GOD, I LOVE CONTEXT!
To start off our adventures in learning, here’s a brief(ish) timeline of events and lives relevant to the Something Rotten! narrative:
500ish–1450ish: The Middle Ages in Europe (also called the Dark Ages or the Medieval period)
1347–1351: The first wave of the Black Death in Europe (also called the Plague, the Pestilence or the Great Mortality)
1360–1667: Many, many recurring (but far less destructive) waves of the Black Death in Europe
1436: Johannes Gutenberg invents the printing press
1450ish–1650ish: The European Renaissance
1492: Christopher Columbus lands in what is now San Salvador in the Bahamas
1503–1566: The life of Nostradamus (born Michel de Nostredame)
1533–1630: The Puritan movement in England
1558–1603: The reign of Queen Elizabeth I
1564–1616: The life of William Shakespeare (born Gulielmus Shakspere)
1595: Nick Bottom writes
Omelette1599ish: William Shakespeare writes
Hamlet1925: Grant Wood (yes,
that Grant Wood) produces a play called
Cardboard Moon in his 5 Turner Alley studio in Cedar Rapids and launches what will eventually become Theatre Cedar Rapids
2015: Something Rotten! gets ten Tony nominations (and wins only one: Christian Borle [Shakespeare] for Best Featured Actor in a Musical)
2024: We put on some snazzy pants, do some jazzy hands and make a star-lit, won’t-quit, big hit musicaaaaaal!
THAT PESKY LITTLE PESTILENCE THAT’S KILLING HALF OF EUROPE
The Black Death (also called the Plague, the Pestilence or the Great Mortality) made its first recorded appearance in Europe in October 1347, when 12 ships from the Black Sea docked at the Sicilian port of Messina. Italian dockworkers entered the ships to begin unloading but were met with a horrifying surprise: Most sailors aboard the ships were dead, and those still alive were gravely ill and covered in black boils that oozed blood and pus.
Their mysterious, terrifying disease spread through the local population at alarming speed and soon spread farther along trade routes that ran both inland and along the coasts. It also followed people to neighboring cities as they tried to escape but unknowingly brought the disease with them.
Modern epidemiologists have traced Black Death outbreaks to regions of China as far back as 600 BCE. The Medieval outbreak appears to have started in the same regions and traveled northwest across Asia to ports in Constantinople and then through the Mediterranean Sea to its first European appearance in Messina (which is right where the Italian boot makes contact with the Sicilian football, for those of you who visualize shapes in land masses). From there it spread roughly clockwise along the Mediterranean border and up the continental interior until it hit England in June 1348. (247 years later, Nick Bottom wrote a merry little Black Death showtune with a derivative medley and frankly it was TOO SOON.)
From England, the Black Death spread further north into Scandinavia, where it hit water, had nowhere else to go and finally died out in 1351, after a four-year European rampage that killed an estimated 25 million people—which was somewhere between 40% and 60% of the total European population.
Fun fact: Ports along the Mediterranean started making trade ships wait 40 days offshore before docking to help prevent the Black Death from reaching land. The Latin word for 40 is “quadraginta,” which eventually evolved to the modern word “quarantine.”
One more fun fact: The “Ring Around the Rosie” nursery rhyme may or may not (depending on your school of etymological thought) trace back to the details of the Black Death: Rosie rings represented bubonic lumps on the body, people carried posies and other flowers to mask the smell of rotting corpses, bodies were burned to ashes in an attempt to kill off the mysterious illness, and falling down was because people were really clumsy back then. Or they were dropping dead from the plague. It was probably the latter, but I wasn’t there and I hate to make assumptions.
WHAT’S THAT COMING UP THE SILK ROAD?
The Silk Road (a name that wasn’t coined until the 19th century) was a collection of trade routes linking Medieval China and the Mediterranean between the 3rd and 16th centuries. Named (obvs) for the transport of Chinese silks and other textiles, the Silk Road also saw the transport of spices, salt (which at the time was most importantly a preservative and often a form of currency), precious metals, gunpowder, cultural artifacts, ideas and education, missionaries of many religions, and—the least lucrative from an economics standpoint—the Black Death.
Look for it on a map. It was VERY LONG. And there were very few hotels with complimentary shampoos and continental breakfasts along the way. But there were plenty of bandits along its 4,000-mile route to help you lighten your load.
Did you catch that 4,000-mile part? People traveled the Silk Road in camelpower caravans, and a full-length one-way trip could last an entire year.
Trade and transportation along the Silk Road lasted until 1453—a full century after the first Black Death outbreak in Europe—when the Ottoman Empire (which at the height of its power and territorial control engulfed everything around the Mediterranean Sea except modern Italy and the northernmost coasts) boycotted trade with China and closed the route. (142 years later, Nick Bottom wrote a merry little Black Death showtune with a derivative medley and frankly it was TOO SOON.)
Remnants of the Silk Road survive today in the form of a paved highway connecting Pakistan and the Xinjiang region of China. The Silk Road also survives as a metaphor for the exchange of sketchy goods and services on the Dark Web, which is something that hack Nostradamus clearly didn’t see in humanity’s economic future.
WELCOME TO THE RENAISSANCE!
Now that we have our Middle Ages backstory out of the way, let’s join the historical narrative of our merry little play. (And my advance apologies: I totally geeked out researching and writing this so it’s way longer than I intended. I promise to be less overwhelming in the future.)
Renaissance—as our opening number helpfully explains—means “rebirth.” The Black Death had killed roughly a third of the entire European population, which—among mega-many other consequences—gave serfs (the lower working class) bargaining power for their agricultural labor. It decimated the longstanding feudal system, caused a seismic redistribution of wealth, and spawned the rise of a middle-ish merchant class that had newfound money, leisure and upward mobility through commerce and education.
It was against this socioeconomic upheaval that a confluence of events across the continent stirred and boiled over into the aforementioned rebirth that underpins two full centuries of cultural development, artistic exploration, scientific discovery, social restructuring and political reform:
GEOPOLITICAL: The 1453 fall of Constantinople (now Istanbul) (not Constantinople) (this is a joke for the They Might Be Giants fans among us) brought a brutal end to the Byzantine Empire. Byzantine scholars fled mostly to Italy with their collections of Greek and Roman books and manuscripts, which inspired a widespread revival in the studies of philosophy, science and art.
EDUCATION: These Classical Greek and Roman texts fostered a more rational, scientific approach to theology, the natural world and the arts. Human beings and nature became subjects worthy of study.
PHILOSOPHY: The texts also shifted the philosophical zeitgeist from the longstanding Medieval philosophy of scholasticism—which demanded a strict adherence to religious theology, doctrine and dogma—to a newfound exploration of humanism, a rational outlook that emphasized the potential value, goodness and morality of humans and looked for rational ways to solve human problems. This transition sent our very own Brother Jeremiah through paroxysms of existential crises, and Paroxysms of Existential Crises would make an objectively terrible band name. Which is exactly why we mock him.
SCIENCE: Humanism’s emphasis on rationality, empirical observations and mathematical knowledge challenged generally accepted scientific theories and led to what we now call the Scientific Revolution. In 1534, Polish mathematician and astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus published
De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres), which placed the sun—not the Earth—at the center of the solar system. It upended centuries of scientific thinking and inspired scientists across Europe to approach the natural world from a multitude of innovative perspectives. (Of course, that one guy on YouTube has since proven that the earth is flat, so we know today that all that Copernicus stuff is just silly.)
ART: Artists adopted the rational elements of Classical learning—such as anatomy and aerial perspective—and strove to achieve newfound levels of perfection in their representations of humans, animals and nature. (Once that perfection ideal had been achieved, however, artists had nowhere else upward to go and over the centuries started to deconstruct the content and representation in their work to eventually bring about movements like Abstraction, Impressionism, Cubism and the sad little stick figures I’m barely able to draw because I have zero artistic talent.)
PATRONAGE: Most of the Renaissance’s rich artistic achievements would not have been possible without the funding of wealthy patrons. Perhaps the most famous of these patrons were the Medicis, an art-loving family of bankers (and three popes) who commissioned enormous quantities of paintings, sculptures and architecture for their palaces and family tomb. Their most immediate legacy, of course, was the lofty ambitions of our very own dyspeptic Lord Clapham and awkwardly earnest Shylock as they struggled to usher Nick Bottom to the literary pantheon of fame and glory.
LITERATURE: The artistic achievements of the Renaissance also extended from the visual arts to the worlds of literature and theater (otherwise we wouldn’t be rehearsing all these songs and tap numbers). Inspired by humanism’s emphasis on emotions and morality, the literature of the Renaissance broke free from stringent religious dogma and began exploring the struggles and triumphs of human protagonists from history, folktales, Biblical narratives and other familiar sources. In addition to dramatic comedies like
Omelette and dramatic tragedies like
Hamlet, the Renaissance also saw a flourishing of the poetry that brings our very own star-crossed Nigel and Portia together in awkwardly adorkable love.
I think we can all agree, though, the the most important aftermath of this dramatic rebirth in literary thinking and writing was the day in the late 1980s that a befuddled Iowa college student realized he was NOT cut out for a career in engineering, biology, music, dance or journalism and finally declared his sixth major: English, with an emphasis on Renaissance literature—which he accomplished in three short but overwhelming semesters. And then he waited 33 damn years for this opportunity to use it. He deserves an omelette.
THIS BOTTOM’S GONNA BE TOPPED WITH A DONKEY HEAD
Many characters in our merry little play get their names from characters in Shakespeare’s plays.
Nick Bottom, for example, is a buffoon who alternates between being a character in and a narrator of Shakespeare’s
A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He’s a member of a mediocre acting troupe (sound familiar?) who, in the middle of rehearsing a play for the amusement of Oberon, the King of the Fairies, gets transformed by the mischievous Puck, a minion of Oberon, to have the head of a donkey. (Are you still with me?) But it gets weirder. (If you can believe it.) You see, the Fairy Queen Titania, wife of Oberon, gets put under a spell that makes her fall in love (and totally make out) with the donkey-headed Nick Bottom (as one does). Other stuff happens, and long story short Titania eventually gets unspelled and Nick Bottom gets his human head back and ends up thinking the whole thing has been a dream in the night in the middle of summer (hence the title).
But there’s more! The mediocre acting troupe eventually (and very poorly) performs for Oberon a rife-with-subtext play called
Pyramus and Thisbe (which are objectively cool pet names), which ends with Nick Bottom performing a melodramatic death scene that’s cringier than the entirety of the
Cats movie.
And, scene.
It’s worth noting that Shakespeare wrote
A Midsummer Night’s Dream after the narrative of our merry little play, implying by our authors that he continued mocking his rival after poor Nick Bottom got exiled to America. Because Shakespeare is kind of a dick.
THE MAN WHO PUT THE "I AM" IN IAMBIC PENTAMETER!
The above lyric kinda flies by as Shakespeare gets introduced at the beginning of "Will Power." But it’s actually a pretty important and defining aspect of the way he wrote.
Iambic pentameter—for those of you who slept through British Lit as we nerds took fascinated and copious notes—is a type of metric line built on standardized syllables and patterns.
It’s broken into iambic feet of two syllables with the emphasis on the second syllable (“
da DUM”) strung together in sets of five (“penta-”), like so:
Da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM
And Shakespeare—being a total word nerd—almost exclusively followed this pattern for a whopping 884,647 words in 118,406 lines of plays and sonnets. No wonder the other kids kept beating him up on the playground and taking his lunch money.
But it ended up bringing a unifying lilt to everything he wrote:
But SOFT! What LIGHT through YONder WINDow BREAKS?
If MUsic BE the FRUIT of LOVE, play ON.
Two HOUSEholds, BOTH aLIKE in DIGniTY.
Of course, Shakespeare—being the talentless, no-future hack that he was—didn’t always nail it. Some lines ended up with extra syllables:
To BE, or NOT to BE: that IS the QUES(tion)
And some ended up playing fast and loose with standard cadences and speech patterns:
Friends, ROmans, COUNtry MEN, lend ME your EARS.
But it’s the occasional fast-and-loose line that prevents his dialogue from getting sing-songy and that gives his actors room to breathe and bring natural inflections and interpretations to their lines.
For those of you looking to pad your trivia-night knowledge base, iambic pentameter is part of a wide and diverse meter family. Here are just a few of its siblings and their weird feet:
FEET:
Iambic: da DUM
Trochaic: DA dum
Anapestic: da da DUM
METERS:
Trimeter: three iambic/trochaic/etc feet
Tetrameter: four iambic/trochaic/etc feet
Pentameter: five iambic/trochaic/etc feet
Now pair them up any way you like and write poetry like a sixteenth-century badass. Or don’t. This won’t be on the test.
INTELLECTUAL ICONS IN PUFFY PANTS AND POINTY LEATHER BOOTS
Here are some CV basics about every local celebrity mentioned in our opening number, in the order their appear:
Francis Bacon (1561–1626): English philosopher, statesman (under the name Lord Verulam) and scientist. Considered the father of empiricism—a scientific philosophy that emphasizes sensory experience and evidence (often derived from experiments) over intuition, skepticism or rational thinking—he became a martyr to his own scientific method when he stuffed a dead chicken with snow to see if freezing temperatures could preserve the meat and in the process he developed fatal pneumonia from his prolonged exposure to the cold.
Sir Walter Raleigh (c. 1552–1618): English statesman, soldier, writer and explorer. With Queen Elizabeth’s patronage, he commissioned and financed expeditions to what is now North America and helped establish the Roanoke colony that soon disappeared under mysterious—and still not definitively resolved—circumstances. Raleigh never personally set foot on the continent, but he did bring potatoes and tobacco to England from what is now South America. In 1617, Raleigh violated a Spanish peace treaty in his search for the mythical “City of Gold” riches of the mythical city of El Dorado in present-day Venezuela, for which he was imprisoned and eventually beheaded by King James.
Thomas Dekker (1572–1632): English writer, dramatist and pamphleteer. He was known primarily for the lively descriptions of English life he published in pamphlets, which were unbound booklets circulated to spread humor, op-ed commentary and political propaganda. While he was also a prolific playwright, he was not regarded as worthy of the pantheon of masters like Shakespeare, Johnson, Marlowe and Middleton. Heck—he wasn’t even regarded as worthy of getting a first name in our lyrics.
John Webster (c. 1578–c. 1632): English dramatist. While he collaborated with many leading playwrights, he is best known for his intricate, subtle, brooding tragedies. The two most famous of these tragedies—
The White Devil and
The Duchess of Malfi—are still studied, revered and performed to this day.
Ben Johnson (1572–1637): English playwright, satirist and poet. Generally regarded as the second most important dramatist after William Shakespeare, he popularized the character-driven comedy-of-humors genre that directly combatted Shakespeare’s signature emotion-, adventure- and fate-driven romantic-comedy genre. Though intellectual rivals in writing style and worldview, Johnson and Shakespeare had great respect for each other and Johnson called Shakespeare the “Sweet Swan of Avon” in tribute of the publication of the
First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays seven years after his death.
Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593): Arguably the most famous of the Elizabethan playwrights and poets outside of Shakespeare. The first English author to receive critical fame using blank verse—unrhymed poetry written in a consistent meter and thought to more closely mimic natural human speech and inflections—Marlowe had a profound influence on Shakespeare, who quoted his work and referenced his existence in
Antony and Cleopatra,
The Merchant of Venice,
Hamlet,
Macbeth and many other plays. Marlowe died relatively young (age 39) under mysterious circumstances variously attributed to a violent bar fight, blasphemous libel against the church, homosexual intrigue, betrayal by another playwright and assassination due to espionage.
Thomas Kyd (1558–1594): English playwright. His play
The Spanish Tragedy (along with a
Hamlet precursor often attributed to him) created the Elizabethan revenge-play genre. The genre established tropes like the vengeful ghost and the play-within-a-play used to trap a murderer, both of which drive narratives in Shakespeare’s
Hamlet and some of his later works.
Thomas Middleton (1580–1627): English poet and one of the most successful and prolific playwrights of the Jacobean period, which immediately followed the Renaissance. Named for King James I and marked by intense conflicts and threats of civil wars between Protestant and Catholic states, the Jacobean era saw a literary focus on tragedy, revenge, cynicism, satire and human evil. Though Middleton was skilled in writing across all genres, he wrote something literally called
The Revenger’s Tragedy and he may have collaborated with Shakespeare on
Timon of Athens,
Macbeth and
All’s Well that Ends Well.
Thomas Moore (1478–1535): English author, lawyer, judge, philosopher, statesman and humanist. Eventually declared the patron saint of statesmen and politicians, his staunch Catholicism made him a vociferous opponent of the Protestant Reformation, the theology of Martin Luther and Henry VII’s separation from the church to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. After refusing to take the Oath of Supremacy to Henry VIII—which was required of everyone taking public or church office—he was executed for treason.
William Shakespeare (1564–1616): Hack “writer” and total nobody who’s completely lost to the ages. If he even existed, he’d probably be one of those obsessive fans of
Cats. It’s silly to even include him in this list. God, let’s hate him.
IT’S HARD TO BE THE BARD
But it’s easy to tell you what a bard is. Or was.
Outside of Shakespeare hogging the bardness title to himself for all eternity, a bard in the traditional Renaissance sense was one or any combination of the following:
- A poet
- Someone who recites poetry to an audience (poetry readings were a popular form of entertainment back in the days before Golden Girls reruns)
- A writer, composer, singer or orator who recounts epic tales or impassioned narratives using lyrical, poetic language
“Bard” isn’t a formal title; it’s more of a descriptor for an avocation, like pianist or painter or gymnast or cat lady. It comes from a pre-Renaissance Celtic tradition where a wealthy patron would hire someone to tell stories, compose music and lyrics, act as an oral historian and genealogist, and generally shower the patron with praise for his sophistication and benevolence.
By the late English Renaissance, a bard did what Shakespeare and Nick and Nigel Bottom were doing: writing poetry and epic narratives about kings and supernatural beings and good-cholesterol breakfast comestibles.
But Shakespeare wasn’t called The Bard—at least not in a way that took in the public vernacular—until 150 years after his death. The designation is attributed to David Garrick, an English actor, playwright, poet and theater owner, in a 1769 poem he wrote about Shakespeare.
So when Nick Bottom complains about Shakespeare being called The Bard in our merry little play, it’s a bit of an anachronism—but thankfully it’s the only anachronistic cultural reference in our entire show.
A ROSE BY ANY OTHER NAME
Many—but not all—characters in the Somethingrottenverse share names with characters in Shakespeare’s plays. Here’s some background (or not) on the more prominent folks:
Bea: A feisty, sharp-witted protofeminist (full name: Beatrice) in
Much Ado About Nothing. Beatrice is tricked into falling in love with a soldier named Benedick, with whom she has a will-they-or-won’t-they “merry war.” (Spoiler alert: they do.)
Nigel: The only principal character in
Something Rotten! not based on a character from a Shakespeare play. To add insult to injury, Nigel had a brilliant song called “I Suck” that was cut from the show before it got to Broadway.
Portia: A wealthy heiress in
The Merchant of Venice. Written as a wise woman ostensibly modeled after Queen Elizabeth I, Portia disguises herself as a lawyer to circumvent the lottery her father established in his will to find her a husband.
Shylock: A greedy Jewish moneylender in
The Merchant of Venice. Characterized with rather appalling stereotypes from our modern perspective, he contractually establishes—and tries to literally collect—”a pound of flesh” as payment on a defaulted loan to a Christian. Even more appallingly, his “redemption” arc ends with his conversion to Christianity at the end of the play.
Lord Clapham: The only prominent supporting character in
Something Rotten! not based on a character from a Shakespeare play. But he’s happy and he knows it, so clap your hams.
Toby Belch: The pseudonym Shakespeare uses when he infiltrates Nick Bottom’s acting troupe, Sir Toby Belch is originally ingénue Olivia’s boisterous drunk uncle in
Twelfth Night. Though he mostly provides comic relief and a few insightful observations throughout the narrative of the play, he also exhibits a cruel streak toward some of the more vulnerable characters.
AWW, SHE’S BEDAZZLED!
Shakespeare isn’t kidding at his party when he brags about making up words. Of the 20,000 words in his plays and poems, he invented more than 1,700 that are still in use today. Here’s an alphabetical sample, except for a sample for X because Elon Musk hadn’t been invented yet:
Alligator: Romeo and Juliet, Act 5 Scene 1
Bedroom: A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act 2 Scene 2
Critic: Love's Labour's Lost, Act 3 Scene 1
Downstairs: Henry IV Part 1, Act 2 Scene 4
Eyeball: Henry VI Part 1, Act 4 Scene 7
Fashionable: Troilus and Cressida, Act 3 Scene 3
Gossip: The Comedy of Errors, Act 5 Scene 1
Hurry: The Comedy of Errors, Act 5 Scene 1
Inaudible: All's Well That Ends Well, Act 5 Scene 3
Jaded: Henry VI Part 2, Act 4 Scene 1
Kissing: Love's Labour's Lost, Act 5 Scene 2
Lonely: Coriolanus, Act 4 Scene 1
Manager: Love's Labour's Lost, Act 1 Scene 2
Nervy: Coriolanus, Act 2 Scene 1
Obscene: Love's Labour's Lost, Act 1 Scene 1
Puppy dog: King John, Act 2 Scene 1
Questioning: As You Like It, Act 5 Scene 4
Rant: Hamlet, Act 5 Scene 1
Skim milk: Henry IV Part 1, Act 2 Scene 3
Traditional: Richard III, Act 3 Scene 1
Undress: The Taming of the Shrew, Induction Scene 2
Varied: Titus Andronicus, Act 3 Scene 1
Worthless: The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Act 4 Scene 2
Yelping: Henry VI Part 1, Act 4 Scene 2
Zany: Love's Labour's Lost, Act 5 Scene 2
THOMAS NOSTRADAMUS? I PROMISE!
Michel de Nostredame (1503–1566), usually Latinized as Nostradamus, was a French astrologer, apothecary and reputed soothsayer who is best known for his 1555 book
Les Prophéties, a collection of 942 poetic quatrains—none of which involved the discussion of gyrating one’s ass—allegedly predicting future events.
Les Prophéties was by no definition a work of scholarly merit; it was filled with anagrams and references to mythology and astrology, and it very vaguely predicted (inevitable) natural disasters (Beware! It will rain someday in the future!). And Nostradamus wrote it in his own hybrid of French, Greek and Latin—most likely to stay vague enough to avoid being persecuted for heresy during the Holy Inquisition.
Soothsayers, seers and oracles—a list that is objectively more fun to say than “lions, tigers and bears”—were people (or sometimes just things) revered for their ability (?) not only to predict the future but to provide insight and counsel to everyone from royalty to lazy playwrights with giggly last names. Their powers (?) were said to come from both deities and the occult. And they were almost never named Greg.
You’ve probably already figured this out, but since the real Nostradamus died 29 years before the events of our merry little play, the
Something Rotten! writers invented his ass-gyrating nephew Thomas to help drive our narrative. You might say they tapped him for the job. But please don’t. Nobody should ever say that.
THE MOST LAMENTABLE COMEDY
The men in Nick Bottom’s terrible acting troupe are named for the men in a terrible acting troupe made up of menial laborers from
A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In
Midsummer, the troupe barely holds it together enough to very poorly perform a version of a Greek tragedy they call
The Most Lamentable Comedy and Most Cruel Death of Pyramus and Thisbe at a wedding celebration. Here’s a bit about each of them:
Francis Flute: A young, over-excited actor and a bellows-mender by trade, Francis Flute is forced to play the female role of Thisbe, who talks to her lover Pyramus (played by Nick Bottom) through a gap in a wall.
Tom Snout: A tinker (a name for a tinsmith) by trade, Tom Snout plays the aforementioned wall, holding two fingers of one hand open to be the aforementioned gap. He even has two lines as The Wall.
Peter Quince: An amateur playwright, Peter Quince is the author of
The Most Lamentable Comedy and Most Cruel Death of Pyramus and Thisbe. He and the troupe perform it at a wedding celebration for Theseus (the Duke of Athens) and Hyppolyta (the Queen of the Amazons).
Snug: A joiner who literally joins wood for a living, Snug plays a lion who indirectly causes the deaths of Pyramus and Thisbe. Though The Lion was only supposed to roar, Snug was worried he’d forget his lines. In the end, Peter Quince gave The Lion a few lines explaining that he’s not a real lion so the audience shouldn’t be scared of him.
Robin Starveling: A tailor by trade, Robin Starveling plays the role of Moonshine in the play. He makes a fool of himself using a lantern to create moonlight, and he’s thoroughly derided by the audience for it.
BONUS CHARACTER!
Sir John Falstaff: In our play, Shakespeare calls the Master of the Justice “Lord Falstaff.” It’s not a withering insult, but it’s not necessarily a compliment either. Falstaff was actually a recurring character in three of Shakespeare’s plays:
Henry IV Part 1,
Henry IV Part 2 and
The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Shakespeare eventually killed him off with casual mention in
Henry V. (All four plays were written after the events of our narrative, so it could be said that Shakespeare invented the character in our courtroom.)
Falstaff was mostly a comic figure: a vain, boastful drinker who hung out with petty criminals and lived off of stolen money. While he certainly led people into trouble, he’s generally regarded as being a jolly, debauched figure, and he’s lived on in other works by Giuseppi Verdi, Ralph Vaughn Williams, Edward Elgar (whom you know for writing
Pomp and Circumstance) and even Kenneth Branagh.
THE STUPIDEST THING THAT I HAVE EVER HEARD!
The characters in our merry little play break into song in two separate worlds: the one they live in and the one they create onstage.
And there’s a very cool—and rarely useful—word for the world-they-live-in singing: diegesis (say it: die a JEE sis)
Diegetic (say it: die a JET ik) songs are songs sung between characters who in the backs of their minds keep wondering WHY AREN’T THEY TALKING? The songs in almost all musicals are diegetic—or, more specifically, the songs that characters sing to each other are diegetic. The songs that characters sing to themselves or about themselves to the audience are diegetic-adjacent, which is objectively a terrible name for a puppy.
On the flip side, songs in a show that are sung as performances by the characters in the show are mimetic (say it: meh MET ik).
Memesis (say it: meh MEE sis) has a number of contextual meanings in theater—and a bunch more in the various disciplines of science—but for the sake of this already-too-long explanation, they’re play-within-a-play or stage-upon-a-stage songs performed for a scripted audience.
So in our merry little play, “God, I Hate Shakespeare” and “A Musical” are diegetic because the characters sing them to each other instead of talking like normal people. And “The Black Death” and “Omelette” are memetic because they’re being intentionally performed.
“Bottom’s Gonna Be on Top” and “Hard to Be the Bard” are the aforementioned diegetic-adjacent soliloquies that the characters sing to themselves or directly to the audience. And “To Thine Own Self be True” and “We See the Light” muddy the diegetic-adjacent waters even further because it’s not always 100% clear to whom they’re specifically being sung.
Finally: If your cholesterol’s high, you’re probably diegetic. Or not. In either case, you should definitely get it checked out.
NOTHING RHYMES WITH AMERICA!
What did the Bottom brothers and their merry band of misfits encounter when they reached the New World?
Our narrative takes place entirely in 1595 and the average transatlantic travel at the time took two months, so it’s safe to assume Nick et al. had arrived on the first ship to the New World by 1596.
But Hamlet was written between 1599 and 1601 and transatlantic travel wasn’t a terribly regular occurrence at the time, so let’s assume word of the play’s success wouldn’t have reached the New World until 1602.
Sir Walter Raleigh had founded the Roanoke Colony in what is now North Carolina in 1585. Virginia Dare, the first known English child born on the North American continent, was born in 1587. But the Roanoke Colony disappeared under mysterious and never yet fully resolved circumstances in 1590. So it’s safe to say there wasn’t much of an English-expat welcoming party—or even an audience—for the brothers and their epic tale of leaving Cornwall when they arrived.
Kinda-lost-to-history explorer and privateer Bartholomew Gosnold was the first Englishman to land on the New England coast—exploring and naming Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard—in 1602. But if he was the first person (and potential audience member) in the area, it’s unlikely that the Bottoms were in their dressing rooms waiting for anyone to call places as soon as their New England house was full.
Another Bartholomew—Bartholomew Gilbert—landed in the Chesapeake Bay in 1603, but he was killed by Native Americans as soon as he came ashore. And his season tickets were probably non-refundable, so his seats sat empty during any possible performances.
BUT! The American social landscape wasn’t completely barren. There were Native American settlements all along the Atlantic coast—though their insatiable hunger for ponderous, derivative musicals about British perseverance in the Renaissance was debatable.
BUT AGAIN! All was not lost. The Pilgrims arrived in what is now Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1620. An offshoot of the Puritans—their main difference involved the Pilgrims’ belief in some degree of separation between church and state—the Pilgrims’ hunger for bawdy musical theater was also dubious. But I wasn’t there, so I can’t say for sure.
A pilgrim is just a person who journeys—and the Mayflower Pilgrims arrived two decades after the Bottoms—so history is very unclear about who might have been on Shylock’s Pilgrim Productions Board of Directors.
In any case, our adventures at Theatre Cedar Rapids come to a close today, just as the Bottoms’ adventures in England eventually came to a close in 1595. And I’m gonna put a stake in the ground and say we had waaaay better—and more attractive—American audiences.
Land of opportunity indeed!
