The Roaring Girl

Everyone knows that during the Jacobean period all actors were male and women never ever appeared on stage... except when they did.

I'm not talking about masques, which were held in private for the court and featured aristocrats (and even royalty) rather than professional actresses. I'm also not talking about foreign companies that allowed actresses to perform at special exhibitions and were booed by English audiences for it, though that happened, too.

No, I'm talking about Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton's comedy The Roaring Girl, which told the story of the real-life female criminal Mary Frith, better known as Moll Cutpurse. The play was acted at the Fortune Theatre and later published in 1611. Middleton wrote a brief preface in which he alluded to Frith's crossdressing, stating: "Venus being a woman passes through the play in doublet and breeches, a brave disguise and a safe one, if the statute untie not her codpiece point."

But was Middleton alluding to more than just the depiction of crossdressing on stage? In addition to the play being published in 1611, in that same year a confession of Frith's was recorded, in which she claimed to have appeared upon the public stage. Frith said not only had she gone to the Fortune Theatre dressed as a man, but she had "also sat there upon the stage in public view of all the people there present in man's apparel and played upon her lute and sang a song." (She flatly denied, however, being "dishonest of her body" or drawing "other women to lewdness.")

In what play did Frith appear? Chances are, her own. In the second act of The Roaring Girl, the character of Moll Cutpurse enters "in a frieze jerkin." Was this Frith? Possibly, but more likely she played the porter, who enters with Moll in a later scene "with a viol on his back." The porter asks, "Must I carry this great fiddle to your chamber, Mistress Mary?" This would allow Frith some time on stage with a musical instrument (as she claimed to have) but not require her to learn too many lines.

On the other hand, it is not the porter but the character of Moll herself who sings in Act IV. One verse of her song goes:

        Here comes a wench will brave ye.

            Her courage was so great,

        She lay with one o' the navy,

            Her husband lying i' the Fleet.

        Yet oft with him she cavilled,

            I wonder what she ails.

        Her husband's ship lay gravelled,

            When hers could hoise up sails,

        Yet she began like all my foes

        To call whore first: for so do those,

            A pox of all false tails.

That certainly sounds like something a real-life criminal like Frith might have enjoyed roaring out on stage.

The Moll Cutpurse of the play, rather like the actual Mary Frith, who confessed to some crimes while denying others, defends herself in the final act. She compares herself to a traveler recently returning from Venice who heard about all of the tricks of panders and courtesans and now warns others against them. She asks others not to condemn her just because of her ill name. Could these line have been spoken by Frith herself?

While we can't be sure, the play's epilogue drops some juicy hints. It ends with the poets and actors saying,

        Both crave your pardons: if what both have done

        Cannot full pay your expectation,

        The Roaring Girl herself, some few days hence,

        Shall on this stage give larger recompense.

        Which mirth that you may share in, herself does woo you,

        And craves the sign, your hands to beckon her to you.

Perhaps Frith actually made good on that promise.

The Decameron

Like a number of people enduring the quarantine of the present plague, I've been working my way through reading The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio. I knew that the book's hundred tales had made a profound impact on literature in general, but I hadn't realized how important they were to the theater.

The framing device of The Decameron concerns seven women and three men who flee Florence during the Black Death. Outside of the city, with little else to do, they begin telling stories. Each of them tells a story on the first day, and over the course of ten days, they recite a total of one hundred stories, ten stories for each teller.

A woman named Pampinea gets the storytelling rolling by challenging everyone on the first day to tell a tale about whatever pleases them best. Panfilo tells the first story, about a scoundrel who is thought a saint, and then Neifile tells a tale about the debauchery in the Pope's court in Rome. It is the third tale, told by Filomena, however, that caught my attention, since it relates the same story as Ephraim Lessing's Nathan the Wise.

In Boccaccio's version, the story is set in Alexandria, rather than Jerusalem, but the general idea is the same as in Lessing's play. Saladin, the Sultan who ruled the Islamic world during the twelfth century, is looking to borrow money from a wealthy Jewish merchant. Testing him, Saladin asks which religion is truly authentic: Judaism, Christianity, or Islam. Knowing that there is no safe way to answer with any of these three, the merchant comes up with a parable to tell that gets him out of the predicament.

Lessing's version makes Saladin more sympathetic, and uses the merchant's parable as a general plea for religious tolerance. Still, many of the elements of the play are present in the tale Filomena delivers in The Decameron. This story is not the only one, however, that later provided fodder for drama. On the second day, Filomena challenges everyone to tell a story about someone who after suffering many misfortunes, finds unexpected happiness. Hmm... that sounds like a Shakespearean Romance.

And in fact, Filomena's own tale on the second day provided much of the plot for William Shakespeare's Cymbeline. Shakespeare did not necessarily read The Decameron directly, since some details in the play aren't in the original, but do appear in a Dutch version of the story called Frederyke of Jennen. The outline of the plot is still there, though. A man foolishly makes a wager on his wife's chastity, and then a villain hides in a trunk that gets carried into the lady's room. Creeping out at night, he examines the room, takes a ring of hers, and examines an unusual mark on her breast. Proof positive that he vanquished her virtue!

Of course, that's not how the story ends, either in Boccaccio or in Shakespeare. After hearing what sounds like incontrovertible proof of his wife's infidelity, the husband orders a servant to kill her. The servant doesn't have the heart to commit the deed, and instead of murdering her, he gives her a set of male clothes so she can escape unseen and reports the murder to her husband. In the climax of the tale, the lady reveals herself to her husband and exposes the villain. Shakespeare's innovation was to combine the tale with the legend of a British king who appears in Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles, along with some events from the anonymous Elizabethan play Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune.

Filomena's tale on the third day contains some wonderful humor as she describes a woman getting a friar to unknowingly arrange trysts between herself and her lover. Molière incorporated elements of the tale in his play The School for Husbands. The ninth story of the third day is given by Neifile, and it provides the ultimate source of Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well. Again, the Bard appears to have used an intermediary source, probably William Painter's Palace of Pleasure. Shakespeare also seems to have invented the role of the braggart coward Parolles, which is arguably the best role in the play.

On the fourth day, the stories concern those whose love ended unhappily, but these tales did not provide the inspiration for Romeo and Juliet. Instead, Filomena's tale became the basis of the poem "Isabella, or the Pot of Basil" by John Keats. The fourth tale of the fifth day also apparently provided material for Lope de Vega's play The Nightingale of Seville, though I haven't read that one.

Other dramatists who have retold tales from The Decameron include Thomas Middleton, Apostolo Zeno, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Perhaps during our present quarantine, Boccaccio will inspire more plays. Now if we could only open the theaters to let them be performed....

The White Devil

John Webster's play The White Devil is a bit of a mess. Webster usually collaborated as a playwright, and The White Devil, which premiered at the Red Bull Theatre in 1612, might have been his first solo work, which could explain its rather complicated nature.

The plot, based loosely on events surrounding the historical Italian noblewoman Vittoria Accoramboni, is ridiculously complicated, and filled with the fantastical instruments of death Webster helped to make popular in Jacobean revenge tragedies. According to the play's printed preface, it was a failure when first performed at the open-air Red Bull. When it was revived at the indoor Cockpit Theatre in 1630, however, it was a success.

Webster seems to have been ahead of his time. The play requires the intimacy of a small, indoor theatre to get its full effect, and it looks forward to other bloody revenge tragedies like Thomas Middleton's Women Beware Women, Middleton and William Rowley's The Changeling, and Webster's own The Duchess of Malfi, as well as John Ford's masterpiece 'Tis Pity She's a Whore. A portrait is perfumed with poison, and when a woman kisses it, she is murdered. A death is faked with bullet-less pistols. In the final bloody slaughter, a brother and sister bound to a pillar meet their ends with tragic defiance.

Years ago, when I saw the show performed by the Pittsburgh Irish and Classical Theatre, it was a revelation. In spite of the labyrinthine plot, I was able to follow every twist and turn. When a conjuror had a character put on a charmed nightcap and see visions of murders being committed far away, the audience just went with it. Seeing the dumb shows performed before our very eyes in a dark, intimate space, created an atmosphere charged with electricity. We were being treated to a glimpse of what might have happened in the Cockpit so many years ago. The costumes were a mixture of modern and period, but the feel of the play was pure magic.

I was very excited when I heard that the Red Bull Theater Company was going to be doing The White Devil this year. The company is named for the open-air playhouse where the show was first performed, and Red Bull specializes in the Jacobean aesthetic. Lately, the company has strayed a bit from its mission statement to focus on Jacobean drama and related work, stretching concepts of Jacobean aesthetic to produce such plays as Nikolai Gogol's The Government Inspector. They usually do good work, though, and while I was a bit surprised that Red Bull founder Jesse Berger wouldn't be directing, the director for The White Devil, Louisa Proske, has a long list of opera credits, so I remained hopeful.

While the play is still worth seeing, it didn't quite measure up to the Pittsburgh production of my memory. The piece is done entirely modern, with beautiful contemporary costumes designed by Beth Goldenberg. Virtual Reality goggles replace the charmed nightcap, and a tournament becomes a video game the characters play in celebration. The opening scene takes on the feeling of a video conference call, with a massive projection of a character's face on the set. The video, complete with intentional slips into poor quality for verisimilitude, isn't poorly done, but the production tends to lean on it like a crutch.

There are some good performances, though, chief among them Derek Smith as Lodovico, the banished count who enacts revenge upon Vittoria and her brother Flamineo. Lisa Birnbaum is stunning as Vittoria, the titular White Devil, though that part can be upstaged by the role of her cunning brother Flamineo, played here by Broadway veteran Tommy Schrider. The other part that tends to shine is Monticelso, the powerful cardinal who later becomes pope in the play. Robert Cuccioli plays the churchman with a perfect mixture of gravitas and hypocrisy.

The White Devil isn't the only literary work to tell the story of the ill-fated Vittoria. The French novelist Stendhal and the German Romantic Ludwig Tieck both had their own takes on the 16th-century beauty who came from a family of impoverished nobility, went to Rome to make her fortune, and married the nephew of a cardinal. The powerful Duke of Bracciano fell in love with her, and her husband ended up murdered, probably with the help of Vittoria's own brother.

That history is closely followed by Webster's play, though The White Devil does take some liberties later on for dramatic effect. If you'd like to see it on stage, check out the Red Bull Theater website. You can also put in for $20 rush tickets through TodayTix, though you might have to pay some pretty steep fees.

Witches' Songs

The text of Macbeth calls for two songs that are also in Thomas Middleton's play The Witch. Though The Witch seems to have been written after Macbeth, many critics believe the songs are by Middleton, as full lyrics appear in The Witch and Macbeth simply gives the first lines of the songs in stage directions.

Most likely, they were a later addition to Macbeth made by theatre professionals always looking to utilize a popular song if it could serve their purposes. Of course there are other possibilities as well. Maybe Shakespeare wrote the songs, and Middleton incorporated them into his own play, of perhaps the lyrics were written by a member of Shakespeare's company who contributed to both plays.

The first song, "Come away, come away," occurs at the end of Act III, scene 5 of Macbeth. Here's how the song appears in Act III, scene 3 of Middleton's play:

               WITCHES: Come away, come away, 
               Hecate, Hecate, come away. 
               HECATE: I come, I come, I come, I come, 
               With all the speed I may, 
               With all the speed I may, 
               Where's Stadlin? 
               STADLIN: Here. 
               HECATE: Where's Puckle? 
               PUCKLE: Here. 
               WITCHES: And Hoppo, too, and Hellwain, too; 
               We lack but you, we lack but you. 
               Come away, make up the count. 
               HECATE: I will but 'noint, and then I mount.

                              A spirit like a cat descends.

               WITCHES: There's one comes down to fetch his dues, 
               A kiss, a coll, a sip of blood, 
               And why thou stay'st so long 
               I muse, I muse, 
               Since the air's so sweet and good. 
               HECATE: Oh, art thou come? 
               What news, what news? 
               MALKIN: All goes still to our delight, 
               Either come or else 
               Refuse, refuse. 
               HECATE: Now I am furnish'd for the flight.
               FIRESTONE: Hark, hark, the cat sings a brave treble in her own language!
               HECATE, going up: Now I go, now I fly, 
               Malkin my sweet spirit and I. 
               Oh, what a dainty pleasure 'tis 
               To ride in the air 
               When the moon shines fair 
               And sing, and dance, and toy, and kiss; 
               Over woods, high rocks, and mountains, 
               Over seas, over misty fountains, 
               Over steeples, towers, and turrets, 
               We fly by night, 'mongst troops of spirits. 
               No ring of bells to our ears sounds, 
               No howls of wolves, no yelps of hounds, 
               No, not the noise of water's breach 
               Or cannon's throat our height can reach. 
               No ring of bells, etc.

The other song, "Black Spirits," appears at the beginning of Act IV in Macbeth, which also has the famous "Double, Double Toil and Trouble" song. This fact has led some scholars to speculate that Middleton wrote that song as well, along with perhaps other passages in Macbeth. There's no external evidence for that theory, but lack of evidence has rarely stopped fans of Middleton from attributing all sort of things to him.

Whether "Black Spirits" was written by Shakespeare, Middleton, or someone else, here's how it appears in Act V, scene 2 of The Witches:

               HECATE: Black spirits and white, red spirits and grey, 
               Mingle, mingle, mingle, you that mingle may. 
               Titty, Tiffin, keep it stiff in. 
               Firedrake, Puckey, make it lucky. 
               Liard, Robin, you must bob in. 
               Round, around, around, about, about, 
               All ill come running in, all good keep out. 
               FIRST WITCH: Here's the blood of a bat. 
               HECATE: Put in that, oh, put in that. 
               SECOND WITCH: Here's libbard's bane. 
               HECATE: Put in again. 
               FIRST WITCH: The juice of toad, the oil of adder. 
               SECOND WITCH: Those will make the younker madder. 
               HECATE: Put in; there's all, and rid the stench. 
               FIRESTONE: Nay, here's three ounces of the red-hair'd wench. 
               ALL: Round, around, around, about, about, 
               All ill come running in, all good keep out.

Regardless of who wrote the songs, the fact that two plays by different dramatists shared some of the same material probably tells us something about playwriting and theatre production during the Jacobean era. Authorship was complicated, and companies had few qualms about recycling material. When directors today incorporate modern songs into Shakespeare's plays, they might be doing something similar to what Shakespeare's own company did hundreds of years ago.

British Romanticism

British Romantic writers were frequently inspired by what their colleagues were doing in Germany, but they also created their own version of Romanticism.

The watershed moment for the Romantic movement in Britain was William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge publishing their joint poetry collection Lyrical Ballads in 1798. Before publishing Lyrical Ballads, however, both Wordsworth and Coleridge read German writers of the Storm and Stress movement, and incidentally enough, both wrote their own plays, hoping to have them produced in London.

After being rejected by Covent Garden, Wordsworth seems to have ceased to have ambitions for the stage, not publishing his drama The Borderers until 1842. Coleridge, on the other hand, clung to his play Osorio, recycling two passages from it to provide the poems "The Foster-Mother's Tale" and "The Dungeon" in Lyrical Ballads. Later, he rewrote the play as Remorse, getting it finally staged at Drury Lane in 1813.

For both Englishmen and observers on the European continent, the soul of British Romanticism was expressed in one extraordinary person, George Gordon, known as Lord Byron. Byron was instrumental in getting Remorse staged at Drury Lane, and he undoubtedly influenced Charles Robert Maturin's tragedy Bertram, which features a dark, brooding hero-villain, perhaps modeled after Byron himself.

A month before Bertram's premiere in 1816, however, Byron had left England, never to return. After the break-up of his marriage (which unfortunately occurred not long after the wedding) Byron was dogged by scandals about his sex life, including his probable incest with his half-sister Augusta Leigh. To avoid the scandal, Byron fled to Switzerland, where he proposed the famous ghost story contest that led to the creation of both Frankenstein and the first literary vampire tale in English, The Vampyre.

In Byron's drama Manfred, published in 1817 but not performed until after the author's death, the title character exclaims: "My Spirit walked not with the souls of men, / Nor looked upon the earth with human eyes." This super-human attitude came to be ascribed to Byron himself. Byron, in turn, admired the acting of the English tragedian Edmund Kean, and likely had him in mind when he wrote the role of Manfred.

Indeed Byron was the most theatrical of all the British Romantics. Though only one play of his (a rather minor work called Marino Faliero) was performed during Byron's brief lifetime, his entire life was a piece of theatre, watched breathlessly by all of British and European society.

After leaving Switzerland, Byron traveled south to Italy, where in addition to writing Marino Faliero, he composed a trio of important dramas published in 1821, Sardanapalus, The Two Foscari, and Cain. The young English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley followed Byron from Switzerland to Italy, where he composed his own drama The Cenci, about the fall of a powerful Roman family during the Renaissance. Though the play was not performed until the end of the nineteenth century, The Cenci influenced later theatre and came to be considered the greatest Romantic tragedy in English.

Sadly, the most talented playwrights of the era did not feel comfortable remaining in England, largely due to crackdowns on political dissent in the wake of the French Revolution and Napoleon. Shelley drowned while sailing off the coast of Italy, and Byron went to help the Greeks obtain independence from the Ottoman Empire. Instead, he died of disease in Missolonghi in western Greece on April 19, 1824.

Thomas Lovell Beddoes represents the final stage of Romanticism in Britain. While still a precocious teenager at Pembroke College, Oxford, Beddoes published The Bride's Tragedy, a verse drama that garnered favorable reviews, but no productions. Beddoes left England for Germany in 1825 in order to study anatomy, and it was there that he wrote his masterpiece Death's Jest-Book.

The play pays homage to Jacobean revenge tragedies, but with absurd twists and morbid devices that go beyond anything in the work of Cyril Tourneur, Thomas Middleton, or John Webster. However, Beddoes's uncompromising portrayal of characters descending into death and madness has led some critics to consider it one of the first major responses to English Romanticism, anticipating the modernist movements to come. Sadly, Beddoes committed suicide in 1849, and the play was not published until after his death.

Last Chance to See The Changeling

If you haven't seen Red Bull Theater's production of The Changeling, this weekend is your last chance. Don't let the snow keep you away. Shows will still go on as scheduled, and this is a production you won't want to miss.

I had the good fortune to see The Changeling last night just as the snow was starting to come down in New York. This jewel of a play by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley is perhaps a flawed jewel. Some commentators have remarked the text we have for the play seems to be missing a scene. (Where is the entertainment the lunatics are supposed to perform for the wedding?)

But just as the flaws in a gemstone can most bring out its luster, the supposed weaknesses in The Changeling add a sense of unpredictability. When Beatrice-Joanna (Sara Topham) sees the handsome nobleman Alsemero (Christian Coulson) at church, the two fall in love. Since she is already engaged to Alonzo (John Skelley), and since this is a revenge tragedy, we're pretty sure we know where this is all headed.

Only when Beatrice-Joanna employs the ugly and loathed servant De Flores (Manoel Felciano) to do the deed, things take an unexpected turn. Love and loathing become inextricably linked, and gasps can be heard in the audience. Yes, indeed, a play first performed in 1622 still has power to shock jaded New York audiences in the 21st century.

The madhouse scenes are particularly memorable, thanks in large part to the costumes designed by Beth Goldenberg. Marion Williams's set design, which provides mirror images of the actors at key moments, is also quite effective. As usual, Red Bull founder Jesse Berger provides excellent direction for the whole ensemble.

If you want to go, hurry to the Lucille Lortel Theatre tonight or tomorrow afternoon for the final performances. For more information go to:

Red Bull Theater Company

Death's Jest-Book

While still in his teens, the Thomas Lovell Beddoes published his first play, The Bride's Tragedy. At the time, Beddoes was a precocious student at Pembroke College, Oxford. His dream, however, was to write for the stage.

In his dedication of the play to one Rev. H. Card, Beddoes expressed his admiration for contemporary plays and praised "the flourishing condition of dramatic literature" in Britain. But alas, in spite of favorable reviews in the press, the theatres did not rush out to produce The Bride's Tragedy.

After leaving Oxford, Beddoes went to Germany to study anatomy, and there, in 1825, he began a new play, one he would continually rework and revise until his suicide in 1849. That play, Death's Jest-Book, Beddoes obsessively rewrote in reaction to the comments of his friends,.

The play pays homage to Jacobean revenge tragedy, including the work of Cyril Tourneur, Thomas Middleton, or John Webster. Beddoes's uncompromising portrayal of characters descending into death and madness led the critic Alan Richardson to conclude the play "can be placed as one of the first major responses to English Romanticism, anticipating a tradition that embraces The City of Dreadful Night and The Waste Land."

Death's Jest-Book is subtitled "The Fool's Tragedy," so I will concentrate on the character of the fool, Isbrand. Brother to the knight Sir Wolfram, Isbrand is brought into the service of the Duke of Munsterberg as a jester. The Duke has wronged their family, and Isbrand seeks revenge, but the forgiving Wolfram has reconciled with the duke and is even setting off to the Middle East to rescue him after an ill-fated expedition during the Crusades. In a brilliant prose passage, Isbrand mocks his brother:

Stay: you have not my blessing yet. With what jest shall I curse you in earnest? Know you this garb, and him who wears it, and wherefore it is worn? A father slain and plundered; a sister's love first worn in the bosom, then trampled in the dust: our fraternal bond, shall it so end that thou savest him whom we should help to damn? O do it, and I shall learn to laugh the dead out of their coffins!

Though Wolfram saves the dukes life, the two men are in love with the same woman, and the duke basely murders his rival. Wolfram is so honorable, he will not name his murderer even as he lies dying. When the duke returns, however, Isbrand is plotting. In Act II, the jester bequeaths his fool's cap to Death, in a passage that gives the play its name:

Let him wear the cap, let him toll the bells; he shall be our new court-fool: and when the world is old and dead, the thin wit shall find the angel's record of man's works and deeds, and write with a lipless grin on the innocent first page for a title, 'Here begin's Death's Jest-book.'

This idea, that death makes a cosmic joke of all earthly existence, pervades the play. The knowledge that life is a joke, however, does not prevent Isbrand from getting caught up in his own delusions of grandeur. Though he sometimes speaks in cynical prose, his language also rises into verse, as in this passage from Act III, where a ruined church-yard leads his to rhapsodize:

                                                            This is a sweet place methinks:
                    These arches and their caves, now double-nighted
                    With heaven's and that creeping darkness, ivy,
                    Delight me strangely. Ruined churches oft,
                    As this, are crime's chief haunt, as ruined angels
                    Straight become fiends.

As Isbrand plots, the Roman Mario offers his services to help overthrow the duke and establish a republic. Isbrand plays along, but secretly plots to make himself duke. His ambition rises higher than to be a mere duke, though. At the close of Act IV, Isbrand dreams of mastery over the entire universe:

                    And man is tired of being merely human;
                    And I'll be something more: yet, not by tearing
                    This chrysalis of psyche ere its hour,
                    Will I break through Elysium. There are sometimes,
                    Even here, the means of being more than men:
                    And I by wine, and women, and the sceptre,
                    Will be, my own way, heavenly in my clay.
                    O you star-mob, had I been one of You,
                    I would have seized the sky some moonless night,
                    And made myself the sun; whose morrow rising
                    Shall see me new-created by myself.

Even in death, Isbrand tries to remain defiant, but as he lies stabbed and bleeding at the end of the play, he sees that he, too, is nothing but a fool. His last lines are:

                    I jest and sing, and yet alas! am he,
                    Who in a wicked masque would play the Devil;
                    But jealous Lucifer himself appeared,
                    And bore him--whither? I shall know to-morrow,
                    For now Death makes indeed a fool of me.

As Richardson comments, "the attempt to rise above others demands a psyche continually at war with itself" and eventually "Isbrand himself perceives the emptiness of his pretended autonomy." A bleak ending for a bleak play.