Posted on

Episode 87: Resistance Is (Not) Futile

Synopsis

“Times are tough, but they could be worse” is the eternal message of our show. This time, we’re talking about persecution and rebellion–how certain groups were oppressed for political purposes in medieval (and early modern, and modern) Europe, and some people and groups who rebelled, in both a personal and more broadly political way. From Boudica to Hrotsvit to Jack Cade, join us to talk about how people in the middle ages took power back from the elites.

Notes

1/ Link to Plague episode!

2/ You can tell I’m not a real historian because they would not be allowed to describe the French Revolution as “a messy breakup.”

3/ R. I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Authority and Deviance in Western Europe 950–1250, Wiley-Blackwell, 2007.

4/ Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, originally published in 1946, translated by George J. Becker and published in English in 1948. The most famous quote from this essay is “If the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him.” It’s a little eerie to go to the Goodreads page in search of quotes and see how many people’s reviews (from the 2017–2020 period) say something like “Wow, this feels eerily relevant for what’s going on right now.” [Unfortunately, I think it’s always relevant!–JN]

5/ Bhabha, Homi K., “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse.” In The Location of Culture. (London: Routledge, 1994), 85–92.

6/ Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press, 2018).

7/ Boudica! (dies 60 CE) See Episode 58, note 11.

8/ Hrotsvit of Gandersheim (973–no later than 1002). Episode 22 is about her!

9/ Margery Kempe (1373–after 1438) was awesome. See Episode 36 note 17 and Episode 70.

10/ St Francis of Assisi (c.1181–1226). We’ve talked about him a lot! There’s more on his stigmata way back in Episode 4! Also, check him out in Episode 23 (on his Christmas pageant).

11/ Peasants’ Revolt (so called) in 1381.

Justice, Steven. Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

Shakespeare’s version of the Adam/gentleman joke comes from the famous Gravedigger scene in Hamlet V.i:

GRAVEDIGGER: There is no ancient gentlemen but gard’ners, ditchers, and grave-makers. They hold up Adam’s profession.

[Second Gravedigger]: Was he a gentleman?

GRAVEDIGGER: He was the first that ever bore arms.

[Second Gravedigger]: Why, he had none.

GRAVEDIGGER: What, art a heathen? How dost thou understand the scripture? The scripture says Adam digged. Could he dig without arms?

12/ Jack Cade’s Rebellion (1450).

Shakespeare again! 2 Henry VI IV.ii:

Dick: The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.

13/ Florence’s Ciompi Revolt (1378–1382).

14/ Defenestrations of Prague. Episode coming soon!

15/ Victor Hugo (1802–1885) wrote Les Misérables (1862) about the 1832 June Rebellion.

16/ We’re about to post this just after the suspect in the murder of a health insurance CEO has been caught, despite extensive sympathy for him from a large portion of the public. The public reaction demonstrates the anger people currently have toward wealthy institutions that cannot be held accountable, an anger that is similar to the anger of some of the people and revolts that we discussed. One of the things we didn’t discuss during this episode is that once anger and vitriol have been stirred up, they become very difficult to control (and there’s a lot of anger going around right now).

Postscript: We got through all that without a the people are revolting joke. Wow.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Spotify | RSS

Posted on

Episode 28: Food

Summary

Hungry? Grab a snack and join Em and Jesse for a discussion of food in the Middle Ages–what did a well-equipped kitchen contain? What kind of dishes were cooked, with what ingredients? And who did the cooking and baking? With some digressions on international variations of hand pies and sandwiches, Wisconsin fish fries, and some modern recreations of Medieval recipes.

Annotations and Corrections

1/ [0:56] For more on the eucharist, check out episode 3 (on Passover and Easter) and episode 6 (especially the long section on the feast of Corpus Christi).

Caroline Bynum’s Holy Feast, Holy Fast. Amazon link.

2/ [5:45] We recorded this on a different day than usual, and for some reason three or four trains went by Dr. Jesse’s house in less than an hour and a half. [I love trains! We’ve got both freight and Amtrak. Invest in train travel!–JN]

3/ [8:30] Actually, my research suggests that the German immigrants who came to Wisconsin were Catholics, so that is where the fish fry tradition came from.–Em

4/ [9:45] Dr. Jesse alludes to the fact that in the laws of Kashrut, fish is considered pareve, meaning it can be eaten with both meat dishes or dairy dishes. (This means specifically fish–not seafood like shrimp or clams.)

5/ [11:00] The Seal of New York City: BEWARE stereotypical/racist Native American imagery! We are linking to the image for the beavers. And the Wikipedia article is here. As of July 2020, Bill de Blasio was in favor of a commission to rethink the seal.

6/ [15:00] The Chester Harrowing is discussed in episode 8 note 26 and episode 27 note 18 [1:02:03].

7/ [16:40] Hrotsvit has come up several times, but the best place to look for more on her is in her own episode, which was number 22.

8/ Chaucer’s Cook: Here’s the description of the Cook in the General Prologue of The Canterbury Tales (lines 379–387). You can also link to the Cook’s Tale from here (sidebar on the left).

9/ [24:20] An Aga is basically a cast iron box that gets hot slowly and then stays hot for a long time. They seem to use a lot of fuel, and (consequently?) they are very posh in Britain.

Here’s a nice blog on hearths and ovens.

10/ [24:30] Maggie Walker came up in episode 10 (note 2), Icons and Iconography. I don’t know who’s blog this is, but if you scroll down you’ll see a picture of the kitchen with the stove (and the kitchen table with an awesome yellow checkered tablecloth).

11/ [30:10] For the frequency (or lack thereof) of communion, see Miri Rubin’s Corpus Christi esp. pp. 147–148. Amazon link.

12/ [31:20] Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381, by Steven Justice. Amazon link.

13/ [32:30] For a lot of the specific information in this episode from utensils to foodstuffs, I recommend Melitta Weiss Adamson’s Food in Medieval Times. For the possibility of roasting a whole ox on a spit, see Adamson, bottom of page 60.

14/ [34:51] Spoons: we don’t talk about it a lot, but I think it’s interesting to mention that spoons and knives existed for quite a while before the idea of having your own personal flatware for eating with at a meal became a thing.–Em

15/ [35:40] Making cheese is pretty easy–bring a gallon of, for example, goat’s milk to a simmer, add some salt and lemon juice, strain out the curds and squeeze out the liquid. Boom, you have chevre. (If you do this with cow’s milk and don’t squeeze out too much liquid, you have ricotta.) However, making really good cheese is much more complicated and can involve different types of rennet, starters, kneading, aging, etc. [Cheese is one of humanity’s greatest discoveries!–JN]

16/ [36:45] Weird Al’s Amish Paradise. (Also note the call out to Buster Keaton with the wall falling over Weird Al. We discussed Buster Keaton in episode 22 note 2–including the falling house façade–and in episode 21, note 3.)

17/ [38:00] Soap tho? [The Middle Ages had soap! It was made using tallow and lots of lye, generally speaking.–JN]

18/ [41:00] Somehow, suggesting that a pastie and a taco are essentially the same thing is like suggesting that a Pop Tart is a kind of ravioli–technically correct, but likely to start a fight. [Food fight!!–JN]

19/ [42:15] Banh mi: apparently, “banh” as a corruption of “pain” or “banh mi” as a version of “pain de mie” is a folk etymology, and the use of “banh” to mean a type of rice cake (like banh Tet) dates to the 13th century. It is written in Nom (Vietnamese Chinese characters) with 餅, pronounced “bing” in Mandarin! “Mi” means “wheat.” “Pho mai” DOES actually come from “fromage,” and inevitably meant Vache Qui Rie (Laughing Cow) brand cheese. The term “banh mi” is used to mean a sandwich, I believe, in the US and other places that aren’t VN. This is an example of synecdoche. In VN you’d say the filling, like “banh mi pho mai” (cheese sandwich). Are they like a taco? This assertion makes me uncomfortable. [I mean no, except in as much as a taco is like a sandwich… 🙂 –JN]

20/ [46:00] Le Viandier. Some fun translations of these recipes can be found here.

21/ [55:00] Liber de Coquina.

22/ The Forme of Cury. For the recipes, see here, and also here.

23/ Clarissa and the King’s Cookbook: Part 1, part 2, part 3. Part two begins with a reading of the recipe for stuffed goose Dr. Jesse recited.

24/ [1:00:40] Again, a shout out to Melitta Weiss Adamson’s Food in Medieval Times. Amazon link. This quote is from pages 63–64.

25/ [1:05:15] Pater Noster = Our Father = Lord’s Prayer. A “Miserere” is Psalm 51 (or 50 in the Vulgate): “Have mercy upon me, O God” (miserere = mercy).

26/ [1:08:25] Meryl Streep savages an onion. [Love this moment!–JN]

27/ [1:11:05] “We haven’t started cooking chicken with sound waves or anything.” Technically we have started cooking chicken with microwaves though, which is a form of non-ionizing electromagnetic radiation. Although, thermal radiation (heat) is also a type of electromagnetic radiation, so… I’m actually torn on whether this counts as an improvement in existing technology or something fundamentally different.

28/ Other cooking shows:
The always awesome Sohla El-Wayly has just started a historic food cooking project with the history channel.

I think the Alton Brown episode of relevance here is season 14, episode 16: A Bird in the Pie Is Worth Two in the Bush. Sadly not freely available, but you can probably stream it on YouTube or something.

This guy does historical baking.

Ann Reardon also cooks historical dishes…here, she’s also cooking from The Forme of Cury.

29/ [1:14:15] St. Apollonia was mentioned in episode 10, note 37.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Spotify | RSS

Posted on

Episode 22: The Strong Voice of Gandersheim

Summary

Em and Jesse discuss the life and plays of Hrotsvit, the strong voice of Gandersheim and the first named playwright in western Europe. Small content warning, we do discuss rape in this episode, but not explicitly.

Annotations and Corrections

1/ For those too young to remember Benny Hill, this is what Em is talking about.

2/ Buster Keaton falls out a window about 25 seconds into this compilation. There’s also a very late in life Buster Keaton in the film version of A Funny Thing Happened on My Way to the Forum–it’s the last film he was in and he is still wonderful. [This montage is so great! Some things worth noticing: the ladder trick is an ACTUAL lazzo from early modern Italy (and let’s be fair, has probably existed since the invention of the ladder). The moment when Keaton misses the building and falls through the awnings–he was supposed to make it to the other building, but when he missed, he created a new lazzo. (Tom Cruise recently did a building-jumping stunt, missed the building, and crushed his ankle.) The house facade falling on Keaton (from Steamboat Bill, Jr., 1928) is absolutely real. It’s probably Keaton’s most famous–and most copied–stunt, but most people do it with a fake façade. Keaton used a real wall and a TINY window. –JN]

For reference, his given name was Joseph Frank Keaton (later he changed his middle name to Francis). The version of his nickname origin story is a version that he told; others sources suggest he was a bit older (18 months vs 6 months) and the nickname was given by another actor named George Pardy.

I’m pretty sure we have linked to Charlie Chaplin dancing with the globe previously, but go ahead and watch it again (actual dance starts around 1:45). And if you haven’t seen it, just go watch Modern Times.

3/ Minstrelsy was a 19th century phenomenon consisting of comic skits, musical acts, and the like, primarily depicting Black people as played by White actors. Here, you can hear the great Tom Lehrer riffing on what he calls the “Southern” song. (And before Jesse can mention it, it’s a little unfair to call the laws of the South “Medieval”–the Middle Ages were a long and complicated time and in many ways better to people of color than the South was. But it rhymed.)

Jesse: Minstrelsy=Blackface=terrible history of US entertainment. Great commentaries on this fact appear in Spike Lee’s Bamboozled and Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles, while great commentaries on the continued use of Blackface can be seen here (from SNL).
For a reminder that voice minstrelsy still exists, or if that’s behind a paywall, try this, and, of course, Hari Kondabolu’s The Problem with Apu.

Em: We previously linked to RZA’s jingle in episode 15, but here it is again.

4/ Want to hear all of Carmina Burana? Click here. Composed by Carl Orff, text by a lot of people.

5/ Hrotsvit of Gandersheim: the first named playwright in Europe. 935–1002 CE. [I said 1001/2 in the podcast, but in fact her death could have been as early as 973, when she may have written her last work. However, it’s possible that she wrote another text later, which would have required her to live until 1002, if all sources are believed. Either way, I tend to lengthen her life rather than shorten it. Just because she wrote her last work c.973 (if, in fact, this was her last work), it does not mean she died immediately. Even if records are wrong, she may have written later works that are no longer extant (or that haven’t been attributed to her). Most people leave her death date open, which seems fair–we could just say she lived in the second half of the 10th century. See Katharina Wilson’s essay in the collection Medieval Women Writers, edited by Wilson, esp. p. 30 and note 5 p. 42–43. Peter Dronke points out that in 1007 Gandersheim was made a dependency of the diocese of Hildesheim, so the “feminist uptopia” discussed here lasted about the length of Hrotsvit’s time in at Gandersheim. At least she presumably didn’t live to see this happen. Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages, p. 295 note 26–JN]

Jesse: This Falstaff moment is in 1 Henry IV, Act IV scene ii.

6/ We have probably linked to this before, but if you want a beginner-friendly overview on the topic of “What exactly is the Vatican?,” here you go.

7/ Jesse: For a description (in Italian) of the “feminist utopia” described here, see: Ferruccio Bertini, Il teatro di Rosvita: con un saggio di traduzione e di interpretazione del Callimaco (Genova: Tilgher, 1979), p. 9.

Peter Dronke, Women Writers… Amazon link.

Autonomous peasant collective. As I’ve gotten older and know more people like Dennis, this has become funnier and funnier.

8/ Christine de Pizan (1364–c.1430): I actually don’t think we’ve mentioned her before.

9/ Terence: I still think we have mentioned him, but I can’t find him in the notes anywhere (as close to an index as we are able to come) and unfortunately I don’t have any memory whatsoever. So–here you go, short summary: lived right around 185–159 BCE (give or take), Roman African playwright who got his start as a slave but was later freed. Wrote six plays, traveled to Greece to gather material and was never heard from again.

10/ Dactylic hexameter: each line has five dactyls (a long-short-short foot) and a final sixth foot that is two syllables (usually a spondee–two long syllables–or a trochee, which is long-short). It isn’t much used in English except by Longfellow in “Evangeline” (e.g., “THIS is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks…”), and by Public Enemy in “Bring the Noise,” when they wrote lines like, “Never badder than bad cause the brother is madder than mad / At the fact that’s corrupt as a senator…”

The double dactyl is a form of light verse that, when done well, is at least marginally more amusing than a limerick. It was invented by Anthony Hecht and Paul Pascal in 1951 (or possibly by Hecht and John Hollander in 1966). The form is two four-line stanzas, each comprising three lines of dactylic dimeter (that is, two dactyls per line) with a choriamb (long-short-short-long) as the fourth. The first line is always two nonsense words, often “higgeldy piggeldy.” Here are a bunch.

Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade” is written with dactyls.

Byron’s “the destruction of the anapest”…no…”The Destruction of Sennacherib.” It’s written in anapests (two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable; short-short-long), which are rarely used in English. (It sounds like the galloping hoofbeats of the Assyrian army maybe?)

James Thurber made some fun of this poem in this essay (“Miscellaneous Mentions”), but it doesn’t excerpt very well.

11/ Jesse: The Passion of the Holy Virgins Agape, Chionia, and Hirena
(aka “Dulcitius”). Dronke’s note is in Women Writers, p. 294 note 11. Dronke discusses the source on p. 77: “a strange source, a late Roman Passion of St Anastasia, which troubled its twentieth-century editor, the great Bollandist Delehaye, because of the amount of ‘fantasy’ and ‘audacious fiction’ that had contaminated what was doubtless a ‘good’ original. The very features that disquieted Delehaye were those that attracted Hrotsvitha: in fact, she chose to focus on these and ignore all else, discarding even the figure of St Anastasia, the protagonist in the source. Hrotsvitha selected, and brought to life, especially the three sisters (whom her source introduced only as minor characters, protégées of Anastasia) and villain-buffoons, Dulcitius and Sisinnius, who are mocked and confounded by those girls” (Dronke, Women Writers, 77; see also p. 297 note 56).

Kathnina Wilson’s Hrotsvit of Gandersheim: A Florilegium of her Works (Library of Medieval Women). The Latin is “voluptas parit poenam, necessitas autem coronam.” Here’s the entire play in Latin.

Maleficium (witchcraft/sorcery): Dulcitius and Sissinus refer to the women as witches using witchcraft (“maleficiis” and “maleficam”).

12/ A list of some Renaissance women painters. A lot of women artists specialized in still lifes because it would have been inappropriate for them to learn anatomy (often carried out by painting nude male figures).

13/ 1:10:40 “George Sanders” = George Sand.

14/ For more on the Shellys, see episode 20 note 16.

Here is “You and Me and PB Shelley” by Ogden Nash.

15/ This is an amazing Google document for pre-1945 BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, global plays that the internet is working on.

16/ I can’t link to them all, but Kate Beaton did some of my favorite parodies of Wuthering Heights.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Spotify | RSS

Posted on

Episode 21: Watch Out for That Banana Peel

Summary

If you’ve ever pondered how “time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana,” then this episode is for you. Join Jesse and Em as they discuss physical comedy and the origins of the commedia dell’arte, its French cousin the comedie francaise, and the Japanese comedic Kyogen style. With a lot of digressions about the Marx Brothers, Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, Key and Peele, Monty Python, and pretty much everyone else who has ever been funny on film.

Annotations and Corrections

1/ Previous episodes in this series include: The Not-Evolution of Theatre (episode 15), Much Ado About Puppets (episode 16), and Dance Like Nobody’s Watching (episode 17).

2/ Jesse: Commedia dell’arte is incredibly complex, and there’s a LOT written about it. Here’s the Wikipedia article.

If you want to delve deeper, I recommend The Routledge Companion to Commedia dell’Arte edited by Chaffee and Crick, which includes many essays by many scholars as well as a bibliography.

Em: I apologize for my continual mispronunciation of “commedia.” I was raised in a barn (that wasn’t in Italy).

The Comédie Française was founded in 1680 through the combining of two companies, one of which was Moliere’s former troupe (which was now run by his widow, Armande Béjart, and had already merged with another company shortly after Moliere’s death). The Comédie Française thus traces its origin directly back to Moliere and lays claim to being the oldest continuously active theatre company in Europe. (The Comédie Française actually lays claim to being the oldest continuously active theatre company in the world, but…that’s much harder to prove).

The Servant of Two Masters (Il servitore di due padroni), by Carlo Goldoni.

Carlo Gozzi (1720–1806) wrote a number of plays that deserve fame in their own right but are most famous for operatic adaptations (Turandot, adapted by Puccini, and The Love of Three Oranges, which was adapted by Prokofiev and premiered in Chicago, are probably the best known). Gozzi’s plays The Stage King, The Serpent Woman, and The Green Bird (adapted by Julie Taymore in 1996) also remain famous.

Some of the zanni:
Harlequin: initially referred to Arlecchino, a comic clown type of character. Most well-known as a servant character. Unrelated to harlequin romance novels, but definitely related to Harley Quinn. [Actually, Harlequin is the name of the publishing company that published the romance novels that eventually gave rise to the name “Harlequin Romance” (a bit like Kleenex=tissue, I guess). Their logo (their original logo, anyway) was a diamond with a jester/Arlecchino figure inside. The diamond itself mimics the diamond patches on Arlecchino’s costume. Today the logo seems to be the diamond with an “H” inside, but the diamond remains. Harlequin was purchased by NewsCorp in 2014 and is now a division of HarperCollins. To get a good look at Arlecchino’s costume with its patches, click here.–JN]

Columbina: A smart, sassy female version of Harlequin.

Jesse: Arlecchino and Columbina are both zanni, or clowns. Zanni were frequently servants (often of one of the vecchi or old man characters like Pantalone). Brighella and Pulcinella (who becomes Punch in England’s Punch and Judy puppet shows) are other examples of zanni. Zanni could be silly and inept or examples of the “smart servant” type.

The Braggart Soldier, aka il Capitano: A soldier who uses the fact that none of the locals know him to brag about his conquests and rank in an effort to impress others.

Some of the vecchi:
Il Dottore, or the Doctor: an old man who serves as an obstacle for the young lovers. He typically dresses in black academic robes and fancies himself an intellectual, although he often speaks nonsense. [Yes, an important reminder that Il Dottore is a professor–a PhD, basically–not a medical doctor. The medical doctor was il Medico or Il Medico della peste, who wore the famous plague doctor’s mask. Not until the modern era did “doctor” automatically mean “medical doctor.”–JN]

Pantalone, or Pantaloon: an old, wealthy (and greedy) man.

Innamorati: The young lovers.

Jesse: The “set list” was called a canovaccio.

Some of the lazzi:
(See also Mel Gordon’s essay “Lazzi” in the Routledge Companion above in note 2 and his book Lazzi: The Comic Routines of the Commedia dell’Arte.)

The lazzo of falling: Harlequin falls from a high ladder or wall after being shot, shaken, or gravitationally abandoned.

The lazzo of the statue: someone is pretending to be a statue, and makes fun of some passers-by when not regarded.

Getting teeth pulled: c.f. The sadistic dentist in Little Shop of Horrors (Steve Martin!)

Food lazzi: c.f. Charlie Chaplin’s version from Modern Times. Also, this category includes lazzi where a character has to attend/serve two dinners at the same time.

3/ The Marx Brothers in Horse Feathers. You can see how they’re both playing stock characters even though they have specific roles within the film.

Buster Keaton clips and analysis from Every Frame a Painting.

Charlie Chaplin clips (eating machine–there’s nothing like food lazzi for many many lols!). And here’s some more hilarious commentary on mechanization and industrialization.

We previously discussed The Great Dictator in episode 10 (see note 20).

Alan Alda doing Groucho.

4/ Kate Bornstein wrote a play called Hidden: A Gender waaaaaay back in 1989. (You can find the play in her book Gender Outlaw. Here’s the film of the play. –JN]

5/ I would try to summarize the plot of The Magic Flute here, but it doesn’t make that much sense, to be honest. Sort of a boy is sent to rescue girl who was kidnapped, finds out that the person holding her captive wants him to go through various trials to be worthy of her, engages in some weirdly masonic-like rites, at some point the Queen of the Night sings “Der Holle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen,” and at the end somehow everyone gets married and the Queen of the Night and her co-conspirators are magically cast out into eternal night.

The music is pretty amazing though. Here’s a version with Diane Damrau singing the Queen of the Night. The parts in it range from “singable by a decent amateur” to “top coloratura soprano arias of all time.”

The Marriage of Figaro. [Again, super great music. Obviously. This is Mozart. Anyhow, Figaro is also the main character of Beaumarchais’s play The Barber of Seville. The most famous opera version of The Barber of Seville is Rossini’s. It’s worth noting that Lorenzo Da Ponte–who was super interesting and Jewish, although his father converted the family to Catholicism–wrote Mozart’s libretto for The Marriage of Figaro, Don GIovanni, and Cosi fan tutte, so…that’s impressive. –JN]

6/ Falstaff, outlaw/knight/braggart and friend of Prince Hal, appears in Henry IV, pt 1 (probably the best one if you’re interested in him), Henry IV, pt 2 (he gets a couple of famous speeches here, too), The Merry Wives of Windsor (a comedy that has its devotees, but I’m not one of them–probably because it doesn’t read especially well–from Jesse’s comments below, you’d probably have to see it performed), and Henry V (largely off-stage, if I recall correctly). [Falstaff is only off stage in Henry V for many reasons, among them the fact that his death is reported (countless possible reasons why Shakespeare decided to do this). Merry Wives is a tremendous Commedia style play–the mature version of Comedy of Errors, which is also wonderful fun as long as you have someone directing who knows how to direct farce. Farce is HARD; if you get it wrong, it’s not funny, and there is no point.–JN]

7/ Moliere: French guy, wrote some plays, including Tartuffe. [Moliere is amazing, all respect, know and love him! But he did marry his lover’s daughter. So….yeah. For more, click on Armande Béjart’s link in note 2 above.–JN]

8/ Kyogen: Japanese comedic counterpart to Noh (we talked about Noh in episode 17 and a bit in episode 20 if you need a refresher. It has come up at least twice–I think that means it’s going to be on the exam).

Also, Einstein on the Beach is about five hours long, and it is typically performed without intermission, although the audience is permitted to come and go as they wish. To hear the section of the opera Em is referencing (with the counting), click here. A warning–I had only ever heard a recording of this before, and watching the visuals…doesn’t really clear anything up. Glass definitely has other operas that are a little more straightforward (The Penal Colony, for example).

We discussed Tropic Thunder in episode 15 (see note 2).

Some Kyogen plays:
Jesse: Thunderbolt (or Kaminari aka Thunder): a Thunderbolt falls from the sky, bruises his tailbone, and is cured by a quack medical doctor who performs acupuncture (a quack lazzo of acupuncture, actually). The doctor and humanity in general are then rewarded. Here’s a clip of the acupuncture lazzo. A translation of the play can be found in Karen Brazell’s Traditional Japanese Theater: An Anthology of Plays.

Mushrooms. (No idea if this is a good translation or not.) YouTube video of it. [Great video of the play; I show this in class. A translation can also be found in Brazell’s anthology linked above, although Kenny’s translation linked immediately above is probably good too.–JN]

The Delicious Poison. [Kenny’s translation of The Delicious Poison or Busu is in Brazell’s anthology linked above. Kenny’s translation of Mushrooms is also linked above.–JN]

9/ Hrotsvit is discussed in episode 6 (note 18) and in episode 20 (and in the forthcoming episode 22).

Jesse: Aristophanes was awesome. Lysistrata!

Jesse: Terence was a great comic Roman playwright who was tremendously influential in the Middle Ages and Early Modern period and is therefore one of the roots of modern western comedy. He was (North) African, probably from Carthage, and was brought to Rome as an enslaved person. He was educated and eventually freed because of his talent, whereupon he acquired the name Terence. His full name is Publius Terentius Afer–he actually took the “Terentius/Terence” from the man who enslaved (but then also freed) him.

Jesse: Were the past 4 years worth it to watch Kate McKinnon play Rudy Giuliani (slightly NSFW) on SNL? I will have to think about it. There are too many Kenan Thompson clips to choose from, but this one is amazing and also has Leslie Jones. (To be fair, the lazzi are pretty restrained in that one. Here’s another one with lots of lazzi that may be considered NSFW.)

Conan O’Brien on Colbert.

The Ministry of Silly Walks (apologies–I could not find a version that was longer or had more pixels). [Honestly there are too many Monty Python possibilities to link to. Google and start watching!–JN!]

The Key and Peele aerobics skit. Also, if you’re interested in Jordan Peele’s interest in horror, this skit about racist zombies is worth watching (and hilarious, regardless of your interest in horror).

10/ Jesse: For more on Commedia, check out this modern company in DC, Faction of Fools. Here are some great images from Piccolo Teatro di Milano (in Milan), and this link should be all the images from their amazing production of Servant of Two Masters, stretching back decades. Here are some masks made today (we are not endorsing this company). Again, not an endorsement for this one either, but a lot of great images of masks–click through the characters.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Spotify | RSS

Posted on

Episode 15: The Not-Evolution of Theatre

Summary

In which Em and Jess discuss the important theoretical contributions of Tropic Thunder and Blazing Saddles to performance studies, thereby illustrating the important differences between performance, theatre, and ritual and vital questions about their respective origins.

Also, Jess calls Socrates evil, and then Em and Jess decolonize medieval theatre beginning with India and China.

(Aristotle loves theatre and therefore was not evil.)

Notes, Annotations, and Corrections

1/ Okay, to be honest–we didn’t talk about Australia, and that is a super colonized place that is ripe for a reevaluation–evidently, the period we refer to as “the middle ages” is typically called “prehistory” in Australia because there were no written records. (Refer to previous rant about the privileging of written records over other forms of memory.) Sometime we will have to circle back and think about this. [I read “super colonized” as “spider colonized” at first, which also rings true for Australia. But yes–we will definitely have to cover Australia and New Zealand!–JN]

2/ The dudes are emerging. [So many layers!!!–JN]

The new ice cream truck jingle by RZA. Turkey in the Straw information.

White Christmas “Minstrel Number”.

A NY Times article on the Met production of Othello. [Seriously, WTF!!! Come on, Met!–JN]]

I think the Ben Stiller/Spielberg movie was Empire of the Sun. [Yes, it was!–JN]

The Sean Penn movie was I Am Sam. I [Em] hadn’t heard of it, and–wow. Reading the summary, all I can say is it deserves whatever fun Ben Stiller was able to poke at it.

Also, as a face-blind person, the fact that so many actors become famous because they look like other actors is the bane of my freaking existence.

And here is the trailer for Satan’s Alley.

3/ [17:35] On performing parenthood: welcome to Em’s theory of how gender inequalities get perpetuated from generation to generation despite the idea that women shouldn’t have to do 100% of childcare and homemaking being a thing since at least 1989. (Actually probably a lot of women had this idea earlier, but 1989 is when The Second Shift was published.)

This doesn’t have too much to do with medieval studies, but whatever, sez I. [This was definitely an issue in the Middle Ages! We should have a medieval kid/parenthood episode.–JN] [I would totally be in for that.–Em]

4/ For Ishtar/Inanna’s Descent to the Underworld, see Episode 8 nt. 18.

Oedipus Rex, by Tom Lehrer.

5/ [29:59] “Socrates is evil…we’ll footnote that.” Stub footnote so Jesse can provide some proof or something. Otherwise we are going to get nailed on this by the ancient philosophy crowd. [I stand by this!! I have long rants on this, but I can boil it down to a few points. 1) Socrates’s students–specifically Critias–were responsible for a coup that overthrew the democracy in 404 BCE and installed the Thirty Tyrants, who were sympathetic to Sparta (to whom Athens had just lost the Peloponnesian War). 2) The Tyrants, especially Critias, were only in power for 8 months but managed to kill a LOT of people (maybe 5% of the Athenian population). Scholars have excused this over the years as “necessary” blah blah BS. IT’S FASCIST; THEY WERE FASCISTS. (Or more properly proto-fascist, I guess.) 3) Socrates hated democracy and loved the idea of an oligarchy composed of elite individuals. (Read Plato’s Republic.) Welp, turns out oligarchs are f**king monsters. 4) Critias again. 5) The democracy was restored in 403 BCE, and it was agreed that because SO MANY PEOPLE HAD BEEN KILLED by the tyrants, the newly restored democracy would only kill the tyrants themselves and their closest allies. Everyone else would be given amnesty. SOCRATES continued to preach oligarchy. 6) Seriously, read Plato’s early work. It’s not actually Socrates, of course, but it’s certainly influenced by Socrates. He was a classist, elitist snob. 7) Socrates was told to stop preaching oligarchy (i.e., the idea that the best government was one run by a few “qualified” individuals), but he wouldn’t stop. He was told to leave town; he wouldn’t. He couldn’t be executed directly for his role in the 404 BCE coup because of the general amnesty. (His role was difficult to prove anyway, despite Critias. The tyrants ordered Socrates to help in an execution, but Socrates said later that he just went home). So, “corrupting the youth” was a euphemism for “convincing people to overthrow the democracy.” 8) We celebrate Socrates as a martyr to education and freedom of speech, which is the most BS thing ever. He was a genius philosopher, and he’s had an astonishing impact on Western Civilization (via Plato). BUT he was pretty evil too. He is, of course, not the only philosopher to have felt that he isn’t responsible for terrible things done according to his philosophy.–JN]

Em: Okay, in my Introduction to Ancient Philosophy class (where we read Socrates’s Apology), we definitely did not talk about it in any sort of historical context, and…I don’t remember if we talked about what “corrupting the youth” actually meant. Huh.

6/ Recovering Ancient Greek music (including Euripides’s famous chorus of the furies from Orestes).

For more on Greeks and whiteness, see Episode 11, midway through note 15 (on the Elgin Marbles).

7/ I was in a play where we just sang A Health to the Company in the middle of Henry IV pt 1. I dunno, directing is hard, probably.

Also, to be fair to community theatre, setting all the songs to different Beatles tunes did work pretty well. I do love community theatre, it is the most punk of all available theatres.

8/ The Banana Song, for those curious:

Time to gather your arse up off the floor,
(have a bana-na)
Brush your teeth and go toddling off to war,
Wave your hand to sleepy land,
Kiss those dreams away,S
Tell Miss Grable you’re not able,
Not till V-E Day, oh,
Ev’rything’ll be grand in Civvie Street
(have a ban-ana)
Bubbly wine and girls wiv lips so sweet–
But there’s still the German or two to fight,
So show us a smile that’s shiny bright,
And then, as we may have suggested once before–
Gather yer blooming arse up off the floor!

This site has all the song lyrics in Gravity’s Rainbow. There are actually song lyrics in all of his books. Sadly, only one of the books ever got made into a film (Inherent Vice–it was weird).

Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves.

9/ Jesse: Here is the website of the Athens Epidaurus Festival. They live streamed Aeschylus’s Persians from Epidaurus this year when the festival finally reopened.

The theatre of Herodes Atticus.

10/ Hrotsvit was in episode 6 (note 18); she’ll also be discussed extensively in a forthcoming episode.

11/ Kalidasa, The Recognition of Shakuntala.

Sudraka, The Little Clay Cart.

The Natya Shastra.

12/ Things England brought back from India (an incomplete list):

  • Spices
  • Paisley
  • Sanskrit drama
  • Some really big diamonds
  • A lot of other artefacts, including a Buddha statue (the Sultanganj Buddha) that weighs over 500 kg (over 1,000 lbs)
  • Approximately $45 trillion worth of stuff (in 2017 USD) over 173 years

13/ Sanskrit is still a language that is around today and you can learn it. There are about 3 million people worldwide who speak it and maybe 25k speak it as their primary language, but I believe what they speak is different from the “perfected” version of Sanskrit you might learn on your way to a degree in Buddhism (in Em’s program, you had to take a semester or two of Sanskrit before you could take Pali, the primary language of Buddhist texts–note that Em did a different track and didn’t take either).

Also, incidentally, Thai derives a fair amount of its script from Devanagari (the script Sanskrit is written in), but not in a way that is obvious if you look at the two abrugidas side by side.

“When we speak of horses” is a misquote from Henry V, act 1, scene 1 (actual quote: Think when we talk of horses, that you see them / Printing their proud hoofs i’ the receiving earth).

14/ Chinese opera: Dear China, I say this with the greatest respect as a Sinophile and a lover of opera: your opera is pretty extra.

Also I (Em) forgot, when we had this conversation, that Samuel Ramey used to leap out of the orchestra pit when he played Mephistopheles. Maybe. I was told this at one point. [Yes, in Boito’s Mephistopheles! I saw it at the Lyric Opera of Chicago. Great production! Also, it starts with something akin to the Dialogue in Heaven, a medieval tradition followed by Goethe in Faust (and hence by Boito in his opera about Mephistopheles and Faust). Goethe might have decided to include the Dialogue in Heaven specifically because of the influence of Sanskrit dramas, which apparently made prologues cool again. Anyway, the Devil shows up to talk to God and bets God that he (the Devil) can tempt Faust. It’s quite Jobian. Anyway, this is why Ramey lept from the orchestra pit (Hell) to the stage (Heaven) to have a chat with God.–JN]

Jesse: Also, a shout out to David Cangelosi’s Mime in Wagner’s Ring Cycle (in a production originated at Lyric Opera of Chicago), where he climbed around the set of his hut (hanging from the rafters and such). It was very exciting!

Zaju 雜劇 is traditional Chinese theater. The technical term for Chinese opera is xiqu (戲曲), I think.

The Injustice to Dou E, by Guan Hanqing. Technically I think it’s not “E” like the letter e, it’s “ə” (not in the sense of an unaccented vowel, just that’s the sound). Unless the pronounciation has changed since the Middle Ages–totally possible. Hm. We will also discuss this one more in a future episode.

The Chalk Circle by Li Qianfu.

Possibly, rather than a common source (although that would also be pretty cool), people have merely observed certain human traits that are universal? [Nope, there’s definitely a common source. I mean, it’s not hard to believe–Genghis Khan’s troops traveled in both directions, for example, but so did a lot of other people, and people bring stories–JN]

Jesse: Here’s a favorite scene–it’s the battle scene in White Snake. The legend is old. Briefly, the hero is a female immortal (a white snake), who falls in love with a mortal. An evil monk tries to separate them, and White Snake and her best friend (the female immortal Green Snake) rally their good troops to fight the monk and his evil troops. This scene is the fight–color symbolism of good vs evil abounds. There are a lot of dancers and acrobats in this battle scene, but the women playing White Snake and Green Snake are also singers. (More on this in an upcoming episode too.)

Here’s the first half of the opera, to hear the singing.

In medieval Chinese theatre, men could play women and women could play men. Much later, only men were allowed to perform on stage (probably because of the influence of Japan). Today, women again play female roles. However, Mei Lanfang was one of the most famous male Chinese opera stars of the twentieth century, and he specialized in female roles. Seeing him perform on stage inspired Brecht to theorize alienation (Verfremdungseffekt). Here’s a (poor quality because it’s old!) video of Mei Lanfang.

Here’s a reconstruction of a medieval mural of a Chinese acting troupe. The leader of the troupe is in the center in red, and she’s costumed in a manner that suggests she might be about to play a male lead role. The female actors appear to be dressed in robes that cover their feet, regardless of the gender of character they are playing. (This is not because of foot binding, which didn’t exist yet. Instead, It seems to be a way to signal to the viewer that these actors are women, regardless of how they are costumed. It might also have been a way for women playing male roles to disguise the size of their feet.) Also interesting, some of the men in the mural seem to have fake beards. On the left, we can just barely see a stage hand peeking out from backstage. In other words, this is a troupe in costume and ready to perform!

Here is the original mural. The text above the mural reads “Ráodū liked it. Zhōng Dūxiù, a famous actress of sǎnyuè performed here. The fourth month of year one in era Tàidìng.” This is how we know for sure that the troupe is led by a women, Zhōng Dūxiù.

15/ As Jesse says, we don’t often set new lyrics to existing tunes…but Weird Al and Tom Lehrer sure do. (Side note: Tom Lehrer is now 92 and still, as of this writing, alive.)

Jesse: Yaaay Tom Lehrer!!! Also, Weird Al tells the following story about “Smells like Nirvana:” Weird Al asked Kurt Cobain if he (Weird Al) could parody “Smells like Teen Spirit,” and Cobain said he liked Weird Al, but so many of his parodies were about food, and Cobain didn’t want this one to be about food. And Weird Al said–Don’t worry, it’s going to be about how nobody can understand your lyrics. And Cobain said yes.

I love this because A+ for both Cobain and Weird Al. And also, Weird Al was not wrong.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Spotify | RSS