Nora J Williams
,@norajay1308
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Artesiaaaaaaa!!! I’ve mostly stepped away from acting, but that’s one role I’d kill to play someday.
Pete, your point about the consolidation of the male power even in the absence of the daughters in the romance plot made me remember the end of The Changeling (also written by Rowley), in which Alsemero ostentatiously declares to his father-in-law–immediately after his wife’s death–that he ‘has a son living’. It’s a closing of ranks that ensures a patriarchal (if not patrilineal) movement of power from fathers to sons — the women, apart from their ability to continue the line through bearing children, are almost incidental.
I’d be interested to find out whether this is a Rowley thing, or a broader trend in Jacobean plays, where the absence of a wife/ability to produce children doesn’t seem to frustrate the succession of power. Interestingly, I remember reading somewhere (maybe your book, Dave?) that Rowley’s plays often seem to be ‘throwbacks’ to Elizabethan themes, styles, concerns, etc. — this makes me wonder if there is a callback here to Elizabeth I, who did not produce an heir. Or maybe that’s a stretch…
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Yes, I think that’s getting at it, Dave! Identity is a very complex thing in this play (I think this speaks to some of what Ellie’s talking about in this thread and the Act 4 thread with the ambiguous beard / masculine patrilineal anxieties as well). And I think it’s significant that our “big baddie” (the Devil) is racialized whereas the Saxons (sort-of-us-but-also-not-us) are not.
I’ll probably revisit this thought in Act 5, when (spoiler!) Merlin renounces and magic-battles his father…
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There’s so much great stuff happening in this thread that makes me wish these discussion boards had Facebook-stlye ‘reaction’ options ? I’m so glad Ellie got deep into the beard discussion and Andrew into the music!
I wanted to pick up on the Devil’s ‘frying-pan’ face and Dave’s comment about the apparently instant costume change — I’m particularly noticing casual of equations of ‘blackness’ and evil/badness/devilry in early modern lit at the moment (probably because I’ve been re-reading Kim Hall’s Things of Darkness with another reading group), and I’ve been tossing around some half-formed thoughts about the early modern stage convention of blackface devils and this costume change. Hall argues that:
‘…descriptions of dark and light, rather than being mere indications of Elizabethan beauty standards or markers of moral categories, became in the early modern period the conduit through which the English began to formulate the notions of “self” and “other” so well known in Anglo-American racial discourses’ (1995: 2).
I think this is especially relevant in relation to The Birth of Merlin because Merlin is so much a part of the Anglo origin mythology: Uter-Pendragon, Arthur, Camelot, etc. Merlin, too, is a component of the ‘formulations of “self” and “other”‘ that are starting to take shape in this period. So I think it means something that his father’s appearance to Joan, at the time of Merlin’s conception, is as a “fair”/handsome and noble man, not as a traditional ‘stage devil’ — and that here he apparently has the capacity to move between his ‘face like a frying-pan’ and his appearance as a ‘gallant’ with ‘all the marks we look for’. It speaks to the Devil’s characteristic slipperiness and changeability and ability to hide among men, yes, but there’s something else I can’t quite put my finger on — something that also chimes with the xenophobia that we see from Edol and others throughout the play? Merlin is, apparently, both an important piece of what makes up the early modern audience’s sense of “self”/us AND, by virtue of his devilish parentage, an “other”/them — but there’s no indication that he has inherited his father’s physical characteristics (see also: cloven feet). So what does that tell us? I’m still parsing it out, but maybe others can make better sense of what I’m trying to articulate?
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One last quick thought before I get to other work for the day: some really exciting stuff for Ellie’s work on forests and danger in this act. The Devil appears in the forest, Merlin’s “monstrous” birth happens in the forst — and yet, the Devil shows much more care to Joan than we’ve seen from any of the courtly men she’s encountered so far. All the summonend spirits and goddesses to look after her in labour etc. Is this a continuation of the topsy-turvy rule of the forest, where we can count on the Devil? Or is it pure Devilish selfishness, looking out for the wellbeing of his son? Or something else?
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Coming back to this thread having read Act 3 again, I’m thinking back to one of Dave’s early questions about collaboration (and his nod to the possibility that the artificial crab is either a nod to Webster or (if I’m understanding correctly?) possibly a hint that Webster was a collaborator on this play). 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??
I’m also really interested in Ellie’s thinking about the forest as a liminal, transformative, and dangerous space…much more to come on this in Act 3, of course! But the idea that the danger of the forest infiltrates the court is one I hadn’t considered before. It makes sense, since Artesia and the Hermit–who we could argue are the sources of these threats to the “natural” order of things–come from/through the forest to enter the castle. They literally invade that courtly, ordered space. Interesting, too, to think of this in terms of xenophobia/nationalism (which, again, we’ll see more of from Edol in Act 3) — when the “borders” of the castle are insufficiently secure, chaos ensues? Then again, it’s the Hermit who restores order at the end of the magic battle…
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One of the things I find so interesting about 2.1 is the knife-edge space between comedy and violence — that’s present in so much clowning, of course, but I think that Joan’s predicament perhaps brings it into relief for me in a slightly different way. Really interesting to think about in relation to Dave’s reminder that the Clown and Joan are a kind of double act (and perhaps a kind of repeat performance, that an audience who knew All’s Lost by Lust might have looked forward to seeing together again).
Having watched the Cheek by Jowl Winter’s Tale last week, it’s also put me in mind of that production’s treatment of Leontes, Mamillius, Polixenes, and even _that_ Clown, where the space between light-hearted play and horrifying violence is wafer-thin. I’m also interested in the way that the play asks us to accept Prince Uter’s violence toward the pregnant Joan and then understand him as a kind of hero at the end of the act (in his resistance to Artesia’s plot to pit the brothers against each other). I’m forgetting exactly how this plot develops, but (possible spoiler!) I believe it’s the Prince who ‘saves the day’ with respect to the Saxon invasion which surely we all see coming…
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Eoin, that point you make about the similarities with Middleton’s asides is one that (from memory???) Dave explores in his book on Middleton & Rowley’s collaborations — he makes a very convincing argument that their collaborative work influences the way that they write as solo playwrights, too, with each picking up some stylistic bits and pieces from the other. Dave may want to say something more specific about that in relation to Merlin?
Failure of speech is a really interesting thread to pick up, Andrew! I don’t want to spoil anything, but that will come back, in other contexts and with magical helpers, in later acts of the play 🙂
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Pete, thank you for bringin up the messy quarto — it’s actually one of my favourite things about this play, and somehow I feel like the hot mess of its 1662 printing matches the wackiness of the play’s contents. I also like the confusion it creates around asides, and that Aurelius speech you’ve quoted is a great example. What’s everyone hearing? What’s Artesia hearing? What’s only heard by the courtiers? What’s just for the audience?
Picking up Sawyer’s points about Modestia, I feel like Rowley perhaps is a bit more willing to let characters weave between plots than many other playwrights of this period? (Tho maybe Dave can correct me on that?). Certainly in this play there’s a fair amount of back-and-forth, especially once Merlin gets involved, and I love Sawyer’s point about the way Modestia is resisting both the romantic narrative her father and Edwin expect, *and* the generic constraints of the scenes she’s in–she quite deliberately disrupts both the ‘lovers’ plot and the ‘political’ plot, as you say. Something really interesting to keep paying attention to as the play goes on, I think…
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Welcome all! This is shaping up to be a great crew 🙂
Just a quick update to say that Charlene has very kindly created a clean PDF copy of the transcription text, so that it’s MUCH easier to read. She’s a star! You can now find that under ‘Files’ above.
Looking forward to diving into Act 1 next week!
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Hi everyone! I’m Nora, currently an independent scholar of early modern drama, performance, and digital culture. My day job is in enrollment management (admissions) for graduate programs at Emerson College in Boston. Current projects include a book on Shakespeare and Twitter (yes, really) and a practice-as-research project that uses Measure for Measure to help kids talk about rape culture. I’m excited to learn more about HC and all of you 🙂
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Thanks for that important context, Dave — I was trying to figure out the best space to highlight the suspicious attribution on the title-page!
Really glad so many of you are as intrigued by Artesia and her epic entrance as I am. It feels like we get a lot more women and kinds of women in these first two scenes than in most plays I can think of? We have Constantia as a kind of archetypal lover, Modestia resisting that and being framed as pious, and Artesia as seductive but evil. And we’ve yet to meet Joan Goe-too’t! Interesting to imagine the range of the original boy players involved…
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