Good King Charles Study Guide New.Pub

In Good King Charles’s Golden Days

By Bernard Shaw

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Shaw Festival Study Guide

The Shaw Story 2
The Players 3 The Story 4
The Playwright 5 Who’s Who 6-7
Director’s Notes 8
Designer’s Notes 9-10 Production History 11 World of the Play 12-16
Did You Know? 17
Say What? 18
Sources 19
Activities 20-32

THE SHAW STORY

MANDATE

The Shaw Festival is the only theatre in the world which exclusively focuses on plays by Bernard Shaw and his contemporaries, including plays written during, or about the period of Shaw’s lifetime (1856 – 1950).

The Shaw Festival’s mandate also includes: • Uncovered Gems – digging up undiscovered theatrical treasures, or plays which were considered major works when they were written but which have since been unjustly neglected
• American Classics – we continue to celebrate the best of American theatre • Musicals – musical treats either from, or set during the period of our mandate • Canadian Work – to allow us to hear and promote our own stories, and our own points of view about the mandate period.

WHAT MAKES SHAW SPECIAL

MEET THE COMPANY — OUR ENSEMBLE

• Our Actors: All Shaw performers contribute to the sense of ensemble, much like the players in an orchestra. Often, smaller parts are played by actors who are leading performers in their own right, but in our “orchestra,” they support the central action helping to create a density of experiences that are both subtle and informative.
• Our Designers: Every production that graces the Shaw Festival stages is built “from scratch,” from an original design. Professional designers lead teams who collaborate with each production’s director to create set, costumes, and lighting designs that complement the play’s text.
• Our Music: Music played an important role in Bernard Shaw’s life – in fact, he wrote music criticism for several years under the pseudonym Corno di Bassetto. Just as the reach of musical theatre is vast and manifold, so is The Shaw’s approach - presenting Brecht and Weill, Rodgers and Hart, and everything in between.
• Our Play Development: The goals of Shaw’s Play Development Program include: 1) to develop new adaptations and translations that will tell classic stories in a contemporary way; 2) to produce new plays alongside those of Shaw and his contemporaries.

Festival Theatre

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

As Artistic Director Jackie Maxwell says, “We all know the man can talk, but Bernard Shaw is also one of the most prescient, provocative, sparklingly articulate writers in the English language. His words and ideas, expressed in plays that are well-known, such as this season’s The Devil’s Disciple, or in plays that are not so familiar but no less interesting, have extraordinary relevance today. It is a joy to draw attention to those ideas and bring them to life on our stages.”

Court House Theatre

OUR THEATRES

The Shaw Festival presents plays in three distinctive theatres. The Festival Theatre with 869 seats is The Shaw’s flagship theatre; the historic Court House where The Shaw first began performing seats 327; and the Royal George Theatre, modeled after an Edwardian opera house, holds 328.

THE SHAW’S COAT OF ARMS

In 1987, on the occasion of our 25th Anniversary, the Shaw Festival became the second theatre company in the world to be granted a Coat of Arms by the College of Heralds. A large painted sculpture of our Coat of Arms adorns the lobby of the Festival Theatre.

Royal George Theatre

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THE PLAYERS

Study Guide

James, Duke of York King Charles II
ANDREW BUNKER BENEDICT CAMPBELL LISA CODRINGTON

A practical, hands-on resource for the classroom which contains background information for the play, suggested themes for discussion, and Ontario curriculum-based activities. Designed by educators and theatre professionals, the activities and themes for discussion are organized in modules that can be used independently or interdependently according to the class level and time

Louise de Kéouaille, Duchess of Portsmouth

Nell Gwynn

NICOLA CORREIA-DAMUDE

MARY HANEY

Mrs Basham

Barbara Villiers, Duchess of Cleveland Sally
CLAIRE JULLIEN ESTHER MALONEY
Queen Catherine of Braganza LAURIE PATON

George Fox

RIC REID

Isaac Newton Godfrey Kneller
GRAEME SOMERVILLE KEN JAMES STEWART

availability. In Good King Charles’s Golden Days is recommended for students in grade 9 and higher.

THE ARTISTIC TEAM

Director

EDA HOLMES

This guide was

Set Designer

CAMELLIA KOO

written and compiled by Suzanne Merriam and Amanda Tripp. Additional materials were provided by Joanna Falck, Eda Holmes, Camellia Koo, and Michael Gianfrancesco

Costume Designer Lighting Designer
MICHAEL GIANFRANCESCO BONNIE BEECHER

THE STORY

A philosopher, a religious leader, an artist, an actress and a King meet at Sir Isaac Newton’s house. The set-up for a joke? No, it’s Shaw’s Restoration comedy, where everything from geometry to art to love potions are debated and discussed by some of history’s leading figures. If only King Charles’s mistresses would stop interrupting!

Cover: Julie Martell, Claire Jullien, Lisa Codrington Photo by Shin Sugino

Previews April 17 Opens May 21 Closes October 9

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In Good King Charles’s Golden Days

A True History That Never Happened

Such a lot of interesting people lived then and he is throwing them all in together to sink or swim

By Bernard Shaw

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he play’s subtitle, A True History That Never Happened , gives us an insight

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into Shaw’s almost whimsical approach to this fascinating and humorous play. In writing it, he took the opportunity to play the ‘what if’ game: what might have happened had several prominent men of history met at the height of their powers? What if a leading scientist had a painter, a religious leader and a King to his house for a good discussion? And what if this discussion was, on occasion, interrupted by one or several of the King’s mistresses? The result was In Good King Charles’s Golden Days - a witty and decidedly Shavian take on some great men (and women) of history.

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Charlotte Shaw

The men that gather in the play include the host for the gathering, the great philosopher and scientist Sir Isaac Newton. His guests are leading portrait painter Godfrey Kneller, religious rebel and founder of the Quakers George Fox, King Charles II and Charles’s argumentative brother, James II. Between them they discuss almost everything: questions of leadership (all of them being leaders in his own field) along with arguments about art versus science versus religion. Even King Charles expresses his excitement in anticipation of the discussion:

(wife of Bernard

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Shaw)

Charles: I confess to unbounded curiosity to hear what George Fox can have to say to Isaac Newton. It is not altogether an impertinent curiosity. My trade, which is a very unusual one, requires that I should know what Tom, Dick and Harry have to say to one another. I find you two gentlemen much more interesting and infinitely more important.

And into this mix of great men, Shaw introduces a few great women - to “relieve the intellectual tension”. Nell Gwynn, the famous comic actress; Barbara Villiers, Duchess of Cleveland, one of Charles’ most notorious mistresses who had five of his illegitimate children and held great power in his court; Louise De Kerouaille, Duchess of Portsmouth, a mistress from France who was known for maintaining her ‘baby face’ good looks throughout her life.

They each come to Sir Isaac Newton’s house looking for Charles, and none is too happy to find the other there. However, they hold their own with the great men and bring their own insights to discussions of science, religion, art, and love. When the Duchess accuses Charles of having been unfaithful to her “a thousand times”, Newton calculates with absolute mathematical precision that King Charles would have to be almost three hundred years old for that to be true: “Figures cannot mock, because they cannot feel. That is their great quality and their great fault,” he tells her.

As in last year’s hit Getting Married, they fall into both serious and comic debate about big topics–it’s another great discussion play that only Shaw could write.

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BERNARD SHAW

An acclaimed dramatist, critic, and social reformer Bernard Shaw was born in Dublin

where he grew up in an atmosphere of genteel poverty. He attended four schools and was tutored by a clerical uncle, but left his formal education behind him at the age of fifteen. He developed a wide knowledge of music, art, and literature under the influence of his mother, a singer and vocal music teacher, and as a result of his visits to the National Gallery of Ireland. In 1876 he moved to London, where he spent his afternoons in the British Museum and his evenings pursuing his informal education in the form of lectures and debates. Shaw declared himself a socialist in 1882 and joined the Fabian Society in 1884. He soon distinguished himself as a fluent and

effective public speaker, as well as an incisive and irreverent critic of music, art, and drama.

Shaw’s first play, Widowers’ Houses, was produced privately in 1892 for the members of the Independent Theatre Society. Shaw achieved his first commercial success with the American premiere of The Devil’s Disciple, the income from which enabled him to quit his job as a drama critic and to make his living solely as a

playwright.

In 1898 he married Charlotte Payne-Townshend, an Irish heiress whom he had met through his Fabian friends Beatrice and Sidney Webb.

Harley Granville-Barker, a young actor-manager, helped to advance Shaw’s popularity in London with his famous repertory experiment at the Royal Court Theatre from 1904 to 1907. Of the “thousand performances” of this venture, over 700 were of plays by Shaw, including the premieres of John Bull’s Other Island (1904), Man and Superman (1905), Major Barbara (1905), and The Doctor’s Dilemma (1906). Shaw’s best-known play, Pygmalion, was first performed in 1913. Two generations later, it attained even greater fame as the musical My Fair Lady.

During World War I, Shaw’s anti-war speeches and a controversial pamphlet entitled Common Sense About the War made him very unpopular as a public figure. In Heartbreak House (performed 1920) Shaw exposed, in a country-house setting on the eve of the War, the spiritual bankruptcy of the generation responsible for the carnage. Next came Back to Methuselah (1922) and Saint Joan (1923), acclaim for which led to the awarding of the

Nobel Prize for Literature in1925. Shaw continued to write

plays and essays until his death in 1950 at the age of 94.

A bachelor, an Irishman, a vegetar- ian, a fluent liar, a social-democrat, a lecturer and debater, a lover of music, a fierce opponent of the present status of women, and an insister on the seriousness of art

IN HIS OWN

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WORDS...

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Who’s Who

In Good King Charles’s Golden Days

*KING CHARLES II (1630 -1685) King of England from 1660-1685. He was briefly King of Scotland after his father’s execution in 1649. But Charles’s invasion of England in 1651 ended in his defeat at Worcester, followed by a humiliating flight to France. Two years after Oliver Cromwell’s death in 1658, a reconstituted Parliament restored the throne to Charles - on Parliament’s terms. (Shaw described Charles II as “the first king of England whose kingship was purely symbolic”.) In the Restoration period under this “Merry Monarch”, the arts and sciences flourished in reaction to their suppression during Cromwell’s Commonwealth.

*SIR ISAAC NEWTON (1642 -1727) Newton's reflecting telescope, made in 1668, brought him to the attention of the scientific community. In1672 he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society. He also studied and published works on history, theology and alchemy. In 1687, with the support of his friend the astronomer Edmond Halley, Newton published his single greatest work, the 'Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathmatica' ('Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy'). This showed how a universal force, gravity, applied to all objects in all parts of the universe. By the early 1700s he was the dominant figure in British and European scientific societies.

*SIR GODFREY KNELLER (1646-1723) Born in Germany, Kneller studied in

Amsterdam and arrived in England around the year 1675. He became the leading portrait painter in England during the late 17th century, and was principle painter to the King. In the preface to In Good King Charles’s Golden Days, Shaw admits that it was William Hogarth, and not Kneller, who said “the line of beauty is a curve” - many decades after the time of this play.

*JAMES, DUKE OF YORK (1633-1701) Became James II after the death of his brother Charles II. The fourth and last of the Stuart kings, James was very unpopular due to his high-handed attitudes and his Catholic sympathies. His reign lasted only three years. In 1685 he fought off an invasion by the Duke of Monmouth, Charles’s eldest illegitimate son. In 1688 some prominent Englishmen invited James’s Protestant daughter Mary and her Dutch husband William of Orange to seize the throne, in what became known as the Glorious (or Bloodless) Revolution.

* Portrait painted by Godfrey Kneller

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GEORGE FOX (1624 -1691) Founded the ‘Quakers’ or Society of Friends. Puzzled by the inconsistency between what Christians said they believed and the way they behaved, Fox became a religious activist at the age of 19. He was imprisoned eight times for preaching views that annoyed the religious and political establishment of his time. Fox's aim was to inspire people to live by the principles of their faith. He objected to the hierarchical structure and the rituals of the churches of his time. He thought that believers should have a direct relationship with God and that no person (priests, for example) and no thing should come between them. Not surprisingly, these views infuriated the mainstream churches, and Quakers were persecuted in Britain until 1689.

CATHERINE OF BRAGANZA (1638 -1705) Wife of Charles II, was Queen of England until Charles’s death in 1685. She had no children. In 1678, a group of Protestants led by Titus Oates invented a “Popish Plot” which accused Catherine of complicity in a plot to kill Charles and place his Catholic brother James on the throne. In the end this “plot” was discredited and Catherine was cleared of any wrongdoing. Catherine helped reconcile Charles to the Catholic faith shortly before he died. In 1692 she returned to Portugal, where she was regent for her ailing brother King Pedro II.

NELL GWYNN (1650 -1687) According to legend, she began her theatrical career as an orange-seller. Her vivacity and charm soon made her Drury Lane’s leading comedienne. Though virtually illiterate, Nell was an enchanting presence on the stage, especially admired for her impudent prologues and epilogues. In 1670 she retired from the stage, becoming the King’s mistress and bearing him two sons. On his deathbed, Charles is said to have begged his brother James: “Let not poor Nelly starve”. James paid off Nell’s debts and provided her with a generous pension for the rest of her short life.

LOUISE DE KÉROUAILLE (1649 -1734) Was reputed to be a French spy. It is more likely that she served Charles in gaining secret financial support from France’s “Sun King,” Louis XIV, for Charles’s administration. She was made Duchess of Portsmouth in 1673, the year after she bore Charles a son.

BARBARA VILLIERS (1641 -1709) Duchess of Cleveland after 1670, was Charles II’s favourite mistress for the decade following his Restoration. The King acknowledged five of her seven children as his own. After losing his favour to Louise de Kéroualle, Villiers consoled herself with other lovers such as John Churchill, later first Duke of Marlborough, and the playwright William Wycherley. In 1677 she settled in Paris, returning to England just before Charles’s death in 1685.

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Eda Holmes talks about directing In Good King Charles’s Golden Days

Q: What’s your vision of the play? A: My vision for the play centers around two things 1) the notion of people who have ideas that are so full of passion that they are driven to arguments, fits, and fist fights and 2) a time machine that allows these historical figures to exist fully alive forever so that through them we can wrestle with the basic issues of politics, religion, science, and human relations with a view that looks both back at history and forward to our own world.

Q: Who would you suggest as the ideal audience for your production? A: I suppose the ideal audience for this play would be anyone with a passion for science, politics, religion or art. Shaw himself said that the perfect audience for his plays would be a pack of philosophers — so really that means anyone who is thrilled by thinking.

Q: Have you ever directed this playwright’s work before? A: No!

Q: What do you find most interesting about this playwright? About the play? A: I am overwhelmed by his unquenchable curiosity about humanity; I am charmed by his imagination; I am humbled by his political commitment as a socialist; I am in awe of his extraordinary intellect that never shrank from challenging assumptions about the world. In Good King Charles’s Golden Days is like a celebration of his curiosity, imagination, political thought, and humanity. And it is funny, which is truly a feat of genius.

Q: What do you want us to tell people about your work on this play? A That I tried really hard.

Q: How accessible will our production be for students and what do you want younger audience members to know about the play’s message and your direction? A: My direction will be as accessible as the play. I would like the younger audience members to come away with a notion of ideas being extremely passion-filled and exciting. I don’t think that it is as accessible as say, Shaw’s Arms and the Man though — there is a lot of British history in it — but the outfits are great.

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Camellia Koo talks about designing the set

Q: Can you describe your vision for In Good King Charles’s Golden Days? A: The play is a collision of humanity and a collision of ideas, so we used Newton's theories on gravity and his model for the universe/solar system as our main inspiration. The set resembles both an orrery, a model/mobile of the solar system, as well as the elliptical shape of a planet's orbit, while at the same time, placing us slightly abstractly, as opposed to naturalistically in Newton's study. The entire set floats in a void, like a celestial body does in space. In Act II, we go to a more intimate location and another form of orrery comes into play. The characters in the play circle around each other, both verbally and physically, and then spontaneously break into fist fights, and at the centre of it all sits King Charles II, in disguise but ever present; the planets elliptically orbiting around the sun, on inevitable collision courses with each other.

Q: Have you previously designed plays by Bernard Shaw? A: I designed Heartbreak House for a set design project while in second year of theatre school. It was only a paper project (texts analysis, research, drafting, making a maquette and doing a final design presentation of the model). In Good King Charles's Golden Days will be the first produced/staged play of Bernard Shaw that I've designed.

Q: What do you find most striking about In Good King Charles’s Golden Days? A: I love what the characters talk about, argue about, in this play...religion vs. science, war vs. peace, circles vs. ellipses, straight lines vs. curves...

Q: What do you want audience members to know about your design? A: I hope the audience members pick up on the subtle details of the set that reflect what the characters talk about. Also, Newton's study is full of his many wide ranging experiments, but the whole room is also a sort of bell jar for the collision of characters that Bernard Shaw wrote to exist inside it.

The orrery model (left) is one of the images that influenced the design of the set. A model of the set (maquette) is pictured on the right.

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Michael Gianfrancesco talks about designing the costumes