THE PAPER STAGE

BROADSIDE BALLADS OF PLAYS BY ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS
sung by Peggy Seeger and Ewan MacColl (2 cds)

The Taming of a Shrew
King Lear and His Three Daughters
Arden of Faversham
The Frolicksome Duke
Titus Andronicus's Complaint
Gerontus, The Jew of Venice
The Spanish Tragedy
A Warning Piece to England Against Pride and Wickedness

Sung by Peggy Seeger and Ewan MacColl, with instrumental support from Sandra Kerr, John Faulkner and Dick Snell, these long narratives were sung in the streets by ballad-mongers and at performances of the plays. They give unique insight into the way theatre, song, storytelling and street-life meshed together in the late 1600s and early 1700s. They are of interest to many university faculties: drama, music, history, folklore and, of course, to the huge folksong and storytelling revival.

Order information: Paper Stage may be obtained at Peggy Seeger concerts and by mail from Camsco Music, 145 Hickory Corner Road, East Windsor NJ 08520-2415 USA. Checks to Camsco Music. $25 (p&p included). e.mail: dick@camsco.com. Any problems ordering? Contact www.pegseeger.com.

Review from Ken Hunt:

The Paper Stage comes down to us as a lost treasure. To say it was neglected or overlooked at the time of its release merely rubs salt - perhaps iodine - into the wound. Barely noticed at the time of its release, this important project in the MacColl-Seeger canon - and an overlooked link in their chain of work - appeared, seemingly to disappear without trace. Ewan MacColl was at its hub. He visualised a work with good stories, street-corner minstrelsy and theatricality. Owing to the sheer implausibility of committing the text-rich lyrics of these broadside ballads to memory - as something like Arden of Faversham fanfares - it was conceived as a studio project.

Broadside ballads like these circulated in a politically charged climate. Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603) reigned over one of the most turbulent periods in English and Irish history from 1558 until her death. Religious extremism, racial bigotry hand in hand with economic protectionism - the era’s Flemish weavers fleeing Catholic persecution and Jews are models for today’s ‘wrong-look’ scapegoats - and proscribing freedom of expression were rife. Prohibition and censorship went hand in glove with very real fears of invasion and the destruction of the scepter’d isle’s new protestant faith. This coincided with a new sense of what it meant to be English. And, as frequently happens under repressive regimes, a blossoming of literature and folk poetry occurred.

The Paper Stage is a high-water mark of disquisitive creativity, lateral thinking and otherness. Or to put the project into context, otherness bounded by MacColl’s worldview of drama and song. The broadside ballads at its heart are nothing less than abridged playlets. But they are more than the Elizabethan equivalent of the three-minute hit. Picture the original street performers reeling in and gaffing their punters with canny ‘street’ stagecraft and bargain-price, barbed-hook dramatics. Liberate - indeed ‘uncondense’ - your imagination. Think ‘now’. Warm to A Warning Piece to England against Pride and Wickedness. Plunder cinematic images from Shakespeare in Love wantonly. Examine them as you would relish Glaswegian folk poet Adam MacNaughton’s contemporary revisiting of the Bard with Oor Hamlet.

The original peddlers of this potted theater left few traces beyond the printed page. Their broadside playlets were hit-and-run theatricality, no doubt with Elizabethan spy-boys scrutinising the throng for professional killjoys. That’s why the Paper Stage team restyled earlier musical accompaniment with instrumentation that had to be light enough for accompanists to leg it swiftly and nimbly when officialdom arrived to break up the throng. MacColl, Seeger and Critics Group members Faulkner, Kerr and Snell contemporised their accompaniments. These modern-day folk instruments – guitar, tin whistle, concertina and dulcimer – are, so to speak, ones they could run with. And like some of their light-heeled ‘chosen ancestors’ at least, they left something behind to treasure.

Ken Hunt, January 2008

(Ken Hunt is a freelance writer and broadcaster (and occasional lyricist). He has written for Folker!, fRoots, The Guardian, The Independent, Jazzwise, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Sing Out!, The Scotsman and the Times Literary Supplement about folk, traditional and non-western classical musics.)