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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 just parades in and says nothing. Not even a ‘hum hum hum’ this time. Rubbish.
In my book on Middleton & Rowley I suggested that the clown roles that Rowley wrote for himself always end with a big climactic Act 5 scene for the Clown that concludes his story and often valorizes his attitudes. This is the exception. There’s nothing. When you couple this with the fact that Act 5 is weirdly short, and then add in the fact that Modesta and Constantia disappear after Act 3 and are kind of hand-waved away in this Act, I can’t help wonder whether somebody may have mucked around with the text between performance in 1622 and publication in 1661. Or whether Rowley ran out of paper.
This is a shame because it really is interesting that Modesta and Constantia end the play having voluntarily chosen to be “secluded from the world and men forever”. But we don’t get a strong final image of their going to that space. It’s not as cool as Massinger’s Maid of Honour where Camiola dramatically sweeps out and gets her to a nunnery.
However, this Act does have the Devil falling into a rock, and the badassery of Artesia’s exit, so I’m not complaining too much.
One final thing: many years ago, a former student of mine, the fabulous Sarah Higgins, wrote a play called So ho, by so, which is a kind of dream play that mashes up Birth of Merlin with a modern-day story about a sex worker and her son. It was performed at the Halifax Fringe in 2010 and 2014 and is a 15-minute blast of theatrical fury. To quote Sarah, “My play is from [Joan’s] perspective. In the play she’s a sex worker who chose the profession. She gets pregnant and juggles that responsibility, her child grows up and judges her for her choice.” Further info for the intrigued:
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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???
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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 the Three English Brothers there’s a scene where people are being stoned with rocks, so non-lethal prop stones may have been a thing.
- And there’s a blazing star too! I suspect it was a banner, rather than a firework, because the characters discuss its details for so long.
Although there’s still loads of fun stuff here, I can’t help thinking this is where the play starts to lose something. As a big fan of Rowley’s clowns, I do agree with Pete’s point that he keeps things light-hearted during the prophecy scene, but I must confess to being disappointed with what happens to the Clown in this act (and, SPOILER it gets worse in Act 5). He is no longer integral to the plot, but rather an appendage. In her 1991 edition, Joanna Udall argues that he’s a late addition to already-existing scenes: “The role of the Clown decreases in importance as Merlin becomes a public figure. […] He interrupts the serious business with his comments, but no sallies of wit are thereby engendered; in fact, he is ignored. […] If the Clown was a later addition in these scenes, it could account for his re-entry in IV.i and his subsequent abrupt dismissal (no reason given), and for the necessity of keeping him quiet in IV.v.” Of course, this raises all sorts of questions about what this play is (she suspects it’s a rewrite of an older play; but perhaps Rowley is hastily inserting his own role into an act written by someone else). What do others think of this?
And what do you think of Joan’s sudden transformation into a morality play heroine who speaks in blank verse and laments her pride? She even calls herself a peacock with black legs (reminding us of the devil-gallant with his cloven feet).
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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 plays thus end up rather confused about who exactly we’re meant to identify with – Britons? Saxons? Kinda both sorta?
Hence, the presence of an extreme “Other”, i.e. the Devil, especially a devil with a black face, is very helpful to the playwrights. Differences between Britons and Saxons fade away compared to that. Things are simple again.
Except… as you say… the Devil can disguise as a “fair-faced” Briton. And indeed is the father of Merlin, who is a legendary ancestral figure of Britain. So … we’re back to being complicated again.
Is that close to what you were trying to say?! Ignore me if not!
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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 leaves Death’s glass for all to look upon” (3.2). I also like, “All are but borrowed robes in which we masque / To waste and spend the time, when all our life / Is but one good between two ague-days”. And wait a minute! Who does that remind you of? Webster!! “Pleasure of life, what is it? Only the good hours / Of an ague” (Duchess of Malfi, 5.4). WEBSTER CONFIRMED.
Costume! The Devil comes on looking like “a ragamuffin with face like a frying-pan”, i.e. in rags with a black face (the latter a convention of stage devils). But then Joan says, look again, and the Clown is like “do you juggle with me?!” and now the Devil is dressed like a gallant. His costume has changed in the space of one line – how did they do that? Some kind of reversible suit? Also, at the end of that scene, the Clown says he spied his cloven feet regardless – just words or a reference to an actual costume?
Rowley’s recurring gags: when the Devil says “I must now call you brother” and the Clown says “not until you have married my sister”, the scene is recalling All’s Lost by Lust 1.3 in which the Clown gets over-excited about a gallant named Antonio marrying his low-born sister, and keeps insisting on being called “brother”. I want to believe it’s the same three actors replaying their schtick.
Wales! Peter, as a Salopian, I too am pleased by references to North Wales, and so, it would seem, was Rowley; check out A Shoemaker a Gentleman, which contains the line “I have some cousins in your country. You know Penmaenmawr, Beaumaris, Llangollen, Abergavenny, Troed-y-rhiw, St Davy’s Harp and the Great Organ at Wrexham?”
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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??
Actually, the authorship of The Witch of Edmonton is very unclear, and what we do know suggests that the playwrights did not take responsibility for just one plotline but rather contributed to all (necessarily, since the plotlines get intertwined quite rapidly). That play is, I suspect, a good one to compare to Birth of Merlin, as both have three plotlines that soon get intertwined.
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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 introduction by legendary British comedian Roy Hudd,who played the Clown; in it, Hudd waxes lyrical on the badum-tish nature of the lines about the knight’s ‘hangers’, which he finds to be a splendid example of a recurring gag; he opines that one can produce similar effects with the word “trossacks”. I defer to his expertise on this matter.
- The Clown and his sister are a great double act. The Clown’s mixture of exasperation and concern for Joan is rather touching. Rowley seems to have liked stories about Clowns with sisters who get into trouble with dodgy men – you can find the same thing in All’s Lost by Lust, The Thracian Wonder and The Maid in the Mill, all, written around the same time. They weren’t all written for the same company, but All’s Lost was, so we might imagine the same boy actor playing Joan and the more tragic Margaretta in All’s Lost, who is similarly done wrong by an aristocratic man, but opts for bloody revenge as her solution.
- Weirdly, this play, and especially this act, is full of lines loosely borrowed from Fletcher’s Cupid’s Revenge (a boy’s company play of about 1608, published in 1615). Example: when Edol says Aurelius’s mistake “would make / Wisdom herself run madding through the streets, / And quarrel with her shadow”, the author is reworking a line from Leucippus in CR: “would make / Wisdom herself run frantic through the streets, / And patience quarrel with her shadow”. That’s the most striking example, but there’s a lot of other, looser ones. What’s going on with that?
- The artificial crab makes me suspect Webster is lurking somewhere in this play. Remember in Duchess of Malfi, “Think ‘t the best voyage / That e’er you made; like the irregular crab, / Which, though ‘t goes backward, thinks that it goes right”. And the year after the writing of Birth of Merlin, Rowley praised Webster in a friendly commendatory poem for the Quarto of Duchess. Just sayin’ there’s connections.
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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 we read on. Does it read like a collaborative play? Do you have any theories about whether Rowley had a co-author?
Studies of the authorship of this play have been muddied in the past by (a) the Shakespeare attribution on the title page, which sucked up a lot of energy, and (b) uncertainty over its date. Now that we know, thanks to N.W. Bawcutt, that the play was written in 1622, the Shakespeare attribution evaporates but other candidates appear more likely.
Consider Rowley’s other collaborations around this time:
- 1620: The World Tossed at Tennis by Middleton & Rowley
- 1621: The Witch of Edmonton by Dekker, Ford & Rowley
- 1622: The Changeling by Middleton & Rowley
- 1623: The Spanish Gypsy by Middleton, Rowley, Dekker, & Ford
- 1624: A Cure for a Cuckold by Rowley, Heywood and Webster
- 1624: Keep the Widow Waking by Rowley, Dekker, Ford and Webster
So, Middletonian asides are most interesting. And as you read, look out for hints of Dekker, Ford, Heywood and Webster. This is relatively unexplored scholarly territory and who know what we may find?!
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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 the plays of this period. St Winifred is prominent in Rowley’s A Shoemaker a Gentleman (c.1618), and there’s also Dorothea in The Virgin Martyr (c.1620) and Camiola in The Maid of Honour (whose date is debated but sometimes thought to be 1621). In those plays, Winifred and Dorothea are both martyred in horrid fashion, but Camiola gets ends the play by getting her to a nunnery, rejecting her suitors. Which will be Modesta’s fate??
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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 discovered as recently as 1996, and thus doesn’t appear in many reference books. The discoverer was N.W. Bawcutt, who found some lost entries from Malone’s transcription of Sir Henry Herbert’s office-book. The entry in question reads:
The Childe hath founde his Father, for perusing and allowing of a New Play, acted by the Princes Servants at the Curtayne, 1622 1li
This is all quite important. The date is significant because it makes impossible the claim on the title page of the 1662 Quarto that Shakespeare was Rowley’s collaborator. It also tells us that it was probably written after Middleton’s Hengist, King of Kent (c.1620), whose plot it overlaps. From the reference to the Curtain, we learn it was written for an outdoor public theatre. And the title is interesting, focusing more on the quest for the father than on the birth.
That is all! Proceed!
Sources:
- N.W. Bawcutt, “New Entries from the Office-Book of Sir Henry Herbert.” English Literary Renaissance 26, no. 1 (1996): 155-66. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43447513
- N.W. Bawcutt, The Control and Censorship of Caroline Drama (OUP, 1996), 136.
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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 didn’t feature in it much, but I touched on it in the chapter on Rowley’s clown roles. It is my opinion that the Clown and his sister in this play are among the funniest characters in English Renaissance drama. I love them!
I’m currently editing Rowley’s All’s Lost by Lust for Digital Renaissance Editions and more generally am working on the drama of the Bohemian Crisis (1618-24). I’m turning Henslowe’s Diary into a blog. Pronouns are his/him. When I am not doing this kind of thing I am usually planning walking holidays, watching weird films, or peering through a telescope.
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