Richard Carew. The Ordinary, The Ordinalia, and the Ordinary Actor ...

Carew's Ordinary 30
9. A Medieval Staging Convention?
Because “evaluating Carew’s description on the basis of the extant plays seems
counterproductive,” as Betcher puts it,112 proponents of Carew’s description have
understandably avoided engaging with the extant guare-mirkle texts. Instead, it has seemed more
productive to view “prompting in full view of the audience” as a “medieval staging convention.”
This tactic both broadens the significance of the claim–it is no longer to be regarded just an
obscure Cornish convention–and makes it unnecessary to defend the specific details of Carew’s
description. Even if Carew plainly thinks that the Cornish Ordinary’s activities are so peculiar that
he has to explain them to an English readership, nevertheless the “convention” can still be
described. Carew may think that the Cornish version of the onstage prompter is peculiar, but
perhaps he would have regarded other versions of the onstage director as quite normal, indeed
conventional.
The difficulty with this approach, of course, is that onstage directors are very hard to find.
Butterworth has tried to document instances of onstage direction in the medieval and Early
Modern period. He has come up with a list of nine such examples. None of them, however, bear
examination. We have already considered one of these, the Conveyour, at some length. We can, I
think, dispose of the other eight more briefly.
Let us begin with the four pictorial illustrations that he has found. Butterworth is in good
company in thinking that Fouquet’s Martyrdom of St Apollonia depicts a fifteenth-century French
meneur du jeu directing a mystère. This theory, however, rests on nothing more substantial than a
flash of inspiration by the brilliant French scholar, Gustave Cohen, one that simply cannot be
substantiated, not even in the production book for the Mons Passion–Cohen calls it le Livre de
Conduite du Régisseur–where he thought he had found traces of his presence. To the contrary,
that text provides considerable evidence to rule out such an onstage director, and there is no other
documentary evidence for such a regisseur toujours sur les planches (an always onstage
director),as he calls him, anywhere else in France.113 There is, indeed, good reason to think that
Fouquet’s image means to illustrate a classical Roman performance, as described by Isidore de
Seville, where a poet declaimed the text while actors mimed the action.114
The reappearance of the blue-coated, bookholding figure in Fouquet’s Rape of the Sabine
Women illustrates frequent practice in Fouquet’s atelier of reusing figures from an earlier painting
in a later one, but otherwise it tells us nothing about the performance of an onstage director. The
bookholding figure appears as a tiny figure, recessed into the background where he is not
obviously directing anything and stands motionless contemplating an idol atop a column. Far
from an illustration of a medieval theatre, as some suggest, the image clearly illustrates a Roman
circus; its obvious, deeply-oval shape is required for horse racing, and the pillar with its idol
serves as one of the two meta around which the horses turned in the race.
Neither Hubert Cailleau’s image of one of the Valenciennes superintendants nor the
portrait of a fancifully behatted Jakob Ruf are depicted as onstage directors. The Valenciennes
superintendant carries a small scroll rather than a book. His image is framed by the text of the
legal contract that binds actors to obey the superintendant and lists penalties for disobeying them.
He carries a scroll and staff as symbols of his authority: the scroll in one hand represents the very
legal contract that frames his image; it grants him the authority symbolized by his staff, which he