(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.
