{"id":1002,"date":"2017-07-26T08:04:43","date_gmt":"2017-07-26T07:04:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/?p=1002"},"modified":"2017-07-26T10:47:29","modified_gmt":"2017-07-26T09:47:29","slug":"early-modern-verbatim-theatre-a-reflection","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/2017\/07\/26\/early-modern-verbatim-theatre-a-reflection\/","title":{"rendered":"Early Modern Verbatim Theatre: A Reflection"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Lucy Munro<\/a>,\u00a0Reader in Early Modern English Literature at the Department of English, and Emma Whipday<\/a>,\u00a0Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at UCL<\/em><\/p>\n

In 1624, a play entitled The Late Murder in Whitechapel, or Keep the Widow Waking<\/em> was staged at the Red Bull playhouse in Clerkenwell. Written by Thomas Dekker, John Ford, William Rowley and John Webster, it was based on accounts of two recent crimes. The first was the murder of a Whitechapel woman, Joan Tindall, by her son, Nathaniel, which became the subject of at least two ballads, one of which survives<\/a>. The second was the forced marriage of a 62-year-old widow, Anne Elsdon, to a much younger man, Tobias Audley.<\/p>\n

\"tavern<\/a>
A woodcut from Samuel Rowlands\u2019s \u2019Tis Merry When Gossips Meete (c. 1613), showing a widow, wife and maid drinking in a tavern<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Tobias lured Anne to a tavern, where he plied her with alcohol and tried to persuade her to promise to marry him \u2013 a promise that could be legally binding if it was said before witnesses. After several days he eventually seems to have got some kind of agreement from her, and a priest hired for the purpose married them. However, the \u2018marriage\u2019 became the subject of a series of cases in the secular and religious courts.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The Late Murder in Whitechapel, or Keep the Widow Waking<\/em> was an early modern answer to what we now often call \u2018verbatim theatre\u2019 \u2013 performance pieces based on real-life events that draw on documentary and oral sources, including the testimony of participants and witnesses involved in those events.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The playwrights seem to have drawn directly on oral testimony from one of the lawsuits, and their play was then cited in another suit. The play is now lost \u2013 a full account of what we know about it can be found in the splendid Lost Plays Database<\/em><\/a>. However, documents from some of the lawsuits survive. One of them provides information about the play and reproduces the lyric of a ballad that was said to have been sung near the playhouse and Anne Elsden\u2019s own house. It professes to offer advice to \u2018You young men who would marry well\u2019 and concludes with the lines:<\/p>\n

And you who faine would hear the full<\/p>\n

Discourse of this match-making,<\/p>\n

The play will teach you at the bull,<\/p>\n

To keepe the widow waking.<\/p>\n

We don\u2019t know how sympathetic the play was to Anne, but the ballad that advertised it is very much on the side of the young man who exploited her.<\/p>\n

\"dekker\"<\/a>
A signed deposition by Thomas Dekker, one of the playwrights who wrote The Late Murder in Whitechapel, or Keep the Widow Waking<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Twentieth- and twenty-first-century verbatim theatre has occasionally drawn on early modern materials \u2013 one example is The Staffordshire Rebels<\/em>, performed at the Victoria Theatre in Stoke-on-Trent in 1965, which was one of the theatre\u2019s early experiments with what artistic director Peter Cheeseman <\/a>called \u2018documentaries\u2019. More recently, academic researchers such as Laura Gowing<\/a>, Eva Griffith<\/a> and Emma Whipday<\/a> have begun to explore what might happen if extracts from early modern legal documents are put on their feet.<\/p>\n

Our event in May this year brought together a group of verbatim theatre practitioners, actors, historians and theatre scholars, focusing on the Anne Elsdon case as both the subject of an early modern verbatim drama in 1624 and the potential source for a new \u2018early modern\u2019 verbatim piece in 2017.<\/p>\n

The symposium began with two talks from academic researchers. Laura Gowing explored the Anne Elsdon case itself, drawing attention to her discovery of Anne\u2019s own testimony before the church courts, which gives us the widow\u2019s perspective on her criminal mistreatment. Lucy Munro\u2019s talk encapsulated the aims of the symposium as a whole, looking at what we know of the dramatists\u2019 approach to the Elsdon case and other documentary sources, and comparing their techniques with those of Cheeseman and his company in The Staffordshire Rebels<\/em>, giving a glimpse of how contemporary theatre can engage with early modern records.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>
The deposition of John Snowe in one of the lawsuits over the marriage of Anne Elsden and Tobias Audley, one of the documents on which our symposium and workshop scenes drew. The National Archives, STAC 8\/13\/16 . We are very grateful to Lauren Cantos, Kim Gilchrist, Jennifer Hardy, Suzanne Lawrence, Miranda Fay Thomas and Jennifer Young for helping us to prepare transcriptions of the lawsuits.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Engaging young people in care, building a community, exploring restorative justice and responding to violence – the ways in which verbatim theatre can be used…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

These talks were followed by a practitioner roundtable. Maggie Inchley (Queen Mary, University of London) and Sylvan Baker (Central), discussed their project \u2018The Verbatim Formula\u2019<\/a>, which uses theatrical practice to engage with young people in care, involving young people in the theatrical process of telling their stories. Ben Hadley (On the Button Theatre)\u00a0shared details of the variety of ways in which his company On the Button<\/a> uses (and re-imagines) verbatim accounts, and suggested the significance of verbatim theatre as a way of building a community. \u00a0Harriet Madeley (author of verbatim piece The Listening Room<\/a>)\u00a0<\/em>discussed how The Listening Room <\/em>explores restorative justice, and described the process of using verbatim interviews to stimulate conversations about responses to violence. All participants explored the ethics of working from verbatim records, and talked about their different ways of involving interview subjects in the creative process.<\/p>\n

We were then joined by four actors \u2013 Virginia Denham<\/a>, Andrew Murton<\/a>, Simona Bitmate<\/a> and George Johnston<\/a> \u2013 to workshop two different \u2018scenes\u2019 drawing on verbatim accounts from the transcribed Elsden court records, written by Harriet Madeley and Emma Whipday. Harriet focused on the initial attempted courtship of Anne by Tobias, staging Tobias\u2019s accounts of his own motives and actions, and playing with the very different account of this courtship by Anne\u2019s friend Martha Jackson, which exposes Tobias\u2019s lies; it also used the ballad \u2013 sung together by the audience \u2013 to devastating effect. Emma\u2019s scene explored the diverse voices involved in the case, from the man who purchased powders from an apothecary to drug Anne Elsdon, to the neighbour who shut her window to drown out Anne\u2019s cries; it ended with Anne\u2019s newly discovered testimony.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>
The closing lines of the deposition of Martha Jackson, showing the \u2018mark\u2019 (an upside-down \u2018m\u2019) that she made instead of a signature.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Workshopping these scenes enabled us to explore the richness of the case, and to experiment with how creative practice could help us to engage with the records from a theatrical perspective.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It would be impossible to recreate the Keep the Widow Waking <\/em>of Dekker, Ford, Rowley and Webster, but this event enabled us to explore how archival materials and theatrical practice, theatre historians and theatre practitioners, can speak to one another \u2013 and how an encounter between these disciplines can enrich both.<\/p>\n

___________________________________________________________________________<\/span><\/p>\n

You may also like to read<\/p>\n

Shakespeare 2.0: Pray tell, what is a ‘Mooc’?<\/a><\/p>\n

‘A New Route Discovered’: On Shakespeare’s Sonnets<\/a><\/p>\n

King’s Shakespeare Festival: What You Will<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

Blog posts on King\u2019s English represent the views of the individual authors and neither those of the English Department, nor of King\u2019s College London.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Lucy Munro,\u00a0Reader in Early Modern English Literature at the Department of English, and Emma Whipday,\u00a0Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at UCL In 1624, a play entitled The Late Murder in Whitechapel, or Keep the Widow Waking was staged at the Red Bull playhouse in Clerkenwell. Written by Thomas Dekker, John Ford, William Rowley and John […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":685,"featured_media":1018,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,25,4],"tags":[312,306,304,298,305,299,303,309,310,307,308,311,301,300,302],"class_list":["post-1002","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-early-modern-and-shakespeare","category-life-writing-creative-writing-and-performance","category-visual-and-material-culture","tag-actor","tag-cheeseman","tag-court","tag-dekker","tag-documents","tag-ford","tag-marriage","tag-on-the-button","tag-the-listening-room","tag-the-staffordshire-rebels","tag-the-verbatim-formula","tag-theatre-historians","tag-verbatim-theatre","tag-webster","tag-widow"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1002","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/685"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1002"}],"version-history":[{"count":21,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1002\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1030,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1002\/revisions\/1030"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1018"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1002"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1002"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1002"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}