‘In Praise of Inauthenticity: Updating Mankind & The Marriage of Wit and Wisdom’
The past is not simply a given body of facts, which
presents itself to us fully formed, but that it is also
a construct and, hence, the product of present con-
cerns as well as past events.1
This paper originates from the experience we have gained from producing and directing mediaeval and Tudor plays over the past seven years. When founding The Mediaeval Drama Group at the University of Dundee (Scotland), the original intention was to stage these dramas as ‘authentically’ as possible. Our staging practices combined elements from both the categories of mediaeval drama identified by Lynette Muir in her book The biblical drama of medieval Europe:
In the English-speaking world, this ‘medieval’ drama [i.e.as it has been performed in the 20th/21st centuries] can be divided into two kinds: the first includes those productions which follow the medieval tradition of community, usually (but not essentially) amateur, drama, often with a church or other religious background. The text of these plays is usually modernised...Less medieval in inspiration though more accurately medieval in text are the ‘reproductions’ by academics which seek to recreate productions and costumes as well as the language of the originals.2
Eventually, however, we came to feel restricted by the notion of authentic staging, and began to ask the question posed by Susan Bennett in her study on performances of Shakespeare in the 1980s and 1990s: ‘...[are] there, in fact, new ways to play old texts [?]’3 Our own move towards ‘inauthentic’ stagings of early drama was also fuelled by our belief that, fundamentally, there is no possibility of fully reproducing the playing or reception of works other than those of our own times. ‘Reproductions’, to use Muir’s term, are as much products ‘of present concerns as well as past events.’ This was verified as early as 1901, when the first attempt was made to reclaim mediaeval drama from the dustbin of history. William Poel’s now legendary production of Everyman was, in the words of John Marshall, ‘essentially Victorian rather than medieval.’4
Restoring Mankind
Recently, our own preferred method of staging moralities and moral interludes has been to transpose them to a less than contemporary setting; thus enabling us to forego the tyranny of authenticity altogether! One advantage to our approach is that it still allows for the historical distancing necessary for engagement with the didactic concerns of these plays. At the same time, it seems somehow easier to elicit an intellectual and emotional involvement from both actor and audience when the plays are done in this way. Our 1999 production of Mankind is a case in point.5 The decision to set the play in ‘Restoration Comedy mode’ meant that the audience could more readily ‘read’ the characters of the 3 Ns (every inch symbols of ‘the new guise and the new jet’, l. 103) by their foppish, self-satisfied and extravagant appearance. High-piled, beribboned periwigs in bold colours, white make-up, beauty spots, flamboyant dress and movement inhibiting shoes demonstrated the playwright’s conception of the evils of fashionableness, frivolity and ‘vogue-ness’ more clearly than ‘authentic’ costuming.6 And their treacherous, ‘idle language’ (l. 147), so objected to by Mercy, as illustrated by the following exchange [show video clip here],
MERCY Say me your names. I know you not.
NEWGUISE Newguise, I.
NOWADAYS I, Nowadays.
NOUGHT I, Nought.
MERCY By Jesu Christ, that me dear bought,
Ye betray many men!
NEWGUISE Betray? Nay, nay, sir, nay, nay!
We make them both fresh and gay.
But of your name, sir, I you pray,
That we may you ken.
MERCY Mercy is my name and my denomination.
I conceive ye have but a little favour in my communication.
NEWGUISE Ey, ey, your body is full of English Latin,
I am afeard it will brest.
‘Pravo te’, quod the butcher unto me
When I stole a leg o’mutton.
You are a strong cunning clerk.
(Ll. 114-130)
anticipates the irreverent dialogue of much Restoration Comedy. Compare, for example, the above exchange with one typical of George Etherege’s The Man of Mode, or Sir Fopling Flutter (1676), another play clearly interested in exploring the topics of fashion and frivolity through characters with significant names:
HAR[RIET] What are these masquerades who stand so obsequiously
at a distance?
SIR FOP[LING] A set of baladines whom I picked out of the best in
France, and bought over with a flutes douces or two, my servants;
they shall entertain you.
HAR[RIET] I had rather see you dance yourself, Sir Fopling.
SIR FOP[LING] And I had rather do it – all the company knows it.
But madam,--
MED[LEY] Come, come, no excuses, Sir Fopling.
SIR FOP[LING] By heavens, Medley, --
MED[LEY] Like a woman, I find you must be struggled with before one
brings you to what you desire.
HAR[RIET] (Aside) Can he dance?
EMIL[IA] And fence and sing too, if you’ll believe him.
DOR[IMANT] He has no more excellence in his heels than in his head.
He went to Paris a plain, bashful English blockhead, and is returned
a fine, undertaking French fop.
(IV, i,)7
As the passage above illustrates, references to singing, dancing and other pastimes associated with idleness and vice are frequent in Restoration Comedy. This is, again, something that the genre shares with a morality like Mankind. At one point in the play, for example, an exit by the 3 Ns is indicated by the stage direction (SD) ‘Exeant simul. Cantent’ (l. 160): the playwright commands them to leave together and to sing as they do so. At SD 81 we find the same characters dancing, and Nought soon after charges Mercy to do the same. Mercy refuses, of course, as he is the epitome of virtue:
MERCY Nay, brother, I will not dance.
NEWGUISE If ye will, sir, my brother will make you to prance.
(Ll. 90-91)
The bawdy (not to say controversial) comment about women made by Medley in The Man of Mode (‘Like a woman, I find you must be struggled with before one brings you to what you desire’), a sentiment which portrays the relationship between the sexes as a battle, is also worth mentioning as it seems a curious echo of Nowadays’ statement that
Also, I have a wife (her name is Rachel)
Betwixt her and me was a great battle,
And fain of you I would hear tell
Who was the most master.
(Ll. 136-9)
For reasons such as those stated above, the translation of Mankind into a Restoration Comedy seemed particularly appropriate, the setting greatly enhancing the contrast between Mankind’s attempt at honest work and the overt idleness of the sixteenth-century fops, the 3 Ns. It is also relevant to mention here that the comedy produced on the Restoration stage often served as a mirror for its contemporary audience as
...such a comedy bore a natural resemblance to the society
which gave it birth....It was totally averse to reflecting on
the mystery of life or the problems of destiny. It was in-
terested only in itself and its own superficial amusements.8
Once Mankind is transposed to the mid seventeenth-century, this definition may, in turn, also offer a clue as to the reasons why the 3 Ns (at least initially) find some measure of success not only with Mankind but with the wider audience of the play as well. As Peter Meredith has noted, ‘Their method is distraction, just as the world distracts man from spiritual concerns.’9 This having been said, it seems only fair to point out that the major difficulty with our production was, inevitably, with the role of Mercy. How was it possible to locate this ‘figure of divine authority, an attribute of God himself’10 within a Restoration context? The play itself offers no explicit information as to how he should be costumed. In the end, we took what might seem the easy (if admittedly historically anomalous) option and dressed him as a quasi-mediaeval religious figure.11
Wit and Wisdom in the 1930s
In 2000, we wrenched Francis Merbury’s moral interlude The Marriage Between Wit and Wisdom out of the 1570s and deposited it in the 1930s. This was, after all, at least on celluloid, the era of the gangster and the petty criminal, of the cocktail and, if Dennis Potter’s Pennies from Heaven is anything to go by, of the rise of popular music. In Wit and Wisdom, the criminality of The Vice, Idleness (who is sent ‘the counterfeit crank for to play’ l. 108), and his cohort Wantonness (whose unborn child has ‘fathers at large’, l. 175) were especially easy to transpose to a seedy underworld setting.12 The bawdy, lawless and, in their dark tormenting of Idleness in the mock mumming sequence, violent sailors, Snatch and Catch, also fitted neatly into this environment, as did the ‘corrupt official’ Search who dupes The Vice out of his fee of eightpence and runs away with his money (SD 535). Thus, at times, our production came to seem like the director’s cut of The Three Penny Opera. This mood was further enhanced by our setting of the songs from Wit and Wisdom to tunes reminiscent of those by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht. Snatch and Catch’s song, with its talk of ‘hunger and cold’, lent itself particularly well to this mood:
I hath been told, been told in proverbs old
That soldiers suffer both hunger and cold,
That soldiers suffer both hunger and cold;
And this sing we, and this sing we,
We live by spoil, by spoil, we moil and toil;
Thus Snatch and Catch doth keep a coil!
And thus live we, and thus live we,
By snatching a(nd) catching, thus live we.
We come from sea, from sea, from many a fray,
To pilling and polling every day,
To pilling and polling every day:
And thus skip we, and thus skip we,
And over the hatches thus skip we.
(Ll. 268-280)
The ultimate triumph of good over this motley crew of adversaries occurs in the tenth and final scene, where the marriage of Wit and Wisdom is anticipated. Severity, Wit’s father, confirms the union when he declares: ‘Come, now! The time requires that we depart away/To celebrate the nuptials with joy, this wedding-day!’ (Ll. 755-56). We staged this scene in the world of cocktails and turned it into the grand finale of a popular musical. The entire cast assembled on stage as wedding guests, complete with confetti, and finally exited to the strains of the wedding march [show video clip here].
Glynne Wickham includes Wit and Wisdom in his edition of a selection of English Moral Interludes and speaks here of ‘the awkward questions that can...arise about the play’s time scheme and matters of naturalistic detail.’13 Such ‘awkward questions’ are largely dispelled once the play is transposed to a complementary historical setting. An attempt was made in 1984, in a modern dress production of the play performed at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, to update Wit and Wisdom even further than we had done. Good Nurture became a University lecturer and Honest Recreation (who was a mime and a bit of a Chaplanesque figure in our version) a PE teacher. It was noted at the time that
The performance [at the Hebrew University] was a convincing
and conclusive argument for the stageability of interludes and
the possibility of transferring them beyond their natural habitat
– but at a cost.14
Ultimately, the individual audience member will decide for him or herself what the ‘cost’ of our eager embracing of inauthenticity is.
J.-A. George
&
Anna Spackman
University of Dundee
Endnotes
1 John Baxendale & Christopher Pawling, Narrating the Thirties, A Decade in the Making: 1930 to the Present (London: Macmillan Press, 1996), p. 168.
Press, 1995), pp. 169-70.
3 Richard Danson Brown & David Johnson, eds., A Shakespeare Reader:
Sources and Criticism (London: Macmillan Press, 2000), p. 312.
Beadle (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre (Cam-
bridge University Press, 1994), p. 290.
play (Alumnus Playtexts in Performance, 1997).
‘morality play’ or ‘morality’, to describe a certain kind of fifteenth and
sixteenth century English play, were – as is well known – invented in
the eighteenth century...’. This is taken from his article ‘The ‘Morality
Play’: Dead End or Main Street’ in Medieval English Theatre 18 (1996):
p. 3.
Restoration Plays (London: Dent, 1992).
(ed.), Restoration Drama: Modern Essays in Criticism (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1966), p. 33.