On Playreadings

I am wearing a jumper with Rock & Roll written on it, and to honour that garment I have spent the past hour finalising the cast list for Monday’s online Christ Church playreading, which will be Romeo and Juliet. I was surprised to realise it will be the fourteenth playreading I’ve run since taking up my Christ Church Fellowship in October 2018 – and the fourth I’ve run online. I’m sharing the list below in case it’s of interest, and also to note that our last in-person playreading was on 2 March 2020 – almost exactly a year before we’ll read Romeo and Juliet. I tracked down an email to make sure (I have been… variable at archiving the readings) and detected no hint of concern; we did then cram about 25 people into my office. 

I began the play readings because (as a graduate student and ECR) I’d really loved the Liripoop playreadings run by Laurie Maguire and Emma Smith. I thought that a version for undergraduates could build community and introduce sixteenth-to-eighteenth-century plays to students in a low-stakes, enjoyable way. Those who know the Oxford BA syllabus will see that I followed it very closely pre-pandemic. This means reading Early Modern drama in Michaelmas (Autumn) Term; Restoration/eighteenth-century drama in Hilary (Spring) Term; and Shakespeare in Trinity (Summer). That’s been helpful, and I scheduled plays to complement my classes; during the pandemic, I also moved to a very deliberate pedagogy of Bangers Only. Where possible, I choose short plays with (in pre-pandemic times) a lot of hard copies available in Oxford’s lending libraries and (very cheaply) online.

Almost fourteen playreadings in, the regular cast includes undergraduates, postgraduates and recent students from across the university – not just English and not just Christ Church. During lockdown we’ve had people from all over the UK, and also from France, come together to read. I look forward to seeing all the participants again in person, but online playreadings have also been absolutely lovely: The Winter’s Tale, before Christmas, was one of my favourites. There were two reasons: first, several Freshers genuinely didn’t know what was coming when the royal family assembled to see Dead Hermione’s Statue; second, people wore costumes. Another joy is seeing students who initially attended as an “audience member” start to request small parts of their own, and then bigger, and then bigger. That’s another big thing: you don’t need to read to attend. Nor do you need any acting experience or ability. The only real rule is not to bring dark-coloured drinks into a study with pale grey carpet.

Reading the plays of course throws up new textual insights and delights; preparing the cast lists and doubling charts has been illuminating (it’s also given me some good research ideas). But that’s not really been the point. It’s taught me more about how plays sound, and how people read, and about the merits and demerits of snack foods sold in the vicinity of St Aldate’s. This blog post is to mark the fourteenth playreading of its kind, and to say thank you to everyone who’s attended over the past two-and-a-half years. It’s also to challenge me to create an archive of the readings in a much more deliberate way.

nb food is key

If you have questions, or run a similar series of your own, I’d love to hear from you. These are the plays we’ve read together – now I’ll get thinking about where we’ll go next! 

  1. Autumn 2018: The Massacre at Paris (Christopher Marlowe)
  2. Autumn 2018: Arden of Faversham (Anon.)
  3. Spring 2019: The Country Wife (William Wycherley)
  4. Spring 2019: The Beaux Stratagem (George Farquhar)
  5. Summer 2019: The Merry Wives of Windsor (W. Shakespeare)
  6. Summer 2019: Pericles (W. Shakespeare)
  7. Autumn 2019: The Witch (Thomas Middleton)
  8. Autumn 2019: The Changeling (Thomas Middleton and William Rowley)
  9. Spring 2020: Venice Preserv’d (Thomas Otway)
  10. Spring 2020: The Enchanted Island (John Dryden and William Davenant)
  11. Summer 2020: Twelfth Night (W. Shakespeare)
  12. Autumn 2020: Edward II (Christopher Marlowe)
  13. Autumn 2020: The Winter’s Tale  (W. Shakespeare)
  14. Spring 2021: Romeo and Juliet (see above)
  15. ?????

Advent 18: 5 Steps To A Spooky Christmas

girl-reading-ghost-story
I can’t tell you how happy this picture makes me.

Christmas horror and Christmas ghost stories were once integral to Christmas in Britain and Ireland. Luckily for us, we can partly blame the Victorians (our great Ur-parents, from whom society inherited a mass need for therapy). From the 1855 cessation on paper tax onwards, Britain saw an explosion of periodical magazines, with the mass marketing of ghost and vampire stories. These stories were generic, sensational, and exploited both Victorian fears of the past, in all its disquieting, revenant, primitive messiness, and anxieties about the future: Dracula (1897) imagines a terrifying Eastern European immigrant who wants to suck the life force out of the rising generation of imperialists. Spirit photography supposedly captured ghosts, while homes became the sites of seances. Stories literally domesticated the Gothic, bringing the ghost story into fireside and domestic reading. Christmas, with its profusion of annuals, gift books, reading-aloud, and superstition, is the ideal vehicle for a bit of horror. European mythology has much to answer for – I’ve already blogged about the Icelandic Yule Lads. But if you want to get into a thoroughly spooky Christmas spirit, here are the five things you need. Why not listen to my Spooky Christmas Playlist while you browse?

  1. Fearful folklore

We’ve met Spoon Licker and the child-catching Yule Cat, but many other countries have mythical and malevolent winter monsters. Check out the malicious Karakoncolos who, in Serbia, disguises his voice as that of your loved one, lures you out into the snow and jumps on your back. Then there’s the Greek Kallikantzaroi, a group of demons who steal any babies born between Christmas Day and Twelfth Night. Fancy some winter sun?

victorian-ghost-story2. Spine-tingling short stories

‘A Strange Christmas Game’ (1865) by J. H. Riddell is a charming story of fun, games, counting thirteen people when only twelve are present – and of a girl with a broken neck. Christmas games can seriously damage your health, so be warned: don’t end up like the heroine of this 1884 poem, the bride in Thomas Bayly’s ‘The Mistletoe Bough’. Or there’s Algernon Blackwood’s ‘The Old Kit-Bag’ (1908), a heart-warming seasonal tale of suicide and severed heads. Feliz Navidad. Bringing us nearly up to date, there’s Jeanette Winterson’s ‘Dark Christmas’ from 2013, where awkward festive plans (‘We had borrowed the house from a friend none of us seemed to know’) turn into an Edwardian horror story. M.R. James has, perhaps undeservedly, become king of the Christmas ghost story even though his tales are rarely set at Christmas – the BBC is broadcasting a dramatisation of one story on Christmas Eve, starring Greg Wise.

3. Frightful films

‘Holiday horror’ is a genuine subgenre. Whether you want to see Joan Collins bury a fire iron in her husband’s head before being stalked by a psychotic Santa (Tales from the Crypt, 1972) or watch a snow-covered New York  reunion turn fatal as the kiddiwinks start murdering their parents (The Children, 2008), there is a Christmas horror film for you. A clip of Tales from the Crypt is on YouTube: warnings for bright red poster paint.

4. Chilling culture

Not everything was the Victorians’ fault. The plays of William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe tell us that supernatural fictions also kept the Early Moderns warm on winter nights. In Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta (1589), Barabas recalls a tradition of seasonal scares: ‘Now I remember those old women’s words/Who in my wealth would tell me winter’s tales/And speak of spirits and ghosts that glide by night.’ Poor little Mamilius in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale (c. 1610-11) has clearly had similar experiences, confidently telling his mother and her attendants ‘A sad tale’s best for winter’. There are also cheerier Christmas superstitions in Shakespeare’s plays: at the end of the first scene of Hamlet, Marcellus gets one of the play’s simplest and most beautiful speeches:

MARCELLUS:
It faded on the crowing of the cock.
Some say that ever ‘gainst that season comes
Wherein our Saviour’s birth is celebrated,
The bird of dawning singeth all night long:
And then, they say, no spirit dares stir abroad;
The nights are wholesome; then no planets strike,
No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm,
So hallow’d and so gracious is the time.

The rest of English Literature tends not to share Marcellus’s view: spirits, witches, and fairies abound in our Christmas heritage. Sorry, Marcellus.

dickens-of-a-christmas-800-x-400_snow-800x400

5. Ghoulish gifts

Buzzfeed has a handy list of 21 Gift Ideas For The Goth In Your Life, and you can also buy a haunted doll from Ebay (because of course you can), sometimes very specifically so (‘This doll is haunted by Stacey, 16‘). But if you want something moderately rather than traumatically scary, there’s the Valancourt Book of Victorian Christmas Ghost Stories, with tales by Arthur Conan Doyle and Walter Scott, or the Folio Society’s illustrated edition of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Or, because in the vernacular of those hideous Facebook posts, The Greatest Gift We Can Give Each Other Is Time, why not cuddle up with a friend and follow this Rookie Magazine tutorial on how to make Victorian hair-based mourning jewellery? Amazing Christmas gifts!!

Oh wait. Everything is the Victorians’ fault.

Have a spectacularly spooky Christmas. And, yes, making Victorian hair jewellery is something I desperately want to do.