Points of Comparison

I was caught a little off guard when one of my actors compared Merry Devil to Twelfth Night yesterday. When seeking a play that is canonically ascribed to the hand of Shakespeare as a point of comparison, Merry Wives comes more to mind than Twelfth Night. The Merry Wives connection was clearly not lost on Arthur Johnson, who also had Merry Wives printed for his book stall at St. Paul's, but my actor does have a point: Twelfth Night is also a play about love and disguise, and Twelfth Night is also highly prosaic. Indeed, Smug bears a passing resemblance to Andrew Aguecheek, and perhaps Sir John is more similar to Sir Toby than Sir John Falstaff. I don't offer this as an argument for the quality or the authorship of any of the aforementioned plays, but in one of the lesser known works of The King's Men, it's fun to compare these roles to try to figure out where sharers may have cast themselves. 

The second part of my actor's comment was at the number of times in the period that a character will put on the disguise of a nun or a friar, as the Duke/Friar Lodowick in Measure for Measure (which was written about the same time as Merry Devil probably was). That's easy. Everyone kind of looks the same in the habit of a holy (wo)man, and a simple hooded robe, which will suffice for most early-modern nun and friar roles, is generally easy to put on, and can easily completely obscure another costume worn underneath. In just about every way you could want, it's the perfect disguise. 

And, of course, since the Catholics were kicked out by Henry VIII in the 1530s, and the Monasteries dissolved and their valuable land appropriated by the crown, Nuns and Friars are always a safe target of satire,

Who's this for?

I always step out of Textual Culture with a wealth of challenges to my ideas, and today's theme was who I'm doing all of this for. Is it possible that there might be some folks out there that don't know the conventions of reading plays? Yes, but I'm ultimately not interested in writing for them. Is it possible there are some folks who would like to read the play with some guidance to help them picture it? Probably, but my cast would take exception to highly detailed stage directions that negate performance possibilities.

So the answer is that I'm doing this for my cast, and then I'm doing it for that mythical beast, the general reader. I hesitate to call it the first step in the process, as that would imply a degree of temporal  linearity that doesn't align with real world practice, but producing a play text for my acting company is the first goal on the road to a new edition of The Merry Devil. They will then perform that text, and that will be a new edition. I will perhaps then use the information gathered from that performance and prepare it as a reader's edition, a text which will be a cross breed of 17th century collaborative writing, performance, editing, printing, and then 21st century transcription, editing, printing, performance, editing, and printing.

So if you followed along with all of that, lets pretend that you're sitting there with the new reader's edition in your hot little hand: who is responsible for putting it there? Who authorizes it? The King's Men? Myself? My actors? The American Shakespeare Center? Mary Baldwin College's M.Litt/MFA program? All of the above? None of the above?

I think I had an insight into all of this in class today, and with luck I've brought you to the same crisis of contradiction that I find myself in: you can't win, so don't try. Alternatively, what is likely to sell the most tickets? And thus I turn back to The Merry Devil of Edmonton as a member of Shakespeare's Apocrypha, because lets face it, the name of William Shakespeare sells tickets.

Disguise Play

Watching the American Shakespeare Co's production of The Alchemist, I was reminded of just how sublime a doubled show that features characters in disguise can be. Until the disguise is revealed, you don't know if you're looking at a whole new character or a character in disguise. The playwright provides the actors a way of putting one over on the audience at the same time they put one over on the the other characters. I think the same would be true of Shakespeare's works if we didn't already know them so well, but Jonson is just obscure enough to be able to pull off this illusion.

The Merry Devil is, of course, replete with both double-cast actors and characters in disguise, so I think we'll be able to pull the same thing off. Keeping the audience guessing as to who is who and what is real is a great way of keeping them interested. I was about to say something grossly incorrect about how we don't have this convention anymore in modern theatre, but that isn't necessarily so. Gilles Segal's The Puppetmaster of Lodz features a "third man" character; a single actor plays many roles throughout the course of the production, but late in the play it is revealed that it is a single character playing many roles. Familiarity breeds comfort, and the revelation of a character in disguise, whom we had mistaken for an actor playing another role, is one of those things that can keep an audience guessing right up through the end.