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Episode 58: Long Live the Queen

Summary

A lot of stuff about Richards II and III for a podcast that’s supposed to be about queens. Also Mathildas, Boudica, and why Black Panther is more historically accurate than Wonder Woman.

Notes

1/ Richard III’s body was eventually found under a car park. I swear we talked about this at some point.

“Was ever woman in this humor woo’d?” Richard III, act I, scene 2

Okay, in reality my husband usually plays one of the murderers, but explaining the other characters is a lot of work so I changed the story. Don’t tell him, he doesn’t listen to the podcast so he’ll never know.

2/ Stichomythia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stichomythia

3/ Richard II has the speech that goes,

No matter where; of comfort no man speak:
Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs;
Make dust our paper and with rainy eyes
Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth,
Let’s choose executors and talk of wills:
And yet not so, for what can we bequeath
Save our deposed bodies to the ground?
Our lands, our lives and all are Bolingbroke’s,
And nothing can we call our own but death
And that small model of the barren earth
Which serves as paste and cover to our bones.
For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings…

If you love language, go read it. [Love, love, love.–JN]

4/ We’ve talked about The King’s Horseman before… (See episode 20, note 9.)

The Invention of Love by Tom Stoppard is about poet/classicist AE Housman and Latin translations. Super funny and brilliant, as one would expect from Stoppard.

5/ I think we quoted the Tony Kushner speech when we last discussed the Bayeux Tapestry. However I don’t know if that episode is live yet? These ones jumped the queue. (For more on the Bayeux Tapestry, see episode 54 note 15.)

He says there’s a Prior Walter stitched into the Bayeux tapestry.
………………………………
The Bayeux tapestry. Embroidered by La Reine Mathilde.
………………………………
Mathilde stitched while William the Conqueror was off to war. She was capable of . . . more than loyalty. Devotion.
She waited for him, she stitched for years. And if he had come back broken and defeated from war, she would have loved him even more. And if he had returned mutilated, ugly, full of infection and horror, she would still have loved him; fed by pity, by a sharing of pain, she would love him even more, and even more, and she would never, never have prayed to God, please let him die if he can’t return to me whole and healthy and able to live a normal life . . . If he had died, she would have buried her heart with him.

–Louis in Angels in America Pt 1: Millennium Approaches Act 2, scene 3

6/ English rulers before William I: See episodes 53 (England Before the Norman Invasion) and 54 (More England, More Normans).

7/ Henry V has a lot of speeches about France.

Example:

Now are we well resolved; and, by God’s help,
And yours, the noble sinews of our power,
France being ours, we’ll bend it to our awe,
Or break it all to pieces: or there we’ll sit,
Ruling in large and ample empery
O’er France and all her almost kingly dukedoms,
Or lay these bones in an unworthy urn,
Tombless, with no remembrance over them:
Either our history shall with full mouth
Speak freely of our acts, or else our grave,
Like Turkish mute, shall have a tongueless mouth,
Not worshipp’d with a waxen epitaph.

8/ Henry/Heinrich V, Holy Roman Emperor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_V,_Holy_Roman_Emperor

Henry/Heinrich literally means “ruler of the house,” so there are a lot of kings with that name. There was also a Henry/Henri V of France, but he only ruled for about five days when he was ten, and then spent the rest of his life trying to get back on the throne. This was during that awkward period in France that lasted from about 1815 to 1870ish when there were a couple of revolutions, different constitutions, Napoleons on and off the throne, kings coming and going…

9/ All of this is very confusing, but Stephen’s wife Matilda was also a descendent of the house of Wessex, so even if his line had remained on the throne the English monarchy would still have been descendents of the house of Wessex.

10/ St Pancras Old Church https://stpancrasoldchurch.posp.co.uk/ Nowadays they call themselves Anglo–Catholic. The church building is one of the oldest in London (maybe in England?), and there are not entirely implausible claims that there was worship on the site going back to the 300s. The churchyard is also mentioned in Dickens (in The Tale of Two Cities) as a place to go body snatching (or “fishing”). More recently, in 1968, the Beatles were photographed there.

The Hardy Tree: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Hardy#/media/File:2780theHardyTreeOldStPancrasChurchyard.jpg

11/ Boudica / Boadicea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boudica

12/ Tacitus (c. 56–120CE) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacitus
On Boudica: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/classics/warwickclassicsnetwork/romancoventry/resources/boudica/sources/tacitus/

13/ Cassius Dio (c.155–c.235) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassius_Dio
On Boudica: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/classics/warwickclassicsnetwork/romancoventry/resources/boudica/sources/cassiusdio/

14/ Torc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torc

15/ Jesse: I should clarify that the problem with the movie’s ahistorical nature is the fact that the Dahomey were major participants in the slave trade. (There were several African nations who were major participants in the slave trade–i.e., they were enslavers who captured and sold people from other tribes to European slavers.) The arguments about The Woman King focus on the fact that the movie glorifies the Dahomey women warriors without acknowledging their complicity in the slave trade. Although Western movies unfortunately gloss over such complexities all the time, the criticism argues that a movie created by an African American team (led and fronted by an amazing African American woman, Viola Davis) has a greater responsibility not to ignore the complexities of history. I hadn’t seen the movie or read the criticism yet when we discussed it on the podcast!

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Episode 24: Stages in the Middle Ages

Synopsis

Em and Jesse discuss physical performance spaces, from Greek amphitheaters to pageant carts to prosceniums, and the changes theaters have seen over time. There’s a lot of Renaissance stuff in here, including an interesting discussion of the various theaters Shakespeare would have premiered plays–the Globe and the Rose–with some interesting digressions about the Blues Brothers, American Realism, and also the Bishop of Winchester and the area of Southwark known as the Liberty of the Clink.

Annotations and Corrections

1/ Hrotsvit was indeed episode 22.

2/ They shout at each other on someone’s lawn because doing the histories is less risky than doing the comedies, as I understand it (of which everyone has their specific favorite). The histories generally involve a lot of shouting.

3/ Bob’s Country Roadhouse: we got both types of music–country AND western. I assume the bottles thrown after they start singing “Rawhide” are appreciative bottles.

Jesse: We forgot to mention that animals can also show up at outdoor theatres (Bats! Racoons!). This definitely adds to the participatory “all-in-this-together” feeling and serves as a nice reminder that the environment can’t be controlled.

Also, the most famous medieval theatre fire is probably this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bal_des_Ardents

4/ A surprising number of early indoor theatres still exist. The earliest extant indoor theatres of modern Western Europe are in Italy. (“Modern” in this instance means after the fall of Rome, and “indoor theatre” specifies a space built specifically for performance.)

1580–85: Teatro Olimpico, Vicienza
1588–90: Teatro all’Antica, Sabbioneta
1617–18: Theatre Farnese, Parma

Proscenium style: from the Greek “pro skene,” in front of the scenery.

The oldest theatre, Teatro Olimpico, has a permanent skene with perspective scenery visible through the arches: it can be seen here.

Here’s the floor plan, where you can see the paths for the Teatro Olimpico’s perspective scenery. The entire back half of the stage is for the scenery and the skene.

5/ Later Baroque theatres such as Sweden’s Drottningholm Palace Theatre (opened 1754, rebuilt 1764-66) allowed actors to go a little upstage into the scenery without ruining the perspective. Nonetheless, actors tended to remain downstage, particularly on what we would now consider the apron (the small part of the stage that thrusts out in front of the proscenium arch). Here are some floor plans.

Here’s a GREAT video of the scenery changing at the Drottningholm Palace Theatre! You even see how they change it backstage (no computers or mechanization!).

Český Krumlov Castle Theatre (1767) in the Czech Republic is also an excellent example of a Baroque theatre. The video on this page has a lot of fun stills, including some of waves like those promoted by Nicola Sabbatini (1574–1654). See also this page (Sabbatini also used periaktoi, or triangular set pieces that could change scenery quickly. Very brief video here.

This video shows the Český Krumlov Castle Theatre scenery changing at 3:16. If you watch the complete video, you’ll notice that the dancer never goes very far upstage.

Here’s another video from the Český Krumlov Castle Theatre–the scenery changes at 10:45. You’ll notice that the scenery isn’t used to create a perspective, and the actors do make use of the upstage space. A cloud descends at 13:49.

6/ Bertolt Brecht, 1898–1956.

7/ The Theatre, built by James Burbage. Built in 1576, it’s not technically the very first purpose built theatre in England, but it’s the one that lasts. Burbage’s brother-in-law, John Brayne, built the actual first purpose-built theatre (the Red Lion) in 1567, but it was not successful.

8/ A Hark, a Vagrant! Comic about Richard III.

An article about the identification of his body from 2013. His bones were discovered in 2012 and reinterred in 2015. (Richard III was buried in Greyfriars, which was Franciscan and was dissolved in 1538 by Henry VIII.–Jesse)

The Rose.

In Shakespeare in Love, we meet Richard Burbage (played by Martin Clunes) and, as Jesse mentions, Philip Henslowe (played by Geoffrey Rush). We don’t meet Cuthbert Burbage.

9/ I think I thought the stage was taller because whenever a tv show (Good Omens comes to mind) shoots in there, they shoot the actors on stage at an angle that makes them seem very tall.

10/ Bishop of Winchester / Southwark.

The bishopric goes back to the year 634 CE, in case you were curious. Also, the bishop of Winchester gets to sit in the House of Lords and was typically the royal chancellor or treasurer. More on the Liberty of the Clink here. The bishop who got the license for permitting prostitution and brothels was the younger brother of King Stephen (the license, however, was granted by King Henry II, who was his first cousin once removed).

11/ For more on American dance dramas, see episode 12 (note 30) and episode 17 (notes 4 and 6).

For more on maps, see episode 14 (notes 18, 19, 20, 21, and 22), episode 11 (note 21), and episode 19 (note 8).

12/ La bohème: An opera by Puccini. Boy meets girl, they fall in love, girl dies of tuberculosis. Basically the same as the plot of the film Moulin Rouge. [Also the same story as Rent, famously! Because Rent is an adaptation of Bohème.–Jesse]

For more on Figaro, see episode 21 (note 5).

13/ Em: I just rewatched part of Deadpool while hanging out in L&D Triage two weeks ago (and texted Jesse about it while I was there). He breaks the fourth wall very effectively. [My love of Deadpool cannot be overstated.–Jesse]

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