Tuesday, March 14, 2017

The Tale of Januarie: Translingualism and Anxiety, Sexuality and Time

a guest post by DAVID WALLACE
(published simultaneously at Global Chaucers)

The Tale of Januarie
Music by Julian Philips, libretto by Stephen Plaice, directed by Martin Lloyd-Evans, Guildhall School of Music & Drama, 27 February to 6 March 2017


Middle English is the surprise star turn of this opera. Librettist Stephen Plaice, shortly before the final public performance, spoke of the liberating effect of writing in a medium with greater flexibility and plasticity than modern English can muster. Variation of stress, word order, and spelling multiply expressive options, and final -e proves more singable, with sicknesse working better than blunt sickness. Having feared that Middle English would be academic and dry, Plaice found it quite the opposite: "a treat!" Having now moved on to write a libretto based on a Conrad novel, he misses the fizz, so he says, of medieval language. Working with Middle English, Plaice says, makes modern English seem "deadening": an interesting word choice, bumping Middle English from the "dead language" column. Composer Julian Philips agrees: Middle proves simply more singable than modern English. Consonants are hard to vocalize; sicknesse or herte move us closer to Italian, the chief language of opera and of opera training. Also, says our composer, Middle English renders "familiar" English strange-yet-familiar; each word must be newly weighed, for expressive possibilities, with no "default" position. And clearly different rhythmic-linguistic strains flow close to the surface of Middle English: Frenchified elements, suggesting courtliness and "triplety feel," pitch themselves against Germanic bluntness ("bulles ballokes by yow").
            The work that became The Tale of Januarie began as part of a taught MA at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London, developing from chamber piece to full-blown, fully-produced opera (with excellent staging and lighting, and phenomenally energetic playing from the pit). It was supported by the "Cross-Language Dynamics" project, led by the University of Manchester and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.   Setting Middle English in this "translingual strand" provoked much discussion, leading to gradual realization of its aptness for opera.  Lovers of this medium are well attuned to hearing languages they do not speak; opera puts meaning over by relying not just upon words sung, but also by combining sonic, scenic, visual, and bodily elements. One audience member compared experiencing The Tale of Januarie to "listening to something in a foreign language that you know quite well."  
            Composer and librettist, and later director and designers, had nine months to research and develop the project, from first inklings to opening night.  Much of what followed depended upon the varied talents available locally, at Guildhall. Both Philips and Plaice had studied Chaucer at school, and fortunately both had been "set" the Merchant's Tale. Composer Philips followed the melodic lines of Middle English while borrowing, he says, from Machaut's Ballades, and from secular songs. He also experimented with Pythagorean tuning, a mode especially associated with Pluto's on stage entourage of courtly musicians, one of whom, Elisabeth Flett, proved doubly adroit at bagpipes and medieval fiddle. Librettist Plaice remembers being long ago enchanted by the sound of Chaucerian Middle English as committed to vinyl by Oxford don, and theatrical impresario, Nevill Coghill.  But on turning to Coghill's Penguin translation, first published in 1951 and still going strong, he was disappointed: "the music," he said, "has gone out of it."  In attempting to put music back in, Plaice was led not only to borrow, bend, and adapt Chaucerian lines but also to essay Middle English, Middle English-ish, composition.  In what follows I consider first this liberation of the librettist, and then his difficulties-- which are not so much his difficulties, but those of Everyman, in anxious times.
            Both composer and librettist became increasingly aware, in developing The Tale of Januarie, of their work resonating strangely with, but often against, an ever more alienating present. Philips, in working through the time of "Brexit horror," found solace in celebrating multilingual English, "as if writing an opera in two or three languages at the same time." Plaice found uncanny historical resonance in the folly of January's vanity building project: "we're going to build A WALL!" The huge wall on stage, erected to create a private space for Januarie and May, fails (like every wall since Hadrian's, or China's, or the Great Hedge of India) to exclude, building only the illusion of an isolated, self-sufficient place. Januarie's final stage direction is "the TOWNSFOLK are demolishing the wall again."
            Plaice's jouissance in composing Middle English expresses itself chiefly through street cries, wassailing songs, and in ditties sung by Proserpina and her attendant nymphs. His lines are generally shorter than standard Chaucerian, and his chief source of inspiration or encouragement here, Plaice says, are those songs sung in Shakespearean comedies.  The apotheosis of such writing comes "In the Privy" (Act 2 scene 3), where May seeks to enjoy

                                    Sweet pees of the privee
                                    the onlie place I kan sit alone.

The Middle English-like alliterating of the first line works nicely here, and place in the second begs for a second syllable, just before the caesura. It is upon this eminence, her privy-throne, that May reads her letter from Damyan, ignoring Januarie's off-stage cries, and then sings "an aria of revenge on her former employer" (stage direction), Maistresse Wellow:

                                    Well, now I am wed
                                    With a lover in store,
                                    I'm richer than yow,
                                    Far richer mor.

                                    So Maistresse Wellow
                                    bulles ballokes by yow,
                                    go boyle, go frie,
                                    you're not werth a cow.

At this point of the opera, seated beneath the canopy of her outhouse "privee," May dominates the stage and directs events. The very next scene, however, brings her down-- and this is perhaps where the librettist's difficulties begin, too. The scene, called "Back in the Bedroom," sees aged Januarie demanding sexual compliance from youthful May, his new wife:

                        Stonde and strepe on the bedde!
                        In the preestes bok the rubriche seye --
                        a wyf shul shewe her buxomness alwey . . .  

May resists, Januarie becomes more peremptory ("Strepe naked!"), and Proserpina is outraged:

                        A wyf is not a pepe and se!

May finally begins to comply, removing her clothes, Pluto arrives and does nothing, Proserpina strikes Januarie blind: end of Act 2.
            Theatrical tension towards the end of Act 2 stems from the fact that in standing and stripping on the bed, at Januarie's command, May would expose herself to the entire theatre. Act 1 had concluded with the wedding night, in which Januarie performs his "trespace" upon May in private:

            stage direction: He closes the curtains on the four-poster bed. Noises from      within.

            Such "noises" are comically augmented by the pit, with much use of squeaky toys.  And this, as May boasts to Maistresse Wellow, is a union to which she, May, has consented. Januarie is at fault in the second scene because May does not consent again-- and here a gulf opens between medieval and modern understandings of the marriage contract. Or, we might rather say, differences between legal assumptions extending from the Middle Ages to the 1970s (with marital rape not recognized as a crime in all fifty states of the USA until 1993) and the present. In the Middle Ages, au contraire, consent is effectively given once only, at the wedding, as each party contracts "the marriage debt." After that, says Chaucer's most famous exponent of this concept, the wife no longer possesses control of her own body, nor the husband:

                                    I have the power durynge al my lyf
                                    Upon his propre body, and noght he.
                                                                                    (Wife of Bath's Tale, 3.158-9)





            For the librettist of The Tale of Januarie issues of consent loom, topically and understandably, large.  The final day of performance, the day of public discussion, saw England's only significant liberal newspaper, The Guardian, lead with the headline "'Epidemic of sex harassment in universities" (with the further headline "Resistance is female: The new wave of protest" top left, a feature in the G2 section). Campus sexual harassment, as The Guardian detailed throughout the week, and as most everybody knows, mostly involves older men forcing themselves upon younger women, Januarie coercing May. In 2017, then, Januarie must be stopped in his tracks, called out, and punished through imposition of a disability: blindness.
            Campus rape, consent, and sexual harassment are still issues that campus authorities struggle to see as individual stories to be heard; when the librettist or indeed academics of my generation were at college, as undergraduates, this was much more so. The enhanced isolation and punishment of Januarie is thus understandable, albeit (I would suggest) somewhat panicked. Panic perhaps stems from the fact that all six core members of this production team (director, designer, lighting designer, conductor, composer, and librettist) are men. And it must be said that presentation of sexuality in this production is notably, egregiously, penis-driven. When the curtain first rises Priapus is seen on stage, pushing a heavy wooden wheelbarrow. This barrow, it turns out, transports his own gigantic phallus-- at first, and generally thereafter, covered with sacking, but eventually unveiled by Proserpina's nymphs. Said nymphs have much fun at the beginning of Act 3 in provoking Priapus.  He wheels hopelessly after them, but their joint chorus of disapprobation is

                                    Somme seyen ye, we seyen ne,
                                    That has nought to do with love! 
                                                                        (emphasis added in the singing)

Priapus is referenced in the Merchant's Tale, but only as a descriptor of gardens (4.2034-7). His only other appearance in Chaucer comes in The Parliament of Fowls (a text from which the librettist sources some textual material):

                                    The god Priapus saw I, as I wente,
                                    Withinne the temple in sovereyn place stonde,
                                    In swich aray as whan the asse hym shente
                                    With cri by nighte, and with his sceptre in honde.
                                                                                                                        (253-6)

Priapus does momentarily enjoy the spotlight here, "in sovereyn place," albeit disabled by his giant stiffie. But it is worth noting that "the temple" housing him is that of Venus; later in the poem, Chaucer walks out into a pleasant, grassy domain to find another female deity, Nature, governing matters of sexual attraction and reproduction. In The Tale of Januarie, however, anxiety about the penis couples with rule and narration by the penis (and I'll stick with penis, rather than phallus, since it is palpably and pinkly there, on stage, in the wheelbarrow). For strangely, Priapus (who more often speaks than sings) is the tale's narrator, from the start:

            stage direction:  PRIAPUS wheels his barrow into the foreground and addresses the audience.

                                    PRIAPUS spoken  
                        Whilom ther was dwellinge in Lumbardye
                        A worthy knyght . . .

So whereas we might say that a poem such as the Parliament is structured by successive and diverse visions of all-encompassing female sexuality, Januarie seems rather driven by anxieties arising from the penis, the phallus, Priapus (the last of the characters to leave the stage, "with his empty wheelbarrow").
            As in The Merchant's Tale, Januarie has his sight restored by Pluto just in time to see May's "struggle" with Damyan upon the pear tree; as in Chaucer, some new form of understanding is then negotiated between husband and wife.  But for The Tale of Januarie, this is not the end, and a "Finale" is appended to Act IV. Librettist and composer thought Chaucer's tale, so they said, to be somehow "unfinished." The logic governing their additive ending might be compared with that of Robert Henryson, in his Testament of Cresseid: the protagonist found guilty of sexual crimes should not get off so lightly. The final scene, described as "Autumn," begins with townfolk and rustics celebrating the fruitful season. Pluto, borrowing a scythe from a grass-cutter, suddenly becomes Death (with exact visual modelling upon Death in Bergman's Seventh Seal). Januarie negotiates with Pluto-Death for extra time: "An half-yeere?" Pluto refuses all bids for extended life: not even a day's leave will be granted:

            JANUARIE:      Oon deye.
           
            PLUTO:           Noon deye.

            JANUARIE:      Noone deye!

            PLUTO:           Noone deye.

            JANUARIE:      Then I must leet heer for alweye?

Januarie then attempts to approach May, who is heavily pregnant. Pluto and Proserpina debate (yea and nay) whether Januarie should retain the comforting illusion of  human legacy, fruit of his sexual labor. Having exclaimed "An blood heir. An fader I am!" as his parting words, Januarie descends to the underworld with Pluto and Proserpina (herself, of course, subjected to perennial raptus). This last scene gathers up some of the theatrical memory of Henry IV, Part II, where the new monarch, in the presence of his rehabilitated Lord Chief Justice, casts off Falstaff. Sir John, however, retains some hope of social rehabilitation; Januarie has none.
            In Chaucer's Merchant's Tale, judgements passed by the tutelary deities pertain to all men and women.  Or at least, all women: Pluto merely capitulates ("I yeve it up!" 4.2312) when faced down by Proserpina's feminist decree:

                        Now by my moodres sires soule I swere
                        That I shal yeven hire suffisant answere,
                        And alle wommen after, for hir sake.
                                                                                                (4.2265-7)

The Pluto of The Tale of Januarie, unlike his Chaucerian counterpart, overrides the will of his wife, evolving into one of those lurking ducal or despotic figures familiar from Shakespeare: Vincentio in Measure for Measure, for example. While Proserpina and her nymphs frolic at the beginning of Act 3, Pluto "is some distance off, watching, but uninvolved" (stage direction). The judgement delivered upon Januarie at the end of his contemporary Tale, his repudiation and isolation, seems especially harsh when compared to the inclusive Chaucerian ethos of "alle wommen," and all men under women. Centuries of post-Shakespearean theatre helped shape this end, riding the deep current of a non-negotiable, post-Reformation divide between the society of the elect and those condemned to darkness.  But Januarie's final isolating of Januarie as a man who fails to seek a woman's sexual consent also symptomatizes the anxieties of a male-authored, male-produced text of our own time.  Issues of consent concern all men, not just a few individual, isolable malefactors, and "alle women" also.

            The Tale of Januarie achieves something always to be hoped for in this kind of contact experiment: that the earlier text, erupting into the present, should expose contemporary anxieties and blindspots.  Additionally, while necessarily working through certain intermediary Shakespearean conventions, The Tale of Januarie effects conjunctures between past and present that speak to remarkable continuities over time: what is funny then can be funny now; a privy is still a place for private reading. The most obvious sign of such continuity is the prop that dominates the stage, from first to last: the giant tree. For the Middle Ages, of course, the tree is the most fraught and fruitful of symbols, connecting the garden of Eden, and its apples, to the tree of the cross.  And for the most iconic of modernist productions, Beckett's Waiting for Godot, the tree (first without, and then later with leaves) is the one indispensable feature of stage design. The tree of Januarie is first seen bare, as the play opens; by play's end it is full of fruit. It thus marks the duration of drama, but also queer continuity with the time and language of Middle English, dialoguing with this Tale. Priapus has the play's last word:

                        The pere hath ripen on its tree.
                        Thus endeth heere the Tale of Januarie.

This ending is especially poignant since, so far as I can find out, no video trace remains of this extraordinary, sometimes ferocious, collaboration of musicians, actors, singers, and designers.  Women did not script or direct The Tale of Januarie, but made their mark on stage through full-blooded portrayals of May and Proserpina, of market women Friuli, Ravizza, and Signore Farina, as maidservants Rosina, Julietta, and Laura, and as nymphs Nightshade, Flycap, and Mandrake.
            All this, while lingering in the mind, is gone like smoke.  






with thanks for quick and crucial responses from Crystal Bartolovich, Carissa Harris, Robin Kirkpatrick, Clare Lees, and Elaine Nixon; and with further thanks to Candace Barrington and J.J. Cohen.




















  

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