Merry Devil's Staging Conditions

Not too long ago, I got to sit in on a staging conditions workshop at the American Shakespeare Center, and as it just so happened, I was in the midst of my most recent collation of Merry Devil at the time. It immediately occurred to me just how often the characters in that play refer to each other by name or relation to one another, as if to help the audience keep track of who's who, and who's related to who. I read this as an author's acknowledgement that the audience might be having a hard time keeping track of what's going on (the author, or more likely authors clearly were).

I'm trying to meditate on why that might be. The most obvious answers to me both relate to my theories of disguise play and multiple authorship that I've discussed before, which means I want to keep looking. Disguise play struck me as being a function of the characters who wear disguises, and while this revelation may support that theory, it comes after the fact. When an answer presents itself as being obvious, that usually means it needs a more dutiful interrogation. 

This convention could just be the result of sloppy writing, after all. Maybe the device doesn't work, even when implementing the disguise play that I'll be employing in the production. Ultimately I won't know how audiences respond to it until after the production is over and done with, and even if I can determine their reactions to that specific devise, this would be a 21st century audience, so I still won't know how the constant name and relationship dropping would have worked 400 years ago. 

Perhaps this is one of those moments where I simply need to make a choice, unburdened by some abstract notion of the truth. When we say we are re-creating Shakespeare's original staging conditions or using his original staging practices, we inevitably have to guess. None of us were there, after all. 

As I get closer to finishing my critical text and start thinking of branching it off into a performance text, I'm having to decide what to keep and what to cut. While for a play this short I'm not cutting so much for length as I am for incompleteness -- that is, in order to preserve the sense of what is going on -- something tells me that these identifies need to stay put. Although, perhaps, as an experiment, I should try reading them and seeing if I can follow along. On second thought, I think I'm probably too familiar with the play by now.

Is anyone out there in Internet land interested in a little experiment?

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,

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.