Mark Eccles (1905–1998)

Covering a bit more territory than Edgar I. Fripp's 1922 Shakespeare's Stratford, Eccles’s 1961 book covers the entire shire of the bard’s family starting with his ancestors the Shakespeares and Ardens in the area and continues on for a few generations after William, the actor, playwright and theater producer’s death. Relying on the existing court and property records, Professor Eccles’s work consists of many accounts of who sued whom for what, and the legal difficulties that the Shakespeare family, relations, and their neighbors were involved with for several decades in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, as well as their purchase and sale of real estate and other goods.

This makes this a somewhat drier read than Fripp, since Eccles sticks strictly to the record, reading very little into it, and only speculating when he is unsure of the facts. Part of the difficulty and uncertainty after several centuries have passed is non-standardized spelling and how common many of the first names and surnames were used and reused in the shire during this period.… (más)

So it’s A.D. 1400 and the wretched Brits finally have a nice play they can all go and see. This is more than five hundred years since the Germans managed it and a clear thousand since the Romans had got bored with that kind of thing. As you might expect, this purely tactical delay has resulted in a mighty work of art. The Castle of Perseverance is not the best play ever written, but it’s certainly better than what the Germans managed and it does have the best stage direction:

“and he þat schal pley belyal loke þat he haue gunnepowdyr brennynge In pypys in hys handes and in hys erys and in hys ars whanne he gothe to batayl.”

I can hear the gritted teeth of a director who has had to suffer through a performance that lacked these things.

The author, whatever his name was, is a major poet. Rhythmic, end-rhymed, alliterated, and making sense. What normal person can do all those things? He also manages to differentiate between characters. Compare the consonantal clusters of Belyal’s speech at line 1899 and the slow vowels of Death at 2777.

At times its very funny. The Bad Angel is particularly amusing. “Cum blow at my neþer end” he says to the Good Angel. “Cum blowe myn hol behynde.” At other times it’s impressive and staged right I think it could be frightening, even in our post-Python world.

The staging is particularly important. On the page it doesn’t look like a modern script, with characters giving long speeches in stanzas. The stage plan survives so we can see that this an interactive multi-media experience, performed in the round, with actors and audience sharing the same space. The audience (or at least their heads) would have been in constant movement. The space obviously represents the Castle of the title, with a keep surrounded by curtain walls. I also note that what we have is a circular ditched enclosure. A Henge like the Rollright Stones would be about the right size. Interesting that one can import any religion one likes, but given the opportunity British religious performances revert to a circular format.

The play is very long. Every character gets a chance to speak and plot-wise, Mankind’s double fall is unnecessary. I suspect this is an attempt to exhaust the audience. It would have been quite dangerous at this time to go to a town and take people’s money. No phones. No police. Leaving them unsatisfied could well lead to trouble.

Story-wise, what we have is a conflict between good and evil, followed by a death. Then the prosecution and defence plead their cases for or against the dead at the seat of judgement. Internal proportions differ, but I note that this is exactly the same as an episode of Law & Order. I’d never considered L&O as mystery plays before, but it seems the genre is alive and well. I’m sure Dick Wolf has read this play.

The other two plays in the volume show how theatre developed over the course of the century, or as it turns out, how the art form was totally debased.

Wisdom is no more than a versified sermon. At times it really doesn’t matter who is actually speaking. The talking is occasionally interrupted by song and dance routines which would have given the audience time to swallow their vomit. Mark Eccles, the editor, suggests it “may have been presented by the men and women of a town or guild for a general audience”. Certainly, you couldn’t have toured with it. If you took people’s money and gave them this you would be subjected to a sustained and violent assault.

The language is interesting. The Castle might date as late as 1425. Wisdom may be as early as 1460. So there is conceivably only thirty-five years between them. Yet Castle is in a foreign language and Wisdom on the cusp of modern English. It must have made life difficult for people who weren’t linguistically minded. I suppose the situation is analogous with non-technologically minded people today struggling with computers.

Mankind would have been staged as part of the pre-Lent festivities. People would have been to the footie and then down the pub for a few bevvies. The play is a pub entertainment. The paper-back original of mystery plays. Completely unpretentious. It knows exactly what it is. It’s not high art, but funny and entertaining.

A quick word on editions as you have a choice of two. My copy is EETS OS 262 edited by Mark Eccles. It’s a replacement for the earlier EETS volume ES 91 edited by F. J. Furnivall. I know Furnivall was a legend, but he was randy little bugger and easily distracted by the ladies’ sculling team. Up and down like the bloody Assyrian empire. Eccles takes delight in listing his errors which includes missing lines. I’ve not seen the earlier volume but the EETS only issue two books a year and they’re not inclined to re-do books if it’s not necessary.

OS 262 has an interesting introduction and a truly superb glossary. It’s intended for scholars and I can hardly criticise it for that, but it does have a couple of features that made things hard for me.

Many of the explanatory notes were useful and interesting, but others are obviously not intended for the layman. Sometimes a note was lacking when I needed an explanation. Most annoying, all three plays have some lines in Latin. These are all unglossed as Eccles assumes I know the language. Fifty years on from publication there are probably a fair few scholars in the same position as me.

The textual notes run as footnotes, which is obviously what scholars need, but I missed the on-page glossing of particularly hard words as in the Riverside Chaucer. It had been a year since I’d read any Middle English and for the first few scenes I had to sit there with pen and paper and translate. Not as bad a situation as it might have been. The alliteration meant I would often find two words from the same line on the same page of the glossary. But for a book in which Mercy features so prominently I think the editor could have shown more.… (más)