It’s funny how once you get into a topic, new angles on it keep popping up everywhere. A few days ago I was exploring the early modern idea of Eve, then a journal I was reading for something entirely different fell open at an article about Eve in medieval English and French religious drama.

And what a different picture it paints. It focused particularly on the Jeu d’Adam, also called Mystere d’Adam, a 12th-century play, which it says was probably produced in England (although most of the web decriptions I found call it French). The article describes it (I suspect controversially) as “the oldest extant religious drama in any vernacular tongue”.

In the play, I read, Eve “represents on the one hand the role of woman (in Aristotelian terms) as the formal cause of the Fall; and, on the other hand, because of God’s promise that her seed shall crush the serpent’s head, she prefigures the Virgin Mary as Adam prefigures Christ”. She is also seen as a prophet of redemption, promising salvation.

Yet in the English mystery plays she soon loses the latter role to Adam alone and becomes “a comic butt for Adam’s misogynistic humour”. In France she was treated more sympathetically, but also lost that powerful prophetic role; she “evolved as the mother of the race, but died without believing in her own salvation”.

From ‘The Evoltion of Eve in Medieval French and English Religious Drama, Maureen Fries, Studies in Philology, Winter 2002, No 1, Vol 99.

An interesting article, but I do have one complaint – the Jeu d’Adam extracts are only printed in the original Anglo-Norman. I can’t imagine there are too many people around who can read that, so while this is a topic that might be interesting to people in lots of fields, its full use is being restricted to specialists. Translations please!

There’s a modern French extract here (I couldn’t find anything in English) and a review of a book about women in French drama of the period here.

Now, I’d better go off and set myself 200 lines:
I must stick to the research topic at hand ….
I must stick to the research topic at hand ….

You might have noticed that Lady Jane Grey has appeared as an ornament in my sidebar. The image is from Stories of the Lives of Noble Women by W.H. Davenport Adams, a text of 1883.

I’ve got a couple of these books, usually Victorian or Edwardian, and obviously designed as suitable presents for school and Sunday school prizes, or for unimaginative grandparents to give their grandchildren.

That seems to me to be the market anyway – another of these texts, Brave Women and Their deeds of Heroism by Joseph Johnson, was given to Edna Smith by the Wigan and District Equitable Co-operative Society for the “Children’s Examination, 1900-1”.

They are fervently religious, respectful of authority, and frequently light with historical fact, but they must have been an important source of hisorical knowledge.

They remind me of an incident in George Orwell’s A Clergyman’s Daughter (a much-under-rated Orwell, I’d suggest). Dorothy, the runaway clergyman’s daughter, has been forced to take a post in a miserable suburb of south London, and here she finds:

The whole atmosphere of the place was so curiously antiquated – so reminiscent of those dreary little private schools that you read about in Victorian novels. As for the few text-books that the class possessed, you could hardly look at them without feeling as though you had topped back into the mid-nineteenth century. There were
only three text-books of which each child had a copy. One was a shilling arithmetic, pre-Great War but fairly serviceable, and another was a horrid little book called The Hundred Page History of Britain – a nasty little duodecimo book with a gritty brown cover, and, for frontispiece, a portrait of Boadicea with a Union Jack draped over the front of her chariot, Dorothy opened this book at random, came to page 91 and read:
After the French Revolution was over, the self-styled Emperor Napoleon Buonaparte attempted to set up his sway, but though he won a few victories against continental troops, he soon found that in the’thin red line’ he had more than met his match. Conclusions were tried upon the field of Waterloo, where 50,000 Britons put to flight 70,000 Frenchmen—for the Prussians, our allies, arrived too late for the battle. With a ringing British cheer our men charged down the slope and the enemy broke and fled. We now come on to the great Reform Bill of 1832, the first of those beneficent reforms which have made British liberty what it is and marked us off from
the less fortunate nations [etc., etc.]….
The date of the book was 1888. Dorothy, who had never seen a history book of this description before, examined it with a feeling approaching horror. …
(Penguin, 1971, p. 187)

It wasn’t always the good old days.

First: the loudest curtain call for the management. On a Monday in August in the National Theatre’s biggest auditorium, there wasn’t a spare seat in the house last night for Henry IV Part 1. For this is part of the Travelex £10 season, the second proving as successful as the first. It attracted an audience much younger and more casually dressed than you’d usually expect to see in London, particularly for Shakespeare.

One can only hope they’ll start going to other shows. What few seem to realise is that, certainly around this time of the year, you can get perfectly good seats (perhaps excluding musicals) for £10 or not much more. The silly thing is that theatres don’t publicise this fact. (Just turn up at the theatre box-office and ask for the cheapest ticket.)

The National is promoting the show with the words of Falstaff: “There lives not three good men unhanged in England, and one of them is fat, and grows old.” The old knight is of course referring to himself, and in the case of this production is speaking all too truly.

Henry IV Part 1is unusual among Shakespeare’s histories in that the comic scenes, rather than being light relief, are central to the plot, and occupy at least half of its length. And Michael Gambon is so powerful, so funny, so characterful, that he completely overshadows the king for whose son he is competing. David Bradley as Henry IV is just not believable as the usurping warrior. He simply lacks the presence, the charisma – characteristics that must survive in such a king even as he ages.

The same imbalance is evident in the play’s other axis: Hal/Hotspur. Matthew Macfadyen as Prince Hal is a brilliant comic foil before the interval as the irritating aristocratic sprog with more dash than determination, more brains than sense, but his transition to the upstanding, chivalrous warrior just doesn’t happen – it feels as though the first Hal is just acting the part. And while the sword-play in the climactic scene is fancy enough, it is impossible to imagine this fop overcoming the sheer animal testosterone of David Harewood’s Hotspur – the noble played as football hooligan, which works remarkably well.

My other complaint is the set and staging – minor issues you might think – but the wide open space is too often invaded by an army of scene-shifters well before the final words of each scene, meaning whole lines are lost in the distraction and noise. And the stage is dotted with World War One-invoking blasted trees, which works well in the initial and final scenes but is otherwise distracting.

Yet I don’t want to sound too critical. I, and I think the vast majority of the audience, enjoyed the virtuoso performance of Gambon, with its accompanying (big) belly laughs, and the female members at least, the display of male animal magnetism. It is a lot more than you’ll get from the latest Hollywood blockbuster (a ticket for which will cost you about the same).

For another view: The Stage’s review.

Thanks to Willisms, host of History Carnival No 13, who’s made my hit counter go suddenly bananas with not just one but two mentions. I only nominated myself once, honest! (The second one is the hominid post, if you were wondering.)

And I have to say that I was going by the rules, since I’ll be hosting the next carnival on August 15. Willisms has done a great job, which I’m going to have to try to live up to, so: Roll up, roll up, nominate early, nominate often. Don’t be shy – nominate yourself and nominate your friends, and particularly any post on history that’s off the usual trails.

You can drop a line in the comments here, or by email to natalieben (at) journ (dot) freeserve.co.uk. Please put history carnival or similar in the subject line – I’m on far too many email lists.

Visitors to London often ask: “Where’s the centre?” They’re surprised to find locals responding: “Umm, which centre do you mean? If you’re talking entertainment, you probably mean Soho, if government Westminster, and business the City (although with Canary Wharf coming up fast).

It is a confusion that has historical roots. For “London” well into the early modern period had a specific meaning, the City of London, enclosed within the walls drawn more or less along the route established by the Romans. It had suburbs, like Clerkenwell and Whitechapel, relatively lawless areas that lived in uneasy symbiosis with the tightly controlled city.

Then there was the other city – Westminster, an entirely separate, if less clearly defined, entity. By 1662 it was in the eye of one observer “the greatest City in England next London, not onely in Position, by by the Dimensions thereof …” It from 1601 had its own coat of arms, and there were three attempts between 1585 and 1633 to establish it fully as a legal entity equal to the City.

Recent historical work has done much to recover Westminster’s medieval history, through the records of the abbey, but says J.F. Merritt, author of The Social World of Early Modern Westminster: Abbey, Court and Community: 1525-1640, the early modern period has disappeared into more general discussions about the development of the West End, or the “western suburbs” of the City.

He seeks to recover Westminster’s history through the records of its two main parishes, St Margaret’s, centre of the medieval vil, and St Martin in the Field. Through extensive work in their records, he explains how each very different church – one long-established, the other relatively new and fast-growing – dealt with all of the turmoil of the Reformation.

The results are somewhat surprising, for it seems that St Margaret’s, despite its close proximity and links to the Royal court, was highly resistant to “Protestant” reforms, and only adopted them under pressure, while St Martin was more flexible.

These are important, but not always gripping, accounts of church management, but woven among them are also some wonderfully human stories (which come closer to my personal areas of interest). For example:

The St Martin’s vestryman Henry Waller died without immediate heir. He specified his possession be divided among 12 nieces and nephews.

“Foreseeing some difficulty with this arrangement, however, he specified that if any dispute should arise ‘they [should] cause fower or sixe of the better sorte of the vestrie of .. St Martin in the feildes … to hear and determine the same without sute of lawe’. (p. 118)

He also left £4 to pay for a dinner for vestrymen – perhaps as a sort of recommence for the likely trouble. Worrying about the lawyers swallowing up your cash was not just a modern concern.

Nor was getting on with the neighbours, a particular problem for St Margaret’s with all of the wealthy, and potential imperious, members of the congregation it attracted, at least when the court was in Westminster.

“When building works took place at the Westminster House of the privy councillor Sir Thomas Wentworth, his brother-in-law, Lord Haughton, reported that a local notable ‘Mr Ireland’ (presumably the St Margaret’s vestryman William Ireland was ‘so careful of your service … he came or sent dayly to inquire of the health of my sisters catts, and what rest they had taken the night before’. (p. 134)

Detailed reading of The Social World is likely to be only for the specialist, but the general reader can also find many fascinating tales within it.