Pete Kirwan
,@drpetekirwan
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What a climax! I love 5.1.
The moment that stands out in my memory from the Read Not Dead reading was the final confrontation between the Devil and Merlin. I mentioned this in a previous thread, but those of you who know James Wallace will hopefully be able to imagine his voice as he channelled Inigo Montoya and Darth Vader in a low, slow, snarl of ‘Merrrrlin.‘ On stage, it worked surprisingly well as a final confrontation, more so than I’d expected from reading it. I was also struck by the references to the Devil as a hound, thinking of The Witch of Edmonton.
Joan’s lack of response to Merlin’s plan for her – just after he’s saved her! – leaves the play’s tone at this point interestingly ambiguous for me. Nora and Anna, I know you’ve both also been interested in the silence of female characters at the end of plays, and this feels like an especially profound one for me, which could be played in a number of ways. I think Joan would be a fascinating role to explore further – the Globe reading went full on parody, but on this re-read I’ve come to see the role shifting from something comedic early on to something more earnest and sincerely tragic.
Compared to The London Prodigal – another play in the ‘Apocrypha’ which has a great female character who gets to declare her absolute lack of interest in marriage at the end, the rejection of the daughters here feels more ambiguous, doesn’t it? Donobert gets his new sons, and ‘stubborn daughters’ are disinherited and forgotten about. I feel this is a ‘yay’, inasfar as the women get what they want, but from another point of view they’re a problem that is resolved by shrugging and forgetting about them.
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Anna – just a right-click copy-and-paste worked for me!
David – love this: ‘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.’ And there was me thinking they’d trained real dragons (young ones of course) – maybe they used those in court performance? 😉
I disagree, though, about the ‘suddenness’ of Joan’s transformation. I’m thinking back to my comments on Act 3, where Joan was already speaking blank verse even in two-way conversation with her prose-speaking brother. In this sense, one of the things I like is the consistency of the dynamic – it feels to me that Joan is always trying to be in a more serious romance that her brother is bathetically undermining, and (as was really clear in the Read Not Dead production) Merlin’s arrival is key in overtly intervening in that dynamic to bring out the more sincere plot – he tells his mother to ‘Speak freely’ in 4.1, and shuts his uncle up in 4.5. I wrote a piece a few years ago about the ways in which early modern dramatists use magician figures as author proxies, in that their less overtly spectacular interventions are so often rooted in deciding who gets to speak or ensuring the next plot point happens, and Birth of Merlin is another great exemplar.
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To give some slightly more serious thoughts, what I take away from Act IV is just how important the Clown is. This is the most conventionally Arthurian material so far – it’s telling the oft-retold story of the dragons and the castle, Merlin’s early prophecies, and the promise of Uter’s line. With the subplots and the Devil sidelined, the material has potential to be quite po-faced, especially in the long prophetic scenes of Merlin. So, aside from the absolute hilarious stone gag (I love imagining how that might be staged), the Clown has such an important role in keeping things interesting and light here, particularly in the long scene of him gagged and trying to interrupt. It’s a beautifully subversive scene, in which it’s easy to imagine everyone onstage gazing portentously into the middle distance, all while the Clown gurns and ‘hmms’ his thoughts to himself.
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A miscellany of thoughts today – what an act!
3.1 is a great scene. I love how Joan is speaking verse while her brother is in prose; she’s sustaining the narrative of being in a courtly romance while he repeatedly undermines it. In this sense, when the Devil appears, I feel like he’s continuing to play into Joan’s narrative, and at this stage – to answer Nora’s comment – I still feel suspicious of him (I mean, he’s the Devil, right?). Those of you who know James Wallace (or saw him in the NT Twelfth Night last week as the Captain) will know the quality of his voice – him appearing as the Devil in the Read not Dead production gave a confidence and mellifluousness to the role that made clear just how out of their depth Joan and the Clown were in these scenes.
I’ll defer to our resident beard expert, but I’m interested in how old Merlin is here. Most of the Arthurian narratives I’m familiar with allow Merlin a childhood of some kind, but here he’s already got a beard, and I wonder how old he’s being presented as here – a young man? A full-bearded wizard a la Disney?
In 3.6, I re-read the last section several times before confessing I’m confused – isn’t it weird that, after having dominated the first half of the scene, the Prince goes silent for the last fifty lines? I’m finding Uter a very bizarre character, and here, the fact that his dialogue ends at the point of crisis and conflict as the two armies are drawn up seems an unusual choice – and gives lots of options for what is going on for him onstage (is he being restrained? Is he stunned by the turn of events? Is he pushed aside to make way for the eruption of other furies?)
Finally, I can’t believe I haven’t spotted the Clown’s suggestion that the Devil’s ‘Ancestors came first from Hell-bree in Wales’. I might be wrong, but this sounds to me like a reference to Hilbre on the Wirral (which fits with the play’s general interest in the border region between what is now North Wales and Cheshire/Merseyside – aka my neck of the woods). Hilbre is an archipelago just off the NW coast of the Wirral, and the tides of the Dee allow you to walk out to it sometimes. There’s tons of local mythology around it – the quicksand, the risk of getting cut off, and the utter barrenness of this little outpost in the middle of the Dee estuary makes it a place of urban legend and semi-supernatural interest (and a director from the area based a whole murder thriller around it called Blood a few years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2cy-Et2Bnc).
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Couple of initial thoughts:
One of the interesting recurring features when working on the ‘Shakespeare Apocrypha’ was the recurrent forests – see also Mucedorus and Locrine – and what happens within those forests. In 2.1, aside from the misogyny (wow) that Nora has noted, I was struck by the coincidence of the location and the focus on naming. Identities are always murky in the forest – from the disguised and cannibalistic figures of Mucedorus to the shifting identities of As You Like It – and the emphasis of both the Clown/Joan on the name of the father, and Uter on the name of the woman he searches for, is marked.
I love Edoll’s whole presence in 2.2. ‘Do not deceive me by your flatteries’ – the no-nonsense dismissal of political niceties is a great start, and then that rage just builds and builds. In the Read Not Dead production, John Gregor marched in wearing camo and served as a catalyst to all the court scenes, immediately forcing people to draw lines of conflict, and you can see that in this first appearance. The whole of 2.2 is a really interesting scene in this sense – other than the opening procession, it’s build-up to this character, and the character delivers powerfully.
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In relation to David’s point about Artesia being like Tamora, I’d also compare Estrild from Locrine. Edwin’s ‘She was woo’d afore she came, sure’ is a great cynical line, and I love these set-ups where everyone onstage apart from one person (who is the most powerful) can see exactly what’s going on.
Picking up on Anna’s comment about Aurelius being rendered incapable of thought, I was enjoying how this is represented in his speech. The page of the quarto is a mess, and Tucker Brooke’s attempts at punctuation and lineation were catching my eye, especially where he’s almost broken his em-dash key with overuse:
Aurel. True, thou art old: how soon we do forget
Our own defects! Fair damsel, — oh, my tongue
Turns Traitor, and will betray my heart — sister to
Our enemy: — ‘sdeath, her beauty mazes me,
I cannot speak if I but look on her. —
What’s that we did conclude?Especially combined with the enjambment, that fragmented speech is such a beautiful textual performance of distraction. And then there’s a fragmented verse line as Donobert loyally concludes his king’s last half-line:
What’s that we did conclude?
Dono. This, Royal Lord —
Aurel. Pish, thou canst not utter it: —Aurelius’s new part-line smashes across Donobert’s attempt to regularise his king’s speech, perhaps? I like the fact that Tucker Brooke’s lineation creates a really uneven split line that contributes to the chaos.
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[For interest, I’m reading this in the 1908 Shakespeare Apocrypha; will be interested to see if any of C.F. Tucker Brooke’s editorial idiosyncrasies show themselves, though he’s usually pretty diplomatic.]
One thing I appreciate is how straightforward the opening is. The deference to Constantia’s wishes; the banter about ‘He is a man, I hope.’ / ‘That’s in the trial’ (I like to imagine Cador standing by awkwardly); I kept expecting a family squabble, and the low stakes are something of a relief. And I like the structural imbalance that almost always gives Modestia a longer riposte to Edwin than his initial approach, even before her soliloquy.
I’m from near Chester, so one of the things that jumps out at me straightaway is the significance of that location on the Welsh border (and of course, we’re up in Green Knight territory too). Right from the start, the evocation of the hermit emerging in that liminal area between ‘Brittain’ and ‘(Welsh) Brittain’ (as Tucker Brooke’s dramatis personae clarifies) sets up a play invested in those slippery, fluid spaces.
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Hi all,
Latecomer, sorry, but very excited by this group! I’m Pete (he/him), I’m based in Nottingham, and I research the contemporary and historical performance and text of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.
I wrote a PhD and a book on the so-called Shakespeare Apocrypha, in which The Birth of Merlin only tangentially featured as it as a real outlier even in that group of misfits – so I have Unfinished Business with the play and am delighted to have the chance to rediscover it with learned folk. I also got to attend the Read not Dead performance of it at the Globe a few years back, so I may be able to chip in some insight from that if no-one else saw it!
Away from all this I’m usually to be found walking, indulging an unhealthy obsession with film and TV, and indulging my cat.
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