For our next few episodes, we’re going to turn to performance and look at how music, theatre and dance have intersected with education in the past. Our stop will be in early modern England, where Dr Amanda Eubanks Winkler will be our guide to performance in the schoolroom.
Amanda is a historian of English music in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and twentieth centuries at Syracuse University. Her research interests include the relationship among musical, spiritual, and bodily disorder; performance and pedagogy; and the intersection of music and politics. Her most recent book, Music, Dance, and Drama in Early Modern English Schools, touches on a number of these topics.
Transcript
Michael Donnay
Welcome to Passing Notes, Amanda, thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate you taking the time to talk with me.
Amanda Eubanks Winkler
Oh, it’s really my pleasure.
Michael Donnay
So I think maybe the best place to start is just giving people an overview and context for your book, which we’ll be talking about today. Can you place us: when are we and where are we?
Amanda Eubanks Winkler
We are in early modern England. And my book, which talks about performance at early modern English schools, considers different performances from the late 16th century, all the way up through 1706. So it has a very broad chronological span.
Michael Donnay
And when you talk about those educational spaces in that performance, what kinds of performance and what kinds of spaces is your book looking at?
Amanda Eubanks Winkler
Right, so I’m looking at grammar schools. And in my archival research, I did see that in some grammar schools, both boys and girls attended, which is interesting. Boarding schools for girls, as well, which became increasingly important over the course of the 17th century. Academies – these were schools that you paid to attend, and that would teach you a set of skills to make you a polished person. Sometimes they were based on a French model, and could combine things like military training of various kinds with dance and performance, which seems kind of idiosyncratic, but it was the thing. Charity schools – schools that were educating orphans or poor children, but not exclusively from that demographic. But schools that were set up as charity schools. A famous one, of course, is Christ’s Hospital. And so those are the different kinds of schools that I’m looking at.
And I’m also interested in how spaces or performance spaces that were outside the school intersected with the schoolroom. So this could happen through the bodies of personnel who worked perhaps both in the theatre or at court, but also had a side gig working at a school. It could also be just the fact that there were certain perceptions of the act of performance, for example, the professional stage that bled into people’s perceptions of how performance functioned in the schoolroom. There was also a desire at some of these schools to have prestige. So in some ways, they were recapitulating certain kinds of courtly performance in the schoolroom space to align themselves with court. And also, of course, religious instruction – how sacred musical or performative practices informed what was done at school, and how that became a form of religious instruction and indoctrination.
Michael Donnay
One of the interesting things that I think your book does a really good job of weaving through all of those various spaces and forms is this idea that performance has a pedagogical purpose in a lot of these contexts. And probably is more complicated than having a single pedagogical purpose. So I was wondering if you could talk about what those purposes might have been and how educators were thinking about the use of performance in these contexts?
Amanda Eubanks Winkler
So different educators had different opinions on the role performance might play in education. To kind of flatten out a very complicated landscape here: there were some people who felt that performance was a really great way of training students in the arts of rhetoric, oration. In some places, they taught dance, because they felt as if it was good exercise and it could make for a healthy body. Music was something that was taught. It was especially important for girls to learn music, because then that could be a skill that they used in their future life as a wife, or a person who in the domicile might entertain. And so these pedagogical acts or acts of performance, were sometimes separated along quite gendered lines. We’re operating in a binary gender system in early modern England, in terms of the way things were spoken about. And so for girls, they needed to learn how to be a good wife and mother. And so musical performance was part of that because they might be able to perform in the household, and that would make them a more desirable marriage prospect. For men or for boys, they would go on to have a more public facing existence than girls were able to have at this particular point in history. And so they were then able to practice rhetoric and practice these skills that would make them a polished public individual that could maybe help them with their future careers in a different set of ways.
But there were also moments of pushback. So for example, Bathsua Makin who was a late 17th century educational theorist, who had a school very briefly, she didn’t like the fact that girls weren’t given a broader education. And she tried to push back against that a little bit and said, “You know, shouldn’t just be the ornamental arts for girls. That they should be able to learn other things as well.” Although Makin did admit that girls sometimes didn’t have access to anything beyond the domicile in terms of what their future life would hold. So she did understand the importance of the ornamental arts, but she wanted something more for women. There were also people who were worried about boys engaging in play acting at school, because they either felt it was a waste of time, or they felt that it would allow them to practice immoral behaviors that might be present in these plays. And so there were these moments of pushback as well. So some educators really did feel as if it was a wonderful way of teaching children certain kinds of skills that they can then take into their adult life, and practice certain gendered skills that they could then take on into their futures. There were also these anxieties as well about performance in the schoolroom and that not everybody was on board with these practices,
Michael Donnay
It’s not particularly surprising that there are anxieties around performance, it seems to be sort of a recurring theme, throughout this intersection with education and arts, that something about performing is worrisome, particularly when it comes to young people. And I would love to focus on that thing you mentioned a second ago about performing vice. And it seems like there’s a particular concern at this point that students who are performing characters or roles that are behaving badly could start behaving badly in real life as a result of performing that. And I was wondering if you could talk a bit about why they would be performing those roles in the first place – what pedagogical or dialectical role performing vice in a school setting might have had. And then why people were so concerned that just because they were playing these characters, they might then become evil or bad as a result of that.
Amanda Eubanks Winkler
Yeah. So there was a divide between theory and practice here as well. If you read some of the practices to these plays, they’ll say things like, “Well, the purpose of this play is to teach our boys to hate not to imitate.” So we want them to loathe these bad behaviors and not imitate them. And somehow by the act of playing this out, and then seeing for themselves or feeling for themselves, how these ill deeds are punished, that this will somehow teach them not to behave in these ways. Another schoolboy play – this one is Oedipus and it’s from the late 16th century. You’re thinking, “Well, wow playing Oedipus in a pedagogical context given the subject matter.” But the prologue says that, “Yes, there’s horrible crimes and damnable incest in this play.” But this play clearly shows the cost of engaging in these behaviors.
Having said that, there are numerous instances in these plays where they aren’t necessarily punished. So for example, a very famous example, comes from a late 17th century boarding school for girls that was renowned for putting on these operatic entertainments and one of them very famously, was Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas. And in Dido and Aeneas, you have these witches who want to completely destroy Dido. And they’re inserted into the story, right. I mean, they’re not a big thing in Virgil, Book IV of the Aeneid – this is something that they put in there because English liked witches. They just enjoyed them – think Macbeth. So they add they amplified f sorcery aspect and they really want to go after Dido and they do all of these horrible things. And they win. Dido dies and the witch’s win. So sometimes characters are these vice filled characters don’t actually get a comeuppance at all.
Having said that Dido dies. And in part if you know the story from Virgil, Aeneid Book IV, she had had been in this relationship with Aeneas after she taken a vow of chastity. And so for the girls, some people have read it, that these girls were learning that they shouldn’t engage in these illicit relationships with men. And there is in the girls’ plays and musical entertainments, there’s this constant refrain and concern about their chastity. And in part, this is because especially throughout this period, there was great suspicion of women performing in a public way. To the extent that on Shakespeare stage, of course, it was an all-male stage. But after the restoration, after 1660, women were allowed to play on the public stage, but there were still anxieties that these were not “proper women.” Proper, in scare quotes, right? That they were doing things that were illicit, that they were having relationships with men outside of marriage. And so they were sexually suspect in various ways. And so for girls to be performing, aligned them with potentially the taint of the professional actress.
Michael Donnay
I would love to turn to a second idea. I think that gender analysis in your work is really clear in the conversation we’ve had so far, it seems very much that whether they’re boys or girls has a huge influence on the performance and how it’s received. I was wondering if there were similar issues around class? Are students of different socio-economic classes having a different relationship to performance? Are there different purposes for how they might be introduced to performance in their school settings?
Amanda Eubanks Winkler
Yeah, this is something that I thought was really interesting. So the girls who are at the boarding school, they mostly come from fairly affluent families who can pay the fees to send them to these boarding schools. The demographic of the boys who I talk about, their entertainments at grammar schools, they’re not exclusively from a super high class, demographic, but they do tend to – at least the ones we know about, because there’s a lot we don’t have information about – they may have been lower class students. But the charity schools I think, are really interesting, because of course, training and performance functions in a different way to charity school. So if you’re a girl who’s performing a masque at Christ’s Hospital, that’s going to work differently than if you’re a girl performing at a fee paying boarding school. In a sense, you’re being trained into how to perform as a lady, to allow you perhaps to transcend your class or to perhaps marry up even because you have these skills.
It’s interesting at Christ’s Hospital anyway, at least what I found, they had suspicion about having children being apprenticed to a musician, because they felt like that, for understandable reasons that it may not be a career path that could lead to good things economically for you. It’s the same today that there were worries about this. But I do think that being trained in skills that could perhaps allow you to transcend the class or the circumstance, for example, if you’re an orphan that you were born into, through marrying up because you have that kind of polish. So it could serve a different purpose as an institution like Christ’s Hospital. Some of the academies, too, are interesting for that reason, because even if you didn’t necessarily have the bone, a fetus of a nobleman, or a noble woman, you could perhaps buy your way into it by paying these fees and by getting this training. So the idea was, then you could pass you could pass as someone – have this class mobility through learning how to perform in certain kinds of ways, which is quite interesting I think.
Michael Donnay
The last thing I would love to talk about before we jump more into the methods end of things is just getting a sense of what these performances might have looked like or might have been like to experience. It seems like some of them might be approaching fully staged theatrical productions, but I imagine some of them were not quite as elaborate. I know I’m asking you to paint again with a pretty broad brush, but I’m wondering if there’s one or two examples of what these performances might have been like to experience that you could talk about for us?
Amanda Eubanks Winkler
Yeah, so some of them definitely had a lot of resources. For example, Cupid’s Banishment, which was a masque that was performed by school girls before Queen Anna in 1617 at Greenwich, that one was fairly elaborate because it had this kind of courtly imprimatur, it was performed before the queen. And a lot of daughters of court officials were involved in that production, so that one was a little bit more elaborate potentially. The others, it’s hard to say because – and this gets it what we’ll talk about in the methods – but what we have, oftentimes, sometimes they were manuscript copies and they were file copies, so it’s like, this is the way we wanted it to go and this is for posterity. Or they’re printed and so they’re public facing, and they’re saying, “This is this great thing that happened at our school.” And it kind of serves as a advertisement for the school. So then you have to kind of think and tease out, “Well, did the school really genuinely have this kind of machine available? Or is this something that they just put in the printed version as like a hope for thing that they would have loved to have had?”
So sometimes you’ll find in these sources, these things that give you pause and make you wonder, “Well, maybe the school had this kind of resource. It’s possible.” I mean, just like today, there are schools that are very well resourced, and there are schools that are less well resourced. You have to kind of look at these documents and think, what purpose these documents are serving. So if you have a printed version of a play, it’s public facing, it’s advertising the school, and they’re not going to necessarily say, “Oh, well, we didn’t really have resources to do this, it didn’t work out so well.” They’re not going to write that down in the margin that we didn’t do that, because it’s not like a prompt book where they would excise things that they weren’t going to do, or they would cross these things off. I haven’t found anything like that in my sources, where you find these kind of on the spot alterations to the script or the text that are responsive to what was going on in performance. Although there is one document that I – it’s a score, where it has things like turn fast. You know, turn the page fast, because we have to get on to the next page so we can do this thing. So you sometimes do find these little traces of performance there. But for the most part, a lot of these things are public facing in some kind of way or a file copy. And so it’s wanting to put their best foot forward and make it seem as wonderful as possible.
Michael Donnay
I think that’s a really lovely transition into then this conversation about sources and methods. I know sort of one of the perennial problems with doing a history of any performing art is this idea that it’s challenging to recreate those because they’re often meant to be ephemeral. Or that the documentation that historians are used to working with, as you’ve just said, doesn’t necessarily capture the full nature of that performance. So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit first about the sources you’re using and how you’re using them to try to get at some of these questions about performance that are at the center of your work.
Amanda Eubanks Winkler
Trying to recover what people were doing in schools, because for the most part, we’re talking about what I call in my book – and I’m following Christopher Marsh here – occupational performers who were the professionals and then the recreational performers who he would call amateurs. But the students – they don’t really – they occupy this in between space because they are being trained. And some of them are obviously trained at quite a high level. But they’re not necessarily doing it just for fun or for recreation, because it’s serving a pedagogical purpose. But because they’re not what we would today call professionals, a lot of these sources are lost to time because they weren’t viewed to be important.
So I had to cast a very wide net to find things. I used newspaper advertisements, I used personal correspondence and letters, sometimes between family members who had witnessed these performances. I used to printed masque and play texts. I used manuscript masque and play texts. I cast as broader net as possible in order to try to understand the landscape for pedagogical performance during this period. With each source, you have to look at it for what it is, as I indicated, and you have to fill in a different set of gaps based on the context. So if I have a letter from a parent, or a relative, and the relative is saying, “Wow, little Molly, she’s improved so much over time. Her dancing is just brilliant now and she’s doing so well.” That gives you a certain kind of information. You know, this particular person – John Verney, in this case – was writing to the student’s father and praising her and saying she’s really much improved, and she has this grace she didn’t have before, and she’s doing really well. But then you always have to figure out well: that is true. But we also know that this particular girl ends up running off and eloping with someone that they didn’t want her to elope us. So all of this training and polish ultimately didn’t end in the desired outcome from the perspective of her family. So you always have to try to fill in these gaps.
And in the book, I also tried to fill in the gaps imaginatively by – instead of just looking at the text on the page – thinking through the implications of students performing it. And sometimes students are performing it with their teachers. So in one chapter, for example, I might say, “Well, if this passage were performed with two girls, and one girl was in breeches – meaning they were cross dressed playing a male role, it’s a romantic interlude between the two of them – that would signify differently than if it were her teacher playing the part with her. And so I think it’s important to think through the different implications of performance, so that these texts aren’t static, because anyone who’s worked in the theater knows that things don’t always go to plan. And that who you cast in these roles has a profound effect on the way that people understand the performed work. And so in my book, throughout, I’m trying to introduce this idea of these texts as performed, and how children performing them would effect interpretation.
Michael Donnay
And it seems like that approach in a lot of ways is drawing on some of these methods from performance studies, which is a bit different from what one might think of as a traditional historical method. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about those methods and how you came to use them in the particular contexts that you were doing this research.
Amanda Eubanks Winkler
This book had a long gestation period. And I wrote one draft that was kind of an archival dump. It was just an archival data dump. And I was really dissatisfied with that draft of the book, because I felt as if it was missing an essential piece. At the same time, as I was writing this book, I was also engaged with a practice based research project, Performing Restoration Shakespeare, in which we were trying to perform restoration Shakespeare for audiences today. And it had component at Shakespeare’s Globe in London, and it had a component at the Folger Theatre in Washington, DC. And so I was very much thinking about revivifying past performance, practice based research, this iterative process, and how that affects of performance and how it affects interpretation.
And I’d also been reading pretty extensively in the field of performance studies. And in performance studies, there’s many debates, but one of the debates is, “Is performance ephemeral?” That is, does it completely disappear after it’s done? And it’s completely irrecoverable? Or are there ways in which performance lingers or stays, and I tend to side with the people who think there’s something of the past in the present. And so the person who’s very much siding with performance being ineffable in a very famous academic work as Peggy Phelan. And then the people who are speculating about the ways performance might stay are people like Joseph Roach, the musicologist Elisabeth Le Guin, who looks at scores and says, “Well, you in the sense by looking at the score, you’re doing what someone in the past has already done with your body. And say this role was originally conceived of or this thing [performance] was originally conceived of, for a particular person. When you do it, you’re then conforming your body or your voice or whatever to what this person in the past did.” But as Joseph Roche says, it’s always going to be an imperfect fit between those two things. There’s always going to be this gap. So yes, you are revivifying something of the past when you perform it today, or when you have the script and you’re imagining these past children performing in your mind’s eye, you might be revivifying something of the past, but it’s always going to be with a difference, so to speak.
And another performance studies scholar Rebecca Schneider, uses this terminology – kind of cribs it from Gertrude Stein – called syncopated time. So it’s the incursion of the past into the present when you revivify something or when you perform it again. And so there are moments in this book where I demonstrate that some of these school-based performance practices that were early modern linger and persist to this day. So for example, the Christ’s Hospital children’s still wear their Tudor uniforms, and they still go through the streets in London, and they still participate in the Spital Sermon. Or I talk in the final chapter of the book about a recent performance of Dido and Aeneas, in which these unruly school girls take the stage. In part because they know about the performance legacy of this piece, but it’s not that the school girls are behaving exactly the same way as early modern school girls, but something of that energy might be present when they are present on the stage engaging with this 17th century mini opera.
Michael Donnay
I really love that phrase, syncopated time, I think it obviously draws so nicely on that musical idea that syncopation really pulls your attention towards something. And I just love the way you’re using those ideas to think really critically about performance in the past.
I’m really interested in this idea of performance-based practice, and particularly, because I think, for so many historians, that isn’t really a possibility- to be intimately involved in creating at least some version of the work which you also study. I was wondering if there’s anything that the researcher part of you has taken away from those practice based experiences, and anything you might be interested in sharing with other historians who work on similar kinds of material.
Amanda Eubanks Winkler
Performance unsettles historical texts. So thinking about the way people actually did things, will call all of the the archival documents or all of the sources that you have into question if you think about people actually doing these things. This isn’t new – it’s not like I’m inventing this or it’s total news to historians. I mean, Kenneth Charlton, he says, we always have to think about the distance between what these documents are saying and what they hope for or what they want, and what actually happened in practice, and sometimes there’s an utter disconnect. So one of the things that I learned in my practice-based research was: there’s frequently a distance between what you hope for or what you want to happen and what actually happens. But that can be really interesting and generative.
And sometimes you even find it in the sources. So for example, in the book, I talk about this incident, where the Christ’s Hospital children were going along to the Spittle Sermon, and they got in a fight with these other kids and they were hurling invective at each other. So they were clearly not doing any of the things that they wanted these children to do, because they wanted them to be like these exemplars of moral children. And part of it was about soliciting donations for the school. So if they get into a fight, and they’re cursing at each other, then that’s completely antithetical to the pedagogical aims of what they wanted to happen. So I think that sometimes you find these places in the documents, it’s very suggestive of the things that could have gone wrong, or of tensions that were happening behind the scenes.
Another one is in Apollo’s Shroving, there’s this boy Wentworth Randall, who played the pivotal role of the siren in this play. He was obviously a great singer, and they gave him a lot to do – just pages and pages of song, so he clearly is very good at it. And he’s clearly an attractive boy, because of the way that they describe him or describe the character anyway. But at the end of the play, because it’s all about restoring order, and the siren is luring people into vice, they rip off this boy’s costume quite violently, and the monstrous sea monster tail is revealed so it’s clear that this is a monstrous body underneath. There’s some really strong language. I mean one of the characters after doing this says, “Out b*tch”, I mean, which is strong language – it’s not like there’s never language in an early modern play – but it’s it’s quite a strong and violent and passionate moment.
And so there are these moments where you wonder, “Oh, gosh, was sometimes a function of these plays to purge or to kind of work through these interpersonal issues between students? Or if this boy was bullied at school – which we know happened then and happens now – was this in some way reflective of these other tensions at the school filtering into the entertainments that they were creating?” So those are some of the things that I think thinking through performance and the actual bodies of these children performing – that’s something that we can really can be an added bonus, I think, as a historian. And it really helped me come to terms with the potential meanings of these pedagogical performances by thinking, as much as I could, what was at stake when children were performing these roles? Figuring out if I could, who the children were, and then thinking – it’s speculation to be sure, because I don’t know – but I think it can be informed speculation or historically informed speculation. And it can be quite useful, I think.
Michael Donnay
Thank you so much for those reflections. I think that’s a lovely place to leave it. So I just want to thank you one more time for taking the time to speak with me today and to share your research with your audience. I really appreciate it.
Amanda Eubanks Winkler
Thanks very much. I really enjoyed it.
Michael Donnay
Passing Notes is a production of the History of Education Society UK. Our social media manager is Elena Rossi, and our executive producer is Heather Ellis. This episode was written and produced by me Michael Donnay. You can find a transcript of this episode, as well as more information about our events, publications and conferences at our website, historyofeducation.org.uk.
Sources
Music, Dance, and Drama in Early Modern English Schools by Amanda Eubanks Winkler
Shakespeare in the Theatre: Sir William Davenant and the Duke’s Company by Amanda Eubanks Winkler and Richard Schoch
‘Opera at School: Mapping the Cultural Geography of Schoolgirl Performance’ by Amanda Eubanks Winkler, in Operatic Georgraphies: The Place of Opera and the Opera House, edited by Suzanne Aspden