Roundtable: The Production Context
9:30-11:00AM | Chair: Helen Ostovich (McMaster)
Speakers: Michael Cordner and Oliver Jones (York, UK)
Respondant: Peter Cockett (McMaster)
Cordner and Jones joined us in a digital roundtable to tell us about the 2013 York (UK) production of The Dutch Courtesan. This production was part of series staging early modern drama at York’s department of theatre, film and television, and was designed to try out assumptions about the play frequently made in criticism, but rarely tested on stage. One of the central assumptions the York production wanted to test was whether Franceschina’s accent is meant to be comical – a long-held position that researchers have contested in recent years. The accompanying York Dutch Courtesan website hosts critical pieces by early modern scholars, and was designed to provide context for the performers and actors as the show was being developed, while also recording the play in production. Jones opened the roundtable by detailing the development of the site, and its aims of sharing off-stage work and conversations related to the production and providing one space where PAR conversations around early modern texts can take place.
Jones and Cordner’s period-set production explored how meaning is created through historical contexts, material artefacts, and different playing conditions. Adopting a new historicist approach that works to understand the play within its early modern culture helps us to import the play into our own contexts without privileging either past (early modern) or future (present day). We can then work to come to grips with The Dutch Courtesan’s misogyny, racism, and religious bigotry while respecting the differences in how these problems exist in Marston’s and our own world. Cordner also outlined how tight collaborations between historical and scholarly critics, editors, and directors are essential to making this approach work, allowing us to think complexly about the play from a variety of knowledges and methods. Scholarly research and editing also helps to disseminate the thinking that happens throughout production development, which informs decisions in performance, but which remains largely hidden from the audience who sees only the ‘final’ product. Cordner and Jones reiterated that websites like the York Dutch Courtesan site also play a crucial role in preserving some of this hidden thinking.
Cordner also spoke on the play’s language and structure. Calling The Dutch Courtesan a 'patchwork quilt', he reported how working with the play in production illuminates just how much Marston draws on other early modern plays in his work: Hamlet, Measure for Measure, Much Ado about Nothing – all appear in quotes, and echoes, and borrowed plots in The Dutch Courtesan. Marston had an extraordinary memory for the voices of his contemporaries and collaborators. (Indeed, Marston’s echoes of and influences on early modern drama became something of a recurring theme of the conference, as we found connections between Marston and Jonson, Barry, Ford, Shakespeare, Wilson, and others.) The characters also repeatedly echo each other: for example, the resonances between Freevill’s defense of the brothels in 1.1, Cockledemoy’s oration for bawds in 1.2, and Crispinella’s diatribe against husbands in 3.1.
One of the structuring principles of Cordner’s production was that of ‘spontaneous combustion’: characters would be provoked and each individual scene had a ‘metamorphic’ capacity. For example, in act 2, the opening conversation between a distraught Malheureux and a mocking Freevill leads to their aggressive encounter with Cockledemoy, and finally to the explosive meeting with Franceschina. The characters, too, fluctuate within a range of emotional states and dextrous verbal shows: Crispinella moves from pert to sympathetic, Beatrice from trusting and sweet to edgy and suicidal, all with equal convincingness. Such parts speak to the skill of the boy actors who must be able to pass through emotional states with ease and wit. They also speak to Marston’s writing for performance rather than readers – oscillations which feel clumsy on the page work extremely well on the stage.
However, Cordner also observed that the chaos of The Dutch Courtesan cannot be perfectly ironed out into a unified play – the explosive qualities which provide its energy and complexity cannot be expected to coalesce into a perfectly unified play. In discussion we wondered whether this ‘wildness’ (Lopez) is one of Marston’s definitive qualities, and what makes producing his plays both risky and rewarding.