OK, I hate to be a pooper, but I have issues with this Act. Not with scene 5.1 (that’s a scene – wow!), but ultimately 5.2 is a bit of a squib. Of course my main complaint is, where’s my boy the Clown? How does he feel about Joan being taken away to pine away in some weird bower? Doesn’t he have any bon mots to share with us at the end? Nope, he…[Read more]

Oh! And Pete, I love your point that magicians can be author-proxies. This is really interesting given that Rowley plays the Clown. If you’re right, he’s kind of fighting with himself. Shutting himself up.

Or if the play is a collaboration, maybe the Clown is Rowley and Merlin is Webster???

Pete, thanks for those fantastic suggestions about the Clown/Joan/Merlin relationship. Love the idea that it’s kind of a meta battle over what kind of play this is.

Anything that can help me like Acts 4 and 5 more is very gratefully received!

So many staging challenges!

• In his Catalogue, Martin Wiggins points out that since the dragons are able to stop and start fighting on cue, they are probably performed by actors in costume.
• Sadly, Wiggins has nothing to say about the stone that kills Proximus, which is quite baffling; I will say that in Day, Rowley and Wilkins’ The Travels of…

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Hi Nora, I think what you’re trying to say may be tied up with the central weirdness of most Ancient Britain plays of this period. They’re all messed up because they depict native Britons being invaded by foreign Saxon “Other” – boo hiss! Except the Saxons are the ancestors of the English, i.e. “us”. So, we’re the foreign Other. A lot of these…[Read more]

I don’t even know where to start. So much awesome in one act. I can only offer random thoughts.

There’s some good poetry here! It has a smoothness that you don’t often get with Rowley. I like, “This world is but a masque, catching weak eyes, / With what is not ourselves but our disguise, / A vizard that falls off, the dance being done, / And…[Read more]

To answer Nora’s question…

The structure of the three plots, up to this point, certainly seems to match something like The Witch of Edmonton, where each of Dekker, Rowley, and Ford took responsibility for one plot line (again, if I’m remembering correctly?)….then again, everything’s about to start crashing together in Acts 4 and 5, so who knows?…

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So much stuff to talk about! Great comedy, weird poetry and a battle of magic! Some random observations:

• This comedy is very funny. If you rummage the shelves of your local academic library (not easy right now, I know) you might find a very obscure edition of this play, created to accompany a revival at Theatr Clywd in the 80s and featuring an…

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I’m gonna be honest, I never mentioned asides in my book!  I’m not aware (though admittedly have not thought much about it) of Rowley having any particularly unusual uses of asides in his other plays beyond The Changeling.

Which leads to the interesting question of authorship! I would love it if we could think more about who wrote this play as…[Read more]

It was interesting to read Act One, because when I read this play before I was mostly interested in the Clown, so I tended to skim-read the serious bits. But they’re actually fun! Artesia is a great role; she’s reminding me of Tamora in Titus Andronicus.

Modesta is interesting. She makes me think of the other holy virgins who reject marriage in…[Read more]

I’ll have some comments on Act 1 soon, but, before we start, can I get some practical stuff out of the way? This play was originally called The Child hath Found his Father and was written in 1622 for Prince Charles’s Men, who were then performing at the Curtain in Shoreditch.

I’m making a special point of saying this because the information was…[Read more]

Hello, I’m Dave! I have read this play more often than I care to admit, although I can never remember exactly what happens in it. My general perception is that the first three acts are fantastic and then it goes off the rails. But I look forward to being corrected.

I once wrote a book about Middleton and Rowley’s collaborations. Birth of Merlin…[Read more]