with the attitudes of the other male characters in the production. The tribunes, Sicinius and Junius Brutus, were urban hustlers who confidently sported fashionable walking sticks, d la 1890s, when it seemed apparent that Marcius had lost his bid for power against them. In the final scene the envelope containing the terms for peace between Rome and the Volsces was refused and silently returned to the briefcase in which it was delivered. War would continue, as would the irrational forces that shape such conflicts, with or without proud and unresponsive leaders like Marcius. His life was given a wider perspective in this final, silent moment with the envelope, a perspective in which neither his guilt nor Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/sq/article/41/3/368/5085016 by guest on 29 September 2021 our affection really figured. Peace is finally out of Marcius's hands, carried instead by the unseen and unspoken forces that have controlled people and events throughout history.
Mucedorus and The Birth of Merlin at the Los Angeles Globe
JOSEPH H. STODDER The plan of Globe Playhouse producers R. Thad Taylor and Jay Uhley to perform the fifteen most noteworthy of the apocryphal plays is continuing, but they are being offered at a slower pace than had originally been intended. After a promising beginning (Sir Thomas More in 1984, then seven plays between July 1985 and March 19871), the Globe was confronted by the restrictions imposed by the new Actors' Equity Association rules. The Los Angeles Theatre Plan of October 1988 removed the equity waiver (a release permitting low-budget houses to function without paying directors, actors, and crews) under which small theatres such as the Globe had been operating. The result for the Globe was that its production of little-known plays such as those in the apocryphal series had to be scheduled at less frequent intervals. Since the Globe's main revenue is drawn from productions of the more popular Shakespeare plays, specialized offerings are now relegated to summer months. Thus Mucedorus, the next play in the series, was not performed until July of 1987, and it was not until August 1988 that it was followed by The Birth of Merlin. Plans, as of early 1989, call for production of The Merry Devil of Edmonton and Locrine in summer 1989, concluding with Fair Em, Edmund Ironside, and Cardenio (Lewis Theobald's Double Falsehood, or The Distress'd Lovers) to be offered as budgeting permits under the new Equity Plan. Mucedorus was one of the most popular plays of its time and throughout the next half-century, going through at least seventeen editions between 1598 and 1668. By 1610 it was well enough known for the Citizen's Wife in Beaumont's The Knight of the Burning Pestle to make a casual reference to it as a play in which the grocery apprentice, Ralph, had acted. External evidence for Shakespeare attribution, as with a number of the apocryphal plays, is limited to the statement on title pages (1610 and after) that it had been performed "By his Highnes Servants usually playing at the Globe"—that is, by Shakespeare's company, at his theatre, and in his lifetime. As for internal evidence, attention has focused on the post-1610 additions, of a superior quality to the main text and variously attributed to Greene, Lodge, Peele, or to Shakespeare himself. C. F. Tucker Brooke, who is less tolerant of the possibility of Shakespeare's hand in the play than a more modern, less reverent editor might be,2 asserts that the additions were
' For my review of these seven productions, see Shakespeare Quarterly, 38 (1987), 243-48, and 39 (1988), 232-38. 2 See, for example, Arvin H. Jupin, ed., Mucedorus: A Contextual Study and Modern-Spelling Edition (New York: Garland, 1987). Jupin argues that Shakespeare's hand in Mucedorus need not be measured by literary quality only, but can also be seen in the play's extraordinary ability to meet the demands of its audience. SHAKESPEARE ON STAGE 369 written by "a person of true, but neither great nor mature poetic gifts who stood somewhat under the influence of Shakespeare."3 Whoever the author was, one fact remains: Mucedorus was hugely successful for most of a century. Director Bennett E. McClellan began his production of the play with the passage of fulsome praise for James I that was added, along with several scenes, to the 1610 edition. Since it was addressed to an unnamed "most sacred majesty," and since it had little relevance to the play, its effect was one of some confusion for this modern audience. In approaching these works, with their special value as historical artifacts, the Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/sq/article/41/3/368/5085016 by guest on 29 September 2021 Globe directors understandably endeavor to retain each detail, but sometimes risk unfortunate results, as the flawed beginning of this production demonstrated. McClellan next orchestrated a colorful procession of the characters across the stage, led by Comedy, in a flower-decked frock, with more flowers scattered in her hair, and with sparkling arms and legs. Her opposite, Envy, followed—all black, with sharp nose and arching eyebrows. Behind them came the rest of the cast in varied postures: Mucedorus; Anselmo; Mouse, the Clown; the Bear; Segasto; Amadine; and Adrastus. The progress ended in a graceful dance to a Renaissance measure. When the other characters had dispersed, Comedy was left alone, excitedly describ ing to the audience the entertainment she had in store for them. Suddenly Envy erupted, grim and menacing, from the Globe's trapdoor, terrifying Comedy with threats to "mix your music with a tragic end." Comedy, however, quickly regained her composure, and the two of them fell into an animated debate on the popular topic of the respective merits of comedy and tragedy. In this Induction, Comedy won a guarded victory, but Envy warned that he would infuse the action with tragic elements, beginning with "threats of blood" in the opening scenes of the play. Comedy responded by confidently reassuring the audience that she would nevertheless bring forth "from tragic stuff . . . a pleasant comedy." McClellan cleverly wove together the figures of Comedy and Envy throughout his production (in the text they reappear only as epilogue). Comedy had the responsibility of identifying, with placards, the frequently shifting settings as the action alternated between the court of Valencia, the Forest of Aragon, and the court of Aragon. Both Comedy and Envy also assumed choric roles, appearing periodically to influence a character or otherwise guide the action. The main plot of Mucedorus is thin and predictable, centering in the conventions of disguise and eventual recognition to resolve the complications of a courtship. The Aragonian prince, Mucedorus (Robert Standley), in love with Amadine (Lori Russo), the daughter of the King of Valencia, disguises himself as a shepherd in order to court her in her country, unrecognized and on a more simple, personal level. After he rescues her from a bear, she falls in love with him, but he is banished for having killed the king's captain, whom Mucedorus's rival, Segasto (Tony Weber), had sent to murder him. Forced into a second disguise, now as a hermit, Mucedorus again rescues Amadine, this time from Bremo, the wild man of the forest. What follows is thus a double revelation: first of his identity (as her beloved shepherd) to Amadine, then, after being restored to the king's graces, his identity within the identity—as Prince Mucedorus—to her father, as well as to Amadine herself. The play's great popularity did not rely, one would hope, on the spinning out of this basically hackneyed story. More likely, seventeenth-century audiences were delighted, as was this twentieth-century one, by such intriguing characters as Mouse, the Clown (Joe Barnaba), and Bremo, the wild man (Steve Welles). Barnaba's Mouse was a scintillating merry-andrew, darting in and out of the main action, infusing it each time not only with welcome low-comic relief but also with renewed energy. Some of his best scenes were those with the villain of the play—his master, Segastus—wherein Mouse regularly misused words by mispronouncing or juxtaposing them, or in other ways misconstrued messages. The flustered Segastus thus became the butt of the humor, to the delight of the audience.
3 The Shakespeare Aprocrypha (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1918), p. xxvi. 370 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY
Welles played Bremo as a satyr-like figure, more bestial than human, with a crude, primitive mentality. Bremo's first scene began with Comedy silently watching as Amadine waited in the forest for her rendezvous to elope with her shepherd, Mucedorus. From the upper stage, Envy, true to his promise to make Comedy's actors ' 'fear the very dart of death," beckoned Bremo from his inner-stage forest den to attack Amadine. As Bremo hungrily eyed his victim, lusting to "glut [his] greedy guts with lukewarm blood," Comedy intervened. At this point the text simply depicts Bremo as confused
by a sudden inexplicable loss of strength combined with an alien pang of conscience, Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/sq/article/41/3/368/5085016 by guest on 29 September 2021 and thus unable to harm Amadine. McClellan, however, articulated the textual impli cations, employing Comedy as a counteractive Ariel-like agent who wafted Bremo away from his victim with flowing gestures. In his bemused state Bremo yielded to Amadine's charms, at least until, in a succeeding scene, she could be rescued by Mucedorus. Mucedorus is a frothy comedy, fast-paced and insistently entertaining. If its main action is inane, it must be added that it never pretends to be taken seriously. McClellan and his actors demonstrated that the fantastic and low-comic portions of the play, when fleshed out on a stage, can effectively balance the conventional romantic plot, resulting in an audience-pleasing product.
As interpreted by R. Thad Taylor and his co-director Christopher Sumpton, The Birth of Merlin: Or the Child Hath Found His Father reveled unashamedly in its often extravagantly romantic potpourri. Merlin offers- a kaleidoscopic array of characters, including pre-Arthurian heroes, Saxon invaders, sprites, magicians, warring dragons, the Devil himself—and his son Merlin, born full-grown, complete with teeth and beard. Given the license that the text surely justifies, Taylor and Sumpton marshaled the action with broad, sweeping gestures, savoring its comic moments, sensationally exploiting its spectacle, and exaggerating the transparency of its melodrama. The deliberate shallowness with which emotional range was managed in the early melodramatic scenes was exemplified when the Briton king Aurelius, played by Tom Charles, was instantly and quite visibly smitten at his first sight of Artesia (Ana Gabriel), sister of his enemy, the Saxon general. The others, of course—Aurelius's retinue as well as we in the audience—were immediately aware that the king's rapture was certain prelude to his downfall. But as audience we were not even mildly apprehensive about his fate. All of the signals indicated that whatever his destiny, the play would end well. The next scenes are comic. Merlin's mother-to-be, Jone-Goe-Too't, a grotesquely pregnant trollop, was artfully interpreted by Taryn Power. Sumpton cast himself in the role of Jone's clownish brother, whose search for a father for the child, though valorous, was consistently bungled. The first suspect he comes upon is no less than Prince Uter, later called Pendragon, the lost brother of King Aurelius. As Uter, Stuart Chapin provided some fine irony as material for comic exploitation by the gawky brother. Overhearing Uter lamenting a lost love in the center of the forest, he confronts him, saying "the gentlewoman you spoke on is my sister."
Prince [to Jone-Goe-Too't]. Have you e'er seen me, lady? Clown. Seen ye, ha, ha! it seems she has felt you too; here's a young Go-to't coming, sir; she is my sister; we all love to go to't as well as your worship. . . .
As Uter runs off—in terror, as we would expect—Aurelius's lieutenant, Toclio, appears. When Toclio admits to having seen "her face" before, Jone faints, and Toclio escapes. In these and several other instances—notably one involving Sir Nichodemus Nothing, who offers his knightly assistance—Sumpton and Taylor skillfully develop the brother's search for the child's father into a comically sympathetic endeavor involving the audience as eager spectators, hoping for success. When the Devil (Alan Altshuld) appears—from the Globe stage trapdoor, in thunder and fiery red smoke—Jone instantly SHAKESPEARE ON STAGE 371 recognizes him as her lover, though he remains invisible to her brother. As she runs off stage after her fiendish mate, the brother stares after her in bewildered reflection in which farce and irony coalesce: "Clown. Oh brave, she'll run to the devil for a husband; she's stark mad sure, and talks to a shadow, for I could see no substance." The pyrotechnic entrance of the Devil was one of the many spectacles that this romance affords and that Taylor and Sumpton managed with considerable theatrical bravura. Merlin's magic, performed with confident ease, was always stunning. He
destroyed the world's greatest magician, Proximus, by causing a rock to fall on him; he Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/sq/article/41/3/368/5085016 by guest on 29 September 2021 conjured the white and red dragons (evocatively costumed warriors played by Chapin and Sumpton), pitching them in an archetypal struggle in which the triumph of the white over the red foretold the eventual demise of the Britons at the hands of the Saxons; and when he finally encountered his Devil-father, he catapulted him into a rocky enclosure. As Merlin, Leonard John Crofoot was unerringly convincing: diminutive in stature, as befitted the newly-born adult, he nevertheless manifested in his movement and bearing the mysterious power and wizardry that could instantly and effortlessly resolve whatever crisis it encountered. Merlin does not appear until midway in the action of this play, the focus of the earlier scenes having been split between the Saxon threat (with the Aurelius-Artesia alliance) and the search of Jone and her brother for the father of the unborn child. He dominates the later scenes, however, as reflected in the instances described above, but perhaps most memorably exemplified in this production in his prophetic interpretation of the significance of a star blazing in the Celtic firmament. As Prince Uter and his men gathered around this Merlin under the light beaming down from above and behind the audience, the wizard stretched his arms to the light and matter-of-factly prophesied "the change of Britain's fate and death of kings." For Uter, however, the omens were good, promising not only his long reign but also the magnificent achievements of his son, Arthur, who would one day be crowned in Rome and ultimately would have the satisfaction of crowning the great Constantine his imperial successor.
The question of Shakespearean attribution, because it continues to generate more controversy over this play than is the case with most of the disputed works, may deserve some comment at this point. Aside from the rather shaky external evidence (the 1662 quarto attributing it to Shakespeare and Rowley), little has been discovered by editors or other scholars to justify Shakespeare's authorship. Yet the question has persisted, partly because of quarto publisher Francis Kirkman's repeated assertions of the collaboration in his 1661 and 1671 catalogues. C. F. Tucker Brooke, who, like most other readers, recognizes the unreliability of Kirkman's authority, insists that "there is not a single poetic passage in The Birth of Merlin, which will justify for an instant the hypothesis of Shakespeare's authorship." Nevertheless, he later concedes that Merlin contains "occasional bits of poetry and characterization which have certainly a remote kinship to Shakespeare and were probably written under his influence," and still later notes F. G. Fleay's belief that Merlin was Rowley's revision of "another man's work."4 Mark Dominik's contribution to the dialogue5 has stirred recent interest, partly because of his five-thousand dollar challenge to anyone who could dispute his claim for Shakespeare-Rowley collaboration.6 Although some of Dominik's conclusions, based on close stylistic comparisons of language and phrasing, may be arguable, it is possible that his central thesis that "Shakespeare's share is obscured by his intimate collabo ration with an inferior dramatist"7 will stand, along with his wager, since its key term "obscured" presumably does not invite categorical contradiction.
4 p. xlvi. 5 William Shakespeare and The Birth of Merlin (New York: Philosophical Library, 1985). 6 See Shakespeare Newsletter, 36 (1986) 47, 51. 7 p. 151. 372 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY
The Globe presentation of Merlin provided vivid evidence, however, for Dominik's claim that "it is funny, colorful, fast-paced, entertaining, and at its best even charming, moving, and exhilarating, a rewarding work that deserves much more attention than it has received. . . . "8 What Dominik anticipates that many earlier readers seem to have missed is this dimension of the play, which, though latent in the text, becomes excitingly apparent when the script's life is effectively realized in stage production.
Shakespeare in Montana, 1989 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/sq/article/41/3/368/5085016 by guest on 29 September 2021
SHARON A. BEEHLER and SARA JAYNE STEEN In honor of Montana's centennial year, the Shakespeare in the Parks production of The Taming of the Shrew was set in an 1889 Montana town, with Baptista Minola as the proprietor of the Last Chance Mercantile and Saloon, Wild Bill Sly as the town drunk (who's convinced he's a cattle baron), Kate as an Annie Oakley to lasso Bianca, and Petruchio as a cowboy and gambler fit to tame the wildest Kate. The production reflected the maturity of the summer touring company, now beginning its eighteenth season providing Shakespeare to largely rural audiences in Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho. Shakespeare in the Parks was established in 1973 at Montana State University, with which it is still connected. In the last decade, under the leadership of artistic director Joel Jahnke, the company has become a significant regional attraction, its young professional actors chosen by national audition, its sponsors ranging from corporations and the state of Montana to local clubs and private individuals, and its audiences delighted with the company's spirit of festival and its willingness to take risks, even with early experiments that some more scholarly viewers eyed with skepticism. This year's "old West" Taming of the Shrew, directed by Thomas Q. Morris and designed by Mary Alyce Hare, used the traditions of the West thoughtfully to reexamine Shakespeare's play and raise new questions for a modern audience. From its rollicking Western songs to Petruchio's whipcracking and the rowdy brawl among his henchmen, the production was true to the play's boisterous comic spirit. It differed from all of the previous productions we have seen, however, in its characterization of Kate in relation to Padua. Because characters in the play continually call attention to Kate's difference, her lack of propriety, her wildness, most productions emphasize this quality in her, inviting the audience to regard her as an exception to the civilized, refined, and cooperative norm. The Montana production, however, set in the untamed West, throws this interpretation into question and succeeds in making us aware of the hypocrisy of Padua. The Wild West literary tradition carries with it a host of stock characters who reflect indecorous behaviors—outlaw gang members, town drunks, gamblers, Mexican ban- ditos, and prostitutes. And there are other types who likewise live beyond the boundaries of conventional "civilized life" without necessarily breaking whatever law exists, such as the lone prospector, the naive Eastern traveler, the transplanted Southern belle, the saloon maid, and the Chinese servant. Baptista peddles liquor as well as his daughters' hands and employs a Chinese immigrant (Hop Sing, who hops and sings when called); Vincentio is an aging prospector; Bianca, in ruffled, pastel skirts a la Scarlett O'Hara, will bend any rule to get what she wants; Grumio is a tough Mexican outlaw and Petruchio's other servants at best rough-and-tumble cowhands. The consequence is that we see how ridiculous the complaints made against Katherina actually are: her wildness is no more shocking in the Western setting than any of the other indiscretions or unconventionalities. Kate's lawlessness in smashing a guitar over Hortensio's head simply underlines the general lawlessness of her environment. Thus we are led to ask, "What, in this setting, is conventional?"
p. 7.