Ivan Fuller

Associate Professor of Communication & Theatre

Augustana College

605-274-5334

ivan_fuller @augie.edu

Everything Old is New Again: The Elizabethan and the Contemporary Appeal of John Lyly’s Gallathea

John Lyly’s fantasy-romance Gallathea had its debut performance between 1584 – 1588. Written for performance by one of London’s boy companies – the “young eyases” – Gallathea enjoyed a high degree of popularity. Did Shakespeare witness a performance? While this is a possibility, there is no concrete evidence to support that theory. There are certainly many similarities between Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Lyly’s play, from plot elements to character types. However, it is just as likely that the plot elements and character types of these two plays were in the air of Elizabethan England.

Lyly would have grown up watching the medieval morality plays and the early Tudor plays of Udall, Preston, Sackville and Norton. The rebirth of antiquity, with its focus on mythology and fantasy, would have been a breath of fresh air – one that likely captured the audience’s imagination and helped to pull them away from the filth of the city and into the pastoral beauty of the magic forest. It also would have given stage life to stories never before witnessed by its audience; stories of ship-wrecks, gods and goddesses, sea monsters, sacrificial virgins, astronomy, alchemy and same-sex love.

Despite the Elizabethan popularity of Gallathea and other works by Lyly and his contemporaries, there have been relatively few 20^th & 21^st century performances of non-Shakespearean scripts. In fact, there have only been five documented productions of Gallathea since the 16^th century and all of those have been within the past ten years. Perhaps the dominant reason lies in the enormous shadow which Shakespeare’s work has cast over his peers. As Kate Levin wrote in an article explaining the “performability” of Gallathea, “most criticism of Lyly appreciates his evolutionary innovations on the Darwinian path to Shakespeare.” (25) We appreciate Lyly merely as a stepping stone to the future greatness of Shakespeare. Levin goes on to explain that “interest in Lyly has been almost exclusively literary, not theatrical, for so long. As a result, Lyly has suffered, perhaps more than any of his contemporaries, from unrelenting comparisons to Shakespeare.” (26) Couple this obscuration by Shakespeare with name-recognition on the part of ticket-buyers and it becomes even clearer why so few productions of Lyly’s plays have been presented. In fact, all five recent productions of Gallathea have been by educational institutions that were able to take a risk on such a lesser-known work.

And yet, despite this phenomenon, the recent interest in Lyly’s plays begs the question “why now”? The recent productions of Gallathea (together with productions of other Elizabethan, non-Shakespearean plays) seem to indicate that there is interest in something new (despite the fact that the plays are actually over 400 years old). While Shakespeare has dominated the stage and continues to be a popular source of performance texts, it seems that there is a growing desire to experience new stories. Audiences seem to want surprises in addition to the comfort of yet another production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This theory may explain why there are so many recent productions of lesser-known Shakespeare works – The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline and Pericles, topping the list.

If a desire to experience something new is one explanation for recent interest in these plays, then the current enthusiasm mirrors the Elizabethan enthusiasm for theatrical novelty. The remainder of this paper will examine what it is about Gallathea that gives contemporary audiences the same sense of novelty that the original audience experienced. The paper will conclude by addressing some specific examples of Gallathea in performance today. How does it “work”? What was done to make the play leap the 400- year gap between its “eyases” performance and the world of the audience attending this author’s 1998 production?

While critics have called Lyly’s plays static and too focused upon intellectual ideas, Gallathea takes those ideas and places them in a world full of comic confusion that carries with it a highly theatrical and popular appeal. As Kent Cartwright has argued, Gallathea gravitated “toward popular theater to the degree that it transgresses the statis of the drama of idea.” (209)

Gallathea begins with an explanation that it is time to sacrifice the town’s fairest virgin to Neptune’s sea monster, Agar. Two fathers, unbeknownst to each other, decide to disguise their beautiful daughters (Gallathea and Phyllida) as boys and send them into the forest until the time of sacrifice has passed. Meanwhile, Cupid is scampering about the forest taunting the goddess Diana’s virginal nymphs. After being slighted by one of them, he decides to seek revenge by making them fall in love. Comic dilemmas ensue when the two disguised girls meet and fall in love (each assuming that the other is really a boy) and when Cupid causes the nymphs to fall in love with the two “boys.” Adding more comic fuel to the fire are Rafe and his brothers who are shipwrecked and wandering around looking for employment. From these basic plot lines Lyly gives his audience a bundle of novel stage pieces.

Bearing in mind the medieval and Tudor theatre tradition most familiar to Elizabethan audiences, where Biblical stories were the primary source of material, the appearance of gods (Neptune, Diana, Cupid and Venus) would have certainly been something new. A revival of classical ideas and literature was sweeping northward from Italy, infiltrating the universities where playwrights like Lyly would have studied and taught. It was only natural, then, that the works of antiquity would begin to influence what appeared on stage.

The sacrifice of Isaac gets a novel twist in Gallathea with the requirement to sacrifice the fairest virgin. When the beautiful Gallathea and Phyllida retreat to the forest, the homely Hebe is left as the only option. She is comically rejected, much to her relief and subsequent shame. “Fortunate Hebe, how shalt thou express thy joys! Nay, unhappy girl, that art not the fairest.” (V, ii, 71 – 72)

The comedy of mistaken identities is timeless, but perhaps no one prior to Lyly took the convention to the extreme of promoting same-sex love and actually allowing it to continue once the mistaken perceptions are corrected. While this idea is not novel to contemporary audiences, the appearance of the act in an Elizabethan play tends to come as a big surprise. However, Lyly does not go so far as to let the two girls come together physically. Rather, Venus will take them to the chapel where one will be turned into a boy. “Neither of them shall know whose lot it shall be till they come to the church door. One shall be [a boy].” (V, iii, 203 – 205)

The shipwrecked brothers provide several opportunities for novel additions in the script. The act of being shipwrecked itself appears to have been a fairly novel idea in theatrical literature when Lyly began writing, although Shakespeare would put it to great use in several of his plays (Twelfth Night, The Tempest, Pericles). Once the men realize that they are stranded without a means of financial security, they set off to make their way in the world. Rafe first encounters an alchemist and signs on as his apprentice. The practice of alchemy was fairly new in Elizabethan England and was often the source of ridicule. Astronomy experienced a similar reaction and would have provided equal pleasure when Rafe quits working for the alchemist in order to study under an astronomer. Eventually Rafe discovers the apparent folly of both professions: “No more masters now, but a mistress, if I can light on her. An astronomer? Of all the occupations that’s the worst. Yet well fare the alchemist, for he keeps good fires though he gets no gold.” (V, i, 1 – 4)

Another element of the production that was not a part of medieval plays was the use of music and songs throughout the show. Gallathea has two musical numbers, adding to the novelty of performance style.

A final element to consider is the developing nature of the English language and the experiments that were often conducted to refine it. The stage was a perfect place to introduce new words and phrases. While Shakespeare has become famously noted for “inventing” over 20,000 new words, he was certainly not the only person engaged in that practice. Gallathea is filled with the delight of verbal frolicking. When Rafe encounters the alchemist’s apprentice, he is introduced to a world of magical words:

It is a very secret science, for none almost can understand the language of it: sublimation, almigation, calcination, rubification, incorporation, circination, cementation, albification, and frementation, with as many terms unpossible to be uttered as the art it be compassed. (II, iii, 12 – 17)

There have only been five documented productions of Gallathea since the 16^th century and they have all been within the past eight years. In 1994, the Shakespeare Institute of the University of Birmingham in Stratford, UK staged an outdoor production in modern dress with Glenn Miller music opening the show. One reviewer commented on the “freshness, wit and humor that makes it difficult to see why it has not been regularly performed” (Knott 13).

1995 saw two productions of Gallathea. The University of New England, Australia staged an all-male production directed by Adrien Kiernander and a greatly abridged US production at Philadelphia’s Red Heel Theatre. While not much seems to be known about the Red Heel production, Kiernander discovered that Lyly’s stilted, highly formal language worked very well when the performers would resist the tendency to perform in a naturalistic fashion. He was also very interested in experimenting with the layering of gender that occurs when boys play girls playing boys.

In 1999, Kate Levin directed a production of Gallathea at the City College of New York which resulted in an article for Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama. In her article she discusses the staging choices made for her production and points out that hers was only the second production of Gallathea to be staged in the United States. This, however, is not the case.

In 1998, I directed a virtually uncut production of Gallathea at Augustana College in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. I will conclude by describing some of the choices made to help make the play fully accessible to our audience which went away singing the praises of our production.

The show was staged in a very intimate black-box theater with the audience seated on three sides of the playing space. The upstage side of the space contained a large tree in addition to several stumps and rocks that could be “magically” moved by the nymphs to transform the space to a new part of the forest.

The costumes were designed to help the audience know who the characters were by using our modern sensibilities about clothing. For example, the militant Diana and her nymphs were costumed in military fatigues; Cupid flittered about in red boxer shorts, shooting foam-rubber arrows; and the fathers wore “red-neck” flannel shirts and ball caps.

The lyrics to Lyly’s songs were set to recognizable tunes, the most notable being the shipwrecked brothers song sung to the theme from “Gilligan’s Island.” The nymphs had two moments when dancing was an appropriate diversion. Janet Jackson provided the inspiration for their hip-hop moves.

Perhaps the greatest key to the production’s success was in the amount of audience interaction that we incorporated. Springing from the belief that Elizabethan audiences were directly addressed by actors on a regular basis, we looked for every possible opportunity to do the same. Audience members became silent characters in the play: Phyllida’s mother and Hebe’s parents. Cupid flirted and gave his calling card to some of the women. When Rafe says that he hopes to find a mistress instead of a master, he looks expectantly in the audience. When Cupid is captured and punished by the nymphs, they forced his head through a circle in a board and had audience members throw wet sponges at him while they sang the song Lyly had inserted for the scene. And finally, there were many wonderful lines that cried out for targets in the audience: “We could find none fairer” and “There shall be nothing more vile than to be a virgin.”

The works of Shakespeare’s contemporaries continue to find new life on today’s stages and while there are many reasons why this might be the case, I’m convinced that a significant reason lies in their relative freshness. Shakespeare has seldom been more popular than he is now and this new interest seems to be sparking an interest in other works of his age. While these non-Shakespearean texts continue to be produced with creative ways of making them exciting and accessible, this new renaissance should continue to revive even more “rare” classics.

LIST OF WORKS CITED

Cartwright, Kent. “The Confusions of Gallathea: John Lyly as Popular Dramatist.” Comparative Drama. 32.2 (Summer 1998): 207 – 239.

Knott, Sue. “Gallathea by John Lyly.” Mason Croft Review 2 (1994): 12 – 14.

Levin, Kate D. “Playing with Lyly: Theatrical Criticism and Non-Shakespearean Drama.” Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama.40 (2001): 25-54.

Lyly, John. Gallathea. Drama of the English Renaissance I: The Tudor Period. Ed. Russell A. Fraser and Norman Rabkin. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1976. 125 – 43.