Staging the Henrician Court : Jupiter and the Text
This page last changed on Aug 20, 2009 by Peter Cockett.
I thought Mr Hurley worked the text extremely well, relishing the alliteration and sharing the pleasure in the rhetoric with his audience. The 'Play' is primarily a play with words, a debate, and the more pleasure the actors took in the words the more fun it was for the audience. I imagine the experience was one step away from the staging of discourses at the university, the means by which students attained their degrees. The English monarchs attended these discourses and Heywood's play strikes me as playful version of such university debating. A large part of the pleasure was in seeing the characters construct their arguments, the more aware they were of the construction and the game the more fun it became.
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