My friend Michael in this time of plague isolation had a bit of trouble with one of Jamie Oliver’s bread recipies, so, I’m sending her my recipe that makes pretty much all of our bread at home, plague or no plague.
Feel free to try it yourself and let us all know in the comments how it worked out!
It was a large room with three big windows and it was lined from floor to ceiling with books; more books than Lucy had ever seen before, tiny little books, fat and dumpy books, and books bigger than any church Bible you have ever see, all bound in leather and smelling old and learned and magical. But she knew from her instructions that she need not bother about any of these. For the Book, the Magic Book, was lying on a reading-desk in the very middle of the room. . .
– C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Chapter 10.
Pauline Baynes’ illustration of Lucy approaching the Magician’s Library
While reading The Ordinal I found myself slowly realizing that I was quietly fulfilling a childhood dream that I might one day read actual books of magic in their original languages. Very early in my life I had read C. S. Lewis’ Narnia books and I have been quietly haunted by the scene in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader – actually haunted by Pauline Baynes’ illustration of the chapter in which Lucy discovers the Magician’s Book of spells. Later in life I had read silly New Age books of fake witchcraft and found them absurd, uninspired, and uninspiring. And I have spent many years studying the twelve Old English metrical charms, which are in an authentic voice like that of Norton, but have tragically been appropriated by shallow crystalline herbal wiccans on neo-pagan websites. It was only when reading The Ordinal of Alchemy, hidden behind it’s obscurity of language and image, that I came to realize that I was finally – had actually long been – truly in the Magician’s library.
Therefore if ye wil voyde alle dreede,
In the grose werke do bi my reede:
Take nevir thertoo no howsholde man,
Thei ben soone wery as I telle can;
Therfore take no man therto
But he be wagide, how evir ye do,
Not bi the monthe as nye as ye may,
Ne bi the weeke, but bi the daye;
And that your wagis be to theire mynde
Bettir then thei elsewere can fynde;
And that thei nede not for wagis sewe,
But that their payment be quyke & trewe.
ll. 1349-1360
Olde men wrote in avncyen tyme
How that of sapours there be fulli nyne:
Which ye may lerne within half an houre
As sharpe tase, vntuous, and sowre
Which iij to Meen mater testifye,
As byting taste, saltish, & werish alle-so;
Othir iij came thikke substance fro,
As bitter taste, undersowre, and dowce,
These ix be fownde in many a noble howse.
ll. 2107-2116
Trust not Geomancye, that supersticious arte,
For god made reason which yer is sett a-parte;
Trust not to all astrologyeris, I say why,
For that arte is as secrete as alchymye.
ll. 2973-2976
No man is sure to haue his entent
With-owte ful concorde of arte with Instrument.
ll. 2897-2898The proper tools are fundamental to success.At times Norton seems to be saying something that makes a sort of sense to the modern reader, but we are not seeing his intent:Liquour conioynyth male with female wyfe,
And causith dede thingis to resorte to lyfe;
Liquours clansith with their ablucion;
Liquours to oure stone be chief nutricion,
Without liquours no mete is goode,
Liquours conveith alle Alimente & fode
To euery parte of mannys bodie . . .
ll. 2189-2195
Therefore in oure werk, as auctours techith vs,
There must be Corpus, anima, & spiritus.
ll. 2397-2398One part body, one part soul, and one part spirit. This distinction between soul and spirit seems foreign to both the materialist and dualist modern mind, but, whatever it means, it is fundamental to the work Norton is trying to teach. Anyone who wishes to grasp the foreign Medieval intellectual world that produced The Ordinal of Alchemy must wrestle with such different categories of experience and understanding.
Pauline Baynes’ illustration of the Magician’s Book
Two issues I will take with the Tedx talk a friend posted to Facebook a few days ago about the global monetary system is that:
a) Yes, the banks create fiat currency to finance loans/innovation seen as profitable and repayable. They don’t grant €100K to every potential furniture maker or web developer who may happen along. They finance good risks. The bet on sure things and by so doing they increase the wealth of the economy by collaborating with creative minds AKA entrepreneurs. The Tedx talk pretends that banks provide loans of fiat currency with no discrimination or discernment, with no consideration of the viability of the proposed enterprise. Even children know that banks don’t simply give out money for the asking. The talk also ignores the fact that the “growth” nurtured by the monetary system is the growth of individuals’ livelihoods, the financing of children’s’ educations, the building of homes, the replacement of furnaces, roofs, worn out clothes, food for families. And this growth is also, at its fundament, employment for a growing population.
b) The new algorithm proposed in the talk would provide everyone with a subsistence income but it would provide no seed money for major growth projects. If someone had an idea for a new furniture business, they would not be able to go to a bank and borrow €100K to purchase materials, rent manufacturing space, hire an apprentice . . . the idea would never leave the basement workshop. The result of such a monetary system would necessarily be stagnation at a “contented” level of well-being only slightly above the medieval. A healthy herd. Forever. No advancement. No improvement. No toys. Certainly no new toys. Nothing at all new, except rarely. As “excess” savings are explicitly to be clawed back by the totalitarian government of this hypothetical command economy, the furniture maker and the web developer and every other business, small or large would never be able to find the capital to start their businesses! All the little shops we love so much would be impossible.
What a terrifying, colourless, Orwellian future!
But there was another voice somewhere, a voice which grated like the rasp of a saw cutting through bone, like the grind of a broken machine still working at ruinous top speed. It was an evil voice, a terror-filling voice.
Perhaps this really was the “death” which the tunnel underpeople had mistaken her for.
The Hunter’s hand released hers. She let go of D’joan.
There was a strange woman in the room. She wore the baldric of authority and the leotards of a traveler.
Elaine stared at her.
“You’ll be punished,” said the terrible voice, which now was coming out of the woman.– Cordwainer Smith, “The Dead Lady of Clown Town”, Galaxy Magazine, vol. 22, no. 6, August 1964, p.42.
Give me my scallop-shell of quiet,
My staff of faith to walk upon,
My scrip of joy, immortal diet,
My bottle of salvation,
My gown of glory, hope’s true gage;
And thus I’ll take my pilgrimage.”
– Sir Walter Raleigh “Pilgrimage”
The Malachite Company has been doing Shakespeare in Edmonton for four winters now, and what a treat it has been to have Old Strathcona’s grand old Holy Trinity Anglican Church filled up with light and laughter and warmth and a few bits of Elizabethan tragedy each January. Last night the fourth Malachite winter and the first Winter Shakespeare Festival got off to an uproarious laughfest of a start with the first performance of an out-of-season Midsummer Night’s Dream. I was fortunate to go to this perennial Shakespeare favourite with someone who had never seen the Dream before (and to sit a pew in front of “Meg”, who also had never seen the play before, and who somehow became dear to the heart of Nick Bottom over the course of the performance). If this Dream had been my first experience of A Midsummer Night’s Dream what a joy it would have been (instead of that fairly ordinary thing I saw as a teenager with a man named Patrick Stewart playing Oberon).
The Malachite Dream is a joyous party of dance and song, thanks to Musical Director and Titania/Hippolyta Danielle LaRose and a cast of twelve others that put their whole hearts into filling the sanctuary/stage to bursting with happiness.
The Titania/Hippolyta Oberon/Theseus (Brennan Campbell) split rolls are handled economically and effectively with simple costume changes. Campbell’s Oberon very satisfyingly combines an air of noble control over his fairy-pranks with a quiet sense of confusion as he sees Puck’s (Colin Matty) errors send the fairy king’s plans spiralling into (in the end, harmless) chaos (as they both sit watching and eating popcorn).
Emily Howard & Owen Bishop and Sarah Louise & Liam Coady as the two pairs of young lovers, the material of the fairy-made confusion, do a remarkable job of making what are in large measure stock characters into individuals that we remember very distinctly the morning after the play. Very charming, each in their own way.
Of course, the play-within-a-play of the Rude Mechanicals is at the centre of the production, whatever the nobles and fairies may try to do. And, again, each cast member manages to take a very conventional character and bring out a very human individuality and even a bit of pathos. Chance Heck’s performance as Snout playing “Wall” is a surprising piece of dramatic eloquence. And the moment when the Nobles, now a part of the audience, poke fun at Anna MacAuley’s Starveling playing the Man in the Moon — a moment that could be a bit of painful cruelty, is turned around nicely, there is a moment of empathy across classes between Theseus the King and Robin Starveling, the young tailor.
All the above makes the Malachite Midwinter Midsummer Night’s Dream worthwhile, but . . .
Monica Maddaford’s Bottom is absolutely to die for! Clutching a copy of Melvin Bragg’s biography of Laurence Olivier, Maddaford rolls her eyes and chews the scenery and milks each scene both over-the-top and to just the perfect extent. Her performance is — by itself — a very worthwhile play-within-the-play-within the play. A fine and winding line between going to far and not going far enough is walked here by Maddaford, and she walks it perfectly without a slip. And on opening night, for goodness sake!
Much more could be written about this opening night, but better to just tell you to get down to Old Strathcona and enjoy the real deal!
The Winter Shakespeare Festival continues until the beginning of February. Julius Caesar will join A Midsummer Night’s Dream on January 9th. As well, the Festival will include two staged readings of a pair of little-known Elizabethan plays by Shakespeare’s contemporaries, The Witch of Edmonton and The Merry Devil of Edmonton. These readings will occur on the evenings of January 22 and January 29 at 7:30. Full disclosure: I have had the pleasure of adapting the Witch and the Devil specifically for the Winter Shakespeare Festival.
The following is adapted from the introduction to my adaptations of The Merry Devil of Edmonton and The Witch of Edmonton.
Out of Shakespeare’s Shadow
That fellow from Stratford casts a long, virtually impenetrable shadow over the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage. Few today would be able to think of another playwright from the period — I hear a few of you shout “Marlowe”. Fewer still would be able to name a non-Shakespearean play from the period — “Dr. Faustus” one or two yell, as Marlowe peeks out of Shakespeare’s shadow again. But Shakespeare and Marlowe were just two of a multitude of playwrights of the period, and many, many plays of varying quality have come down to us that have nothing to do with Bill the Bard. But how many of those plays ever see a stage today? And how many of those plays have you seen performed? I confess, apart from an occasional bit of trans-Atlantic leakage from the BBC, I’ve never seen a production of a non-Shakespearean Elizabethan play. On the other hand, I’ve lost count of the number of Midsummer Night’s Dreams I’ve tripped over, from Patrick Stewart in a loincloth as Oberon at Stratford in 1977 to Edmonton’s Winter Shakespeare Festival’s production in 2020.
I don’t think it in anyway diminishes Shakespeare’s genius to suggest that the time is long past for him to yield the stage for an evening or two to some of his illustrious but neglected colleagues. There is so much good and great theatre out there in the world (And I don’t mean just the English Language stage tradition – I dream of seeing a production of Calderón de la Barca’s La vida es sueño !): I can’t help thinking that it is the responsibility of theatre artists to provide, and theatre audiences to demand, a broader view of our shared inheritance of great drama. I am so very grateful that Benjamin Blyth and Danielle La Rose of the Malachites feel the same way and are bringing The Merry Devil of Edmonton and The Witch of Edmonton to the place these plays truly belong: a stage in Edmonton.
The Merry Devil of Edmonton
The Merry Devil of Edmonton first came into my life as an accidental side benefit of my (possibly) pathological book collecting. A few years ago I was walking home from The Bookseller (96th Street and Whyte Avenue in East Strathcona, hard by the Mill Creek Bridge) examining my latest finds with happiness, when my eye fell with startlement on a title in a small volume of Elizabethan Tragedies: The Merry Devil of Edmonton. “Why have I never heard of this?!” I exclaimed, perhaps aloud. There and then began a decade or so of study, writing, and mild badgering of the Edmonton theatre community about the need to somehow bring the Merry Devil (and, later, The Witch of Edmonton) to the stage in their namesake city in the distant woods of Rupert’s Land. A passing mention of the plays to Danielle La Rose of the Malachites (over frozen haggis, if I remember) about a year ago, led to a staged reading of the two plays at Edmonton’s first Winter Shakespeare Festival in 2020.
The Merry Devil as it has come down to us is what would be termed a “bad” text. Many passages seem garbled and whole scenes appear to be missing. I have emended one speech, in Act IV, Scene ii, to remedy a generally recognized corruption of the text. Three scenes, those of Fabell disguised as Hildersham meeting the knights in the Rectory of Holy Trinity, of Sir John’s singing in the woods of the Mill Creek Ravine with his friends (the songs themselves are traditional), and of Smug and the Tavern Signs are my own creations. I have added these scenes to clarify very apparent inconsistencies in the play as it has survived. The events in my added scenes are hinted at in the play and the latter two survive in a chapbook version of the adventures of Peter Fabell, Smug the Smith, and his friends. I have little doubt that in some Elizabethan performances of The Merry Devil of Edmonton similar scenes would have been performed.
Peter Fabell (like most of the characters in The Merry Devil of Edmonton) is a folkloric figure with perhaps some basis in fact. He bears resemblance to the Faust legends, but, unlike Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, Fabell traditionally outwits the Devil, saving his own soul (by being buried in the exterior wall of the Church in the Village of Edmonton, in the space between consecrated and unconsecrated ground) while having enjoyed the benefits of his Demonic contract.
In our play, Fabell is still a young man, just beginning on his magical career of outwitting demons and the older generation. But he is already a powerful trickster figure. With his tricks Fabell helps his young friends overturn the plans of their parents. In fact, Fabell works to effect the transition of his society from the Medieval to Modern — in Marshall McLuhan’s words, “out of the world of roles into the new world of jobs” (The Gutenberg Galaxy, p. 22 in my old Signet paperback copy). Young Raymond, Millicent and their friends, and particularly Fabell, are not willing to quietly submit to the roles prescribed to them by their elders. Instead they set about, with the help of Fabell’s wit and magic, the job of creating their own future, and, in the end, they draw their elders into that world as well.
The Witch of Edmonton
This natural infirmity is most eminent in old women, and such as are poor, solitary, live in most base esteeem and beggary, or such as are witches; insomuch that Wierus, Baptista Porta, Ulricus Molitor, Edwicus, do refer all that witches are said to do, to imagination alone, and this humour of melancholy.
Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, Pt. I, Sec. 2.
The story of Elizabeth Sawyer, the Witch of The Witch of Edmonton, is a most quintessential tragedy, made even more tragic by the fact that Elizabeth Sawyer was a real woman tried and executed just a few years before the play was first performed. Mother Sawyer was scapegoated and killed for witchcraft. This in spite of the fact that the educated of her time, such as the real-life scholar Robert Burton, writing about what we might term “geriatric depression” in 1621 above were quite convinced that witchcraft was not really a “thing”. Mother Sawyer is a woman far more sinned against than sinning. She is condemned as a witch by neighbours who project their own fundamental ugliness onto her truly superficial ugliness. She wishes nothing else than to cling to her meagre existence, to be left alone, but she is condemned, beaten, and killed by the wealthy and the privileged, while those same wealthy and privileged go about their sinful business. Mother Sawyer so rightly describes that business of the privileged as actual “witchcraft”. Mother Sawyer is a tragic and pitifully realistic counterbalance to the educated and urbane Fabell. Both Fabell and Sawyer deal with the Devil, but it is only in poverty that the Devil truly has full, unrestrained power to do his damage.
For the Winter Shakespeare Festival, I very heavily abridged the text of The Witch of Edmonton to bring it within the time constraints of the staged readings. This was a quite painful process: there is much poetry in this telling of the true-life tragedy of Elizabeth Sawyer. Much of the abridgement came down to the removal of single words, often of lines or brief speeches, but once of a large portion of a scene. The process was very opposite to that of adapting The Merry Devil, which largely involved adding my feeble creations rather than vandalizing a wonderful and coherent piece of art.
A Note on Locations
The localities mentioned in the original text of the plays — Edmonton, Waltham, Enfield, Cheston (Cheshunt) — are now neighbourhoods of North London, but in Elizabethan times they were rural towns and villages in their own right. Just so, many neighbourhoods of our Edmonton were their own towns and villages not so very long ago. My own neighbourhood, Strathcona, was once a city in its own right. Since truly human truths are true wherever their story is told, I felt it would be both true and entertaining for modern Edmonton, Canada audiences if I quietly replaced the localities of London, England, circa 1600 with names of neighbourhoods, churches, and other landmarks around my home in 21st century Edmonton.
The Village of Edmonton in the plays, Fabell’s and Mother Sawyer’s home, is the namesake of our City of Edmonton, where so many today are energetically working like Fabell’s cohort, or tragically struggling like Mother Sawyer, to use imagination and wit to invent and reinvent themselves and their home. It has been small but enjoyable work to move the localities from the banks of the Thames to the banks of the North Saskatchewan.
Vanessa and the Mob
There is a lady who lives in my neighbourhood– let’s call her “Vanessa”. She has a small dog, and she sells slim street newspapers each Saturday outside the “Farmers’” Market just down the Avenue from my house. If you live in Old Strathcona, you probably recognize Vanessa. The vast majority of the shoppers who pass by Vanessa drive cars from the suburbs each Saturday to get their little bit of “local” stuff before driving back to their distant homes. They can afford to shop at the Market. Vanessa can’t afford to buy her groceries at the “Farmers’” Market.
Vanessa’s dog looks anxious, perhaps anxious to please. She is very calm, but when you talk to Vanessa– really talk to her — you get to know that she has — with reason – plenty of anger in her.
But Vanessa is kind.
I help Vanessa out sometimes – less than I am able. And Vanessa has helped me, too, out of all proportion to the occasional twenty or collection of empties I’ve given her. She’s a “Street Person”, perhaps, but she’s definitely not “down and out”. Vanessa has a home. I have seen Vanessa survive surgery, eviction, alcoholism, and stuff I suspect but hesitate to imagine. Vanessa and her little dog are survivors.
This evening, as I sit thinking about The Merry Devil of Edmonton and The Witch of Edmonton in my comfortable home in a comfortable neighbourhood of a comfortable Canadian city in the second decade of the Twenty-First Century — a time when all statistical indicators tell us unequivocally that I live in the best of times ever for humans on this planet (despite the quite apparent coming climate apocalypse) — I think of Vanessa and her little dog. And I see that I am Fabell — little but fortunate, not a survivor — and Vanessa is Mother Sawyer, gathering sticks just to survive. I wish so much Fabell had been a totally real person, not largely myth, and that he had used his cunning to help the tragically real Mother Sawyer, even if only with a shilling, or a few sticks, or nothing more than a kind word.
And if, as it came for Elizabeth Sawyer, the mob ever were to come for Vanessa, in this modern time, in this Gilded Age of (anti-)Social Media in which it seems so easy for mobs to appear, I hope that I would help her, that the whole neighbourhood would help her, that Edmonton would help her, somehow.
But I wonder . . .
Twin wishes, for these Plays, and for the Reader
I wish that through my small efforts of adaptation, through the creativity of the actors performing the staged readings at the Winter Shakespeare Festival, and through the publication of my adaptations in a little volume, The Merry Devil of Edmonton and The Witch of Edmonton will have been, first of all, appreciated, if only for an evening, by an audience in Edmonton; and secondly, that at some point in the not too distant future these two plays will be taken up and be given a fuller production — and a new home — by Edmonton’s wonderful community of theatre artists.
Foibles afflict all of our lives, and we all need distractions from the little and the big things that disrupt our days and nights. I hope you, Reader and Theatre-goer find these two undeservedly unknown plays at least a small, pleasant diversion. Most importantly, may all your future foibles be nothing like Mother Sawyer’s tragedy, and much, much more like Smug’s comedy.
And if you see Vanessa anywhere in your travels, say “Hello. I hope you’re doing okay.”
And give her a fiver, for her paper.
I like to reread the science fiction I first read when I was a teenager. I find interesting the perspective a life lived in history gives to the artifacts of youth. Recently I reread Larry Niven’s collection of short stories The Flight of the Horse and was particularly struck by “Flash Crowd”, a description, originally published in 1973, of an imagined future world in which personal teleportation has recently become ubiquitous and inexpensive, much like public telephone booths became in the last century.
The story follows an investigative reporter (we might call him a videographer today), first as he scouts stories by flitting between displacement booths, and later, for most of the story, as he tries to find a way to convince the world that he is not to blame for an ongoing, teleportation driven riot that began as he recorded it. In the end he demonstrates that it is not he, as a representative of the free press, but rather the new technology of unregulated transfer booths that is responsible for what threatens to be a plague of floating flash riots around the world. As one part of his investigation, he takes a booth to Tahiti and discovers that already there are permanent lawless crowds plaguing parts of the world, that the riot back home in Los Angeles is what parts of the world have been dealing with since shortly after the first displacement booths were installed. In the end a plan is suggested which will see police having control of an emergency switch which will quickly bring any flash mobbed area back under the rule of law.
The details of the plan Niven comes up with are not of much interest to me at the moment. My interest, rather, is in what I find to be striking parallels between our world and Niven’s Flash Crowd world, in which everyone with an axe to grind, a protest to make, a chip on their shoulder, a product to hawk, a fraud or theft to commit, a conspiracy to postulate, or even a book to review, can simply dial a code in a displacement booth and find themselves before the eyes of the world in an instant piled-on flash mob. In Niven’s world, displacement booths allow individuals to actually go into the thick of the mob. In our world, like so much else, the mob has become virtual.
I’ve written a bit elsewhere about what I see to be one of the dangers of our modern ability to travel virtually to virtually any spot on earth: that there are virtues and benefits for an individual in taking time and effort to experience things. It is better to trek on foot to Everest than it is to simply helicopter into Base Camp before climbing. I think Niven’s story points out that there is also a danger to society in the instant gratification available to us in our digitally interwoven world. Especially when our baser urges — what are traditionally known in some cultures as the Seven Deadly Sins — are allowed to be indulged instantly, the danger of the virtual mob is every bit as real as the danger Niven imagined in his world of displacement booths and physical flash mobs.
There is no need, I think, to rehearse the list of people who have had lives ruined by social media mobbing. I’m sure there are few who are not aware, even if they’ve never visited them, that there are permanently dangerous and unpleasant places in the underbelly of the online world. But I do think there is a great need for thoughtful people to seriously consider the implications of this world we’ve created, to not simply live in a happy online bubble of cat gifs and instant links to family and friends. Behind the cartoons are countless virtual floating flash riots which are causing and will continue to cause very real pain and loss to very real people.
I don’t have any answers, but I can suggest that a reading of Larry Niven’s “Flash Crowd” can offer some perspective from an unexpected half-century old source.
Recipes, Historical Sources, Ingredients
travels, artistic commentary, essays by Ken Brown
Urban Scientist. Community Builder. Keynote Speaker.
Journalist. Writer. Speaker
a blog and podcast about Edmonton's blogs and podcasts
Thoughtscapes - people, place, policy, potential. ....... Think like the mountain, encompass the landscape and its culture, see beyond what we have only come to see
It Is What It Is...
Writer, social activist, a lot of Israel/Palestine, and general mental rambling
Unearthing Stories From the Charles Camsell Hospital
Feminist Eatery Database - Undercover Project
thoughts of an urban Métis scholar (and sometimes a Mouthy Michif, PhD)
Musing on My City
Art inspired by the Earth, the Sky and Beyond.
Reading the classics, CanLit, and everything else. In bed.
I think thoughts ...
Reading the Complete Works of Shakespeare in a Year
What it's like doing a PhD with disability or chronic illness
