What was the experience of the workshop?
It was a fascinating experience – I’d never been behind the scenes watching actors work before, and that was pretty amazing. I was also intrigued by how the scenes we watch in theatre come about, how decisions are made, and how adaptable things are until the layout of the scene is agreed. So much food for thought.
What are these plays with bears?
What really made me think were the bears. The bears that were there and the bears that were not.
To explain, we workshopped four early modern plays – one well known The Winters Tale where the bear makes a fleeting, if memorable appearance, and is later described as being up to its eyebrows in Antigonus’s tummy.
In The Old Wives Tale, a young man is cursed to look like an old man in the day and a bear at night, for upsetting a local sorcerer.
In Mucedorus, the bear provides the opportunity for a pratfall at the start of the play, and then becomes something much scarier before being beheaded by a young fellow with a mighty sword.
Finally, in the “lost” play Cox Of Collumpton, the bear is really the devil in disguise and appears to terrify two people who have been bumping off their relatives. The bear scares them so much they kill themselves in various ways, and that is the end of the play.
What were the bears like?
It’s an intriguing mix – bears as beasts, wanting nothing more than to eat people who are going about their daily business, or bears as devils or disguised people as a result of magic.
The key thing for me was the lack of ‘bear-y-ness’ allowed for the bears in the plays. They were not the calm bears the BOB team met at Wildwood; they were not the bears that evoked pity in the wrestling ring.
They are terrifying monsters, which happen to be bears, who help push the plot along at specific points.
It made me wonder what the early modern audiences thought about the bears they saw. They would not have thought the presence of bears unusual, as the BOB project has uncovered copious evidence of bears in villages and towns all over England.
But is it that the early modern bears, brutalized during bear-baiting or seen eating large lumps of horse in the bear pits at Bankside, were only displaying, or were only seen to be displaying, their ‘beastly’ side?
The chilled bears rolling around playing with their feet or toys at Wildwood display behaviours that the plays’ dramatic bears never get to show.
Were early modern bears typecast by the world in which they lived, both on and off the stage?
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