Katherine Williams
,@katschawill
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Oh, these comments are fascinating! I know we’re about to move on to Act Two, but wanted to add a few thoughts. (Also, Nora, I applaud your pronunciation on Artesia!)
Thanks for the note about the play’s date, Dave; I was thinking about Hengist and the representation of the Saxons–in particular, the onstage spectacle that allows for distinctly separate but overlapping conversations. I was struck here by Gloster’s pronouncement, “he meanes to marry her” only after Aurelius has proposed to Artesia, she has accepted, and Aurelius has pronounced, “Live, then, a queen in Brittain”–I kept wondering who hears what, and when. This observation seems entirely in keeping with many of the earlier observations about asides and broken speech; I’m interested in how the (many!) characters onstage are unified or fractured into “onstage audience” in the temporality of response to a proclamation or spectacle. I also kept thinking about Fletcher and Massinger’s The Prophetess, also from 1622 (I think?), and also invested in spectacular acts of power and instant compulsion.
Relatedly, I was struck by the emphasis on time in relation to theatrical temporality. The play opens with Cador’s “long suit” and Donobert’s reassurance of the “opportunity” of “Time” and then urging to “make haste to end” the love. We know that Artesia is Bad News because Aurelius falls for her so swiftly, after all the metaphors of disease/cure/recovery that take time and are devastating if prematurely concluded, and after the blunt reminder that a 30-day truce is enough time to rebuild the strength of an army. But I think it’s really interesting that Aurelius’s response to Donobert’s caution is premised upon a kind of recognition of psychological projection: you’re old, and you just wish you had a similar chance of winning her. If the counselors to the king fear that he is too hasty in suddenly proposing marriage to the enemy, the king’s response is also logical, because he frames marriage as a way of securing peace forever. The burden of timing is on the women: if Modestia’s deferral sets up the possibility that virginity is an infinite frustration of one man’s desires, Artesia’s too-hasty capitulation to marriage demonstrates that she is suspect, as if Aurelius has no time to struggle with and master his longing. I’m interested in the pace of this play–the suddenness of entrances and alliances, in contrast with the moments that linger, like Modestia’s long soliloquy (and Sawyer, your evocation of the range of “love” in her speech is really apt, perhaps even producing the sense that Modestia’s response to the Hermit is a structural parallel to Aurelius’s response to Artesia).
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Hi all! I’m Kat (she/her), based in Toronto, and I’m sorry to join the group so late. I stumbled on The Birth of Merlin a few years ago while researching the chapter on monstrosity in my book (Unfixable Forms, forthcoming from Cornell UP–on disability, performance, and early modern English drama); a short section of this chapter thinks about how the play employs the tropes of monstrous births to characterize Merlin. But there is *so* much more to note in this weird and amazing play, and I am eager to return to it with all of you!
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