Much of the medical advice given to the poor was done out of charity and also to get them back to their soul-crushingly difficult places of employment as quickly as possible.  According to one article, bone-setters and surgeons were paid a little bit upon being hired, but only given their full price after their patient was healed and walking again.   Basically this meant that the poor person who was sick was tended to by their (usually also poor) doctor until he was fully recovered, or at least seemed to be recovered.  So, in Elizabethan times doctors were held accountable for the work they performed!

Elizabethan wives were expected to know a little bit about natural remedies as well, not a whole lot though, because if something bad went down and you were considered the best healing woman on your block, chances are you’d be tried for witchcraft. Several pamphlets from the time, as well as a book penned by future King James I all showed ways for witch hunters to root out the witches from the honest to god healers, most of the time they were the same thing, without magic involved.

Then, you have the plague.  Now, nobody really knew what to do about the plague in those days, not really.  If you lived in a big, crowded, dirty city like London you were pretty much screwed.  

Yeah, yeah, I guess you could count some of the internet speak like LOL and sexting and the lolcat crazy grammar-ness, but I mean like actually finding something and naming it something else.  Maybe all the actual things have been taken, but there are plenty of situations that are just itching for a word to actually describe them!  Like that uncomfortable feeling you get when you see someone in the street whose name you don’t remember.  

Wilkins’ literary history is interesting as well; he co-authored a few plays and was most
known for his work as a pamphleteer.  He also published a novel entitled
The Painful Adventures of Pericles, Prince of Tyre, which is not only told by the old storyteller
John Gower (who also appears in the play version of Pericles), but follows the story of the play extremely closely.  Here’s the whole text of that novel, if you’re in the least bit curious--
I read the first few paragraphs and my brain started hurting, very dense.

Needless to say, I avoided them at all costs--the same went with improv, I didn’t know what to say or do, and I was so worried about looking like a doofus that I’d hang back and hide till the game was over.
Now that I’m a little older(ish) and wiser, I’ve realized that these games don’t actually have anything to do with me.  Or with any one person for that matter.  The whole point is to be a doofus, to surrender yourself utterly to the fact that you are a part of a group of people whose job it is to tell a story, no matter how silly or x-rated it may become (and believe me, improvs and theater games can get
pretty raunchy).  The purpose of these games is to train an ensemble to work together, give and
take focus and to trust that wherever the story they make may take them, they are in it together.
 

Hi there folks!

These days there’s a lot in the works for ABTC--
we’ve started our workshop of Pericles and the ideas and characters
it’s generating are truly exciting. 

Natalie Holmes is our new Artistic Director (!) and the great captain of this maiden voyage into the land of adventure and myth.  

I figure, since a lot of things have been set in motion in the past few weeks, it’s time to step back and check in.

Why Hello There.

So, instead of imparting upon you some sort of pensive treatise on a theater-related subject with plucky photographic enhancement this go around, I want to see what you guys are thinking.   

I’ve written two entries now and, to be honest, I am quite proud of them, but I have no idea what kinds of responses I’m getting on these from the general public (aside from the inner circle of the American Bard family).

As an actor I’m well aware that whether or not I’m doing a good job up on stage is only a fraction of what makes a knockout show.  I’m only a part of the puzzle here, you readers, my audience are another, and I dare say, most important part of the equation.  In my humble opinion a good show is when there’s a conversation between the audience and actors going on, so let’s get started and make this a damn good show, eh?

Pericles, Prince of Tyre:  What are some of your preconceived notions about the play?  What have you heard, seen, etc that makes you feel that way (feel free to post pictures too, I love visuals). 

How do you feel about Shakespeare in general?  That movie Anonymous about him being a pilferer of ideas/puppet has stirred some heat up no doubt, what do you think about the whole debate?

What has your favorite experience in the theater been like?  Are you a fan of the more intimate? Or is a grand stage with an entire town cast as chorus more your style? 

What about Indoor Vs. Outdoor Theater?  In Shakespeare’s early years (and even now still in some places) theater companies would gallivant around the country performing in tiny town squares and old churches, would you go and see a performance in a location other than an amphitheater or a black box?

What are some of Shakespeare’s contemporaries or other classic playwrights whose work you’d be interested
to see put on stage?

And one last question:
As far as show times are concerned, which do you prefer?  Are you more of an early bird for nighttime performances and would rather see a 7 PM show than an 8 PM?  Is a 2 PM Matinee on Saturday or Sunday too early to recover from that crazy party you had the night before?  Would a 3 PM matinee be better?  Also, who started that convention of show times anyway?

Now, this isn’t a test or anything by any stretch of the imagination—it’s rather me in my little apartment reaching out across cyberspace to you in your little apartment or house or closet or wherever in search of connection.  It can be scary in this big world yelling at the top of your lungs over circuits and knowing there’s a billion-to-one chance that someone will actually read your blog the entire way through; but I wanted to have a go and see if I could make the web a little bit smaller for a few seconds.

This Guy (Source)

Of course, like most Shakespeare plays that have some root in history, the actual historical facts are bent somewhat; but yes, it is about one of the greatest figures in Greek history, Pericles.  It recounts his adventures to various cities at the edges of the known Greek world, the people he meets, the love he finds and loses and then finds again, and his growth as a human being throughout this life-spanning journey.  It has all the juicy features we love in a good Jacobian drama: incest, attractive royalty, dance, dumb shows, music, exotic locations and people—actually, for how little produced it is in our time, it was one of the most popular plays in Shakespeare’s own era. 

There are a few problems textually with Pericles, however, the first one being that Shakespeare didn’t actually write all of it.   There’s a very clear demarcation between what one of my teachers at RADA called the “crap verse” of Shakespeare’s most likely co-writer George Wilkins and the Bard’s own handiwork (the supposed shift happens in Act III Sc. 1, read the scenes before and afterwards and respond back in the comment section, I’d love to hear opinions on this!).

Now, to be clear, there is nothing terribly wrong with setting Shakespeare plays in different time periods per se…but in my mind plays like Pericles and other works by Shakespeare reside in their own particular niche in the present.  They aren’t period pieces, fixed hard fast to a time, but constantly changing worlds based on the current epoch’s sensibility and understanding.  I mean if you think about it, Shakespearean histories produced during Shakespeare’s own time weren’t actually portrayed in the era in which they were set—every play produced was done in the actors’ finest Elizabethan garb and maybe a toga if they were doing Julius Caesar or something. 

You can slap a time period on any Shakespeare play to make a statement, or just to make it cheaper to produce by not spending hundreds of dollars on traditional Elizabethan hoop skirts and bum rolls,
but I think the most interesting productions I’ve seen don’t impose any specific era on the text, but rather create their own world, their own adventure by listening to how the story uniquely speaks to them. 






Bum Rolls!

That’s the most important part of plays like Pericles!  The adventure!  The best productions take you on an adventure of some kind, whether it be an emotional journey or twists and turns of a plot, or simply the world in which the story resides.  This is what makes pieces exciting to me, at least—because what’s the point of seeing a play, or any art for that matter, if it doesn’t transport you to a different facet of reality for awhile?  Just like returning home after a long voyage, you always look at your life a bit differently.  After our last company meeting, I’m super excited to begin American Bard’s journey into Pericles and I have no doubt that come spring we’ll be taking audiences on quite an interesting adventure…

So I guess the moral to be had from all this talk of eras, bum rolls, and crap verse is that there is much to be learned from other points in time, yes, and history does indeed have its place in theater…but as far as molding the world of a piece, there is something to be said for creating something not completely of a specific time, but rather letting it reside in the imagination. 

To find out more about Pericles, Elizabethan Times, or anything else I mentioned in this article, I suggest reading Will in the World by Stephen Greenblatt and checking out Wikipedia.org for other interesting reads.