Bell In Campo (review)

Abstract

Bell In Campo, by Margaret Cavendish Presented for the Seventh Biennial International Conference of the Margaret Cavendish Society at Bolsover Castle, Derbyshire, England. July 1, 2007. Adapted and Directed by Ian Gledhill. Production Manager Lynda Liddament. Stage Manager Richard Liddament. Assistant Stage Manager Laura Panter. Hair and Wardrobe by Jane Isher. Costumes by the English Civil War Society and Sheffield University Drama Society. With John Skevington (Lord General), Mick Connell (Monsieur la Gravity), Jonathan Jones (Monsieur Comerade), Peter Geary (Monsieur Compagnion), Steven Carter (Monsieur Ruffell), Lynda Liddament (Lady Victoria), Catherine Carter (Madam Jantil), Linda Kirk (Madam Passionate), Erica Packington (Madam Ruffell), Julia Bisby (Nell Careless), and Naomi Deaville (Doll Pacify). A highlight of attending the recent biennial meetings of the Margaret Cavendish Society has been the chance to see some of her plays performed. So far as we know, none of Cavendish's dramatic works were staged in her lifetime or after, and it is only in the last decade that a performance history has begun. Whether Cavendish wrote her plays with an expectation of live performance or only as a kind of private theatre of the mind continues to be debated in the scholarship. Regardless, many of her plays are capable of holding the boards as aesthetic objects in their own right in addition to being important documents of mid-century royalist culture. On July 1st, 2007, at the close of the seventh biennial meeting, an abridged version of Cavendish's two-part Bell in Campo was performed at Bolsover Castle, in Derbyshire, England. Bolsover Castle was Margaret Cavendish's dower house, a property specifically entailed to her should she survive William, Duke of Newcastle. The castle and grounds served as one of William's favorite places for entertainment, for instance hosting King Charles I in the summer of 1634, a visit for which Ben Jonson wrote the masque Love's Welcome to Bolsover. The performance of Bell in Campo reviewed here took place in a large building known as the Riding House, built by William in the 1630s for his horsemanship. The Riding House is a rectangular building roughly 150 by 40 feet, and nearly four stories high at its summit. Oak rafters crossed the space above the audience, and natural light flooded in from extremely large windows placed evenly throughout the long walls. These windows, all at their lowest point about ten feet above the floor (high enough, originally, so horses could not look out) kept the performance illuminated with bright natural light. The costumes and military props were courtesy of Sir William Pennyman's Regiment of the English Civil War Society, and they effectively evoked Caroline court and camp styles. The men wore black breeches, ruffled white shirts, and hats plumed with large feathers; the women wore colorful long gowns and, at times, buff coats and more casual dresses. In this beautiful early seventeenth-century building, little additional scenery was necessary; white-washed walls and dark oak beams, some recorded music, period costumes, and hand-held props served admirably to give Cavendish's imaginative closet drama a local habitation and a name. Despite its allegorical character-names and non-specific setting, Bell in Campo is a barely disguised rewriting of the experience of the civil wars of the 1640s in England. It is a kind of counterfactual history play that seeks, as it were, to restage the initial trauma of taking sides and, for royalists, the disastrous future of the hostilities in the early 1640s. At the same time, and typical of Cavendish's corpus, the play is an allusive and unstable mixture of literary genres and political ideologies, in particular those of Shakespeare's middle and late tragedies, and mid-seventeenth-century French romances centered on the deeds of heroic women. Cavendish was an avid reader of Shakespeare (he was, she wrote in Sociable Letters, one of three dead men with whom she was in love), and echoes of his plays can be found in many of her works. …