Michael Cordner

Thomas Middleton's A Mad World, My Masters: From Script To Performance

This article takes as its cue the surprisingly scant attention paid by the 2007 Clarendon edition of Thomas Middletons works to the stage history of his plays. Drawing on personal experiences of directing Middletons A Mad World, My Masters at the University of York in 2011, the essay illuminates how working on the script before and during the rehearsal process raises queries as to some of the ways in which the play has traditionally been analysed, thus generating fresh perspectives on the plays overall crafting and the performance implications and potential, overlooked in the edited collection, of some of its key moments. The article also addresses some of the erroneous suppositions made by scholars about the play: the result, perhaps, of the individual plays distinctiveness being submerged in preconceptions about the presumed generic traits of the larger group of plays to which it is assigned, which leads to a serious underestimation of Middletons ability to revisit material he has explored in earlier plays, and radically reinvent it. In focusing on interpretations of the play bodied forth in the rehearsal room rather than in critical literature, the article ultimately seeks to detach A Mad World from the generalized assumptions made about the text in order to unlock the dramatic potency which textual scholars of the play have previously masked from view.

The Malcontent and the Hamlet Aftermath

Long before W. S. Gilberts Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (1891), Tom Stoppards Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966), or Lee Blessings Fortinbras (1991), early modern playwrights wove their own variations on Shakespeares masterpiece. Unlike their successors, however, they did not annex Hamlets characters for appearances in revisionist narratives of their own. Instead, deploying different characters, they echoed aural and visual details from Shakespeares script in ways which significantly inflected the experiences their own plays offered their audiences. This article focuses on one such play: John Marstons The Malcontent (c.1603), written for the Children of the Queens Revels, and later performed by the Kings Men, with Richard Burbage (Shakespeares original Hamlet) in the lead role. In a departure from the cautious cataloguing of Hamlets abundant presence in Marstons dialogue by the plays editors, this essay seeks to reposition The Malcontent as a play distinctively different in its central design from the conventional image of it: an image of a play first acted in a monochromatically parodic style of performance by the childrens company, and later with less success by Shakespeares adult troupe. Drawing on personal experiences of directing the play at the University of York in 2008, the essay blends rehearsal and performance experience with close textual analysis in order to draw attention to Marstons stylistic oscillations and his radical reinvention of revenge plotting, with a view to offering a revitalized impression of The Malcontents distinctive energies in performance.

A Restoration Vanishing Act: The Case of Thomas Betterton’s Groin

Evanescence is the condition of the actor’s art. The career of the great Restoration actor Thomas Betterton seems to present an extreme instance of this common fate — a figure of overpowering significance in his own time, who played a dominating role (as theatre manager as well as actor) for half a century, but who has left only ghostly traces of the prowess which earned him accolades from those who witnessed his performances.

Zeal-of-the-Land Busy Restored

After the reopening of the playhouses at the Restoration theatre managers had perforce to build their initial repertoire from the rich stock of pre-Civil War playscripts. The earliest recorded performance after the king’s return was of Epicoene, or The Silent Woman — a harbinger of the strong Jonsonian presence in the list of subsequent revivals. Jonson’s renewed prosperity in the playhouse was buttressed by a formidable and burgeoning critical reputation. It was therefore natural that novice dramatists should have consulted Jonsonian precedents as they nerved themselves to devise new plays for contemporary audiences. Equally, staging Jonson’s own plays in the unprecedented circumstances of the early 1660s demanded of the players a responsiveness to the ways in which mid-century experience might have rendered some of their materials freshly resonant or politically sensitive. The present essay aims to explore two related, and mutually illuminating, case studies in the history of the Jonsonian presence in the early Restoration playhouses — namely, the difficulties which attended the return of Bartholomew Fair to the stage and the ingenious use made of that comedy by a new dramatist in writing a comedy adventurously addressed to urgent current preoccupations.