Methodology, Dissemination, and Impact
The Toronto Dutch Courtesan project was a Performance as Research experiment. Our understanding of PAR follows Stephen Purcell’s description as ‘scholarly work in which performance practice constitutes a major part of the research enquiry’ (426). We learned and drew scholarly work from the embodied work of our actors in rehearsal, while also presenting the production itself as original research for our audience networks – including our sold-out RSA show, our general performance run for members of university and local communities, and attendees of our rehearsal and production workshops.
For the editors of the forthcoming edition of the play for the Oxford Complete Marston, rehearsal offered a mode of inquiry into editorial practices. Using their initial complete draft of the edited text as our play script, we worked with our cast and director to test out staging possibilities: entrances and exits, further stage directions, character accents, the movement of groups of characters on stage, and – crucially in a text whose Quarto printing vacillates unevenly between prose and verse – the rhythms of lines. We worked out practical problems, such as the number of constables and line distribution amongst them in 4.5 (unclear in Q) and textual cruces regarding word choice and modernisation (i.e. does ‘welyman’ mean wily man or Welshman or something else altogether?) The discoveries from these experiments will be fully disseminated in the Oxford edition (with some extras published on this site).
The edited text of the play, informed by editorial and theatre scholarship, constituted one of our initial ‘hypotheses’ approaching the project. But we were also keen to explore our hypothesis that, on stage, Marston’s play offers simultaneous resonances and dissonances to modern audiences, particularly regarding its central themes: sex work, the treatment of wives, the treatment of ‘the foreign’. A modern production of the play cannot rest easily with an audience but, we suspected, might offer spaces for resistance against what a previous generation of scholarship on the play has broadly accepted as an intractable conservatism and violence towards women, sex workers, and immigrants in early modern England. Our production contributes towards more recent feminist interpretations of the play in which we can locate complex discussions of gender, class, and race in both Marston’s play and more widely.
Our production was not, then, an ‘Original Practices’ production, but a modern one informed by knowledge of historical theatre practices and modes. We did not strictly adhere to commonly accepted practices around doubling, rehearsal by cues, all-male performance, costuming, music, or stage traffic. Our stage, for example, included three upstage curtained doorways, with movement through the central doorway generally corresponding to movement to and from more interior spaces, while the stage left door was used as a closet or arras behind which characters could hide and spy on others; left and right vomitoria entrances/exits which were mainly used to signal movement to and from ‘outside’ (though a prominent exception occured in 4.1 when the masque dancers entered from here); and a balcony on which Beatrice stood while Freevill serenaded her in 2.1, where our musician played, accompanying Francheschina’s dancing, and from which Beatrice, Crispinella , and the rest of the Hubert household watched the masque in 4.1.
Accents are, of course, of particular interest in the Dutch Courtesan, and have been hotly debated amongst Marston critics. On this point in particular, we were guided both by theatrical scholarship and modern intuition: we tested out the play text’s stage Dutch in rehearsal, but were ultimately guided – partly by our awareness that no one can truly ‘know’ how Franceschina’s accent sounded to early modern ears – to give space to Flora Quintus’s natural Hungarian accent – a move which offered the potential for the character to resonate more sympathetically/complexly with contemporary audiences who might now read her accent as markedly different but not inherently risible. Such experiments accorded with our inquiries into how humour and modes of the comic worked in Marston’s play (another avenue in which we tested both early modern, non-realist, modes as well as the more realist modes governing much of contemporary actor training).
The avenues of research dissemination for this project included the production run itself, the rehearsal workshop leading up to production; the performance workshop held during the conference itself; the special issue of Early Theatre publishing work by scholars who attended the conference; our website which will ultimately include documentary reflections on the project events, productions videos and photos, and director’s interviews; and the forthcoming edition of the play in the Complete Marston. We look forward to tracing further impact in future work by scholars and practitioners who had the opportunity to attend our productions and workshop or who consult our project publications.
Works Cited
Purcell, Stephen. ‘Practice-as-Research and Original Practices’. Shakespeare Bulletin 35.3 (2017), 425-443.