#edward ii

Medieval English Royals + ClickHole, The Onion, and Reductress headlines. Richard II.

philomaela:

John Heffernan and Kyle Soller as Edward and Gaveston in Edward II

Edward II in 1316 

Another day , another play !

xshayarsha:

Edward II (1970) dir. Richard Marquand, adaptation of Christopher Marlowe’s play.

Music Instrument Design for Edward II. 

Our wonderfully talented Director of Music, Bill Barclay has built some unique instruments for our production of Edward II. In this blog he tells us about these instruments and the three different worlds of sound he has created for the production.

Christopher Marlowe’s dark history of Edward II still reverberates loudly today both in its powerfully modern assertion that love is love, and in the incompatibility between vulnerability and the corridors of power. To help tell the story of these contrasts that ripple through time, I’ve built two new musical instruments that provide natural reverberation in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, which has a warm yet dry acoustic. These devices play alongside a raft of ethnic and period instruments to create three contrasting palates of sound.

The first world of sound: war, rebellion, dissidents, and political pressure

The first sound world describes the sounds of war, rebellion, dissidents, and political pressure. This is achieved through the creation of a steel cello, which is an instrument I first encountered in Boston built by musician Matt Samolis, also known by his stage name Uncle Shoe. I was infatuated with his creations and had used them in theatre before, but this is this instrument’s debut in the United Kingdom. With Matt’s guidance I’ve constructed a new kind of steel cello bespoke to the Sam Wanamaker. 

This is how it works: several large deep ride cymbals and metal rods are bolted to a large stainless steel resonating sheet, which amplifies the metal objects as they are bowed and struck. The instrument is capable of a wide range of sounds which are almost entirely below the frequencies of consonants in speech, making words intelligible over a rash of haunting textures. Amazingly, the instrument often sounds synthesised – digital, even – metallic, industrial, dark, and yet shimmering. Matt and I used to play it for sound meditations in long beautiful drone concerts, and yet it can also distort to provide an incredible lexicon of theatrical punctuation. The whole band takes a turn on it, but it is chiefly played by Music Director Rob Millett, and it is played throughout the production.

The steel cello is complemented by a bass drum, field drum, and Sarah Homer’s contra alto clarinet – a rare instrument lower than the bass clarinet which gurgles at the low end of the hearing spectrum under the steel cello’s reverberant strokes.

The second world of sound: love

The second sound world was meant to contrast with the first as much as possible in order to depict the love between Edward and Gaveston as incompatible with its oppressive cultural antipathy to homosexuality.  For this world we lean on Tunde Jegede’s kora – the West African harp, chiefly from the griot storytelling tradition of Mali.(A griot is a West African historian, storyteller, praise singer, poet, or musician).

The kora melds with a swarmandal, a Hindu harp the characteristic buzzing from its sympathetic strings. To fill out this pan-ethnic texture, we use a hammered dulcimer and a bass dulcimer, instruments that are from all over the world, though perhaps most prominent in music from the Middle East. These three harp-like instruments from around the world emphasise the beauty, the universalism, and perhaps the exotic presence that define love so unabashedly in this play. The textures these strings make with each other seems to chime perfectly with the candlelight, and lend an extraordinary atmosphere to the Playhouse.

The third world of sound: the church

The third sound world is of the church. Here the tubular bells,accordion(mimicking an organ),cello, and contra alto clarinet form a league of ominously low, yet sinuously melodic instruments that collect like vines around the ankles of the play’s characters – powerful yet beautiful. Also in this world is the singers, who at various moments intone the Latin prayers of the Requiem Mass, as if the death of Edward I (Longshanks, Edward II’s father), still looms over the cracked glass of our protagonist’s troubled reign.

The second original instrument is the spring machine. Two long helical springs are attached to the theatre’s back wall, and connect directly to the heads of two frame drums bolted to the face of the music gallery. When the springs are rubbed and struck, we discovered that the sounds that pour out of the drums are unearthly, unsettling, and hard to mentally place. For weeks I had been seeking sounds for the play’s horrible final scenes that were truly original – sounds that could only mean this peculiar horror. We tried attaching a double bass to the springs, and had 4 springs start on each string, going into four drums. The sound was amazing but I could still hear the double bass, and the sound was too familiar.

When we took the bass away and hung the springs to a hook instead, it focused the sound much more on the strange sounds of the springs themselves, which we then tightened to amplify the signal. This revealed the coups de grace: when the drum heads are struck with a mallet in a heartbeat pattern, the heartbeat flows to the back wall and out the drums again, creating an analogue looping system. The intention is to recreate the sound of hearing your own heartbeat thudding in your ears, as you imagine the worst. The secondary intention is to allow the truly horrible parts of the story be truly horrible, by preparing our subconscious with unsettling sounds that have no preconceived identity. We don’t want you to be listening to the ‘music’ here – we want the sounds to unsettle the psychological anticipation of Edward’s grisly demise.

Once the act occur, there is no need, or room, for any more music in its final pages. The stage stays mostly in darkness, the characters have their comeuppance, and silence seems the only appropriate ending. We are still processing the horror, and the tragedy, and after two hours of steady building to this moment, it feels right to go out with these solo odd springs.

Other instruments used in the show include the tagleharpa, a medieval bowed three-string harp made for the Globe by a Russian instrument maker in Karelia. This undergirds the ancient character of Old Spencer and provides a bit of the dark ages as an important colour for the older generation of this world. Paul Johnson also plays several ethnic flutes:

• Kaval-  a Bulgarian wooden flute
• Tambin -  the national instrument of the West African Fula
• Bansuri-  a common North Indian flute
• Bombard-  a loud double-reed member of the shawm family used to play Breton music
• Portuguese and English bagpipes

Occasionally Paul plays the bagpipes against Sarah Homer’s soprano saxophone – an entirely modern instrument but ones whose timbre, when mixed with the pipes, creates the sensation of two fanfaring trumpets.

Finally, the Nyatiti, the lyre from Kenya, makes a few important solo appearances. This instrument means ‘daughter-in-law’, and it is the female counterpart to the maleness of the West African kora. The two harps provide contrasting emotional colours – the kora in act 1 when love is free, and the Nyatiti in the second half when it is not.

The ambitious nature of this score is testament to the dozens of shows played at the Globe by these four incredible musicians; indeed, the score has been composed for their unique multi-instrumentalism. There is no other person in London who could double on kora and cello than Tunde Jegede, nor any other player than Music Director Rob Millett who plays the dulcimer at an expert level, yet can learn how to work magic from something so new as a steel cello. Paul Johnson and Sarah Homer each in turn provide similarly original contributions that speak to their true uniqueness as players.

The overarching goal here was for the Globe to do what it does best – be inventive, embrace the parameters of acoustic music, and lean heavily on the unique experience of its core artists. I remain a student of period music at the Globe, but only in service of bringing period sounds together with improvisation, new instruments, living composers, and surprising orchestrations.

In collaborating in this way, we attempt to fabricate an entirely unique sound world that can only define the world of this play, here, right now.

Edward II is in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse until 20 April. 

Musical instrument photography by Hannah Yates 
Edward II production photography by Marc Brenner 

Complicity in Edward II. 

In this blog Assistant Director George Nichols of Edward II asks, should the audience feel complicit in Edward’s shocking death? 

How would a 17th-century audience have reacted to being included in the political machinations of Richard III? How is an audience meant to feel after laughing at Malvolio’s humiliation in Twelfth Night?  What about at Edward II’s grizzly death?

The productions of these plays that I find most affecting are those in which the audience feels complicit in the action of the play. Really, I think this should be a guiding principle throughout all theatre, as writers, directors and actors should think of the audience not as observers, but as participants.

Complicity is definitely something we learn about from the unique stages at the Globe. The proximity of the audience to the stage and the fact that in many instances you must push through or walk past audience to get into the space suggests that the complicity of the audience was a key aspect in how these plays were originally performed. It’s also inherent in the texts; soliloquies, for example, show us that characters were in a constant dialogue with the audience. By letting us in on a clandestine plot as Edmund does in King Lear, it creates dramatic irony through the fact that we are privy to something that the other characters are not.

In our production of Edward II the idea of the audience being participants had to take the fore, not least because of the number of characters we had to cut from the text. In some cases, to accommodate these cuts we changed pronouns from ‘we/ they’ to ‘I/ me’ etc, but occasionally we felt there were opportunities to open the play out to the audience. For example, the barons often refer to a number far greater than themselves, and so in our production they address the audience as their accomplices, at other points we have changed the allegiance of some characters to aid with the flow of the story, and so in one instance the audience becomes Edward’s friends, replacing lost allies in the play.

The shows played before press night when the media review the play are an interesting time for any production, but at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse they are particularly significant. Whilst all pre-press night shows are to some extent a method of gauging how a production sits with an audience, in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse you feel guided toward what their role is in the action through their particular mood or the atmosphere. As we get more experience of the reaction we get, the more the actors learn which lines work as direct challenges to audience members, and which lines are best kept in the space. There’s beauty in the fact that it can be different for each performance once you establish that the audience is flexible and can be friend or foe depending on what you need in that moment.

Once this relationship is established you can use all sorts of techniques to keep an audience on board; soliloquies, asides or even humour. But sometimes, the most effective tool you have is just to pose a direct question. After watching the suffering Edward goes through, being entertained by and complicit in his downfall, how do you  feel when he turns to you and asks: ‘Pity you me?’

Edward II is in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse until 20 April. Tom Stuart’s contemporary response to Marlowe’s play, After Edward, opens on 21 March. 

Photography by Marc Brenner 

Was Shakespeare gay? 

February is LGBT History month. On 7 February we opened Edward II, Christopher Marlowe’s portrayal of a homosexual relationship between the King Edward and Piers Gaveston. Running alongside this production is Voices in the Dark: Pride, Then and Now; an exciting exploration of sexuality and gender.

Research Fellow Will Tosh often has discussions with students and visitors about Shakespeare’s sexuality. In this blog, he tackles this question and sheds fresh light on how we might perceive Renaissance sexual identity.

Was Shakespeare gay?

It’s a popular question from students and audience members at public talks. Revealingly, it’s often posed in ways that draw attention to the debate: ‘I’ve been told that Shakespeare was gay – is that true?’ ‘I asked my teacher if Shakespeare was gay and he said no – what do you think?’

The answer’s more complicated than you might think.

It’s not that it’s exactly hard to find a homoerotic sensibility in Shakespeare’s works. Think of the ties of romantic friendship and erotic yearning that bind Antonio and Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice, or Antonio to Sebastian in Twelfth Night. That play is a queer fantasia, to be sure: Olivia loves Viola, thinking she’s ‘Cesario’, and ends up with Sebastian – who looks the same as Viola; Orsino falls in love with ‘Cesario’, not realising he’s a she, and seems absolutely delighted that she stays in her men’s clothing after he’s proposed.

We often read Shakespeare’s Sonnets as an account of the poet’s intense relationships with a beautiful young man and a bewitching ‘dark lady’. Lots of people find the poems simply too passionate, too obsessive, to be anything other than poetic autobiography. Oscar Wilde certainly thought the Sonnets contained a secret, suggesting in his essay-masquerading-as-a-story ‘The Portrait of Mr. W.H.’ that the fair youth was ‘none other than the boy-actor for whom [Shakespeare] created Viola and Imogen, Juliet and Rosalind, Portia and Desdemona, and Cleopatra herself’ (his youthful good looks must have lasted the best part of fifteen years if the same boy created the female lead in Romeo and Juliet in 1594 and Cymbeline’s Imogen in 1609).

Wilde might have veered into fiction with his identification of Shakespeare’s lover, but many readers are still reluctant to discard the notion that the Sonnets offer a glimpse of the ‘real’ Shakespeare. The poet Don Paterson writes in his recent commentary on Shakespeare’s Sonnets that they are literary proof positive of his bisexual or gay identity.

The complexity arises from the language and terminology we use to describe the sexual identity of historic people. For one thing, our modern words for sexual orientation – gay, straight, homosexual, bisexual, heterosexual – are all nineteenth or twentieth-century coinages. Comparable words used in the past – ganymede, catamite, ingle for men, tribade for women – didn’t carry precisely the same meaning.    

Even more complicatedly, scholarship has insisted since the 1980s that sexual orientation is a modern concept. Most historians are of the view that early modern people didn’t think of themselves as gay or straight (not that those words carried their modern meanings in any case). Sexuality wasn’t so much about the gender of one’s object of desire, but about the degree of license, debauchery and sinful abandonment that an individual permitted oneself. Although we can talk about sexual acts in the past, we probably shouldn’t think about people’s sexual identities.

It might sound odd, but this can actually be a liberating way to think about sexuality. I’ve found it enlightening to think about the ways in which same-sex eroticism and queer emotion were woven into early modern society. What we now specify as homosexuality was infused into the culture at large, in customs, practices and social institutions. Widespread same-sex bed-sharing, the high value placed on single-gender friendship, and a generally un-prudish attitude to bodily functions created an environment in which homosexual acts, while technically illegal, went virtually unreported and unpunished.

Disapproval loomed, of course, as well as hostility from the church, but social history research suggests that the more usual response to same-sex intimacy was a worldly shrug, as long as it didn’t frighten the horses (or challenge society’s rigid gender roles).

But I still feel a bit caught out when someone wants to talk about Shakespeare’s sexuality. And I think it’s because ‘Was Shakespeare gay?’ is actually a really apt question. It’s not the ‘wrong’ thing to ask, and I’m beginning to wonder if it really is so anachronistic to think about the sexual orientation of historical people. I’m not sure I’m satisfied any more with our rather convoluted academic discourses about sexual subjectivity. When we queer the whole Renaissance, we obscure genealogy. The LGBTQ woman or man of today who seeks in the past for ancestry instead finds a well-meant dead-end: we are told that one of the things that makes us who we are did not exist four centuries ago.

The words we use to describe emotions, selfhood and sexuality have changed over the centuries, but I’m yet to be convinced that an early modern person with a prevailing sexual interest in their own gender wouldn’t have thought of themselves as distinct from the majority.

For what it’s worth, when I point my literary gaydar at Shakespeare I get a maybe. The dramatist who gave us the playfully queer wooing of Orlando and ‘Ganymede’ in As You Like It also created happy hetero couple Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing. As a sonneteer, he was able to imagine a complex and anguished affair with a young man, as well as an obsessive, even controlling, relationship with a woman. Perhaps it’s more interesting to think about Shakespeare as a writer who knew that his audience and readership was sexually diverse: he was catering to the LGBT market long before such a thing had a name.   

But that’s not to say there weren’t other writers of the time for whom homoerotic subject matter and sexual identity seem to our eyes to overlap. The playwright Christopher Marlowe (whose Edward II is on now at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse) and pastoral poet Richard Barnfield produced works that explored same-sex love in much more candid ways than Shakespeare. And we know for a fact that Shakespeare read these writers. So he may or may not have been gay, but he definitely read gay literature – and that’s a lesson we can all appreciate during LGBT History Month.

Edward II photograhy by Marc Brenner 

History, part 1: Richard II.

Research Assistant Hailey Bachrach will be blogging about History. This week she shines a light on Richard II. 

It’s a common question when faced with a history play, by Shakespeare or Marlowe or anyone else: what do I need to know to before I see it? What background do I need to make it make sense?  

The assumption seems to be that these plays are impenetrable without a solid background in English monarchical history—that the original audiences must have had this knowledge. And it’s true that some Renaissance audience members may have come armed with information gleaned from the chronicle histories of Rafael Holinshed or Edward Hall, who compiled massive, sprawling narratives of England’s past, and which writers like Shakespeare and Marlowe drew upon when writing their plays.

But many others wouldn’t have. Such books were extremely expensive, and that’s assuming you knew how to read. But that doesn’t mean that only the wealthy and literate knew anything about the past. Just like many of us today will get a vague sense of periods we’ve never studied from films or books, in Shakespeare’s time, plays and ballads served to fill in many people’s understanding of England’s history.  

So if you were an ordinary English person who’d never read a chronicle history, what might you have already known going in to see Shakespeare’s Richard II for the first time?  

If you were a theatre fan, you might have been familiar with the story of King Richard II from the play now generally called Thomas of Woodstock. It now only survives in an incomplete manuscript, but may predate Shakespeare’s play—and fittingly, depicts events that take place slightly earlier in Richard’s reign.

In this play, you would have seen Richard’s neglect of his new bride, Anne of Bohemia, and his sorrow at her sudden death. You would have met his favourites, Green, Bushy, Bagot, and Scroop, all elevated to important political positions that they then abuse for personal gain, unconcerned that they are impoverishing the citizens of England in the process. Ghosts appeared to remind you of Richard’s regal lineage: his father, the war hero called the Black Prince and his grandfather, King Edward III. And you would have met Richard’s uncles, John of Gaunt; Edmund of Langley, the Duke of York; and the titular Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, the humblest and gentlest of them all, who Richard’s favourites persuade him to have murdered. Richard is quickly seized by remorse… but not quickly enough to save Woodstock’s life.

But sometimes connections were less direct. Marlowe’s Edward II and Shakespeare’s Richard II were likely written around the same time, and they are plainly plays in close conversation with one another. Aside from their central scenarios of irresponsible kings surrounded by favourites, even lines and images seem to echo from one play to the other.Edward II was written before Richard II,and these echoes may have sounded for original audience members, shaping their expectations of Richardbased on what they’d seen in Edward.

Thomas of Woodstock isn’t a direct prequel toRichard II,and of course neither is Edward II (though Edward was Richard’s great-grandfather).All three plays offer their own interpretations of their parallel characters or scenarios. But the plays’ similarities and vague familiarities are what many original audience members would have brought with them into a new history play—not a list of facts about the reign of King Richard II. In a time before national history was taught in school, and before the majority of the population was literate, plays were as good a source as any for learning about the past… or at least a version of it.

Writers played fast and loose with historical fact—and often the chronicles themselves were contradictory or incorrect—and the facts (or ‘facts’) that an audience member had learned from one source may have been flatly contradicted by another. Even if you came into a history play with some knowledge of its subject, that knowledge might turn out not to apply.  

This pick-and-mix approach to history was all that most audience members would have brought along with them into a new play. The upcoming season offers the exciting opportunity for us to have a similar viewing experience, accumulating knowledge from play to play, and letting playwrights teach us their own version of history.

Richard II opens in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse on 22 February.

Edward II appears at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse until 20 April. 

Edward II production photography by Marc Brenner 
Richard II rehearsal photography by Ingrid Pollard 

Voices in the Dark: Pride, Then and Now. 

How relevant are Shakespeare and his contemporaries today? That is the question we ask in Voices in the Dark, an ongoing festival of events and performances that run alongside our main-stage productions.

Voices in the Dark examines the nature of Shakespeare’s transformative impact on the world through an ongoing dialogue, a call and response, between today’s artists and Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

This spring in our latest iteration of the Voices in the Dark festival, Pride, Then and Now we respond to After Edward, in itself a response to Marlowe’s Edward II - a play that is rare in its depiction of a gay relationship on the early modern stage.

Moll and the Future Kings
Kicking off proceedings in spectacular style on 30 March is Moll and the Future Kings -  an hour of late-night drag king cabaret and improv, by candlelight.

Moll Frith, also known as Mal Cutpurse, fascinated her 17th-century audiences when, in 1611, she appeared on stage during a production of The Roaring Girl, Middleton and Dekker’s play about her life. An improvised moment involving rude jokes, songs and smoking, this is the only known professional playhouse performance by an English woman.

Performed by members of the Through the Door course, this work-in-progress, this experiment, this conversation with our queer early modern past celebrates Moll the cross-dressing performer, criminal and trickster and all those like her.

Curated by Sarah Grange with Clerkinworks, and supported by Shakespeare’s Globe and Improbable. 

Hear more about Moll and the Future Kings from event curator Sarah Grange and drag king Wesley Dykes in the latest episode of our podcast. Transcript available.

Buy tickets for After Edward in the same transaction and save £2 on tickets for Love is LoveandMoll and the Future Kings.

Wanton poets and pleasant wits: Edward II now
On 4 April, following the 7.30pm performance of After Edward, join us for a free post-show discussion chaired by our Research Fellow Dr Will Tosh.

Bringing together some of today’s most exciting queer thinkers and writers, we will reflect on the legacy of Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II.

This event is free to ticket-holders for that evening’s performance of After Edward and also, subject to space in the auditorium, everyone else who is interested in attending without seeing the preceding performance.

Love is Love
On 6 April London’s a cappella LGBT+ choir, The Fourth Choir, returns to the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse to mark the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots in June 1969.

In a celebration in words and music of LGBT+ lives and loves, Love is Love roams through nine centuries taking influence from Hildegarde of Bingen in the 12th century to jazz legend Billy Strayhorn in the 20th.

Coupled with music by composers such as Poulenc, Tchaikovsky and Rufus Wainwright, Love is Love brings to life hidden histories: the woman put on trial in 18th-century Germany for marrying another woman; history’s most extraordinary bisexual love triangle; the famous composer who liked to wear drag; and the Stonewall Warriors themselves.

Buy tickets for After Edward in the same transaction and save £2 on tickets for Love is LoveandMoll and the Future Kings. 

Image credit: Ellan Parry

Sarah Grange, curator of Moll and the Future Kings and drag king Wesley Dykes discussed the inspiration behind the show on our podcast, Such Stuff . 

By Candlelight. 

George Nichols is the Assistant Director for Edward IIandAfter Edward. He is writing a blog series about the processes and ideas in these two plays.

In this blog, George gives insight into how candles will be used to light Edward II which will be staged in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse.

Obviously, the importance of lighting in theatre goes far beyond just allowing you to see the actors on the stage (although that is a vital function!). A casual theatregoer may not realise how significant lighting is, and how it fundamentally shapes the tone and feel of a production. In a conventional production, a good creative team work closely, so that action, space, sound and lighting are inextricable. Often, if a lighting design is doing its job you won’t notice it at all. Lighting at its best is a fluid accompaniment to movement, a best friend to design and a vehicle for expression.

So how does the unique candle lighting of the Sam Wanamaker playhouse affect the way we stage texts? Well, firstly it’s important not to think of candles as a restriction. Even though you have a very small range of paintbrushes, you have a huge and varied palette to paint from. Anyone who has seen Macbeth, which is running currently, will be able to attest to how ingeniously candlelight can be used.

In the playhouse there are six three-tiered chandeliers that can be lowered or raised, several sconces fixed to pillars which provide a small amount of light, hand-held candles and torches to be carried by actors as well as long footlights that sit at the front of the stage and reflect light upwards. All these light sources can be used in conjunction with each other, and each different combination has a different effect.

We’re always thinking about these different effects during Edward II rehearsals. The locations in the play all have different qualities of light, both literally and tonally, as we move from coronations to battlefields and abbeys to dungeons. Lighting candles takes time, so to flood the space with light or get rid of a lot of light you need to think of ways of incorporating candle lighting or snuffing into the action of the play. The lighting of candles can be a joy to watch, but it can quickly become panicked if a candle won’t light, so we have sessions in the space to make sure the cast all feel comfortable with lighting and holding candles. Open flames can be dangerous, so in these sessions, actors are reminded not to use petroleum based hair products, lest they go up in flames!

There are numerous challenges and quirks that come with candlelight. For example, a blackout can feel intense in a normal theatre, but in the playhouse, we also must keep in mind the fact that everyone is very close together, and that the smell of beeswax and sometimes incense can add another layer of intensity. This makes the use of darkness more of a statement. It’s pretty difficult to do in the middle of a half because you then have to work out a way to bring a lot of light back in to the space. However, we’re very fortunate that our director, Nick Bagnall, has a lot of experience of working in the playhouse. He’s able to quickly turn these challenges to our advantage, reinforcing the principle of seeing candlelight not as a restriction but as a unique opportunity.

Edward II opens in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse on 7 February. 

Staging Renaissance plays in the 21st century: Meanings of words.

George Nichols is the Assistant Director for Edward IIandAfter Edward. He is writing a blog series about the processes and ideas in these two plays.

In this blog, George discusses the meaning of words, how they have changed and what impact that has on stage. In further blogs, he looks at understanding the etiquette of the time the play is set (14th century) and the importance of the Church and the feudal system.  

Edward II was written in the 16th century, set in the early 14th century and will be performed to a 21st-century audience in a building that has the central goal of recreating the performance conditions of the early modern stage.  

This convoluted series of perspectives brings with it a number of challenges and questions. For example, how do we deal with obscure allusions and references? How do we work with words that are no longer in common usage or now have different meanings? How do we stage peculiar and antiquated codes of etiquette from the day?

Meanings

It sounds obvious, but the Oxford English Dictionary can be one of your most valuable tools in staging renaissance drama. In the full OED you can not only find the definition of every word in existence but the changing usage of each word through the last 1000 years. Of course, if a word has an archaic definition it’s unlikely the audience will know that no matter how the line is played. However, knowing the precise definitions of words and occasionally their dual meanings can give us insight into the relationships between characters, illuminate jokes, or crystallise meaning.  Take, for example, the word ‘minion’. This is the kind of word that we think we know. A cursory Google search brings up the definition:

a follower or underling of a powerful person, especially a servile or unimportant one.

This is how we would mostly use this word today (Despicable Me films aside). However, if you look up this word in the full OED you get, among others, the following definitions:

1. A (usually male) favourite of a sovereign, prince, or other powerful person; a person who is dependent on a patron’s favour; a hanger-on.
2. A male or female lover. Also (frequently derogatory): a man or woman kept for sexual favours; a mistress or paramour.
3. A fastidious or effeminate man; a fop, a dandy.

All of these were in usage when Edward II was performed, and so the fact that Isabella frequently calls Edward’s male lover Gaveston ‘minion’ takes on a new significance. It tells us more about what those at court think about the relationship between Gaveston and Edward, not only from the perspective of sexuality but also of what is proper from a hierarchical perspective.

It’s often the words you think you know that yield up the most interesting rewards. From other productions I have worked on I can remember us finding out the word ‘fire’ was synonymous with venereal disease. Some of this knowledge will not be helpful for the audience, but most of it can offer the actor a new perspective on the lines they are playing.

Edward II, written by Christopher Marlowe will be directed by Nick Bagnall. After Edward, a contemporary response to Marlowe’s piece was written by Tom Stuart and will be directed by Brendan O'Hea. Tom will play Edward in both productions. The cast will be the same for both plays.

Staging Renaissance plays in the 21st century: Church and the Feudal system. 

George Nichols is the Assistant Director for Edward IIandAfter Edward. He is writing a blog series about the processes and ideas in these two plays.

In this blog, George discusses the relevance of the Church and the Feudal system in 14th century England. In further blogs, he looks at the importance of understanding the etiquette of the time the play is set and the meaning of words and how they have evolved.

Edward II was written in the 16th century, set in the early 14th century and will be performed to a 21st-century audience in a building that has the central goal of recreating the performance conditions of the early modern stage.  

This convoluted series of perspectives brings with it a number of challenges and questions. For example, how do we deal with obscure allusions and references? How do we work with words that are no longer in common usage or now have different meanings? How do we stage peculiar and antiquated codes of etiquette from the day?

Church and the Feudal system 

In the medieval period, societal order was structured in a hierarchical triangle known as the feudal system. At the top we have the king, believed to be appointed by the church and god; the king’s right to rule and the right of his heir to inherit the throne is known as the divine right of kings. This was common knowledge among our company, however, something we knew less about was the specific relationship between the church and monarchy. You can see from the diagram above that this hierarchy is supposedly ordained by God, but what happens if a king wants to get rid of an archbishop or make changes to the church? The answer to this is more convoluted as the king and the church seem to validate each other. If a king wants to be rid of an archbishop they must get permission from Rome, and when the monarch tried to do things like tax the church or change its structure Rome often voiced its displeasure.

In our cut of Edward II, we’ve tried to bring the church to the fore, partly for clarity of storytelling and partly because it’s a fascinating aspect of the play. But how does the above research contribute to the way we stage Edward II?

Well, something we grasp from both Marlowe’s play and the real life of Edward II is that civil war and deposition were highly unusual and that the stakes of this play must be extremely high. From our research, we know that the final power the church had available was to excommunicate the King, and thus end the divine right of his successors. By using this, or at least being aware of it in the scenes between the Archbishop of Canterbury and King Edward, we can heighten the stakes and ramp up the tension for the audience.

Edward II, written by Christopher Marlowe will be directed by Nick Bagnall. After Edward, a contemporary response to Marlowe’s piece was written by Tom Stuart and will be directed by Brendan O'Hea. Tom will play Edward in both productions. The cast will be the same for both plays.

Staging Renaissance plays in the 21st century: Etiquette.

George Nichols is the Assistant Director for Edward IIandAfter Edward. He is writing a blog series about the processes and ideas in these two plays.

In this blog George looks at the importance of understanding the etiquette of the time the play is set. In further blogs he discusses the relevance of the Church and Feudal system in 14th century England and the meaning of words and how they have evolved.

Edward II was written in the 16th century, set in the early 14th century and will be performed to a 21st-century audience in a building that has the central goal of recreating the performance conditions of the early modern stage. This convoluted series of perspectives brings with it a number of challenges and questions. For example, how do we deal with obscure allusions and references? How do we work with words that are no longer in common usage or now have different meanings? How do we stage peculiar and antiquated codes of etiquette from the day?

Not only is it difficult to answer these questions because we’re making our best-educated guesses about the world the play was written in, but also because Marlowe was writing about a period he likewise didn’t live in.

Engaging with these questions is something at the heart of what the Globe experiment is all about, and in week one of rehearsals for Edward II they’ve certainly been a central preoccupation of ours. As the assistant director, a lot of the responsibilities of research fall to me. Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been doing a lot of work on the etiquette of the court during the 14th century, the relationship between church and monarchy, the feudal system and 16th-century definition of words with the intention of contributing to the fabric of the world of the play. We’ve then worked to interpret what is most important about this information and how it can best be translated or used to create a coherent and, of course, enjoyable production.

Etiquette 

Etiquette from the 14th century is positively barmy, although they might say the same thing about today. It’s easy to forget that we still obey a code of etiquette that we perceive as innate behaviour, but which is actually socially determined; just think about the way we queue, the way we dress or the way we behave in the workplace.

In medieval England, there were a number of writings about proper conduct for people from all different walks of life. Some of these instructions sound ridiculous, for example in Daniel Beccles 3000 word poem The Etiquette of Man, it stipulates:

In front of grandees, do not openly excavate your nostril by twisting your fingers.

And in The Book of Courtesy it says:

Don’t put up at a red (haired and faced) man or woman’s house.

These are some of the silliest examples, but if we get bogged down in etiquette then we can quickly end up in a place where the play becomes difficult to stage, and where we leave the audience thoroughly confused. What’s important is to understand the role etiquette plays in Edward II and how we can best use it to tell the story effectively. By working on when the rules are followed and when they are broken, we can emphasise a threat to social order, an integral theme of the play.

Edward II, written by Christopher Marlowe will be directed by Nick Bagnall. After Edward, a contemporary response to Marlowe’s piece was written by Tom Stuart and will be directed by Brendan O'Hea. Tom will play Edward in both productions. The cast will be the same for both plays. 

Shame. 

George Nichols is the Assistant Director for Edward IIandAfter Edward. He is writing a blog series about the processes and ideas in these two plays.

Edward II, written by Christopher Marlowe will be directed by Nick Bagnall. After Edward, a contemporary response to Marlowe’s piece was written by Tom Stuart and will be directed by Brendan O'Hea. Tom will play Edward in both productions. The cast will be the same for both plays.

‘You can marry, you can adopt, you can say you’re gay in the workplace, but what about the things we haven’t had to time to deal with? The insidious things like shame that affect us silently every day?’

It’s the first week of rehearsals for After Edward,a production that will be performed in tandem with Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. After Edward is a new play, written by Tom Stuart (who will be playing Edward) and featuring a cast that will run across both productions. We’re talking a lot about the relationship between Tom’s play and Marlowe’s and what unites them across a void of 400 years and what makes them so important for audiences today.

Some background. Edward II, the central character of Marlowe’s play, has a same-sex romantic relationship with, among others, Piers Gaveston. It’s an amazing play, not least for what it tells about gender and sexuality in the Renaissance period in which the play was written, and the earlier 14^th century when the play was set. A big question we’re grappling with this week is what connects the experiences of Edward II, Marlowe and a gay man living in the modern era?

Each of these different periods has a vastly different perspective on gender and sexuality (something we’ll cover in the next blog) and so each of these people will have had a vastly different experience. In fact, in the era the play was written people weren’t labeled because of the acts they committed; all people were considered capable of all things and so an act didn’t define an individual. Yet one thing that remains true across the last 700 years is that at no point has the preference for same-sex relationships been a societal norm. Whether homosexuality has been accepted, tolerated, persecuted or hidden the society we live in has primarily been designed with white heterosexual men in mind.

The effect that living up to a hetero-normative ideal has on the individual that doesn’t fit is something that resonates throughout these plays. That effect is, among other things, shame.

We’re fortunate that our company is made up of people with different personal perspectives on gender and sexuality. At some point though, we can all attest to having felt shame of some kind at being unable to live up to an ideal that is thrust upon us.

Despite the progress that can be said to have been made in the 21^st century, for the plethora of people who do not identify with heterosexual ‘norms’ it can be impossible to see oneself in the surrounding cultural and social environment. Just think of something like the couplings on Strictly Come Dancingor the way the sex education in schools is almost entirely based around the heterosexual experience. Not seeing yourself in the world can have the impact of making you feel that the life you want to live is not only abnormal but wrong.

Later in the week, we talk to Dr. Will Tosh from the Globe’s Research Department about how some productions eschew the homosexuality within Edward II entirely and make Gaveston and Edward’s relationship platonic. We agree this is a shame. One of the great connections we have found with both Edward II andAfter Edwardis how important they both are for allowing people to see themselves in the culture around them. As one of the company says, with regards to their first reading of After Edward:‘I wish I had seen this play when I was growing up’.

Tom began this week by telling us a story of him standing in Berkley Castle, where Edward II was executed, and looking around and thinking ‘this is where it happened, this is where he was, he would have seen this light and felt this darkness’. In After Edward,the characters often come back to the idea that they are just one part of a long and never-ending line; from the pornographic petroglyphs unearthed by archaeologists to Edward II himself. In the modern world, we live in it is important that these lives and stories are shared and celebrated, and that we make the world a place where no one feels shame for who they are or the life they lead. It’s essential that this belief is a guiding principle of the work we create and the culture we share.

Edward II/After Edward Cast.

Edward IIandAfter Edwardwill be performed by the same cast of actors. Nick Bagnall will direct Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II and Brendan O’Hea will direct After Edward, written by Tom Stuart in response to Edward II.  

Examining ancestral relationships and notions of identity, sexuality and power, Marlowe’s Edward II sees King Edward recall his lover, Gaveston, from banishment, setting in motion a chain of events that culminate in some of the most shocking scenes in early modern theatre.

Tom Stuart’s new play After Edward, written specifically for the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse in response to Edward II, sees Edward return to the stage alone, bloodied and confused. He has no idea where he is, or how he got here, but he does have an ominous feeling that something is wrong.

Annette Badland will play Mortimer Senior in Edward II and Gertrude Stein in After Edward

Richard Bremmer will play Archbishop of Canterbury/ Spencer Senior in Edward II and  Archbishop of Canterbury/Leather Man in After Edward 

Richard Cant will play Earl of Lancaster in Edward II and Quentin Crisp in After Edward 

Polly Frame will play Earl of Kent in Edward II and Harvey Milk in After Edward 

Jonathan Livingstone will play Mortimer Junior in Edward II and Edward Alleyn in After Edward 

Sanchia McCormack will play Earl of Warwick in Edward II and Margaret Thatcher in After Edward 

Colin Ryan will play Spencer Junior in Edward II and Cowboy in After Edward 

Tom Stuart will play Edward II in Edward II and Edward in After Edward 

Beru Tessema will play Gaveston in both Edward II and After Edward 

Katie West will play Queen Isabella in Edward II and Dorothy Gale and Maria Von Trapp in After Edward 

TheEdward II Company will also include: 

Nick Bagnall as Director 
Bill Barclay as Composer 
Kevin McCurdy as Fight Director 
George Nicholls as Assistant Director 
Wayne Parsons as Choreographer 
Jessica Worrall as Designer

TheAfter Edward Company will also include:

Laura Moody as Composer
George Nichols as Assistant Director
Brendan O’Hea as Director
Tom Stuart as Writer 
Siân Williams as Choreographer
Jessica Worrall as Designer

Edward II opens in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse on 7 February. 

After Edward opens in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse on 21 March.