the Prologue, Act Six and Seven and Epilogue.



God's Promises, like all my audio work, is supported by my patrons - becoming a patron is easy, just go to www.patreon.com/robertcrighton and make a pledge.

A (Mostly) Towneley Nativity

Merry Christmas Everyone!  Here's a little audio gift for you.
Many years ago I organised a little reading of some edited Mystery plays in the bar of the Quay Theatre - it was a heavily edited Nativity sequence, mostly from the Towneley Cycle (including most of the Second Shepherd Play), with an introduction from the Chester Banns.  Luckily I recorded the show on a mini disk player, so this very rough audio recording can now be heard.  With Christmas coming around again, here's the first half of Medieval Mysteries.  The second half, featuring the three Kings and Herod plays, follows below.

Medieval Mysteries - Part One

Narrator and Mak: Robert Crighton
Gabriel and Shepherd: Richard Fawcett
Mary and Gill: Sara Knight
Joseph and Shepherd: David Knight
Other Shepherd: Michael Harding

Medieval Mysteries - Part Two
Narrator and Soldier: Neil Arbon
Herod: Robert Crighton
Nuncius and Mother: Helen Arbon
King and Soldier: Joseph James
King and Mother:  Carole Hughes

Medieval Mysteries was edited and produced by Robert Crighton and performed in the bar at the Quay Theatre in December 2006.

The Nativity - A Nativity

It's happening - we're doing a Nativity in December.  We're calling it The Nativity.  Subtle, I know.  It's going to feature six complete 'pageants' from the N-Town play, plus a little bit from another.

Our Nativity Line Up -
Annunciation: a short passage
Joseph's Doubts
The Nativity
The Shepherds
The Kings
The Purification
Slaughter of the Innocents

Now there are a lot of other Nativity applicable pageants contained in the N-Town play and they're all  very interesting, but the N-Town play is very odd and there are lots of different ways of cutting the cloth.  It's all part of a longer term plan, so here's my thinking.
The N-Town play is a compilation - a composite of a number of different sources, edited together into the final manuscript.  So, you've got the original pageants, performed individually or in some order from a greater whole, but they've been cut up and rearranged and turned into another play - the N-Town play.  It's a bit like we've lost Shakespeare's history plays, but we've got a copy of the Barton/Hall script for The Wars of the Roses - though we don't know whether the text was created to be performed, or as a private document for an individual/family/institution, though most people tend towards for the latter.
The question is then, how do you perform it?  Attempt each play individually, putting the additions or cuts to one side and try to get at the original (whatever that means) text, or perform the final form of the play - which it may never have been meant to be?
The long term plan is this - perform sections of the play in some detail in a number of locations around East Anglia (from whence the plays came), recording, archiving and noting the way the text works (or doesn't) in an individual way.  We may go back to some plays and perform them with others.  The Nativity sequence I've chosen above could be done quite differently, we're sticking to the main thrust of the story in this selection, but we could mix in a number of other plays, perform the Kings and Slaughter as one text, without the addition of Simeon and the Purification in the middle etc.  So this isn't The Nativity, as such, in December we'll be performing A The Nativity.  We'll possibly perform another very different The Nativity in the future.
Once we've played around with all the texts in an individualistic way, curating the material in different ways, we'll look at a complete staging of the whole play.
To some degree this is a text I am coming back to.  I used the Passion Play 1 from N-Town as the primary text for a version of The Passion three years ago.  I'm rather looking forward to covering that text again in a more consistent way sometime soon.

The Fall of Lucifer (Chester) - Full Audio Recording

In the dim and distant past of 2013 we started a real in depth look at the Chester Plays - launching the Exploring the Chester Plays series as well as recording fuller audio productions for future release.  We've nearly caught up with ourselves.  The first five Explorings, covering plays 1 to 10, have now been archived and the first audio production has been edited.  It's not perfect, but considering how rushed the sessions were, it's turned out quite well.  Beyond a minor edit to bypass the issue of the Angels singing (sorry Mat, you ended up on the cutting room floor - we so can't do music of the period yet) it's a full recording of the text we used for Exploring in 2013 - though with more considered performances and sound to help tell the story.  It is hopefully a good introduction to the play for the student who's never seen or heard the play in full before - i.e. almost everyone on the planet.
We've recorded play two which will follow in a similar fashion, and some bits from plays 3,4 & 5 - which may be completed at a later date.
And that'll be it for a while - we're moving on from Chester for the present (though we hope to finish the Exploring sessions at some point).  We're based in East Anglia, so the N-Town play is a much more important 'cycle' to be looking at at in the future.

So, please enjoy our version of Play One of the Chester Plays - The Tanners Play covering the Fall of Lucifer.


God: Robert Crighton
Lucifer: Trevor Laver
Lightbourne: Richard Fawcett
Angels and Archangels: Helen Arbon, Neil Arbon, Adam Webster, Kevin Roychowdhury, AM Barrett, Annie Eddington.
Recorded at the Quay Theatre, Sudbury
Produced and edited by Robert Crighton

Music and Sound Effects all come from the lovely people of freesfx - http://www.freesfx.co.uk

The Pride of Life - A Reconstruction

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.

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.

The second absence was trickier - I could have changed the action so that Mirth delivered a note to the Bishop - this would scan well enough.  Instead I simply adjusted the Queen's lines to Mirth and made them into reported speech for Mirth to say on.  This way the transaction felt more natural and less rushed.
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

Ian McCabe as the King of Life, at the dress rehearsal.

Backstage Photographs from Pride & Dame

To accompany the back stage photos for the medieval drama from the Magna Carta in Clare celebrations we include the programme notes for Pride and Dame Sirith.

THE PRIDE OF LIFE:

The Pride of Life is one of the oldest, if not the oldest, surviving play in the English language. 

There are many caveats to the above sentence.

Firstly, there are other surviving texts which come from about the same period in time, though it’s very difficult to put an exact date to these things.  Pride comes somewhere around 1350. 

Secondly, it doesn’t quite survive - not fully.  There are big gaps in the text we have and the second half / third is completely lost, so it can’t be classed as an extant play. 

Thirdly, though in English, the text is Irish in origin – at the very least by adoption, as this is where the manuscript was copied in the form which has come down to us.

So, on the face of it, not a very appropriate entertainment for a medieval banquet in 1215.

But what else is there?  When I was first approached to do something for the Magna Carta celebrations I racked my brains as to what was most appropriate.  We haven’t got any surviving plays in English prior to 1350 – and I didn’t think that the average persons knowledge of Latin would be up to it.  Thinking a little sideways I considered some later plays about King John.  But all three King John plays from the early modern period have one major deficiency. 

They don’t mention Magna Carta.  At all.

So I made a compromise – the earliest play that was doable and which features at least a thematic link to the story of King John.  The Pride of Life is, as the title suggests, about pride and a prideful King at that.  It resonates nicely.

For all the incompleteness of the text, it is performable thanks to the detail afforded by the banns that open the play – a prologue that tells the whole of the plot, including the ending.  To make the play more whole I have added a section of another early English play – from an East Anglian Mystery play about the death of Herod – to round off the story dramatically, as well as a playless Epilogue that has survived as a fragment.  It is possible this Epilogue has never been performed as part of a production for six hundred years as, being without a play to perform before it, why would anyone use it?  One can never be certain of such things, someone else might have had the idea before me, but it’s an exciting thought.

The Pride of Life has been performed more recently than the mid 14^th Century, though I haven’t had a chance to hunt out any specific productions – either student or professional.  The BBC produced a reasonably accurate version for the Third Programme in the 1950’s as part of their The First Stage series.  It used the prologue throughout the play (which, short as it was, was cut down and heavily modernised) to cover the gaps in the text.  Sadly this recording is only currently available if you can find the LP release of the series (which thanks to ebay I have) – which I doubt will get a wider airing.  I have therefore recorded our cast performing our text of the play and this audio recording (and video footage we hope to make of the last rehearsals and performance) will be put online for free to introduce interested people to the play.

As part of this production I have endeavoured to retain as much of the original text as possible and not overly modernise it.  We have only cut four lines from the extant play and altered some readings where the corrupted text gave me some license to be bolder with changing lines.  I have written two additional lines to one speech where a gap in the text doesn’t complete the rhyming scheme – though this reconstruction is based on patterns found in other plays of the period.  For those who are interested the original play ends with the final lines of Mirth, just as Death kills him.  Sadly none of the original dialogue for Death survived, which is a shame as he’s a marvellous conversationalist in most medieval texts.

I would like to thank the Magna Carta in Clare committee for hosting this Before Shakespeare* production and for producing such a welcoming atmosphere.
[*Our original incarnation - Ed]

Some rehearsal shots for Pride of Life - first full tryout with costumes.

Adam reading from his medieval mobile phone...

A Magna Carta Mumming

The first part of the evening is a completely true account of the story of Magna Carta – told in the fashion of a Mumming.  Mumming is a slippery term, it can mean a lot of different things depending when it was produced and who it was for.  It could involve song, dance or drama.  We’ve used a loose folk ritual to create something new, something special for this event.  It isn’t an historical re-enactment; it is a reimagining of a form designed to illicit a few cheap laughs, created in the spirit of the medieval entertainments of the day, not in absolute fact.

The Mummers Are: Michelle Allen, Robert Crighton, Pat Curtis, Katie Landon, Beth Norris, Clarissa Seeley, Alban Smith-Adams & Kate Terry.  Costumes by Mary Denton.

Dame Sirith

Edited and performed by Robert Crighton

Dame Sirith isn’t quite a fable, if only because it doesn’t have a moral.  It tells the story of a monk, Wilekin, who takes a fancy to the wife of a merchant, one Dame Margery.  When the merchant is away the monk tries to woo Margery but she’s having none of it and sends him away with a flea in his ear.  About to give into despair he meets a friend who recommends Dame Sirith the hend (wise) to help him. 

He goes to her and, after a little bartering, she agrees to get Margery to relent.  To do this she uses a small dog and a jar of mustard... but we wouldn’t want to ruin the ending for you by saying anymore. 

Unlike our very fake Mumming, Dame Sirith is genuinely medieval, appearing towards the end of the 12^th Century, and so is something that would have been about at the time of King John.

This version is only lightly modernised, so features many old words (gange is one of our favourites) and unfamiliar phrasing – but hopefully through the modern day translation service of the storyteller’s backchat it will be both clear and amusing.

And a few shots from backstage during the Mumming - and our strange array of Mummers!