Abstract
Thomas Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and Testament, from which these lines come, is a wonderfully oddball piece. First performed before the Archbishop of Canterbury, John Whitgift, in autumn 1592, probably by a group of boy actors, it was described on its publication in 1600 as a ‘pleasant comedie’, and there is a certain logic in using this term to describe a dramatic work that is framed and presented by Will Summer, Henry VIII’s jester. Yet although it was written by a university-educated humanist who would have been very familiar with the forms and standards of classical comedy, it has none of classical comedy’s intrigue and tight plotting, and its exploitation of set speeches, music and spectacle challenge even the use of comedy to mean simply ‘play’ that was common in mid-late Elizabethan theatrical culture. Moreover, its central conceit of the death of Summer and the dispute between Autumn and Winter over his estate is one that would be hard to accommodate within both classical comedy and its descendants on the commercial stage of the early 1590s: Summer’s Last Will and Testament cares more about age than youth, and its leitmotifs are transience, decay, inheritance and financial accountability. In the publicity material for their production, Edward’s Boys offer a series of alternative descriptions: ‘This rarely performed comedy (?) or tragedy (?) or “shewe” (?) is part pageant, part allegory, part musical’. As this flexible approach to theatrical form suggests, one of the great strengths of their production is their willingness to work with the play’s formal oddities rather than resist them. In their hands, it becomes both funnier and more bleak than it appears on the page, due partly to the interpretative and dramaturgical work of Perry Mills as director and Sam Bridges and Joe Woodman as composers and musical directors, and partly to the skill and inventive energy of the performers.
Nashe was obsessed with the ways in which language can be crafted, warped and manipulated, and at the heart of Summer’s Last Will and Testament is a pun that connects Summer, the personified season ordering his estate, inspecting his dependants and dying his last breath before the coming of Autumn and Winter, with Will Summer, a figure who was a nostalgic throwback even in the 1590s. Throughout, Will is a foil, rival and analogue to Summer, vying with the ageing monarch to be the centre of attention. Edward’s Boys’ production sharpens Will’s satiric commentary on the action – or lack of action – of the main narrative by giving Dan Power the freedom to improvise in the role. During a deliberately chaotic opening sequence in which Dick Huntley (Dominic Howden) runs in and out trying to organize both music and performers, we hear Will before we see him, the words ‘I don’t know me lines’ cutting across a chorus of offstage complaints. When Power enters, wearing fool’s apparel and a truculent expression, he grumbles amiably at the audience, improvised lines combining with Nashe’s scripted invective. (‘Brilliant, innit? Two hours of this’. ‘I’m not big, by the way; this costume’s small’. ‘That’s the first sentence’. ‘Oh, Jesus Christ’. ‘You’ll like this bit; it’s Latin’.) A particular target is Nashe himself. In a scripted line, Will tells the spectators, ‘So it is, boni viri, that one fool presents another; and I a fool by nature, and by art, do speak to you in the person of the idiot our playmaker’. Mills’ production heightens the friction between the ‘playmaker’ and his creation by having Will carry a doll bearing the name ‘Tom Nashe’. Frequently the direct target of Will’s jibes, ‘Tom’ becomes emblematic of the play’s yoking of folly and death when his mask is removed to reveal a skull underneath.
Tensions between Summer (Rory Gopsill), Autumn (Jack Hawkins) and Winter (George Ellingham) underpin Summer’s Last Will and Testament, linking the episodic set-piece appearances of Ver (Ritvick Nagar), Solstitium (Nick Jones), Sol (Isaac Sergeant), Orion (Charlie Waters), Harvest (Ben Clarke), Bacchus (Joe Coghlan), Christmas (Ewan Craig) and Back-Winter (Nilay Sah), each of whom is ushered onto the stage by Vertumnus (Pascal Vogiarisdis). It is, of course, inevitable that Autumn will succeed Summer only to be succeeded in turn by Winter, and seasonal progression lends a subtext to much of the interaction between these characters, aided by sharply detailed performances. When Winter, costumed as an Elizabethan puritan, attacked Autumn as unstable, thriftless, wavering and given to trying to please all, Autumn stood in the aisle muffled in a long scarf, listening and waiting, the light glinting off his spectacles. Winter was finally exposed by his sons, Christmas and Back-Winter. Christmas showed his true colours by dealing harshly with Will Summer’s interjections, abruptly shouting ‘SHUT UP’; the casting of a younger boy in the role made this pinched, covetous figure, with his mirthless laugh, all the more troubling. Similarly, Back-Winter, Winter’s crazed and oedipal attack dog, shocked even his father with his bitter invective. At the close, Autumn handed Summer’s crown to Winter and Winter was forced to crown him; Autumn stood with fists clenched then stretched out his hands, glancing at Winter, who himself paused before finally exiting.
Like earlier Edward’s Boys productions, Summer’s Last Will and Testament is able to exploit some of the ways in which Nashe tailored his play for performance by a company of boys. There is something powerfully unsettling about seeing young people perform a work dealing with ageing and death, an effect underpinned by Gopsill’s performance as Summer, which created the illusion of age and infirmity through posture, gesture and vocal delivery. The original stage direction for the entrance of the epilogue, ‘Enter a little boy with an epilogue’, suggests that the 1592 production included boys of different ages, and Edward’s Boys’ production did the same, including in its cast some actors who had recently left the school alongside current pupils. The effect of this age range was especially potent when broken and unbroken voices combined in song. Moreover, when Jamie Mitchell’s apparently decorous epilogue, clad in pyjamas and carrying a teddy bear, cheekily snubbed Will Summer, he momentarily inverted age and status hierarchies.
This was, of course, a site- and season-specific production, taking place in the same hall in which Summer’s Last Will and Testament was originally performed and at around the same time of year. Nashe’s play is a direct response to, and commentary on, the early days of the Elizabethan fin de siècle, a decade marked by failed harvests and political unrest; the figure of the ageing Summer may have become increasingly resonant in the years between the play’s performance in 1592 and its publication in 1600. Edward’s Boys responded to this local context in ways that both historicized the text and refused simply to consign it to the past. Power’s improvisation as Will heightened the dialogue between the present-day actor, the Elizabethan character and the Henrician jester on whom he was based, while the critique of Harvest, accused of despoiling the earth and hoarding, was made more pointed by the props that he carried: a scythe and an Ikea bag. As this suggests, costumes were an eclectic mixture of period and modern dress, taking the 1600 text’s stage directions as inspiration rather than instruction. Where the 1600 edition describes Sol as ‘very richly attired, with a noise of musicians before him’, Sol appeared wearing a big orange wig, shades and a suit and tie, attended by boys also wearing sunglasses; Nashe appears to have imagined his Orion accompanied by fellow huntsmen, while Orion entered here with a crowd of smaller boys playing his dogs. This delightfully self-conscious moment of theatre was made even funnier when Autumn, spooked by the ‘dogs’, climbed onto a chair to avoid them, and when one of them stayed behind with Will and was given a small ruff to wear. In a similarly carnivalesque moment, Bacchus produced beer for Will from a keg in his paunch.
The appearance of Bacchus concluded the first half of the production, and the second half took on a darker tone, dominated not only by Christmas and Back-Winter but also by the song, ‘Adieu, farewell earth’s bliss’. The spine-tingling delivery of this song encapsulated the ways in which Edward’s Boys exploited the audience’s sensory experience. Singers were placed in different parts of the hall, which was lit only by hand-held lanterns, and the song combined single voices, unison and harmony singing. A bell tolled offstage, and leaves fell; the fact that we could see that they were being dropped by a boy standing on a chair did not detract from their effect, but somehow heightened our sense of ritual. This was an extraordinarily powerful moment, heightened by the way in which it concluded with Autumn repeating the last line of the refrain: ‘Lord have mercy on us’.
In the hands of Edward’s Boys, Summer’s Last Will and Testament is revealed as both a forerunner of Francis Beaumont’s meta-dramatic riot, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, and the more autumnal moments of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. The programme prints the stanza from ‘Adieu, farewell earth’s bliss’ quoted at the top of this review alongside lines from T. S. Eliot’s ‘Burnt Norton’ that reflect something of its autumnal tone. But this production makes an even stronger case for viewing Nashe’s play on its own terms and, more broadly, for revisiting in performance even works that may seem marginal to the theatrical canon.